Back in the hall, I scanned the room. It was getting darker outside now, so the strange twilight had been replaced by a more conventional disco atmosphere. The heat was rising and, as an overweight boy brushed past me on his way from the dance floor, I felt the dampness of his skin against my arm and smelled fresh sweat and cheap aftershave.
Sophie was talking to Matt; she flicked her hair over her shoulder, her eyes never leaving his face. She had to put her lips close to his ear to be heard over the music, and they gradually moved closer and closer together, the heat from him palpable even from where I stood across the hall. I saw Sophie put her hand softly on the side of his neck to draw him even closer to say something into his ear, and as she did so, Matt bent to kiss her. She pulled away giggling and gave him a playful push. I watched as she danced away from him towards Claire and Joanne, laughing coyly at him over her shoulder. When I looked back at Matt’s face, he wasn’t laughing at all.
Maria and Esther were sitting at the far side of the room talking animatedly, one of them leaning in every now and then to shout something misheard into the other’s ear. There was no sign of Tim. As I watched I saw Maria look around quickly and take a miniature bottle of vodka out of her dress and top up the coke with it. Good. That would make her less likely to taste anything else in there.
I saw Esther gesturing to the door near them, Maria shaking her head, and then Esther leaving, presumably to go to the toilet. Maria sipped her drink, then put it down on the empty chair to her right, looking awkward in the way people do when they are unexpectedly left alone in a busy room. This was the best chance I was going to get.
I threaded my way through the room, watching Maria all the way. I probably didn’t have that long, although Esther had gone to the smaller toilet block on the far side of the hall where there was more likely to be a queue. Maria was half-turned away from me, watching the dance floor as I came up on her left. I sat down in the empty chair next to her and she turned, smiling, assuming I was Esther back from the toilets. Her smile faded when she saw that it was me.
‘What do you want?’ Her hand went to the little gold heart around her neck, twisting it so that the tip of her finger bulged red either side where the chain was biting into it.
I thought fast. What was the best tack to take?
‘I wanted to apologise – again.’
‘Apologise? Seriously? Don’t you think you’re a bit late?’ Maria gave a bitter laugh, her face hard with no trace of the forgiveness she had granted me at the party at Matt’s house.
‘I know. I’m sorry.’
‘For God’s sake, stop saying you’re sorry! Where has “sorry” been for the past two months around school? Where was sorry when you put that… that thing in my bag?’
‘Well, that wasn’t me, but I’m so sor —’ I broke off, anticipating her anger.
‘Just fuck off and leave me the fuck alone, Louise,’ she said, standing up. ‘I never want to see or speak to you again.’
She walked off across the hall, but as Esther wasn’t back yet from the toilets she didn’t really have anywhere to go, and I saw her hesitate at the edge of the dance floor, which had filled up since I sat down.
Adrenaline pumped through my veins, my skin tingling with a million pins and needles. I felt breathless with daring and alive with the fear of being caught. I slid my fingers inside my bra and hooked out the package. A group of boys jostled each other in front of me, one of them tripping over my foot. I knew him slightly, this boy. Johnny Majors. He wasn’t cool, but he was funny, popular. He looked down with an apologetic gesture. I smiled, closing my hand around the plastic bag. No problem, I mouthed, the volume of the music making actually saying anything difficult. Johnny Majors smiled at me then, this boy that had never so much as glanced in my direction in five years at school together, his eyes taking in my curves, the flush on my cheeks. There was clearly something in me he had never seen before, something inviting and dangerous. There was a moment, just a heartbeat, where he almost sat down next to me. I had a vision of us talking, laughing, giddy on the newness of it. Imagined him kissing me as I slipped my hand behind me and dropped the little plastic bag and its explosive contents onto the floor behind the chairs, to be found and exclaimed over by the caretaker later.
Then my eyes slid from his laughing face to where Sophie stood on the other side of the hall, her eyebrows raised, gesturing furiously at me. I looked down at the floor, and saw Johnny’s trainers retreating out of my view. I opened my hand and stared at the bag, at the innocent-looking blue powder. I remembered how the E had made me feel at Sam’s party: light, unfettered, joyous. Would it be so bad to make Maria feel that way too? In a deep, secret part of me I knew the answer to that question, but I pressed it down so hard that it had no room to breathe. I buried the part of me that knew we weren’t doing this to make Maria feel good; that we were doing it to humiliate her, hoping to provoke her into making a fool of herself. To go down in school history as the ones who dared to go that bit further. No silly pranks, no knickers on the flagpole. We would bring everyone together in horrified fascination as Maria came up, not knowing why she felt so uninhibited, so full of joy and love. We wanted to see what would happen, and that wanting was stronger than any worries about safety, or the morality of what we were doing.
I looked over at Sophie again, who was still staring at me, no words necessary to communicate what she was saying. I had a sense of being suspended, teetering on the edge of a cliff; and then I was falling, falling: opening the bag, tipping the contents into Maria’s coke, stirring it frantically with the straw, willing the powder to dissolve quickly. My eyes darted around the room, but nobody was looking at me – and even if they did, all I was doing now was stirring my own drink. Unless you looked very closely, you wouldn’t be able to see how much my hands were shaking. I looked down again into the glass – there was nothing to be seen now, it looked exactly as it had before. It occurred to me that actually, I hadn’t quite fallen, not yet. I could take the drink to the toilets and pour it away. My hand hovered around the glass, but as I looked over to Sophie, I saw that she was beaming, her face alight with happiness, her hands aloft in a big thumbs up. Before I could change my mind, I forced myself onto my feet and went over to Maria, who was still standing uncertainly by the dance floor.
‘It shouldn’t be you who has to run away, or give up your seat,’ I said, my heart thumping as much as the music. ‘I’ll go.’
She looked unsure.
‘Go on – Esther will be expecting you to be there when she gets back. I’ll go over there,’ I gestured to the other side of the hall, where Sophie watched me with glee. ‘I promise I won’t bother you again.’
She glared at me suspiciously and then stalked back to her seat. As I walked over to Sophie, I looked back and saw Maria’s hand go to her heart necklace again, twiddling it nervously. She picked up her glass, put the straw to her lips, and drank.
I think about this now, less than twelve hours later, sitting motionless on my bedroom floor. About the last time I saw her. After I’d mixed in the powder, I went to tell Sophie. She was elated, made a huge fuss of me. I didn’t particularly want to do an E – I was high on the sheer daring of what I’d done – but she persuaded me. She’d taken one too, and when they started to kick in she led me onto the dance floor. For the second time in my life, I felt totally uninhibited, letting my body move to the music in any way it wanted. For the next two hours I thought of nothing else but the music and the physical, animal joy of giving myself over to it. The dance floor filled up (I don’t think we were the only ones who’d managed to get something past Mr Jenkins) and after a while I lost track of everyone: Sam, Matt, even Sophie. Boys who had never looked twice at me were eyeing me in a new way. I felt as though I’d shed my skin and left the old me behind, lying discarded somewhere no one ever goes.
Eventually Sophie resurfaced, wanting to go to the bar and get water.
‘Where have you been?’ I asked her.
‘Oh, around and about.’ She gave a secret smile, more to herself than to me. I felt a tightening inside. Had she been with Sam, the two of them laughing about my frigidity, their heads close together, Sophie’s perfect body radiating heat and invitation? Or with Matt, all thoughts of protecting me from Sophie’s scorn driven from his head by his desire for her?
‘Where is Maria anyway?’ I asked. ‘She must be coming up by now.’ Lost in the moment, I had temporarily forgotten that this was what it had all been about. Of course it had never really been about Maria for me, only about myself and Sophie, and what this act could do for me, where it could take me.
Sophie smiled to herself again.
‘What’s so funny?’ I asked. ‘I thought you wanted to see her off her head. That was the whole point, wasn’t it?’
She shrugged and looked around, but Maria was nowhere to be seen. I could see Esther crossing the room towards us, and with a lurch in my stomach I realised she was coming to speak to me.
She wasted no time on preliminaries. ‘Louise, have you seen Maria?’
‘No, not for a while. Why?’
I suppose at this stage I should have felt the shadow of what was coming, or at least a mild sense of foreboding, but I was still buoyed up by the euphoria that being someone else for the night had given me.
‘She said you were talking to her earlier. What did you say?’
‘I’m not sure that’s any of your business.’ I wondered uneasily how much Maria had told Esther.
‘I think she’s gone off somewhere. She said she wasn’t feeling well ages ago, went to the toilet and now I can’t find her.’
Perhaps it was then that the first tiny seed of doubt began to sprout.
‘Maybe she’s talking to someone outside, or in one of the classrooms?’
‘Like who?’ Esther said scornfully. ‘You and your lovely friends have made sure that no one in their right mind wants to hang out with her. I thought you had better taste than that, Louise.’
Her words stung my cheeks with a shameful flush. I wasn’t used to Esther confronting me like this. I preferred not to think about her, about how close we had once been.
‘The only person I thought she might be with is her brother, but I can’t find him either,’ she went on.
Relief flooded me, mixed with disappointment that we weren’t going to see Maria losing it on the dance floor like we’d hoped.
‘She’s obviously gone home with him then. You said she wasn’t feeling well.’
‘She would have told me if she was leaving. She wouldn’t have left me here on my own.’
‘Are you sure, Esther? How well do you actually know her?’
I could tell from her face that this had stung Esther exactly like I had wanted it to.
‘You know what, Louise? Forget it. You obviously don’t care or want to help. I hope for your sake nothing has happened to her. I’m going to call my mum to pick me up, so if you do see her can you tell her I’ve gone home?’
For a while everything was a blur of dancing and talking and laughing, and then before I knew it, it was midnight. Like Cinderella’s coach turning into a pumpkin, the music stopped, the harsh lights were switched on, everyone was pale and sweaty and the room was just the school hall again.
After that, another blur. Maria’s mum Bridget coming to pick her up: mildly concerned at first, becoming frantic with worry when Tim appeared and turned out to have been there the whole time and not to have seen Maria either. My dad arriving to collect me as Bridget was being led off to the school office to phone Esther’s house. Hearing Mr Jenkins asking Bridget if there were any other friends they could try calling, and the heat that spread through me like a virus as she turned to me, rage and shame etched on her face, shaking her head – no, there was no one else. Hearing the words police and missing person and twenty-four hours.
The warm night had given way to a heavy summer downpour, raindrops thundering on the windscreen as Dad asked me what was going on. I tried to keep up a semblance of normal conversation, to pretend I was perfectly sober. Tried to pretend I was still his daughter, still the same girl who had left the house a few hours before.
And then there was just a space. I sat on my bedroom floor all night and stared into it. A space where Maria should have been: dancing, going crazy, hugging people without knowing why. Being watched by me and Sophie, nudging each other and giggling. Waking up in the morning feeling like crap and not knowing what had happened.
But Maria has simply disappeared into this empty space, leaving only the shadow of a scornful laugh, a golden heart on a chain, a wisp of smoke in the night air.