99: Gabby Deegan was lying in bed trolling Instagram.
Someone had made the hashtag #LiliDaviesMemorial, and it quickly filled up with random pictures of Lili from people at school—people she didn’t know, people who didn’t know Lili. It made Gabby sick.
What gave them the right to weigh in now?
The hashtag contained numerous posts from Ally Winters and Magen Plants. Neither of them gave two shits when Lili was alive, and now all of a sudden they act like they were besties? The last time Ally saw Lili, she told her her hair looked ratty and she needed to go to a real stylist, no more Bargain Cuts at the mall. Last year Magen took Lili’s underwear from her locker during gym class and hid it in the school library. Gabby and Lili spent nearly an hour looking for them and got busted for missing fourth period. Bitch-cunts, the lot of them. That wasn’t the worst part, though—random strangers posted images, and some of them were horrible. There were pictures of the Leigh Gallery. Some people even posed for selfies with the sign outside the gallery. @EddieKnowsStuff in West Virginia posted a picture of Buffalo Bill from that old movie The Silence of the Lambs, with the caption “She DID NOT put the lotion in the basket!” Not someone who knew her, just some a-hole who should have his social media privileges revoked.
The faculty at Wilcox Academy had organized a candlelight vigil for tonight. Gabby wasn’t sure she would go. What was the point? A bunch of people standing around holding candles wasn’t going to bring her back, and they all knew she was Lili’s best friend. Everyone would be staring at her.
She closed Instagram and opened iMessage. She scrolled through all the car pictures they had shared over the past few months. Lili would never own a car, she would never drive, she would never be married, she would never have babies, she would never . . .
The tears came again, and Gabby tried to fight them back. She hadn’t washed off all her makeup before bed, and she could only imagine what her eyeliner looked like.
“You okay in there, baby?” her mom said from the other side of the door.
“Yeah.”
The handle jiggled. “Why is this locked?”
Gabby didn’t reply. She wiped at her eyes.
“Maybe you should eat breakfast. You’ll feel better if you eat something.”
Right. Cap’n Crunch fixes everything.
“Maybe later, Mom.”
Gabby rolled over, the sheets tangling around her legs. She opened the photo app on her phone and scrolled through Lili’s album, hundreds of images, pictures of them at the park, downtown, at school. She saved some of their Snapchats here too. They liked to use Snapchat for their private conversations because messages disappeared the instant they were viewed by all recipients. They were free to say whatever they wanted away from the prying eyes of parents who read everything. They were careful to use iMessage too, for the things they wanted their parents to see, but the real conversations took place on Snapchat. If Lili said something she wanted to keep, like her comment about Philip Krendal’s butt-crack in science class, Gabby took a screenshot before the message disappeared from Snapchat and saved it in Lili’s photo album—password protected and hidden, parent-proof, as it should be. Unlike the Instagram memorial, these pictures made Gabby smile. Lili was the queen of the one-line tag. She liked to send pictures of her Lhasa apso, Scrappy, with little snippets of dialogue. Grumpy Cat had nothing on her. There were pictures of cars too, not the ones she found online but the ones she found at local dealers that she really liked. The next time her dad brought up buying a car, she planned to show him one she wanted locally, a specific car, see if she could talk him into going down to the dealer and making an offer, call his bluff. Her favorite was a 2010 Camaro she’d found downtown, cherry red with black upholstery. If she rolled into the school lot driving that, she would have turned all the boys’ heads—the girls’ too.
Gabby paused at another picture. In this one Lili was holding up her iPad to her camera screen next to her smiling face. The caption read: “#WinnerWinnerChickenDinner.” Gabby had completely forgotten about it. Lili had won some kind of contest online for a local driving school. Gabby told her it was probably a scam. She figured they used the contest to draw kids down there, then try to upsell them into a pricey package. Half the driving schools in Chicago did it, ever since the state made thirty hours of lessons mandatory before you could obtain your license. Lili said she was going to check it out anyway, but if she did, she never had the chance to tell Gabby what happened. She’d have gone with her.
Gabby sat up in bed.
She remembered what the police asked her. Would Lili get into the car with a stranger? Her answer had been no, but . . .
She pinched the image and zoomed in until she could read the name of the driving school: Designated Driver. It took her all of ten seconds to find their address.
Twenty minutes later she was dressed and out the door. Her mom didn’t even hear her leave.