I was so tired I didn’t even take off my boots when I lay down on my bed, disturbing Aristotle, the fatter of the two house cats, who had been fast asleep. He looked up and gave a small, silent meow of disapproval. I curled myself into a ball around him, breathing in the sweet warm smell of his fur. He rubbed his head against my leg, a low, rusty purr vibrating in his broad chest, then slowly sank back to sleep, the purr disintegrating into a snore. I lay beside him and read Gilly’s notebook over and over again, trying to work out what had been going on in her life. Nothing good, it seemed. It was a shame that she’d been writing the diary for her own benefit, not mine, and that she had been so vague at times I struggled to understand what she meant. And she’d only written in it now and then, when something big had happened, to let out her feelings. So I was stuck with a lot of feelings and not enough facts. I tried my best to work out who she meant by M, R, and X. It was like the worst sort of algebra problem. If X is around more than M, R equals who? M was clearly her mum. I spent ages writing out all the male names beginning with R I could remember, trying to match them up with boys from school or from around Port Sentinel. Ryan was on the list, inevitably, but I knew he wasn’t involved; he would have been bewildered at the suggestion. Gilly was not his type. He was much more straightforward than that.
In fact, he was straightforward in every way, I thought, and liked him for it. I was still struggling with Will’s hissy fit about me spending time away from him. I didn’t like him being so possessive. It reminded me too much of his father.
I read through the diary entries again, puzzling over the identity of X, looking for anything that might give me a clue. It was like panning for gold in a particularly muddy river. I got to the end, went back to the start, skimmed through again.
Now there’s no way out …
X is going to punish me for this …
I always wanted someone to love me …
No more playing around . .
She’d fallen in love twice over, and someone had let her down. The first person she loved? The mysterious R? Or someone else? I couldn’t guess who X was any more than Abigail and her friends had been able to.
I hate myself. I knew what X wanted me to do and say, so I did it …
I stopped. There was something specific. She was referring to something that had happened that day. The sixteenth of December. I got off the bed, leaving Aristotle to resettle irritably. I lifted up a flyer so I could see the calendar above my desk. It was a Tuesday.
It was the day I’d had to swap partners so she didn’t have to work with Max. Because X wouldn’t have liked it?
What if X was in our history class?
I sat back in my chair, swinging from left to right, thinking about the boys in the class, working from the back row to the front. Not Max. Sam Milner, so laidback he was practically vertical, seemed unlikely. In fact, they all did. Phil Nolan, with his pale eyelashes and rounded shoulders and silence in the presence of girls. Zayn Khan, madly in love with a girl named Lorna and unlikely to notice anyone else. Rich and Ben and Charlie—none of them seemed the kind of boys who would be threatening, let alone violent.
I did know of one person who’d been violent.
Who’d apologized to Gilly—begged her for forgiveness, really.
What had Mr. Lowell said? Gilly couldn’t work with a boy. Because X wouldn’t like it.
I feel like this is the person I was always meant to be, Gilly had written. This is different.
It’s just love … it doesn’t matter who the person is.
I sat and thought about love and rejection and broken promises, and just what you might do—just how desperate you might be—if the person you cared about more than anyone in the world cut you off.
And I thought about Nessa Mullen. I didn’t know where she lived, but I knew who would. I dug out my phone.
“Why do you want to know that?” Darcy sounded intrigued.
“Because she’s Gilly’s best friend and I thought she might know something about where she is.”
“I heard Gilly ran away to London.”
“Who told you that?”
“I can’t remember. I mean, everyone’s talking about it. I heard…” Her voice went faint for a minute, and when she came back she was saying, “… completely impossible, obviously, because how could she have run away and also been kidnapped and also be hiding somewhere just to see who really cares about her once she’s gone—”
“Is that what people are saying?”
“That and a few other things.” She broke off again, leaving me listening to silence, followed by a sniff. “I still don’t know why you want to speak to—” A sneeze.
“Darcy, what are you doing?”
“Plucking my eyebrows.” She sniffed. “Sorry. It always makes me sneeze. And cry.” Another sniff. “They say your eyebrows are sisters, not twins—did you ever hear that?”
“Of course not.”
“It means they should look similar but not identical.” A pause. A sniff. “I think my eyebrows had different fathers.”
“Darcy.”
“They definitely don’t get on. They’re not even on speaking terms.”
“Are you still talking about your eyebrows?”
“Gilly and Nessa.” She said it as if it should have been obvious. “They haven’t been talking since … I don’t even know when.”
“Try and remember.”
“November?” Her voice was muffled again. “Why does this hurt so much?”
“Because you’re pulling your hair out of your skin.”
“Well, obviously. Oh, that looks better.”
“Good. Are you sure it was November?”
“Wait…”
“Put the tweezers down, Darcy, and help me.”
“I am helping you.” She sounded defensive. “It was around then because I have a free hour before lunch on a Tuesday and they were always in the school library together when I went.”
“Why were you in the library?”
“Trying to have a little nap—not that I could with all the chatter from the two of them. Then it was just Nessa, on her own, and vast, awkward silence.” Darcy sighed. “I still couldn’t sleep.”
“Stop, I’m welling up.”
“I’ll remember this the next time you want me to help you with something.”
“You know I appreciate it.”
“I do.”
“So do you know Nessa’s address?”
“Yeah. Well, not in detail. She lives on Bayview Drive.”
I whistled. “Swanky.”
“I can’t remember what number it is, but the house has pineapples on the gateposts.” The shrug traveled across the air. “Do not ask me why pineapples.”
“I won’t,” I promised.
“Jess, don’t get yourself in any trouble.”
“As if I would.”
Darcy snorted. “That’s all you do. I mean, you should be OK. She doesn’t look dangerous, unless bad haircuts are contagious.”
“I’ll keep my distance, just in case.”
* * *
The next day I went looking for Nessa. The house with the pineapples, Darcy had said, and there it was, halfway along Bayview Drive. The road was a terrace of Georgian houses, tall and white, overlooking the sea. It was remarkable that they had survived the local passion for refurbishing old properties by obliterating them. It was a conservation area, so the council could impose strict rules about how the houses should look, and that had saved them, more or less, except where the gates were concerned. Nessa’s house wasn’t all that bad—the gateposts were round columns, and the pineapples were at least traditional. The house next door had black granite gateposts topped with silver unicorns. Stay classy, Port Sentinel.
I trotted up the steps and used the big lion’s-head brass doorknocker, hearing the sound echo through the house. I looked out to sea while I waited for someone to come. The bay was full of white horses, the wind ripping spray off the top of the dark gray water. The clouds were low and heavy with rain that hadn’t yet fallen. I wished I’d remembered to bring an umbrella.
“Hi.” Nessa was standing in the doorway behind me, wearing a big sweatshirt, skinny jeans, and high-top trainers. She’d pulled back her hair so the undercut was visible, the hair so short I could see her scalp underneath it. Out of school, she filled the piercings in her ears with silver hoops that ran all the way up into the cartilage at the top as well as the ring in her septum. Her eyeliner was smudged. “What do you want?”
“It’s about Gilly,” I said. “Can I come in?”
She held onto the edge of the door, as if she needed it for support. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“I’m trying to help her,” I said simply. “I don’t suppose she’s been in touch with you.”
“No.”
The wind gusted, and I took a step forward without meaning to, blown off balance. “Look, you don’t have to talk to me. I’m not the police. But the police are looking for her. They’re taking it seriously. I found a diary she was keeping, and—”
“You found her diary?” Nessa’s voice was sharp.
“Yeah. And I read it.” And I understood one word in ten, to be honest …
Nessa drummed her fingers on the edge of the door. “OK. Come in. But you can’t stay long.”
She led me into the room beside the front door, a formal drawing room full of antique furniture, a huge oriental rug, and elaborate curtains. Nothing could have looked more incongruous than the two of us in our jeans perching on brocade-covered chairs. The blinds were pulled down so the light was dim.
“No one comes in here,” Nessa said, seeing me looking around. “They only use it for parties. Just keep your voice down and they won’t even know you’re here.”
“Your parents?”
“Yeah.” She seemed to realize that she might have sounded rude. “It’s not that I don’t want you to meet them. It’s just that they’d get so overexcited. ‘Oh, Nessa’s made a friend. Let’s take you out for dinner. Why don’t you stay over?”’ She rolled her eyes. “I like my own company.”
“And Gilly’s.”
“Yes.” She squeezed her palms between her knees. “It’s not what you think.”
“What isn’t?”
“The reason we stopped being friends.”
“Why do you think I think you stopped being friends?” I asked carefully.
“Because of what people were saying about Gilly at school.”
“After someone read her diary?”
Nessa nodded. “People were calling her all kinds of things. I knew none of it was true.”
I was about to get thrown out of Nessa’s house, I thought, and braced myself. “Were you the one with her? In school?”
“Me?” Her eyes went wide and then narrowed. “That’s a pretty big assumption you’re making there. Actually, two. That I’m interested in girls and that I was interested in Gilly.”
“I could be wrong,” I said.
“People assume I’m a lesbian because of the way I dress.” Her eyes were fixed on me and there was a challenge in them.
“You might be. You might not. What does it matter?”
A little of the defiance went out of her face. “My parents are sure I am. They keep trying to get me to come out.”
“Why don’t you?”
“Because I should be able to sleep with whoever I like without explaining myself to anyone—as long as it’s legal and safe. I bet you don’t talk to your parents about who you’re sleeping with.”
“Definitely not.”
Nessa sat back. “They’d just boast about it to all their friends. About how cool they are about it and how much they’ve donated to LGBT causes and this really important campaign they’re supporting.”
“That sounds really annoying.”
“Doesn’t it?” She almost smiled for a moment, then went back to looking pained. “Anyway. I like to keep them guessing. I like to keep everyone guessing.”
“As long as you know what you like, that’s the important thing.”
She wriggled. “I kind of haven’t made up my mind yet.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “So if it wasn’t you, who was it?”
“I don’t know.” Nessa’s shoulders slumped. “She never told me. I just assumed it was a mistake and she wanted to forget about it.”
“That’s not the impression I get from her diary.”
“Can I read it?”
I hesitated. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“Why not?”
“It might upset you,” I said, thinking of the entry where Gilly wrote about being let down. Was it Nessa who’d hurt her? “What happened with you and Gilly? You were such good friends.”
“She cut me off.” Nessa looked bleak. “She was hiding something from me. She wouldn’t tell me what was going on or who she was with at school. She was keeping all kinds of things secret. And I couldn’t leave her alone, even though I knew I was pushing too hard.” Tears glittered in her eyes. “I just wanted her to talk to me.”
“What happened?”
“She cut me off and then we argued, not the other way round. I racked my brains to work out what it was I’d done wrong, and I still don’t know. I mean, we didn’t fight. We never fought. But I’d started to think she was avoiding me.”
“Why?”
“Twice in the same day she saw me and turned round and walked away. She still had her phone then, and I texted her a few times, trying to get a response.” Nessa bit her lip. “I got angry. I was frustrated. I started saying mean things just to provoke her into replying. It was the silence I couldn’t stand.”
“Did she reply?”
“No. She came and found me. She told me to stop texting her. She told me she was getting rid of her phone so I was just wasting my time. She said we couldn’t be friends anymore and she couldn’t say why.”
“Couldn’t? Or wouldn’t?”
“I’m sure she said ‘couldn’t.’” Nessa looked perplexed. “I hadn’t thought about that.”
“Did she seem angry? Upset? Worried? Scared?”
“Um, all of the above.” Nessa shook her head. “I handled it superbadly. I started shouting at her about how she was letting me down, and she just looked at me and said, ‘Sorry,’ and walked off. And that’s the last time I spoke to her.”
“Did she try to talk to you again?”
“No. She avoided everywhere I went, as a rule. I wouldn’t stop going to the places we used to go together, but she did. I saw her at school, but we never spoke.”
“It sounds as if she picked a fight with you deliberately. She pushed you away.”
“That was how it felt. I told her I wasn’t going to be her friend anymore.” Nessa’s voice was husky. “I told her we couldn’t be friends if she didn’t trust me. I told her I didn’t trust her since she’d been lying to me for months.”
“Why wouldn’t she talk to you?”
“Because she was scared. And I let her be scared. I abandoned her to sort things out for herself when I knew she was struggling.”
“But if she wouldn’t talk to you—”
“I shouldn’t have gone off in a huff.”
“When did it start?”
It was as if Nessa had been waiting to say it. “When she started seeing Max Thurston.” Her upper lip curled in disgust. “He wanted to own her. He didn’t like me and he didn’t like the fact that I was close to Gilly.”
“So you two never got on.”
“Never.” She frowned. “He wasn’t good enough for Gilly. I let him know I felt that way. He treated her like dirt until he found out there was someone else, and suddenly Gilly was the love of his life. Sorry if I didn’t believe a word of it.”
“Did Gilly like him?”
“Ye-es,” she admitted. “But he was her first-ever boyfriend. Her mum didn’t want her to see anyone while she was at school. She had nothing to compare him to. And he knew she was going to wake up one day and realize he wasn’t Mr. Right, so he did his best to control her.”
I thought about the way he’d hung around, trying to force her to talk to him. “Someone told me he gave her a black eye.”
Nessa nodded. “That’s what I assumed. She did have a black eye, but she wouldn’t talk to me about it.”
“Do you think she was scared of him?”
The reply was immediate. “I’m sure of it. He was obsessed with her. And she wanted to stay away from him.”
Something occurred to me. “Was he at the party the night Gilly cut herself?”
“He was standing right behind you,” Nessa said simply. “I went past him to help her.”
“Did she tell you why she cut herself?”
“She just said it was all too much.” Nessa’s face twisted as if she was about to cry. “I thought it was going to be different from then on. I thought she’d forgiven me. But she was just the same afterward. She didn’t talk to me or look at me.”
“Why did you hit Max at the market yesterday?”
“Because he knows where Gilly is.”
“Are you sure?”
There was total conviction in her eyes and voice. “I don’t know if he made her leave or if he just helped her, but he knows, believe me. If you want to know where Gilly is, make Max Thurston tell you.”