BROOKE
Saliva gathers thick in my mouth as I throw open the door to the dive shop. I gulp in breaths, but the heavy humidity does little to ease my nausea.
I want to scream, to yell in frustration, but I don’t of course. I realized a long time ago that nothing good ever comes of that. A woman’s anger makes it easy to paint her as crazy. I know from experience.
Instead, I force myself to swallow and walk back to my room in a haze, the reality of what I just discovered overwhelming.
A girl was just found dead at the bottom of the ocean, a girl who had come to me for help—twice. Once via social media and, when that failed, again in person. I think of her parents somewhere back in New Zealand, who have absolutely no idea that their baby girl is gone forever.
I breathe a sigh of relief when I shut the door of my rented hotel room. The room itself is fine. Simple but certainly an improvement over Lucy’s. White walls, a queen-size bed with a mattress that barely moves beneath my body, a nondescript desk, and a large, beige-colored floor. I try not to think of how much it reminds me of the other place they put me in years ago, the one devoid of color.
After a minute, I force myself to pull out my phone and look again at the accounts Lucy Dupin followed on Instagram—the Dive Shop, Greta, Logan, all names I recognize—until I see one I know better than the others. The one I saw minutes ago in the dive shop. Marked with a photo, hair tied up in a ballerina bun, lips pursed in a barely there smile, and a European mountain range in the background.
Lucy Dupin followed me.
I’ve gained so many followers since I’ve gotten to Koh Sang. The picturesque backdrops and—more importantly—the bikini pictures have rocketed up my Instagram engagement. I haven’t bothered to track the messages they send me or the comments they’re leaving on my page.
I navigate over to my message inbox. I get hundreds of direct messages from followers who I either don’t—or refuse to—follow back. I scroll through them, starting with the most recent, images of sleazy men and budding influencers flying past, until I see her handle: @LucyDupin1. I open the message I saw for the first time in the dive shop. It’s dated exactly a week ago, a few days before she checked into the resort. It’s short, only a few words, but each one sinks me like a stone.
Hi. Can you help me? Please?
It’s so innocent. So childlike. If I had spent even another moment inside after I saw it, I would have exploded. I needed to breathe fresh air, to process this new piece of information.
What did Lucy need my help with so badly that she’d approached me for it twice? Did it have something to do with the woman who fell from Khrum Yai? And more importantly, would Lucy still be alive if I’d given her the help she needed?
The last question crushes me.
A thought breaks through the surging wave of guilt. Maybe she’d tried another way to get in touch with me when I didn’t respond to her direct message. Maybe she commented on one of my posts.
I navigate to my meticulously curated profile, stopping on my most recent post—a photo from my hike with Cass. I told her I wanted to see the view from Khrum Yai, the tallest mountain on the island. But really, I had another reason.
I wanted to see how far off the beaten path Jacinta, the poor woman who fell from the mountain only a few weeks ago, would have had to go to fall. It was closer than any reasonable person would go toward the edge—especially given the magnificent view that could be seen from steps away—unless they wanted to jump, or unless they were pushed.
I asked Cass what she thought about it, and her expression grew serious. “It was a horrible accident. That poor girl.” I pressed her.
“Did you know her?” But she just shook her head. “I never met her,” she said, “but losing a hotel guest hit us all hard.”
I look now at the photo I had Cass take of me on that summit. My arm is cocked on my hip, the colors edited so that it’s impossible to tell where the sky ends and the ocean begins. Fifteen thousand likes. A ridiculous number. A quick search shows me that Lucy is one of them. Despite the lack of ventilation in my small room, the sight of her name sends a shiver through me. I posted that the day of the Full Moon Party. The day Lucy died.
I start scrolling below the post, looking to see whether Lucy left a comment. When I come up empty, I continue down my profile page, searching the comments of my other recent posts. I stop at a post from last week of me lounging in a bikini at the resort’s infinity pool, my cleavage pouring out of my top. That one scored a record number of comments.
I flick at my screen so that they whirl past in quick succession.
Get a fucking job, says @Christine472.
Nice tits. That one courtesy of @KasimXXX.
Why don’t you come over here and I’ll stick my—I stop reading that one halfway through, flag it as inappropriate, and delete all three comments. But nothing from Lucy.
I move to the next post—me again, holding a cocktail in front of a majestic sunset—and check the comments. Nothing from Lucy, but my eyes touch on another comment from @Christine472. White privileged bitch.
Comments like this used to bring me to my knees, but after two years, I’ve become fairly hardened to them, especially from trolls like @Christine472, women—and sometimes men—who channel their envy over my seemingly perfect life into anger and resentment. They all think they know me: the pretty, successful, carefree woman in skimpy clothes posted all over my page. But she isn’t real.
I think of what that little girl from Monroe would think of these pictures and all the followers. She’d probably be in heaven, drowning in the attention that was almost entirely absent in her frigid Kentucky trailer. I knew what everyone there thought I was: the kids at school, my teachers, even my own mother. Trash. So I made it my mission to prove them all wrong. I holed myself up in my bedroom, away from the leering eyes of my mother’s revolving door of boyfriends, and dug into my dog-eared textbooks, breaking from my studying only to sneak out to the living-room television for the six o’clock news every night. Eventually, I graduated second in my high-school class and earned a full scholarship to college. College was my way out, until it wasn’t. Until it, along with everything else in my life, crashed and burned, sending me running straight into a hell worse than the one I had tried to escape.
No, I’m not the spoiled rich brat most of my followers think I am. I’m just an expert at looking like one. Underneath it all, I’m nothing more than Lucy, with secrets and an agenda, masquerading as someone I’m not.
The thought of her brings me back to the present, and as much as it hurts, I return my focus to Instagram. When it becomes clear that she hasn’t commented on any of my recent posts, I switch back over to her profile page. But no matter how much I try, I glean no new information from it. She’s never been tagged in any photos, nor has she ever posted anything.
Then an idea hits me. I return to the search bar and type in #FullMoonParty. I’m instantly swarmed with results, most of which are affiliated with the bigger Full Moon Party on Koh Phangan. But I scroll through them, stopping at the first one I see that’s geotagged as Koh Sang.
It’s a photo, two twentysomething women, both too old to be Lucy, their heads pushed together, joined at the cheeks, each sucking from a fishbowl filled to the brim with some unnaturally blue liquid. I keep scrolling to the next post with the correct location. It’s a video depicting one of the resort’s staff members—a local guy I’ve seen around the grounds—twirling a long stick lit with fire on both ends. He dances around, deftly jumping away each time the fire nearly kisses his skin. I continue scrolling, contemplating how useful this whole approach actually is as I pass through blurry selfies and bright neon clips drowned out by dance music.
I’m about to give up when the next post shows another video as part of a carousel of images from the party. It’s silent, and for the first few seconds, everything in the shot is blurry, but then the image begins to come into focus. Bodies pressed up against each other, streaks of neon-painted flesh flashing through the dark sky. The screen shakes, like the person taking the video is also moving—dancing, probably.
I’m about to close out and move to the next result, labeling this as unhelpful as the previous posts, until the image zooms in shakily on one figure standing apart from the dancing crowd. When the zoom function seems to narrow in as far as it possibly can, the image still comes closer, the person recording apparently walking toward their subject. After a few seconds, my breaths start coming in quick, jagged succession.
Because I recognize the person in the film. Her eyes dart from side to side, looking for someone. Her small hands are clenched into fists, and she looks frightened but prepared. For what exactly I can’t tell.
And all at once, her eyes land on the camera. Lucy’s expression is unreadable but fixed with the same intensity I saw from her the other morning as she walked past the Tiki Palms. Before either of us knew what would happen to her.
The video ends abruptly, and I sit for a minute, my mind racing. This could be the last video ever taken of Lucy. In fact, if she died at the Full Moon Party, this could be one of the final moments of her life.
Once I recover from the shock, the questions come again, an avalanche of inquiries. Why was this person following Lucy around the party, filming her, apparently monitoring her every move?
On my screen, I navigate to the profile of the person who posted the video. Their handle is @dab2000, and their profile picture is the Arsenal Football Club logo. But as my eyes trail down the screen, I find the name of the person who followed Lucy around the other night, hours, or maybe even minutes, before she died.
Daniel Ayadebo.