“I am smart, and I am thinking about her, all the time, and I’m going to find out how she died and do something about it. Not like you, just moaning and being stupid!” I exclaim. Suddenly I stop. Hattie is sticking her tongue out at me, but I’m having a thought. Why would Hattie be attacking me so viciously? Unless she wants everyone’s eyes to be on me, so they don’t see what’s right in front of their noses. Her. Hattie. A girl who is mean and cruel and evil to the core. What if it wasn’t the walker who killed Billie? What if Hattie, a girl who wanted to be Billie’s best friend so badly, decided that, if she couldn’t have Billie, no one would?
I’d be off the hook. Billie’s death wouldn’t be my fault anymore. It wouldn’t bring her back, of course, but…at least I wouldn’t have killed my best, true, forever friend. Perhaps, on that hot summer night, Hattie doubled back from the village and found Billie in the field. Perhaps she asked Billie to be her best friend, and Billie, of course, said no. She coaxed Billie to the woods. Billie went willingly, because she was so nice, and she felt sorry for Hattie. Billie walked into the den, where she met her doom. I see it in my mind’s eye so clearly that I suddenly truly believe it.
I slip my bag off my shoulder. With both hands, I swing it backward, and then forward, right into Hattie’s head.
She screams and falls down.
Over the other side of the playground, I see Sam clap his hands to his eyes. Both the dinner ladies and a couple of adults who are hanging around the playground (I think one is Daisy from Year One’s mum and the other is Philip from Reception’s dad) rush over, all of them shouting my name.
Mrs. Stephenson, one of the dinner ladies, gets to Hattie first and looks at her face. “She’s bleeding!” She frowns at my hands. “What have you got in that bag?” Before I can say anything, she snatches it off me. Usually we only take reading folders to school. They are fabric, A4, and hold our books, and they do up with Velcro on the top. But I’ve taken extra precautions because there’s a murderer on the loose, so I brought an extra bag to school. You’re supposed to do it with bricks in your bag, but I could only find blocks of solid wood at Dad’s carpentry workshop. Mrs. Stephenson opens the pull-tie. She gasps, bringing out two pieces of wood. “What in god’s name—”
“I think Hattie’s the killer!” I exclaim. “Quick, grab her arms! Call the police!”
“For god’s sake, Thera, Hattie can’t be the killer—the killer’s a man,” Mrs. Stephenson says, telling me off.
“The killer’s definitely a man?” I ask. “How do you know?
“That’s not something for silly girls like you to know.”
“Do they know who it is? Is it the walker?”
“They don’t know who it is!” she snaps. “But it’s not Hattie! It’s a man. So you just be careful what strange men you speak to. Of all the—”
“How do you know?”
Mrs. Stephenson shakes one of the blocks at me. “Your parents will be hearing about this, Thera.”
“My dad said I could borrow them.”
“Don’t talk back to me!”
“I wasn’t talking—Ahh!”
Suddenly I’m knocked straight off my feet. It’s Hattie, rushing me. My head hits the floor, and my eyes go fuzzy.
And then I see her. Billie.
She is standing behind everyone, looking down on me, raising her eyebrows in that funny way she does, as if to say, “Are you okay, bumface?”
I smile slowly, because even though it hurts to see her so pale and know that she is dead, I’d still rather see her than not. “I knew you’d come back for me,” I murmur.
Billie scribbles in the air like she’s holding a pen. I nod, understanding.
The automatic writing.
For the rest of the afternoon I miss Billie. Of course I also do schoolwork, history and geography, but mostly I miss Billie. I miss her jokes, I miss her doodles, I miss braiding her hair.
On the way home I plan when I’ll do the automatic writing. It’ll have to be later, after bedtime, so Mum and Dad don’t come in. I cross my fingers, hoping the walker isn’t the killer. Mrs. Stephenson said the police didn’t know for sure. If it wasn’t the walker, maybe Billie will tell me, when I am writing her words, that it wasn’t my fault. Maybe she’ll even tell me who the killer was. If I was stood in front of him, if he tried to attack me, I would attack him back with all my might for what he did to Billie. I am thinking about this, about what I would do to him, so intently I don’t notice Nathan Nolan until he has hold of my arm. I scream loudly, because for a moment I think the killer has grabbed me.
“Thera!” Dad shouts, turning around. For a second he looks really panicked. Then he looks past me, at Nathan, and lets out a huge sigh. “Jesus Christ.” He puts his hand on his heart. “It’s Nathan. Are you all right, son?”
“Er, yeah,” Nathan says, looking at Dad weirdly, as if he doesn’t like him.
“If you want to talk to Nathan, Thee, Sam, and I will wait for you by the pub.”
I frown. How does he know who Nathan is? “Do you want to?” Dad asks.
“Er…” I say. “Sure.” Dad and Sam walk off.
“Are you okay?” Nathan asks me.
I shrug, but I don’t say anything.
Nathan shuffles from foot to foot and looks over to my dad, who is now sat on the pub wall holding Sam’s hand. “Your dad is big.”
“I dunno. Not bigger than other dads.”
“Is he all right?”
I don’t know how to answer him. “Erm. He’s not ill or anything. We’re all a bit sad.”
“I heard about Billie,” says Nathan.
“Yeah,” I say, because I don’t feel like saying anything else.
“I heard you found her in the den.”
I frown suddenly. “How did you know she was in the den? That wasn’t on the news.”
“Huh?” Nathan says. “Yes it was.”
“Hmm.” I search his face. “You know, the murderer could be any man. Or boy.”
“Oh,” Nathan says. He screws up his face a bit. “How…how do you know?”
“I just do,” I reply cagily. “If it’s not the walker…” I falter. “That’s this guy the police are interested in. Mum says they haven’t found him yet, but they want to question him. If it’s not him, it’s still definitely a man. Mrs. Stephenson said.”
“Well, I didn’t murder her.”
“Okay…”
“Who’s the walker?”
“I dunno. This guy.”
“Well, what does he look like?”
“Um…” I think, embarrassed. “A bit gorgeous, dark hair, greenish clothes.”
Nathan bites his lip. “That’s good.”
“What’s good?”
“That they know who he is.”
“They don’t know for sure,” I say quickly. “They just…suspect that it’s him.”
“It sounds like…I mean, it might be, though.”
“Do you know him?
“No.”
Neither of us says anything for a minute, but I think Nathan knows more than he’s letting on and, since I’m looking for alternative murder suspects, I decide to ask for an alibi. “Where were you last Saturday night?”
“At home.”
“On a Saturday? Doing what?”
“Playing.”
“Playing what?”
“Cards.”
“Hmm.”
We stand in silence for a bit. Nathan looks nervous, as if maybe he really has murdered someone. “Do you want to hang out sometime?” he says.
I frown. “What? Like to play cards?”
“No, I just meant…whatever.”
“Like, come ’round to your place?”
“No, no, just hang out in the village. Have you got a football?”
“Sure
. Sam and I have. I’ll ask him if I can borrow it. Or maybe he can come? Mum likes him to come with me if I’m playing out.”
“Um…” Nathan says, looking up at the sky. He squints at the sun. “I thought maybe it would be cool if you and me could be alone…together.”
My Nano Pet buzzes in my pocket, and then a bird sings at us from the hedge, like it’s replying to my Nano. It makes Nathan and me both giggle, which is weird, because I didn’t think I’d ever be able to laugh again, without Billie. She’s been dead less than a week. This makes me feel guilty. As does the fact that I’m standing talking to Nathan Nolan like everything’s normal and Billie hasn’t just died. I realize I won’t be able to go home and call Billie and tell her about this conversation. Unless…maybe I could tell her ghost about him. I study Nathan. His cheeks are a bit pink.
“So…do you think that would be okay? To hang out alone with me?”
I nod. “Sure.”
“Oh, cool, that’s…Maybe, like, Friday, then?”
“Let me check my diary.” I have my diary with me because the police photocopied it and dropped it back yesterday, so I open the padlock. I stare at it, but really I’m just trying to play it cool. It’s important not to be too keen with boys, or they’ll think you’re a crazy stalker and you’ll lose all your power. (Hattie’s older sister told us so, when we were having a sleepover. She said in a good relationship the girl is always in charge. She should know about relationships. She’s been out with all the boys at the bus stop. But probably not Nathan. She’s fifteen, so way too old for him. He’s thirteen.) “Yep,” I say after a beat. “Friday’s good for me.”
“Cool!” He looks relieved. “I get home from school about four twenty.”
“I’ll meet you at the circle by the graveyard at four thirty,” I say. The circle is a roundabout of green grass. It’s near the graveyard, but isn’t near the triangle, where the walker was, so it feels safer.
“Okay.” He laughs. “Spooky.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t be late, if you’re scared,” I say. We wave bye, even though we’re only two paces away from each other, and then I go over to Dad and Sam, and Nathan goes the other way.
Sam’s backpack makes a fuh-lump, fuh-lump sound as he jogs to keep up with my skipping. When we are a bit ahead of Dad, he whispers, “Did Nathan Nolan ask you out?”
“No!” I shout, and run the rest of the way home, so Dad and Sam have to run to keep up with me. I imagine Billie is running beside me. Not her ghost, though. I’m imagining her alive.
At four thirty on Friday, I come through the cut that runs from the school toward the church, and see Nathan Nolan sitting on the graveyard gate. Dad walked me most of the way through the village, but he let me do the last bit on my own because there are so many police around anyway. There is even a policewoman behind Nathan, stood in the churchyard.
Nathan waves. “Hi!”
“Hiya,” I call back as I walk up to him.
Nathan looks down at me. His lips are dark pink. Mine are a lighter pink. “Cool football,” he says.
It’s a Man United one, covered in emblems. I don’t support any particular team, but if I did it would be Man United, because that’s what everyone ’round here supports. I think it’s weird, though, to support a team. What does “supporting a team” mean, anyway? You don’t send them money. “Do you support Man United?”
I say.
“I’m supposed to support Galway United,” he says. “Because my mum and dad are Irish. But I support Liverpool. It’s cool to have a ball with the logo on, though. It’s official.”
“Aren’t you Irish too?”
“No. I was born here.”
“Where?”
“England.”
“But what city?”
“I don’t know. Maybe Coventry or Birmingham. We used to live around there. When Dad did…”
“When your dad did what?”
“Nothing.”
“It’s weird to not know where you were born,” I say. “I was born in Cleethorpes.”
He shrugs.
“So, you don’t have a football at all? That’s basically unheard of, for a boy,” I say.
“Well, I did have one, but it got a puncture last year.”
“Why don’t you buy a new one?”
“I haven’t got enough money. I’m saving up.”
“When’s your birthday? Can’t you ask for one for then?” He jumps down from the gate and shrugs again. Nathan seems to be a big shrugger. He takes the ball out of my hands and kicks it around in a circle. He’s pretty good. He kicks it back to me. “The second of July.”
“That was only a few weeks ago! Happy birthday!” I frown. “That’s weird.”
“What?”
“Nothing.” I’ve just realized his birthday was the day we used the Ouija board and found the dogs. The day the ghostly girl warned me about death being near. It’s a weird coincidence, but I’m not sure I trust Nathan enough yet to tell him. I don’t know if it’s significant. “Happy birthday anyway.”
“Thanks.”
“What kind of party did you have?”
“I didn’t have a party,” Nathan says.
I frown. Nathan is acting odd. “Well…what did you get?”
“Just stuff. Do you know how to play football?”
“Yeah, I play with my brother. Open the gate, we can use that as a goal.”
We prop the gate to the graveyard open with Nathan’s school bag. We play a few times and we have an equal number of goals, even though he’s a boy and does football in school. Being a girl, I have to do netball, but I like both. “You’re pretty aggressive,” he says, because I accidentally kicked his shin.
“You have to be,” I say, thinking about Billie, which I have basically done every minute since she died. I don’t want to stop, in case she feels hurt, or in case I forget anything about her. “Life’s tough.”
“I’m sorry about Billie,” he says.
“You said that the other day.”
“Yeah, I know…Anyway, you’ve got a pretty good life other-wise, haven’t you?”
I make a face. “Well, Billie’s a big part of why it’s good. Was. And now I feel…”
“What?”
“Alone, I guess.”
“You’ve got other friends. Hattie an’ that.”
I scoff. “Hattie bullies me.”
He stops playing. “Oh. I know Hattie’s sister.”
“Are you friends?”
He laughs weirdly. “Kind of. She’s really bossy.”
“What does she boss you around about?”
He shrugs. “Nothing. Just stuff. What’s Hattie been saying? Does she hit you?”
“No. Well, today, but…not normally. She’s not crazy. She’s always bullied me, but now she keeps saying…saying I killed Billie.”
“That’s mean.”
“Well, I didn’t kill her but…” Suddenly I feel a bit rubbish, like I might cry. “It might be my fault.”
“How would it be your fault?”
“I made her go up to the man who is probably the pervert. I left her in the fields to walk home. And it was my idea to spy on the walker in the first place. It’s my fault. I know everyone thinks so.” I look at him, ashamed. It seems like he feels bad for me. He kicks the ball into the hedge.
“It wasn’t your fault,” he mutters. “I promise. It wasn’t.”
I frown. “But…how do you know?”
“I just…’cause, ’cause you’re not…you weren’t…you didn’t finish her off.”
There’s something weird in the way Nathan says “finish her off.” I look at him suspiciously. “But how do you know I didn’t—”
Suddenly he forgets about the ball, and comes up to me and hugs me. I am surprised, and I don’t know what to do for a few
seconds, but then I put my head on his shoulder. He smells like chocolate and sweaty body odor and apples, and his neck is very warm. His school sweater is thin and waxy. How can it be that thin already, when it was new at the start of the school year? I can feel his hands, gently stroking my back just a tiny bit. I put my hands on his back. He is hard and bony, like a bird.
“It’s not your fault, Thera,” Nathan says. “You’re a good person.” Then he pulls away and goes to get the ball.
“Mm.” I say. I’ve forgotten my train of thought. What were we talking about? Oh. Yeah. Hattie. “Hattie probably won’t bully me anymore because we had a meeting with Mr. Kent and he told us it has to stop. We’ve only got one more week of school and we have to be nice to each other.”
“I’ve got one week of school left too. Maybe we can hang out in the summer?”
“We’re going to Majorca at the end of August, but I can hang out before that, and after.”
“Oh. When are you going?”
“On the twenty-eighth. Where are you going on holiday?”
He thinks. “Maybe we’ll visit my nan,” he says hopefully.
Now it’s my turn to shrug. “I guess that will be fun. I like my grandparents.”
“I like my nan.”
“Don’t you have any others?”
“Granddad died ages ago, and my dad’s parents are in Ireland.”
“That’s sad,” I say, and then, because I don’t know what else to add, “Let’s go in the graveyard.”
Nathan looks spooked, but he picks up the football anyway. The policewoman standing in the porch of the church watches us, her eyes following where we walk. It’s creepy. “Are you going to the memorial?” he asks.
“Huh?”
“They’re having a memorial for Billie in the church on Monday night. It’s on the noticeboard by the gate.”
“Oh yeah. Mr. Kent mentioned it in assembly.”
“They had a candlelight vigil for that other dead girl on TV.”
“What other dead girl?”
“You know. Jenny Ann Welder, who went missing in March. It was on the news for ages.”
“I don’t watch the news.”
“Why not?”
“Well, I guess it’s kind of boring. To me, anyway,” I say, diplomatically. “Also, we’re not allowed to watch it at the moment, because of Billie. Does your mum let you watch it?”
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