Secret Place (9780698170285)

by French, Tana

  Feeling their way closer. Chris: Nothing intelligent to say, was just thinking about you

  Selena: That’s mental, I was just going to text you to say I was thinking about you

  Chris: In fairness I think about you alot so not that crazy of a concidence

  Selena: Don’t be like that

  Chris: I know sorry. I actully mean it. It just comes out sounding fake

  Selena: Then don’t say anything. You know you don’t have to say stuff to me right?

  Chris: Yeah. Just I don’t want you thinking this doesn’t matter to me

  Selena: I won’t. I promise

  Nothing like Chris’s flirtations, overused words from telly scripts, with empty space underneath. This was something else; the real thing, confusing, thrilling, script going out the window. Sappy stuff, once-in-a-lifetime stuff, stuff to make you cringe and break your heart.

  I said, “You think he’s faking that?” Got that hooded dark eye again, and no answer.

  Then, from Chris: I wish we could talk properly. This is stupid.

  Selena: Me too

  Chris: We could try meeting after school in the field or in the park??

  Selena: Wouldn’t be the same. Like we said before. And someone would see us

  Chris: Then somewhere else. Like we can find a cafe in the other direcion.

  Selena: No. My friends would want to know where I was going. I’m not going to lie to them, this is bad enough

  Conway said, “This isn’t like with Joanne and the others, where Chris wants to keep them under wraps and they’re pushing to go public. Selena wants to stay on the down-low too.”

  “Like we said: she knows at least one of her gang wouldn’t be happy.”

  “Julia knew Chris was a dog. And Holly didn’t like him one little bit.”

  In the second week of March, Chris found the answer. Ok guess what. Finn worked out a way we can get out at night. If you can still do it would you be on for meeting up? Don’t want to get you in trouble, but I’d love to see you

  Silence for a day, while Selena tried to decide. Then:

  I’d love to too. Have to be late like 12:30. Meet me at the back gate of Kilda’s and we can find somewhere to talk.

  Chris, fast and bubbling over: Yeahhhh!!! Thursday?

  Selena: Yes thursday. I’ll text you if I can’t get out. Otherwise see you there

  Can’t wait :-)

  Same :-)

  The meetings started and the texts changed. Got shorter, less of them and less to them. No more stories, no families and friends and deep feelings and daydreams. Hi :-) and Tonight same time same place? and Can’t, thurs? and Yeah see you then. That was it. The real stuff had grown too huge and too powerful to fit in little lit rectangles; it had come alive.

  Noise from the fourth-year common room, roll of thuds like a heap of books tumbling. Conway and I whipped round, ready, but it vanished under a burst of laughter, spattering like bright flung paint, too hard.

  And then the bit we’d been waiting for.

  April twenty-second, Chris and Selena arranged to meet, just like we’d thought. Same time same place. Can’t wait.

  That night, the video. The kiss.

  Early the morning of April twenty-third, Chris texted Selena. I’m going to get in trouble cos I cant stop smiling :-)

  Before school, Selena got back to him. Epic text. Chris I have to stop meeting you. I promise it’s nothing you did. I should never have met up to start with but I genuienly thought we could be just friends. That was really really stupid. I am so sorry. I know you won’t understand why, but if this hurts you, maybe it will help to know it hurts me so much too. I love you (another thing I should never have said).

  Conway said, “What the fuck is she on about?”

  “That doesn’t sound like a rape victim,” I said.

  She shoved stray hair out of her face with the heel of her hand, hard. “Sounds like a nutter. I’m starting to think Joanne and them were right about this lot.”

  “And it doesn’t sound like Selena wanted time to think, the way she told us. The way that reads, she’d done all her thinking already.”

  “Why the fuck shouldn’t she go out with Chris? You’re so in love with each other, you go out together. Tell the world. Simple. What’s wrong with these people?”

  Chris came back fast and wild. WTF?!!!!? Selena wgats going on??? If th4s isnt Selena then FUCK OFF. If it is then Selena we have to talk. Same time same place??

  Nothing.

  After school: Selena if you want to be just freinds then we can do that. I thought you wanted to or I would of never even tried you know that. Please can we meet tonite. I swear I won’t even touch you. Same time same place I’ll be there.

  Nothing.

  Next day he was back. I waited for you like a fucking plank til 3am. Swear to God I would of bet my life that you’d come. Still can’t believe you didn’t.

  A couple of hours later: Selena are you serious about this? I don’t get it what HAPPENED? If I did something wrnng I’ll do whatever you want to aplogize. Just tell me what the fucks going on.

  That evening: Selena you have to text me.

  Nothing.

  The Thursday, the twenty-fifth of April, Selena finally texted Chris. 1 o’clock tonight. Usual place. DON’T text me back. Just come.

  “That,” Conway said, and tapped her screen, “that’s not Selena.”

  I said, “No. Selena would’ve said, ‘Same time same place,’ like they always did. And there’s no reason why she wouldn’t want him to text her back.”

  “Right. Someone else didn’t want him answering, in case Selena saw the message.”

  “She didn’t worry that Selena would spot her text? One night Selena gets a bit nostalgic, has a look back through her old chats with Chris, and all of a sudden she’s going, Hang on, I don’t remember writing that.”

  “Mystery Girl didn’t leave it on the phone. Wait for it to send, go into the Sent folder, delete.”

  “So,” I said, “Selena’s texts after the breakup, Chris wasn’t ignoring them because he was in a strop with her. He was just doing what he was told.”

  Conway said, “Some of the time, he was. Not all. Look at this.”

  Five days later, thirtieth of April, Selena’s phone to Chris’s: I miss you. I’ve been trying so hard not to text you and I don’t blame you if you’re raging with me but I wanted you to know I miss you.

  I said, “That’s the real Selena again. Like she told us, she couldn’t stand to cut him right off.”

  Conway said, dryly, “He’s got no problem cutting her right off. No answer. He was ignoring her, all right. Chris hadn’t got what he wanted, for once, and he wasn’t happy.”

  I said, “Here’s the other thing about that text. It says Mystery Girl didn’t actually nick the phone. She used it when she needed it, then put it back in Selena’s mattress.”

  Conway nodded. “Joanne and her lot didn’t have that kind of access—even if they knew where Selena kept the phone, and how would they? Whoever set up that meeting lived in that bedroom.”

  Almost a week later, sixth of May, someone using Selena’s phone texted Chris: I’ll be there. No answer.

  I said, “They’d already set up the appointment; Mystery Girl’s just confirming. Chris must’ve shown up, the week before.”

  “Yeah. But that time, he went because he thought he was meeting Selena. This time, he knows he’s not. And he’s going along anyway.”

  “Why?”

  Conway shrugged against the glass. “Maybe Mystery Girl says she’s going to sort things out between him and Selena, or maybe he figures banging Selena’s mate would make a great revenge. Or maybe he just thinks he’s in with a chance at more tit pics. Chris liked chicks, any chicks. There’s no ‘why’ there. The question is why she’s meeti
ng him.”

  The long day had my mind moving like porridge, bits of thought taking forever to find each other. The corridor stretching away in front of us looked unreal, tiles too red, lines too long, something we’d never be able to stop seeing.

  I said, “If she was going to kill him, why not do it straight off? What were the extra meetings for?”

  “Working up the guts. Or there’s something she wants to find out, before she decides whether to do it—whether he actually raped Selena, maybe. Or she’s got no plans to kill him, not at first; she’s meeting him for some other reason. And then something happens.”

  Selena to Chris, the eighth of May, late at night: I don’t want us to be like this forever. Maybe this is completely stupid but there has to be some way we can be friends. Just hold on to each other till maybe if you’re not too furous with me we can try again someday. I can’t stand us losing each other totally.

  Conway said, “She’s dying to get back with him. She can talk about just friends all she wants; that’s what she’s after.”

  I said, “She said she was saved from doing it. This is what she meant. If Chris had texted her back, no way she would’ve stayed hard-line about not meeting up. They would’ve been back together inside a couple of weeks. Maybe that’s what Mystery Girl was at: keeping them apart.”

  “If you were a teenage girl,” Conway said. “And you wanted to keep Chris away from Selena, for whatever reason. And you were fairly sure she hadn’t been shagging him. And you knew what Chris was like.”

  Silence, and the long red stretch of the corridor, tiles shifting queasily.

  “He brought a condom.”

  I said, “Not Rebecca. She wouldn’t think of it.”

  “Nah.”

  Julia would have thought of it.

  Thirteenth of May: I’ll be there.

  Fourteenth of May, Selena again. Don’t worry, I know you’re not going to answer this. I just like talking to you anyway. If you want me to stop, tell me and I will. Otherwise I’ll keep texting you. We had a substitute today for Maths, when she smiled she looked exactly like Chucky—Cliona got mixed up and called her Mrs. Chucky and we all almost died laughing :-D

  Rewinding, back to the small stories for laughs, trying to bring Chris back with her to a safe place. I said, “For a while, Mystery Girl’s able to convince Chris to stay away from Selena. Wouldn’t be hard: he’s pissed off with her anyway, and if Mystery Girl’s giving him something Selena wasn’t . . . But Selena keeps texting him. If he cared about her, if that was the real thing, then those texts had to get to him. After a while, it doesn’t matter what Mystery Girl’s bringing. Chris wants Selena back.”

  Conway said, “And Mystery Girl has to come up with a new plan.”

  Sixteenth of May, 9:12 a.m. The morning before Chris died.

  Selena’s phone to Chris’s: Can you meet tonight? 1 in the cypress clearing?

  4:00 p.m.—he must have checked his messages after school—Chris’s phone to Selena’s: OK.

  Whoever had set up that meeting had killed Chris Harper. We had room for a crack of doubt—interception, coincidence. No more than that.

  “Love to know who he thinks he’s meeting,” Conway said.

  “Yeah. Not Mystery Girl’s usual day, not her usual MO—this time she asks for an answer.”

  “It’s not Selena. ‘Cypress clearing,’ Selena wouldn’t’ve said that. That was their spot. ‘Same time same place,’ she’d’ve said.”

  Selena was out, again. I said, “But Chris could’ve thought it was her.”

  “Could be what Mystery Girl wanted him to think. By now, she’s planning. She breaks the routine to get Chris wondering, make sure he shows up. Takes the risk of having him text her back—maybe she does nick the phone outright, this time. She knows no one’s gonna be using it from now on.”

  Conway’s voice was level and low, rough-edged with fatigue. Small eddies of air nosed around it, curious, carried it away down the corridor.

  “Maybe Joanne’s twisting her arm; maybe she’s doing it off her own bat, for whatever reason. That night she sneaks out early, takes the hoe out of the shed—she’s wearing gloves, so no prints. She heads for the grove, hides in among the trees till Chris arrives. When he’s mooning around the clearing waiting for his twue wuv to show up, our girl hits him with the hoe. He goes down.”

  The lazy drone of bees, this morning, long ago. Seed-heads round my ankles, smell of hyacinths. Sunlight.

  “She waits till she’s sure. Then she wipes down the hoe, puts it back where she got it. She takes Chris’s secret phone off his body and gets rid of it. Gets rid of Selena’s, too. Maybe she does it that night, goes over the wall and ditches them in a bin; maybe she hides them somewhere in the school till the fuss dies down. Now there’s nothing to link her or her mates to the crime—except maybe Joanne, and Joanne’s got enough cop to keep her mouth shut. Our girl goes back inside. Goes to bed. Waits for the morning. Gets ready to squeal and cry.”

  I said, “Fifteen years old. You think any of them would have that kind of nerve? The murder, OK. But the wait? This whole last year?”

  Conway said, “She did it for her friend. One way or another. For her friend’s sake. That’s got power. You do that, you’re Joan of Arc. You’ve gone through fire; nothing’s gonna break you.”

  Shiver building dark in my spine, the way it does when power comes near. That beat of pain again, deep in the palms of my hands.

  “There’s someone else who knows, but. And she hasn’t been through fire for her mate; she hasn’t got that kind of nerve. She holds in the secret as long as she can, but it finally gets to be too much. She cracks, makes the postcard. Probably she genuinely doesn’t think it’ll go further than that board, corridor gossip. The bubble again: you’re inside it, the outside doesn’t feel real. But your Holly’s been to the outside before. She knows it’s there.”

  Sound from the fourth-year common room, sharp and sudden. Something heavy thudding to the floor. A squeal.

  I was half off the windowsill when Conway’s hand clamped round my bicep. She shook her head.

  “But—”

  “Wait.”

  Murmur like bees, swelling and bristling.

  “They’re going to—”

  “Let them.”

  A wail, rising above that murmur, high and trembling. Conway’s hand tightened.

  Words, a terrified cry too garbled to catch through the thick door. Then the screaming started.

  Conway was down and hitting the combination lock before I realized her hand was gone off my arm. The door opened on a different world.

  The noise punched me in the face, sent my vision skidding. Girls up and on their feet, hands and hair flying—I’d been seeing them through texts for so long, just narrow snippets of minds shooting through dark, it felt like a double take seeing them real and solid. And nothing like I’d seen them before, nothing. Those glossy gems, watching us cool-eyed and assessing with their knees perfectly crossed: gone. These were white and scarlet, wide-mouthed, clawed and clutching at each other, these were wild things.

  McKenna was shouting something, but none of them heard her. Shrieks launched off them like birds, battering against the walls. I caught words, here and there, I see him oh my God oh God I see him it’s Chris Chris Chris—

  It was the high sash window they were fixed on, the one where Holly and her mates had been sitting an hour or two earlier. Empty now, blank evening sky. Heads back, arms open to that rectangle, they were screaming like it was a joy, a physical one. Like it was the one thing they’d been dying to do, for years and years, and the time had come.

  It’s him it’s him look oh God look— Conway’s ghost story had paid off.

  Conway dived in. Aiming for Holly and her lot, pressed together in a far corner. They weren’t screaming, weren’t gone, but they were huge-eyed, Ho
lly’s teeth sunk into her forearm, Rebecca crouched in an armchair gasping, hands pressed over her ears. Get them now, we might get them talking.

  I stayed put. To guard the door, I told myself. In case anyone made a break for it; the state those girls were in, one of them could do something stupid, down the stairwell before you know it and then we’d be in trouble—

  Load of shite. I was afraid. Cold Cases takes you to bad motherfuckers, these were just little girls, but these were the ones that stopped me dead. These were the ones that would smell me stepping over their threshold and turn, hands rising, come for me in a rush of streaming hair and silence and rip me into a thousand bloody gobbets, one for each reason they had.

  Oh God oh God oh—

  The overhead bulb exploded. Sudden rush of dimness and slips of glass firing like golden arrows through the light of the standing lamps, a fresh burst of screams; a girl clapping her hand to her face, blood black in the shadows. The window burned pale, lit their upturned faces like worshippers’.

  Alison was on her feet on the seat of a sofa, spindly and rocking. One skinny arm stretched out, finger pointing. Not at the window. At Holly’s four: Rebecca head back and white-eyed, Holly and Julia grabbing at her arms, Selena glazed and swaying. Alison was screaming on and on, screams huge enough to rise up over all the rest: “Her it was her I saw her I saw her I saw her—”

  Conway’s head came round. She clocked Alison, scanned frantically for me. Caught my eye and gestured over the whirl of heads, yelled something I couldn’t hear, but I saw it: Fucking come on!

  I took a breath and I dived in.

  Hair slicing across my cheek, an elbow ramming my ribs, a hand clawing at my sleeve and I wrenched away. My skin leapt at every touch, nails or for a second I thought teeth raked the back of my neck, but I was moving fast and nothing dug in. Then Conway’s shoulder was against mine like protection.

  We got Alison under the arms, lifted her off the sofa—her arms were rigid, brittle, sticks of chalk, she didn’t struggle—had her back through the boiling mess and out the door before McKenna could do anything but see us go. Conway slammed the door behind us with her foot.