by Nicci Cloke
If I’m expecting – okay, hoping – to see Cheska’s yellow convertible, then I’m disappointed. It’s a pale blue Beetle, and although the driver is blonde, it’s not Cheska. It’s Lauren. So they’re back together… if they ever split up in the first place.
I go and collect my stuff, and I’m about to head back to the main room to do some core work, when I notice the girl from Year 13 smiling at me.
‘It’s Aiden, isn’t it?’ she says, and I tug one of my earphones out.
‘Yeah. Hi.’
‘I’m Emily. I’m in the year above you?’
‘Yeah, sure.’
‘I worked on A Midsummer Night’s Dream with you.’
So that’s where I know her from. ‘I’m surprised you remember,’ I say. ‘I didn’t exactly have a big part.’
She laughs. ‘Well, I did the set design so I wasn’t the star of the show either. I came to see you guys the next year though, you were great.’
I feel like I’m sinking, slowly, my heart heavy. ‘Thanks.’
‘Do you still act?’
I shake my head. No. I couldn’t. Not now.
‘That’s a shame. You’re really talented.’
‘I had a good co-star,’ I manage to say, and then I turn to go. ‘See you around.’
I can feel her watching me all the way out.
BY EIGHT THIRTY, Scobie’s room is filled with half-empty plates and greasy wrappers. Half a giant pizza sits sweating in its box on the floor, along with a load of shiny bones, which are all that’s left to show for the ribs and chicken wings we’ve also munched our way through. If I didn’t play football, I would be clinically obese; I’ve got no idea how Scobie stays the same skinny shape he’s always been.
Scobie has carefully selected and downloaded Shark Week’s highlights, and we’re halfway through a programme about tiger sharks in Hawaii, with his Mac’s screen swivelled round on the desk and a load of pillows lined up against the wall to turn his bed into a sofa. We’d usually be more than welcome to use the actual sofa downstairs, but Frank’s still awake and sharks make him cry. Plus Liam’s got a girl round, so Jodie, Scobes’s mum, is on hyper-hostess alert.
‘Tiger vs tiger shark,’ Scobes says, through a mouth full of samosa, ‘who wins?’
‘In water or on land?’
He thinks while he swallows. ‘Shallow water.’
‘Tiger.’
‘Interesting.’ He slumps onto one side to look at me. ‘Why so?’
‘Tigers can swim. And in shallow water, the tiger shark’s gonna be all edgy and trapped.’
He shakes his head. ‘Tiger sharks love the shallows.’ As he says it, the screen shows the silhouette of a tiger shark moving stealthily towards a beach. ‘See?’
‘Nah, I still say tiger. Cos it can attack from above, like jump out of the water. And it has claws and teeth. It’s got all bases covered.’
He nods. ‘Good points, well made. I still say shark, though.’
‘Well, that’s up to you, Scobes. You’re wrong, but that’s up to you.’
He picks up the plate next to him and offers it to me. ‘Last chicken skewer?’
‘Is it satay or tikka?’
‘Hard to tell.’
I take it, even though I feel like at this point I’m at least seventy-five per cent chicken. If Doug could see how far I’ve deviated from the healthy eating plan Norwich email us all each month, he’d throw one of his purple rages.
‘Liam said that sighting of Lizzie’s been confirmed. They’re going to put the CCTV on the news.’
I nod. ‘Hopefully that’ll help.’
‘Yeah, it might jog people’s memories, right?’ He looks hopeful. I feel hopeful. Maybe it will.
He glances sideways at me from behind his glasses. ‘I guess this is all pretty weird for you, isn’t it?’
I poke the sharp end of my now empty skewer against one of my fingers, again and again. ‘I guess. We were close, and now all of this –’ I switch to the next finger, poke a little harder. ‘It’s kind of like I never really knew her.’
‘You guys didn’t hang out much this year, did you?’
‘No, not really. We kind of fell out.’
He glances at me. ‘After prom night, right?’
Suddenly I wish I hadn’t eaten so much pizza. ‘Kinda, I guess.’
‘Was all that something to do with Lizzie?’
‘No,’ I say, but my heart is really thudding now. ‘Nah, that was just Honeycutt being a dick.’
Scobie looks at me and doesn’t say anything for a minute, and in that minute I’m sure he’s going to challenge me, ask me why I’m lying. But instead he just looks away, back at the screen, where the tiger shark is breaking open the shell of a giant turtle. ‘No change there, then,’ he says.
I want to tell him that I saw Honeycutt kissing Cheska Summersall but I don’t. I don’t want to talk about Deacon Honeycutt.
Scobie changes the subject anyway. ‘Marnie Daniels still trying to find stuff out about that Facebook guy?’ he asks.
You’re so cute. My stomach twists. ‘Yeah.’
‘How come she’s got you helping her?’
‘She asked me,’ I say, even though the question makes me feel funny. ‘Could hardly say no, could I?’
He glances at me. ‘Have you found anything else?’
I shake my head. ‘Not really. Profile’s gone, hasn’t it?’
He taps his fingers against his plate thoughtfully. ‘Maybe not.’
‘Huh?’
He sits up suddenly, grabs his mouse and keyboard and clicks away the shark programme. ‘It only disappeared this week, right?’
I shrug. ‘Yeah.’
‘Facebook are pretty slow about deleting data. There’ll still be a cached version.’ He’s busy typing, clicking through windows too fast for me to follow. ‘Here we go.’
He sits back so I have a proper view of the screen and, sure enough, there’s the Hal Paterson profile, the guy in sunglasses who is not called Hal Paterson staring back at me. I feel a wave of revulsion. How could she fall for it?
‘Let’s take another look,’ Scobie says, and he can hardly disguise the excitement in his voice. He loves technology, loves this step-by-step solving of things. It’s like CSI: Internet to him. He scans down Hal Paterson’s wall, looks at all the app stuff again.
‘Red flags,’ Scobie says, tutting. ‘Total red flags. She should have noticed there was nothing personal on here.’
‘Yeah,’ I point out, ‘but maybe he had it set to private. You can’t see the personal stuff on my wall unless you’re my friend.’
‘You’d be surprised,’ Scobie says, but he doesn’t elaborate.
‘How come you can still see all this?’ I ask, suddenly afraid to look at the screen. ‘He deleted it.’
‘Yeah, well that’s the thing about the internet. Hardly anything’s ever really deleted.’
That’s a scary thought.
Scobie’s mouse hovers again over the location Marnie noticed on one of the posts. ‘So we know he – assuming it’s a he – was in or near King’s Lyme at the end of the summer. Would Lizzie have been?’
I feel another lurch of nausea. ‘Yeah. Her drama summer school thing was there.’
‘Right –’ He points at me, like Kevin does when someone says something smart or interesting in one of his presentations. ‘So that’s something. That’s worth checking out.’ He thinks for a minute, scrolling up the page again. ‘Hey… Have you tried just Googling him?’
Before I can reply, he pulls up a new search window and types in Hal Paterson.
The computer takes 0.71 seconds to return nearly 700,000 results. Lots about Hals, lots about Patersons, a few Hal Pattersons; none of them what we’re looking for. Just that same Facebook profile and nothing else.
“Hal Paterson” London, Scobie types.
Zero results.
“Hal Paterson” Kings Lyme, he tries.
Nothing.
‘Thought he m
ight be using the name on other sites,’ Scobie says, after a minute. ‘Guess it was just that profile.’
He turns and sees the expression on my face. I’m guessing it looks pretty bad.
‘They’ll find something,’ he says. ‘Liam reckons the police have got computer forensics guys in. They can do all kinds with signatures and IP addresses and stuff.’
‘Can Facebook find out who set up the profile?’ I ask, my fingers bunching themselves inwards to form fists.
‘He could have set up a fake email account to use,’ Scobie says, ‘but yeah, they’ll have stuff that’ll be useful. It’s tricky, though. Privacy laws and data protection and all that. They’ll have to go through the courts.’
‘Even with something like this?’
He shrugs. ‘It’s complicated.’
Isn’t everything?
I look again at the face in the photo, the eyes hidden behind those mirrored sunglasses. Talking to you. Always makes me smile.
‘We’re assuming she went to meet him, but there’s nothing that says that anywhere. Can you honestly imagine Lizzie – Lizzie – doing that?’
Scobie considers this. ‘It’s just weird, isn’t it? The guy says he’s from London, Lizzie boards a train to London.’
I suddenly feel close to tears. I think of Marnie, sitting in Café Alice, her head in her hands. I should’ve done something. I think of Lizzie, smiling at me across the drama studio, the Midsummer’s set going up around us. ‘I should’ve done something,’ I say, quietly.
Scobie turns round to look at me. ‘Hey. What could you have done? Nobody knew. Nobody knew any of this stuff about her.’
I stare at the screen. Hal Paterson stares back. I feel a twist of hatred in my gut. ‘There must be something we can do,’ I say. ‘Somebody knows where she is.’
Scobie considers this, and then he briskly clicks away from Hal’s profile page and onto his own newsfeed. With a couple more clicks, he’s opened a new window: Create Page.
FIND LIZZIE SUMMERSALL, he types in the title box, and then he pauses over the description. HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL? he tries, and we both look at this and shake our heads. MISSING, he puts instead, and then he stops. ‘I’m no good at this,’ he says. ‘Words, you know – not really my thing.’
I’ve read enough of Scobie’s history coursework to know that that’s not exactly true, but I know what he means – when something’s this important, this personal, the words just seem to dry up. I take the keyboard from him and I picture Lizzie catching my eye across the playground, her hair blown back by the wind. I start typing.
MISSING – Can you help?
Lizzie Summersall has been missing from her home in Abbots Grey, Hertfordshire, since Saturday 8th October. The last known sighting of her is of her boarding a train to London Kings Cross in neighbouring town, Kings Lyme.
Lizzie is a much loved sister, daughter and friend. She loves Harry Potter, roast potatoes, and every kind of sweet except orange ones. She is 5’5”, with long, blondeish hair, and green eyes.
If you have any information, please, please share!
Scobie reads over my shoulder and when I’m done, he nods. ‘That’s good,’ he says. ‘That’s perfect.’
He takes the mouse and keyboard back from me and clicks ‘Create’. ‘Now we need to find a good photo of her,’ he says. ‘Do you have one?’
I shake my head.
‘That’s okay, we’ll just get one off her profile.’
He finds Lizzie’s Facebook, and I look at her beaming at me from the corner. He clicks through her profile pictures until he finds one of just her, close-up, a shot of her at the fair that came to Kings Lyme last autumn. The sky is purple behind her and she’s holding a huge stick of candyfloss. Her hair is down and shining in the bright lights of the waltzers beside her, and I can almost hear her laughing.
‘That one,’ I say, but he’s already saving it.
After he’s uploaded the photo to our page, we both sit and look at Lizzie, at the word MISSING that we’ve typed beside her.
‘Someone must know something,’ I say, and my voice is small and hopeless.
He gives me a sympathetic smile and an awkward kind of man-pat on the only part of me in reach: my socked foot. ‘Fingers crossed,’ he says. After a couple of minutes’ silence, he tries: ‘Distracting shark attack documentary?’
Somehow, I manage a smile. ‘Always.’
‘It’s got actual footage, not just reconstructions.’
‘Good times.’
He hits play and slides back into his own space.
‘Scobes?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Thanks.’
We sit and watch in comfortable silence. After a bit, we hear Jodie bring Frank to bed, even though he keeps telling her, in between yawns, that he’s ‘not tired yet!’ Near the end of the programme we hear two sets of footsteps going into Liam’s room, the door closing quietly. I feel a sudden pang of jealousy.
‘Who goes swimming near a seal colony anyway?’ Scobie says, sitting up to grab some of the cold leftover party food. He considers the guy being interviewed on screen, the scarred outline of a shark’s jaw right across his side. ‘Idiot.’
But I’m not really listening; too busy idly flipping through my phone. Trying to resist the urge to look at my messages with Lizzie again. ‘Hey, do you remember a girl called Autumn Thomas who was in our year for a bit?’
He thinks about it, tapping a spring roll against his plate. ‘Yeah, think so… redhead?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Never really spoke to her.’
‘She was in my English class. She friend-requested me the other day.’
He pushes his glasses up his nose. ‘Oh right.’
‘She seems nice enough.’
He shrugs and takes a bite of the spring roll, attention returned to the grainy camcorder footage of a fin cutting through the water towards a canoe.
But then he frowns. ‘Are you sure –’ he starts, but before he can ask me whether it’s really a good idea to be talking to some new girl when all I’m really thinking about is Lizzie, the lights – and Scobie’s Mac – go out.
‘Liam!’ Jodie yells from her room, at the same time as Liam calls out ‘Sorry!’ sheepishly.
‘Well, if they’d just listen to me and get the fuses actually fixed properly,’ Scobie says in a huff, getting up and heading downstairs.
‘I’ll take that as my cue to leave,’ I say, following him. ‘See you at school tomorrow, mate. Good luck with the electrics.’
‘Yeah, thanks.’ His hand finds my shoulder in the dark. ‘And look, don’t worry. This Lizzie thing. It’s all going to be okay. They’ll find her.’
I just wish I could be as certain.
I GET HOME from Scobie’s around ten, and realise I need to finish a history essay for Radclyffe that’s due in tomorrow. Mum and Kevin are already in bed, so I make myself a coffee, grab one of Kevin’s weird healthy oat and seed bar things – because, yep, unbelievably, I’m still hungry – and head for my room. I put the TV on low and flip open my laptop. I’ve only got the conclusion to finish, so I’m hoping it won’t take too long. I feel drained, like I could sleep forever. The last week hasn’t exactly been restful.
I’ve just started checking through the last paragraph I wrote, when Facebook flashes at me from another tab. Autumn’s sent me a new message.
hey, how you doing?
Hey
not bad thanks
how are you?
good thanks
…
While she’s typing, I try to work out if I’ve ever really spoken to her properly. I’m pretty sure it was just English we had together. I try to remember the projects Gerber gave us that year, if Autumn and I were ever grouped together. I think I remember her being Miss Maudie when we did our read-through of To Kill a Mockingbird, and us reading a scene together, me as Jem, with another girl, Katie Jupe, narrating as Scout. I try to picture Lizzie there too, head bent over her b
ook, hair tumbling forwards.
how’s your weekend?
She does seems nice enough. But maybe I shouldn’t really be talking to some random girl right now, especially when there’s every chance she’s just fishing for gossip about Lizzie.
yeah, good thanks, I write, and I don’t add anything else.
I click onto her profile. She has 302 friends, most of them from her school in Clapton. I look at the little box which says we’re friends with each other, and the one next to it, with a tick and the word ‘Following’, and a chill runs through me. It’s such a creepy word, especially now, especially with Lizzie… It was so easy for her to let strangers follow her, to let them look at everything she did and thought. Just like I’ve done with this girl, even though I barely remember her.
There are loads of photos of her; some from a beach holiday somewhere, a few parties. Lots of her horse-riding. I flick through them and start to relax a little bit. Seems like Autumn has a nice enough life; friends, a happy family, potentially her own horse – which is not that unusual for a girl from Aggers. She’s always smiling, never doing that annoying pout girls like Lauren and Cheska do every time they see a camera. She seems sweet. Friendly. Like the kind of person who maybe would add someone just because they went to school with them once.
I have to go quite far back to find any of her in Abbots Grey, and I’m shocked when I do at how young everybody looks. Funny how much people can change in two years. Scary, really.
The photos from Aggers are mostly just normal stuff; lots of girls from our year hanging around by the basketball courts, one of them on a bus on a school trip somewhere. There’s a couple of her and Lizzie, and my heart stalls in my chest. Lizzie, in her school blazer, beaming, her arm round Autumn. Lizzie, in her shirt and tie at their desk in English, and there, in the corner of the photo, just the edge of my face, caught in shadow. I click away quickly, look through more of the boring school trip ones.