‘Exactly.’ Pip grinned back, with a small laugh, as though Naomi had said something funny. ‘We just eat and talk.’ She unrolled her paper bag and reached inside, pulling out her box of six nuggets and her chips, a few lying abandoned and soggy at the bottom of the bag. ‘Oh, I’ve got the ketchups,’ she said, passing one each to Naomi and Cara.
Cara took the small pot from her, staring down at Pip’s outstretched arm, her sleeve sliding back towards her elbow.
‘What happened to your wrists?’ she asked quietly, uncertainly, her eyes on the raw, ragged skin the duct tape had left behind. ‘And your face?’
Pip cleared her throat, pulling the sleeve back down over her hand. ‘We don’t talk about that,’ she said, avoiding Cara’s eyes. ‘We talk about everything except that.’
‘But if someone hurt you, we can –’ Cara began, but it was Naomi who cut her off this time.
‘Cara, could you go grab us some straws?’ she asked, an older-sister edge to her voice.
Cara’s gaze flicked between the two of them. Pip nodded.
‘OK,’ she said, pushing up from the booth and over to a counter a few tables away with a straw dispenser and napkins. She returned with a few of each.
‘Thanks,’ Pip said, piercing the straw through the lid of her Coke, taking a sip. It burned in her throat, in the gouges left by her screams.
She picked up one nugget. She didn’t want to eat it, she couldn’t eat, but she put it in her mouth and chewed all the same. The texture felt rubbery, her tongue coating itself with saliva. She forced it down, noticing that Cara hadn’t started her own food, was staring too hard at Pip.
‘It’s just,’ Cara said, voice dipping into whispers, ‘if someone hurt you, I would kill th—’
Pip choked, swallowing the regurgitated food back down. ‘So, Cara,’ she said when she recovered. ‘Have you and Steph decided where you’re going on your travels? I know you said you really wanted to do Thailand?’
Cara checked with Naomi before answering. ‘Um, yeah,’ she said, finally opening her box of nuggets, dipping one into the ketchup. ‘Yeah. We want to do Thailand, do our scuba diving there, I think. Steph really wants to go to Australia too, maybe do some kind of tour.’
‘That sounds amazing,’ Pip said, turning to her chips instead, forcing a few down. ‘You’ll remember to pack sun cream, won’t you?’
Cara sniffed. ‘Such a Pip thing to say.’
‘Well,’ Pip smiled, ‘I’m still me.’ She hoped that was true.
‘You’re not going to do skydiving or bungee jumping, are you?’ Naomi said, taking another bite of her veggie burger, chewing uncomfortably. ‘Dad would freak out if he knew you were throwing yourself off a bridge or out of a plane.’
‘Yeah, I don’t know.’ Cara shook her head, staring down at her own hands. ‘I’m sorry, this is just really strange, I don’t –’
‘You’re doing really well,’ Pip said, taking a sip of Coke to force down another bite. ‘Really well.’
‘I want to help, though.’
‘This is helping.’ Pip locked her eyes on Cara’s, trying to tell her with her mind. They were saving her life right now. They were sitting in a service station McDonalds forcing down chips, having stilted, awkward conversation, but really they were saving her life.
There was a crash behind Pip. She whipped her head around, saw one of the drunken men had tripped over a chair, knocked it to the ground. But that’s not what the sound was, by the time it reached Pip’s ears. And she was surprised, in a way, that the sound wasn’t the crack of Jason Bell’s skull breaking open. It was still a gunshot, blowing an unfixable hole through Stanley Forbes’ chest. Staining the sweat on her hands a deep, deep, violent red.
‘Pip?’ Cara called her back. ‘Are you OK?’
‘Yes,’ she sniffed, wiping her hands on a spare napkin. ‘Fine. Fine. You know what?’ She leaned forward, pointed at Cara’s phone lying face down on the table. ‘We should take some pictures. Videos too.’
‘Of what?’
‘Of us,’ Pip said. ‘Hanging out, looking normal. The meta-data will have a record of the time and be geo-tagged. Come on.’
Pip got up from her chair and moved over to the booth, sidling in beside Cara. She picked up Cara’s phone and flicked it on to the camera. ‘Smile,’ she said, holding the camera out to take a selfie of the three of them, Naomi holding up her McDonalds cup in a mock-cheers.