She placed it back on the coffee table, spout open, her eyes snapping to Max’s face as he took a particularly heavy, shaking breath, sounding almost like a sigh.
‘Yeah,’ Pip whispered, looking down at him. Max Hastings. Her cornerstone. The upturned mirror by which she defined herself, everything he was and everything she wasn’t. ‘It sucks when someone puts something in your drink and then ruins your life, huh?’
She walked away and back out into the night, hiding her eyes from the too-bright stars.
‘You good?’ Ravi asked her.
A sound escaped her, a punch of breath that was almost a laugh. She knew what he’d meant, but the question hit deeper, reverberating around her gut, tucking itself in. No, she wasn’t good. She could never be again after today.
‘I’m tired,’ she said, her lower lip quaking. She shook it off, retook control. Couldn’t give in yet. Not done, but so close now. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Just got to remove the tape from the cameras.’
Ravi waited down the road while she did it. The same way she’d placed the duct tape earlier, sidling up against the front of the house, pulling it off, looping around the back of the house this time to remove the other. But it wasn’t her doing that, of course, it was Max Hastings. And this was the very last time she had to be him. She didn’t like it there, in his head, or him in hers. He wasn’t welcome there.
Pip clambered over the front fence and found Ravi on the moonlit street. Neither of them had left her yet, the moon still showing her the way.
They finally pulled off their latex gloves, the skin on both their hands wrinkled and damp as Pip slid her fingers in between his, where they belonged, hoping they still did. Ravi walked her home, and they didn’t speak, they just held hands, like they’d given everything already and there were no words left. Only three of them, the only three that mattered as Ravi said goodbye at her front drive.
His arms wrapped around her, too tight, like his holding her was the only thing stopping her from disappearing. Because she had already once today; she’d disappeared, and she’d said her final goodbyes to him. Pip burrowed her face into the place where his neck met his shoulder, warm, even when it had no reason to be.
‘I love you,’ she said.
‘I love you,’ he said back.
Pip kept those words close, forced the Ravi in her head to echo them as she silently unlocked her front door and crept inside.
Up the stairs, over the creaky one, back into her bedroom and the smell of bleach.
The first thing she did was cry.
Dropped on to her bed and wrapped a pillow around her face, taking it away just as DT had. Silent, aching sobs that retched, tearing at her throat, unpicking threads in her chest, leaving them unravelled and bare.
She cried and she let herself cry, a few minutes to grieve for the girl she could never be again.
And then she pushed herself up, and pushed herself back together, because she wasn’t finished yet. An exhaustion like she’d never known before, stumbling across her carpet like a dead girl walking.
She carried the bucket with the bleach mixture carefully out of her room, stepping with the loud outward breaths of her dad down the hall, disguising her movements beneath them. Into the bathroom and the shower, slowly tipping the mixture out and down the drain. The clothes and tape left behind were sodden, white bleach marks starting to leach the colour out of them.
Pip took the bucket and everything inside back to her room, pushing her door close-to but not clicking it shut; she’d be in and out over the next few hours.
From her rucksack, she laid out one of the larger plastic freezer bags – now empty – to protect the carpet and tipped out the wet, bleached things from the bucket. On top of those she added everything else from her rucksack that she needed to dispose of. Destroy and get rid of, so they could never be tied back to her. She knew just how to do it.
From the top drawer of her desk, she pulled out a pair of large scissors, sliding her fingers in through the red plastic handle. She stood over the pile and surveyed it all, creating new columns of boxes to tick off in her head. Small, manageable tasks, one at a time.
□ Sports bra
□ Leggings
□ Hoodie
□ Trainers
□ Rubber tube
□ Green Scene gloves x2
□ Used latex gloves x3
□ Nisha Singh’s mittens
□ Cleaning cloths
□ Rohypnol pills
□ Spare underwear
□ Spare T-shirt
□ Duct tape
□ Burner phone
□ Jason’s burner phone
She started with the first item, picking up the sloppy, stained-white mess of the sports bra she’d been wearing, the rusted bloodstain gone to the naked eye, but there would always be traces of it.