‘That dickhead wasn’t even looking,’ Stella said, her voice still high and panicked as she bent down to scoop up Pip’s phone. ‘You were at the crossing, for fuck sake.’
She placed the phone into Pip’s hand, remarkably unscratched.
‘Must have been going at least sixty.’ Stella was still talking, too quickly for Pip to keep up. ‘On the bloody high street. Sports cars think they own the damn road.’ She ran her hand nervously through her long brown hair. ‘So close to running you over.’
Pip could still hear the screeching of the wheels, left behind as a ringing in her ears. Had she hit her head?
‘… going so fast I couldn’t even attempt to read the number plate. It was a white car though, I could see that. Pip? Are you OK? Are you hurt? Should I call someone for you? Ravi?’
Pip shook her head and the ringing in her ears faded. Turned out it was just in her head after all. ‘No, it’s OK. I’m fine. Really,’ she said. ‘Thank you, Stella.’
But as she looked at Stella, at her kind eyes and her tanned skin and the lines of her cheekbones, she became someone else again. A new person but the same person. Layla Mead. The same as Stella in every way, except her brown hair was now a dusty, ashy blonde. And when she spoke next, it was in Charlie Green’s voice.
‘How’ve you been, anyway? I haven’t seen you in months.’
And Pip wanted to scream at Charlie and tell him about the gun he had left behind in her heart. Show him the blood on her hands. But she didn’t want to scream, actually. She wanted to cry and ask him to help her, help her understand everything, understand herself. Beg him to come back and show her how to be OK with who she was again. Tell her, in his calm, soothing voice, that maybe she was losing this fight because she was already lost.
The person in front of her was now asking her when she was off to university. Pip asked the same question back, and they stood there on the street, talking carelessly about a future Pip wasn’t sure she’d have any more. It wasn’t Charlie standing in front of her, talking about leaving home. And it wasn’t Layla Mead. It was Stella. Only Stella. But, even so, it was hard to look at Only Stella.
‘Another one?’ Ravi didn’t move, the expression on his face held there, like he was suspended in time, on that one patch of carpet. As though to move either way, forward or back, would confirm the thing he didn’t want to hear. If he didn’t move, it might not be real.
He’d only just walked through her bedroom door; it was the first thing Pip had said to him. Don’t freak out but I got another blocked call today. She hadn’t wanted to text him earlier, distract him while he was working, but the waiting had been hard, the secret burrowing around under her skin, looking for its own way out.
‘Yeah, this morning,’ she said, watching his face as it finally shifted, eyebrows climbing up his forehead, away from his glasses that he’d remembered again. ‘Didn’t say anything. Just breathing.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ He stepped forward, closing the gap between them. ‘And what happened to your hand?’
‘I’m telling you now,’ she said, running a finger down his wrist. ‘And nothing really. Car nearly hit me as I was crossing the road. It’s fine, it’s just a scrape. But, look, this call is a good thing because –’
‘Oh, it’s good, is it? Getting calls from a potential serial killer. Good. Well, that’s a relief,’ Ravi said, hand raised to theatrically mop his brow.
‘Can you listen?’ she said, rolling her eyes. Such a drama queen when he wanted to be. ‘It’s good because I’ve spent all afternoon looking this up. And look, see? I’ve downloaded this app.’ Pip held up her home screen to show him. ‘It’s called CallTrapper. And what it does is, once you’ve activated it – which I now have – and paid the bloody four pound fifty subscription fee, when you get a call from a blocked number, it will unmask it. So you know the number that’s calling you.’ She smiled up at him, hooked her finger on to his belt loop, like he always did to her. ‘I should have installed it after the first call, really, but I wasn’t sure what it was at the time. Thought it might have been a random butt dial. Never mind, I have it now. And next time he calls me, I’ll have his phone number.’ She was being too cheery, she could tell, overcompensating.
Ravi nodded, and his eyebrows climbed back down just a little. ‘There’s an app for everything these days,’ he said. ‘Great, now I sound like my dad.’