She stares at Anna.
“You think Anna has Rachel’s phone? You think she might be involved?” I ask.
Priya shrugs. “Don’t you?” She interprets my silence as an invitation to keep talking. I do my best to hide any signs of the panic I feel, while trying to turn off the phone inside my jacket pocket at the same time. “We know that someone called Anna’s mobile from the landline in the school office at five A.M. But we have no way of knowing where her phone was at the time. She could have been standing right next to it and called herself.”
My fingers finally find what they are looking for, and I turn off Rachel’s mobile. I laugh and it sounds as false as it feels.
“You had me going for a moment there! Great work on the phone trace, and good joke about my ex-wife being the killer,” I say, fully aware she wasn’t joking.
Priya gives me a strange look, then heads back over to the rest of the team by the car, her ponytail in full swing. Someone sent that text deliberately just now, and I’m sure I’m being watched. When I look around to try to locate Anna, I can’t see her anywhere.
It was a shame to do it, but I had to smash the window on the Mini. It isn’t as though it can’t be repaired, and the car will be good as new as soon as it gets mended. Not like me. But then people do tend to be trickier to fix than things. I’ve decided that succeeding in my plan is highly dependent on misdirection, so damaging the car was a necessary act of vandalism. Not that anyone would have suspected me of doing it. That sort of behavior goes against the idea that others have of me, but I am not who they think I am. Like most people, there is more to me than my job.
Watching things unfold and people unravel afterward was delicious. Better than anything I’ve read or seen on TV, because it was real. And I was the author of it all. I made use of that opportunity—seeing the fruits of my labor with my own eyes, enjoying the reactions of my handpicked cast. It left a bittersweet feeling.
I think I’ve always been very resourceful, perhaps because I had to be. Good at finding a use for things. Take the voice changer, for example, left to gather dust in a box of confiscated items in the school office. It was surprisingly simple and fun to use, so much so that I kept it. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, as my mum used to say.
I also took the school’s drama trophy from the headmistress’s office, and used that to smash the car window. It seemed appropriate somehow. Nobody saw me; the parking lot was empty and it didn’t take long. Afterward, when I experienced the pure rush of adrenaline that always accompanies the feeling of getting away with something, I felt invincible and invisible all at once. I kept the trophy too. My acting skills deserve some kind of award.
I have spent a lifetime trying on new skins like new clothes, seeing which version of myself suited me best, shedding the ones that didn’t. Not everyone seems to know that personalities can be altered, until a person finds the perfect fit. I didn’t know who I was when I was younger or, if I did, I pretended not to. People often see what they want, rather than what is really there.
I only took the bag because of how I needed things to look.
We all try to buy a little more time, but it’s priceless. We get what we’re given, not what we can afford. Time is a trapdoor we all tumble down at some point in our lives, often completely unaware of how far we have fallen. Captivated by an audience of our own worst fears, that demand an encore whenever we dare to stop feeling afraid.
The emotional walls we build are there to keep the real us inside, as well as to keep others out. I’m making mine stronger, one brick of revenge at a time.
We all hide behind the version of ourselves we let the rest of the world see.
Her
Wednesday 08:15
I can see it even if he can’t.
The pretty junior detective clearly has some sort of crush on Jack, and although we are no longer married, it still feels very strange to watch. Uncomfortable and mildly distressing, to be honest. I’m not na?ve. I’m fully aware that he must have moved on with his life in more ways than one since we stopped living together, but seeing another woman looking at him like that still makes me want to scratch her eyes out. While nobody is watching, I slip away into the woods. I head toward the exact same spot where Rachel and I would sometimes skip lessons to hang out.
* * *
I was aware that the other girls in our little gang—Helen Wang and Zoe Harper—were becoming increasingly jealous of the amount of time Rachel and I were spending together. They didn’t do a very good job of hiding it; not that I cared. I’d never even been kissed by a boy let alone a girl before, and for the first time in my life, I felt pretty.