LIU WAI:
Zoe and me ended up in this amazing nightclub called Heaven, and I ran into Andrew at the bar. It was the first time I’d seen him since he’d been holding forth in our kitchen a few weeks before. I started trying to talk to him but he didn’t listen or actually engage, he was quite drunk. He was squinting at Zoe on the dance floor.
ANDREW FLOWERS:
Yeah, I thought. It’s the one whose underwear went walkabout while you were in her flat. The one who said you could talk another time when you buzzed her door. Well, I thought, this is another time. I should go over and buy her a drink, make my peace. And I guess it must have worked, because the next thing you know we were on the dance floor, kissing like our flight was going down.
LIU WAI:
It was an incredibly disappointing end to the night. Andrew was dancing with Zoe, trying to scream into her ear over the music, but it was so loud. She was just laughing and nodding—I mean, there was no way you’d ever hear her in that place either. Let’s just say they weren’t connecting intellectually.
ANDREW FLOWERS:
Listen, I freely acknowledge that I’m every shade of shit rolled into one for not noticing the difference between Zoe and Kim that night. I did think, somewhere right at the back of my brain, that this didn’t seem like the funny, self-deprecating girl I’d met before. I couldn’t feel that same spark that had almost lifted my feet off the floor the first time. But who thinks of twins? Who outside of fucking Poirot thinks of twins? I hadn’t got Kim’s name the first time we met. But I’d seen that same sneering Asian girl with her. The same one who was even then giving me the evils across the dance floor. So in my head, in that moment, it all just clicked into place. When the girl I was dancing with told me her name was Zoe, I thought, Yeah, great, that must have been her name.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
I think I probably tried to stay awake for them, just to see Zoe and check in, but sometime after midnight, I nodded off. I would have been in my room asleep when they got back.
ANDREW FLOWERS:
Zoe and I went back to hers. Not to air her dirty laundry, but she knew what she was doing. I only say this because I’ve seen stories online suggesting I was her “first” or whatever, and I think we can probably put those to bed, so to speak. In the morning, while she was still out cold, I guess I had a chance to get a good look at her. And I guess some doubt was really starting to bubble up, because I definitely recall thinking, Wait, was this really the girl I met before? The one quoting “Blister in the Sun”？ I couldn’t see anything in the room that would verify things one way or the other, but what I could see was giving me an extremely bad feeling. We’re talking Ed Sheeran posters, Harry Potter merchandise, the Twilight books. So I go out into the hall, thinking I’ll just double-check this is the same place I was in before…
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
I was the first one awake as usual, watering Chihiro. I’d gone through into the kitchen to make some toast when Andrew walked in, wearing basically the stupid look on his face and nothing else. We just looked at each other, both silently computing the situation. Then he nodded, sighed and went back into Zoe’s room. I sat there for five minutes with the toast in my hand, then I think I left it and went back to bed. That was my first day of being nineteen.
ANDREW FLOWERS:
I see no reason why anyone would believe me, but at the time it broke my heart. Before that, even with all the shit I’d been through with élodie and my father, I didn’t even know the meaning of the phrase. After it, I couldn’t believe that people were expected to walk around that way without medical intervention.
When I met Kim for the first time, it just felt different. I felt different. Like another man or the one I might have been. That evaporated when I saw her sitting there in the kitchen and realized I’d slept with her sister. I got dressed, kissed Zoe goodbye and started to leave. She asked if we could see each other again and I suppose I must have said yes.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
It wasn’t the end of the world. Men always went for Zoe over me. [Laughs] Even though I had my own tree and everything. It was just confusing. Was I upset because a boy I fancied had slept with someone else? Or was it because he’d slept with my sister? And I liked Andrew at the time. I think if it had been different, if he’d shagged Alex or Liu, maybe I’d have said something, I might have fought for him. But I was trying to be my own person. I was really trying not to have issues with Zoe. So I never said anything to her about it. I swallowed the whole thing.
ANDREW FLOWERS:
When I got back that morning, I saw Jai, of course. And I mean, he’d had the living shit kicked out of him. Plaster across his nose, black eyes, bald patches. Someone had ripped out clumps of his hair with their hands. I went straight into my room, found the card that the two police officers had given us and called them. It took them three days to get around to visiting and taking a statement.
Three fucking days.
And I knew then that this was all shit they’d put into play. They took that picture of Zoe from him. I’m sure they had something to do with the posters going up around campus, the rumors of a predator or whatever. They knew they couldn’t get him one way so they got him another. I sat there and watched them and didn’t say a word while Jai gave his statement. The fucker taking notes was just doodling, he didn’t even try and hide it.
JAI MAHMOOD:
It wasn’t the violence that sent me off the rails, man. I mean, it didn’t help, but at the end of the day, I could see it for what it was. Some cock lump hit me because he had a hang-up about brown boys and white girls, yeah? Seeing the posters didn’t change his mind or make him think that way, the posters just gave him permission to act like he wanted to. That shit’s normal. What wasn’t normal was getting back to my room the next day and finding it turned over. Like, someone had gotten in there and stolen stuff. I didn’t tell Andrew, I didn’t tell the others and I didn’t tell the cops. At the time, I thought it could of been any one of them. I was scared.
Every single picture I’d taken since I got there, either developed or on film, printed or framed, had been taken. Nothing else in my room was out of place, and it hadn’t been trashed. It was just like those pictures had never existed, man. It made my blood run cold.