I draw the Fall chill into my lungs, trying to jerk myself back to reality. Drizzle coats my hair. I make it to the car and immediately turn the radio dial.

‘...her parents, Angela and Philip Hundley, are appealing to anyone with information to call the dedicated police hotline -’

I snap the radio off. Already my phone is starting to buzz, I can feel it vibrating in my pocket.

Devon, what have you done?

*

Devon Hundley.

She looks like money, that was my thought when I saw her for the first time. At Horton, most of the girls would almost make a show of being scruffy and bed-headed at breakfast, if they appeared at breakfast at all. They’d come through the doors yawning elaborately, slouching in designer loungewear, messy buns, slept-in makeup. Thorpe hated it of course. I figured they cultivated the look on purpose, a combination of rebellious and slatternly that they found exciting. It doesn’t take having boys around to make teenage girls compete for sex appeal. It was unnerving, the wall of raw hormones you could feel coming off them. Sometimes I felt we were running a modern-day convent, locking up young maidens at the request of their parents, stamping out unmentionable urges, and keeping their bodies safe from the hands of marauding boys.

But the Hundley sisters weren’t like that. They were like princesses or something - not modern princesses, running about town and getting into trouble in the tabloids - more the medieval kind, dainty but hard-edged, imperious. Unlike the girls who would flop through the doors looking barely out of bed, Devon always appeared with her hair neatly combed, held back with the thin velvet band she always wore. She had a clean look about her somehow, as though her shirt was just a shade whiter, her shoes just a touch more polished than the other girls’. Perfect skin, perfect teeth. Her older sister Lucy was much the same, just as groomed and put-together, if a little more bored-looking. Devon reminded me of a sphinx. That blank expression, where you were never really sure what she was thinking. I never saw her angry or sulking - or giddy or impatient or out of control. She didn’t talk much to other girls in her year from what I saw. It was hard to tell if she had friends.