Message icon on my screen. Conway, a few minutes back, while I’d been too busy to notice. She must have pulled the plug, or Mackey had. I was just in time.

Got anything yet? Stalling him long as I can but lights out is 1045 get a move on

‘What the fuck,’ I said out loud.

The grin came on top of it, grin like my face was splitting open and every colour of light bursting out.

Idiot, me, supersize idiot and I could’ve punched myself in the head for it. For a second there I forgot all about Rebecca, didn’t care.

Go for a nice walk, admire the grounds, Conway had said to me outside the door of the art room. See if you can get Chris’s ghost to pop up for you. Meaning Get outside and talk to those girls, stir them up as hard as you can, see what you can get out of them. Clear as day, if I’d been looking. I’d been so busy staring at how Mackey could’ve used me to fuck me up, I’d missed what she was waving in front of my face.

Conway had trusted me: not just trusted me through all Mackey’s doom-peddling, but trusted me to know she would. I could’ve punched myself all over again for not doing the same for her. Made my stomach turn cold, how close I had come to too late.

I texted her back. Meet me out the front. Urgent. Don’t let Mackey come.

Chapter 26

Chapter 26

May comes in restless, fizzing in the warm air. Summer is almost close enough to touch and so are the exams, and the whole of third year is wound too tight, laughing too loud at nothing and exploding into ornate arguments full of slammed desks and tears in the toilets. The moon pulls strange hues out of the sky, a tinge of green you can only see from the corner of your eye, a bruised violet.

It’s the second of May. Chris Harper has two weeks left to live.

Holly can’t sleep. Selena still has her fake headache, and Julia is being a bitch; when Holly tried to talk to her about whatever’s up with Lenie, Julia blew her off so viciously that they’re still only kind of speaking. The bedroom is too hot, over-intimate heat that sends waves of itch across your skin. Things feel wrong and getting wronger, they twist and pull at the edges, drag the fabric of her all askew.