While living with Lissy wasn’t quite what she had dreamed of, Chloe found she was almost looking forward to it. There would be Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn prints on the walls. Heart-shaped candles on the table. Herbal Essences shampoos in the shower. It would be normal. Not what she had planned, but nice. Obviously, moving into Archer Crescent was no longer an option. The house was to be rented out to a family, which would presumably be an enormous relief to everyone who lived nearby.

Lissy had moved heaven and earth to find a place for Chloe in her house, convincing the three other girls that they should give up the four-bed that they’d found close to campus and the big supermarket in favour of a five-bed so that Chloe could join. She’d seen a steeliness in Lissy, as she strong-armed the girls into picking a slightly smaller, slightly shabbier house, which surprised her.

‘Why are you doing this?’ Chloe had asked her.

‘Because we’re friends,’ she had answered.

Her reply had surprised Chloe. What sort of a friend had she been to Lissy? Occasional chats and texts, a few nights out. Nothing spectacular or dramatic. Nothing like what she had had with Zadie. But then, Lissy was here, and Zadie was gone.

Rav liked Lissy. He hadn’t said it outright, hadn’t admitted that he liked Chloe more when she surrounded herself with gentler, more normal people. But it was implied. Chloe wondered if maybe she liked herself more now, too. She often felt like the smartest, funniest person in the room. She didn’t replay everything she said back in her head to try to work out whether she sounded stupid or not. She’d managed to scrape a 2.1 in her end-of-year exams. But despite all of that, she knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that if her phone rang tomorrow and it was Zadie summoning her to anything, whether it was a party or to help her bury a body, she would smack aside any obstacle that prevented her from being there.

31

Now