Nicole made a skeptical sound in the back of her throat, half question mark and half laugh. “Nice? That sounds like what you say when you really don’t like someone.”
Lily shifted, and when she spoke again, it was to her knees. “Katie and me, we were friends when we were really little. Our moms met in some kind of ‘mommy and me’ class when we were like two. But we got older and we got different.”
Nicole said, “Translate that for me.”
Lily twisted the silver ring on her left thumb. “To be honest, Katie’s kind of a suck-up. Adults like her more than kids do.”
“A suck-up?”
“You know, an overachiever. She wants to get straight A’s, she wants to go to Harvard, she wants to be a lawyer. She has this whole plan. She says she’s going to be president someday.”
A thought occurred to Allison. “So did she run for office at Lincoln High?”
A roll of the eyes. “Last year. Ran—and lost. I tried to warn her. It’s like everything else at school. It’s not how good your ideas are, it’s a popularity contest. Katie kept saying she had a great, what’d she call it, a great platform. Only it’s not about your platform. It’s about how many friends you have.”
“Are you saying Katie didn’t—” Allison corrected herself. “Doesn’t have any friends?”
“She has friends,” Lily admitted reluctantly. “Friends like her. So of course there aren’t a lot.”
Allison couldn’t imagine that Lily herself had that many friends.
“Have you been in touch since she left for the program?” Allison asked.
“Sometimes Katie texted me if she saw someone famous. You know, like an actor or something came to the Senate. It was like she was trying to impress me. Which is stupid. She’s the one that gets to go off to DC and live on her own. And I’m stuck in Puddletown.” She sighed. “I can’t wait until I can move out on my own.”
“So Katie just texts you, then,” Nicole said patiently. “She doesn’t call you.”
“She called me once in October. It was like, right before Halloween. And she said she had a boyfriend.”
Allison straightened up. “Who was he? Do you know?”
“She wouldn’t tell me his name. But she did say he was somebody important. Somebody everyone’s heard of.” Lily shrugged. “At first I kind of thought she was lying.”
Lying? Allison thought of Katie’s blog. Katie had known that others might read it. Which meant she might have shaded the truth. Allison had known that. But until now, Allison had never considered that Katie’s hints of a boyfriend could have been conjured up from her imagination. At that age, you might be tempted to mimic the drama you saw all your friends going through.
“Why did you think she might be lying?”
“I wasn’t there, was I? In DC, I mean. She could say anything she wanted about what it was like there, and how would I know? I mean, if it were me, I would come back and tell the best stories about what I had done there. You know, like about how I had eaten dinner with the president and his family. And no one would know they weren’t true.”
“So what did Katie tell you about this guy? Her boyfriend?”
“She mostly just bragged about having one. She’d never really had a boyfriend before. Not a serious one. And when I asked her who he was, she said that all she could tell me was that he was famous. And I was like—famous? You know, ’cause we’re juniors in high school, not like rock stars or anything. But she said he took her to expensive restaurants and he drove an expensive car and he bought her a bracelet.”
Nicole and Allison exchanged glances. Someone rich and famous. Was it true? Or was the whole thing like Lily thought—an elaborate lie to make Katie feel better?
“So is that when you thought she might be lying?” Nicole asked.
Lily nodded. “I figured she was probably just staying in her room and doing her homework. You know how sometimes you say something and it’s not true, but to make people believe it’s true you have to tell more and more lies?”
Allison nodded. As a prosecutor, she had met a lot of people who did exactly that.
“You said ‘at first,’” Nicole said. “At first you thought Katie was lying. So did something change to make you think she was telling the truth?”
Lily nodded. “I saw her the second day after she came back home for Christmas break. The day before she disappeared. Her mom came over to have coffee with my mom and brought Katie with her. We went up to my room, but we really didn’t have that much to talk about. She didn’t care what was happening at Lincoln, even though she’s coming back in February. She just kept wanting to talk about this guy. But it wasn’t like it was in October, when she was bragging about how wonderful he was. She kept saying it was complicated, but that it was true love, and that was all that mattered.”
“Oh?” Allison asked.
True love. Kids were the only ones innocent enough to believe in that idea. That two people, no matter how mismatched, were fated to be together despite any obstacles.