“No.” She raises a hand to stop me speaking. “I did all of that to try and prove to the outside world I was coping. To try and show my mum and dad I was happy. Because they aren’t happy, as much as they pretend to be.”
Sunlight begins to stream through the bottom of the door. At last, this horrible night is over.
But the day is just beginning.
There are tears in Poppy’s eyes now. “Finally, I had to look the four of you up.”
“When was this?” I ask.
“A year ago,” Poppy says. “I’ve been watching you all for a long time. Investigating your lives. You were very easy to track.”
“Chloe’s burglary,” I whisper. “That was you, after all?”
“She’ll never know now,” Poppy says. “That’s a shame. I’d have liked to have seen her face knowing it was me. But doing that got me a whole load of access to everything about you all.”
But Chloe did know. She’d figured it out.
And now I have the confirmation.
Does that mean Poppy really does have the video?
Here in the hut, without windows, the claustrophobic feeling seems to increase, everything closing in on me. “You tracked us for so long. Why?”
“To give you a chance,” Poppy says. “It’s as simple as that. If I saw that you were—I don’t know, helping people, doing good deeds, living good lives, I think that would have been enough for me. I could have just taken what I needed and left you alone. But not even one of you could manage that. You were all still as selfish as always. You haven’t even made any other real friends. That says a lot about who you are as people.”
Taken what she needed?
“You all accepted my invitation,” Poppy says, “and none of you apologised. You were more concerned with what I looked like.”
Another awful truth.
“But faking your death?” I say.
“It was poetic justice,” Poppy says.
“What’s that meant to mean?”
Poppy sighs. “You all barely remembered the past. Or at least you pretended not to. Only Tanya was at least willing to bring it up. Did the rest of you forget?”
“We didn’t forget,” I say quietly.
“No.” She looks me up and down, and the action makes me feel naked.
“It was ten years ago!” I can’t tell her the truth: that even now, I still can’t believe it was really that bad.
Poppy continues as if I haven’t spoken. “The initial bullying, I could forgive perhaps. Kids bully other kids. That’s an unfortunate fact of life. Kids can be nasty. But then you had to outdo yourselves.”
I don’t know what to say.
“You need to remember it,” Poppy says. “Remember what you did ten years ago.”
I shake my head. “This isn’t the time. Everyone is dead, Poppy.”
“This is the perfect time.” Her voice sounds strangled. I can hear just how much this hurts her. “Ten years ago this very day, actually. May twenty-second, 2013.”
The art exam.
“That was the worst day,” Poppy says. “Why don’t I take you back?”
I want to say no.
“You want an explanation for why I killed Tanya and Chloe and did this to you all?” she says. “Then you need to listen.”
Thirty-Two
Poppy
May 22, 2013
Dear Diary,
I’m sorry if my writing looks shaky. My hands are still trembling from earlier. I’ve opened this notebook up and then closed it again a dozen times. How do I even process what happened?
I can’t believe it. If I don’t write it down I can pretend that nothing actually happened at all, and it was all some sick nightmare.
Except if I don’t do something I think I’m going to fall apart.
Okay. I can write about this if I start at the beginning and pretend it’s a story happening to someone else. That’s the only way I’ll be able to make sense of it. If I record everything, maybe I’ll be able to deal with it. Maybe I’ll be able to think about it all without crying.
This is a story about a girl who failed her art exam.
Our final piece for the Art A Level was an almost two-day-long exam in Miss Wersham’s art room. We had this time, and this time only, to produce a project that showcased the very best of our ability. Everyone had been talking about it for months, even more than our portfolios, which were now done and waiting to be sent off to the exam board.
Before we got started, we were allowed to choose our own work spaces. I took myself immediately to the back of the room in the corner where no one else would be able to see what I was doing. I didn’t want them to copy me at the last minute! My theme throughout my A Level has been isolation and the human body, and I’ve taken a lot of inspiration in my style from artists such as Frida Kahlo, Remedios Varo, and Gertrude Abercrombie, meaning my work has become much more surrealist.
“I can’t wait to get started,” Sally said after we’d all chosen our places and set up. I could see her easel and canvas from here and knew her work wouldn’t be anywhere near as good as mine. She was just doing art for the fun of it. “I’m going to do a collage from all these newspapers I’ve collected and create an image of a bird to show my theme of spirituality really well.”
How original. But I didn’t say anything, I just nodded.
“I’m doing a sculpture within a sculpture,” Jayla declared. Then she laughed nervously. “I hope it works. I’ve been practicing at home.”
“What are you doing, Poppy?” Ebbie, another girl who was sitting closest to me, asked. “Your canvas is huge!”
I made sure to angle my easel even further towards the back to guarantee she couldn’t see anything. “Something completely unexpected,” I said with pride. “None of you will have ever seen anything like this before.”
“Don’t let Miss Wersham hear you say that,” Jayla said. “She’ll go mad thinking you’re going to break the rules again.”
“Miss Wersham isn’t allowed in here,” I said. It was true. As our teacher, she was seen to be biased and therefore couldn’t be in the room whilst we were doing our exam. Instead, an external proctor had to come in and watch us. “And anyway, something can be edgy and controversial and still within the rules, you know.”
“Right.” Jayla wasn’t convinced. “What’s the idea you’re going for, anyway?”
I put my finger to my lips to show I wasn’t going to say anything more.
I wasn’t the only one keeping quiet. Ollie had set himself up in the other corner and wouldn’t engage in conversation at all, continuing to check obsessively that he had everything he needed.
At that point, the proctor, a rather dull-looking woman with grey hair and too-tight jeans on, stood up and called for quiet. She explained the exam rules (we weren’t allowed to talk to each other, we couldn’t look at each other’s work, I mean duh) and then started a timer. We had eight hours in total for the exam, split across two days into four-hour slots. We were also allowed a break in between, so the timer was only for two hours each time. But it still felt like a huge task, and a lot of pressure to perform and produce something I’d be happy with in such a short period.
I almost don’t want to write about my project. It hurts too much. But we’re still pretending this is a story at the moment, right? This happened to a made-up girl. It didn’t really happen to me.
Ebbie wasn’t kidding—my canvas was huge. Almost as big as me. My plan was a self-portrait, but a surrealist one. The background was going to be full of objects that seemed positive, but on closer look were disturbing. Bright, colourful flowers that were wilting and growing upside down from the sky. Skulls as clouds. Apples with bites in them that revealed a rotten inside. Pomegranates spilling juice that looked like blood. Insects crawling between trees, as tall as them and with thousands of legs. Not ordinary trees—trees with mirrors for bark, shiny and reflecting sad fairy-tale figures trying desperately to reach out and escape. Finally, me in the centre, huge and crying, mouth open to scream, hair growing sideways as if I’ve been electrocuted. There are silver lines on my arms and hands as I reach forward. I have no body; I float.
Frightening. Edgy. Controversial. Surreal. Everything I wanted it to be.
Everyone was going to be stunned. And better—jealous they couldn’t come up with something that so perfectly encapsulated their portfolio’s theme and style like this. I was going to bring it with me to Slade. Show everyone what I was made of.
My ticket out. Like Charlie in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I was going to get my Golden Ticket and escape to a better place.
The first day I drew the scene out, making sure it was as perfect as possible in the timed conditions. The proctor got up and did a loop around everyone to make sure they had everything they needed at the beginning of the exam, and then spent the rest of it sitting at Miss Wersham’s desk reading Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. Hardly a true professional. But everyone was equally as drawn into their work as I was, the room a hushed quiet, the only sounds those of pencils, paint brushes, paper rustling, and sculptures being melded.