I looked over at Sophie again, who was still staring at me, no words necessary to communicate what she was saying. I had a sense of being suspended, teetering on the edge of a cliff; and then I was falling, falling: opening the bag, tipping the contents into Maria’s coke, stirring it frantically with the straw, willing the powder to dissolve quickly. My eyes darted around the room, but nobody was looking at me – and even if they did, all I was doing now was stirring my own drink. Unless you looked very closely, you wouldn’t be able to see how much my hands were shaking. I looked down again into the glass – there was nothing to be seen now, it looked exactly as it had before. It occurred to me that actually, I hadn’t quite fallen, not yet. I could take the drink to the toilets and pour it away. My hand hovered around the glass, but as I looked over to Sophie, I saw that she was beaming, her face alight with happiness, her hands aloft in a big thumbs up. Before I could change my mind, I forced myself onto my feet and went over to Maria, who was still standing uncertainly by the dance floor.
‘It shouldn’t be you who has to run away, or give up your seat,’ I said, my heart thumping as much as the music. ‘I’ll go.’
She looked unsure.
‘Go on – Esther will be expecting you to be there when she gets back. I’ll go over there,’ I gestured to the other side of the hall, where Sophie watched me with glee. ‘I promise I won’t bother you again.’
She glared at me suspiciously and then stalked back to her seat. As I walked over to Sophie, I looked back and saw Maria’s hand go to her heart necklace again, twiddling it nervously. She picked up her glass, put the straw to her lips, and drank.
I think about this now, less than twelve hours later, sitting motionless on my bedroom floor. About the last time I saw her. After I’d mixed in the powder, I went to tell Sophie. She was elated, made a huge fuss of me. I didn’t particularly want to do an E – I was high on the sheer daring of what I’d done – but she persuaded me. She’d taken one too, and when they started to kick in she led me onto the dance floor. For the second time in my life, I felt totally uninhibited, letting my body move to the music in any way it wanted. For the next two hours I thought of nothing else but the music and the physical, animal joy of giving myself over to it. The dance floor filled up (I don’t think we were the only ones who’d managed to get something past Mr Jenkins) and after a while I lost track of everyone: Sam, Matt, even Sophie. Boys who had never looked twice at me were eyeing me in a new way. I felt as though I’d shed my skin and left the old me behind, lying discarded somewhere no one ever goes.
Eventually Sophie resurfaced, wanting to go to the bar and get water.
‘Where have you been?’ I asked her.
‘Oh, around and about.’ She gave a secret smile, more to herself than to me. I felt a tightening inside. Had she been with Sam, the two of them laughing about my frigidity, their heads close together, Sophie’s perfect body radiating heat and invitation? Or with Matt, all thoughts of protecting me from Sophie’s scorn driven from his head by his desire for her?
‘Where is Maria anyway?’ I asked. ‘She must be coming up by now.’ Lost in the moment, I had temporarily forgotten that this was what it had all been about. Of course it had never really been about Maria for me, only about myself and Sophie, and what this act could do for me, where it could take me.
Sophie smiled to herself again.
‘What’s so funny?’ I asked. ‘I thought you wanted to see her off her head. That was the whole point, wasn’t it?’
She shrugged and looked around, but Maria was nowhere to be seen. I could see Esther crossing the room towards us, and with a lurch in my stomach I realised she was coming to speak to me.
She wasted no time on preliminaries. ‘Louise, have you seen Maria?’
‘No, not for a while. Why?’
I suppose at this stage I should have felt the shadow of what was coming, or at least a mild sense of foreboding, but I was still buoyed up by the euphoria that being someone else for the night had given me.
‘She said you were talking to her earlier. What did you say?’
‘I’m not sure that’s any of your business.’ I wondered uneasily how much Maria had told Esther.
‘I think she’s gone off somewhere. She said she wasn’t feeling well ages ago, went to the toilet and now I can’t find her.’
Perhaps it was then that the first tiny seed of doubt began to sprout.
‘Maybe she’s talking to someone outside, or in one of the classrooms?’
‘Like who?’ Esther said scornfully. ‘You and your lovely friends have made sure that no one in their right mind wants to hang out with her. I thought you had better taste than that, Louise.’
Her words stung my cheeks with a shameful flush. I wasn’t used to Esther confronting me like this. I preferred not to think about her, about how close we had once been.
‘The only person I thought she might be with is her brother, but I can’t find him either,’ she went on.
Relief flooded me, mixed with disappointment that we weren’t going to see Maria losing it on the dance floor like we’d hoped.
‘She’s obviously gone home with him then. You said she wasn’t feeling well.’
‘She would have told me if she was leaving. She wouldn’t have left me here on my own.’
‘Are you sure, Esther? How well do you actually know her?’
I could tell from her face that this had stung Esther exactly like I had wanted it to.
‘You know what, Louise? Forget it. You obviously don’t care or want to help. I hope for your sake nothing has happened to her. I’m going to call my mum to pick me up, so if you do see her can you tell her I’ve gone home?’
For a while everything was a blur of dancing and talking and laughing, and then before I knew it, it was midnight. Like Cinderella’s coach turning into a pumpkin, the music stopped, the harsh lights were switched on, everyone was pale and sweaty and the room was just the school hall again.
After that, another blur. Maria’s mum Bridget coming to pick her up: mildly concerned at first, becoming frantic with worry when Tim appeared and turned out to have been there the whole time and not to have seen Maria either. My dad arriving to collect me as Bridget was being led off to the school office to phone Esther’s house. Hearing Mr Jenkins asking Bridget if there were any other friends they could try calling, and the heat that spread through me like a virus as she turned to me, rage and shame etched on her face, shaking her head – no, there was no one else. Hearing the words police and missing person and twenty-four hours.
The warm night had given way to a heavy summer downpour, raindrops thundering on the windscreen as Dad asked me what was going on. I tried to keep up a semblance of normal conversation, to pretend I was perfectly sober. Tried to pretend I was still his daughter, still the same girl who had left the house a few hours before.
And then there was just a space. I sat on my bedroom floor all night and stared into it. A space where Maria should have been: dancing, going crazy, hugging people without knowing why. Being watched by me and Sophie, nudging each other and giggling. Waking up in the morning feeling like crap and not knowing what had happened.
But Maria has simply disappeared into this empty space, leaving only the shadow of a scornful laugh, a golden heart on a chain, a wisp of smoke in the night air.
Chapter 22
That night was the end of everything, and the beginning. The end of something is always the start of something else, even if you can’t see it at the time.