‘You’re very cute,’ says Scarlett, eyeing her quite seriously. ‘Did you know that?’
‘Er, no, not really.’
‘You really are. It’s something about your …’ She tilts Tallulah’s face upwards with her fingertip under her chin and studies her. ‘I think it’s your nose. The way it sort of tips up, just at the end there. You look like Lana Del Rey.’
Tallulah laughs hoarsely. ‘Don’t be mad.’
‘I think it’s the eyeliner, plus the nose,’ She frames Tallulah’s face with her hands. ‘You should always wear your eyeliner like that,’ she says, slowly pulling away, but her eyes still taking in the detail of Tallulah’s face.
Tallulah feels something flash through her, the kind of adrenaline rush that you get when you nearly miss a step coming downstairs, a sort of thrilling sickness.
And then a flashlight appears from the darkness, and the sound of voices, and there is Scarlett’s gang, incapable of surviving without the oxygen of their leader’s presence for even ten minutes before hunting her down.
‘Oh, there you are,’ says one, almost cross with her for daring to be elsewhere. ‘Jayden said he thought you might have gone home.’
‘Nope. Just out here, chatting with Tallulah from the bus.’
The two girls look at Scarlett quizzically, and Tallulah sees them take in the shape of their bodies pressed together underneath Scarlett’s coat and sees something like recognition pass across their faces, a small shock of understanding, and she wonders what it is that they’ve seen.
They nod at her and she nods back, and Scarlett says, ‘This is Mimi and this is Roo. They’re a pair of ho bags I’ve known for about a hundred years. This is Tallulah. Don’t you think she’s pretty?’ she says. ‘Don’t you think she looks a bit like Lana Del Rey?’
They look at her blankly, slightly awkwardly.
Scarlett gets to her feet and her coat falls from Tallulah’s shoulders and suddenly she is cold, very cold. She looks at thethree girls, all of whom are lighting cigarettes and dancing together to the background thump of ‘8 Days of Christmas’ by Destiny’s Child emanating from the dining hall and she remembers Chloe sitting alone waiting for her can of Diet Coke and she says, ‘I’d better get back in. My friend’s waiting for me.’
Scarlett puts her hands on her hips and narrows her eyes at her in mock annoyance and then smiles and says, ‘See you around, Tallulah from the bus.’
Tallulah gives her an awkward thumbs up. She doesn’t really know what else to say. And then she turns and heads back inside, where Chloe gives her a pained and questioning look.
‘I’m really sorry,’ Tallulah says, sitting down next to her. ‘I don’t really understand what just happened. She just kind of … hijacked me.’
‘Weird,’ says Chloe, wrinkling her nose slightly.
‘Yeah,’ says Tallulah, caressing the curves of a rather warm plastic beer bottle and staring into the middle distance. ‘Yeah. It really was.’
12
June 2017
Kim leaves Kerryanne’s apartment and walks across the common with Ryan to Megs’s house to collect Noah.
He’s asleep in his car seat when Megs brings him to the front door. Kim swallows a surge of annoyance. She specifically told Megs that Noah needed to stay awake because otherwise he wouldn’t be tired at bedtime and now she’ll have to wake him up to get him out of his clothes and ready for bed and he’ll be grouchy and miserable and then won’t want to sleep when she puts him down at bedtime but Megs just smiles indulgently at him in his car seat, his dark hair damp with sweat, and says, ‘Bless his little soul, he was exhausted, I couldn’t bear to keep him awake.’
Kim smiles grimly and takes the handle of the car seat. ‘Never mind,’ she says tightly.
‘And I take it …?’ Megs begins. ‘Nothing about the kids?’
‘No,’ says Kim. ‘Nothing about the kids. Although – did Zach happen to say anything to you about what he had planned for last night?’
‘No. I mean, I didn’t even know they were going to the pub until you told me about it. Haven’t really spoken to him the last few days.’
‘So, you didn’t know anything about …’ Kim pauses, wondering whether to spoil the surprise or not, then decides that, no, getting to the bottom of the whereabouts of Zach and Tallulah is more important than surprises right now. ‘… a ring?’ she finishes.
‘A ring?’
‘Yes. An engagement ring. Did Zach say anything to you about proposing to Tallulah?’
Megs laughs. ‘God,’ she says, ‘no!’