Ryan nods, a finality about it. I wonder why my opinion means so much to him, holds any weight at all.
After several attempts at polite conversation, Ryan and I drive away. I look back at Richard Coates, wandering his motorbike graveyard like a restless spirit, until he is lost to sight.
Chapter 15
‘What happened to you?’ says Brenda nastily at my elbow when I return to Paradise High for the last period of the day, Maths. ‘We’ve been trying to track you down for hours.’ Her two, ever-present henchwomen take up unsmiling position on either side of me and I know they’ll be escorting me to my seat personally today.
After they work me over a little first. For a moment, I wonder if Brenda saw Ryan picking me up just past the school gates this morning, and wants to cause a scene just for the hell of it. But then I recall what went down at Mulvany’s the night before.
‘My meds reacted badly with the stuff Bailey slipped into my drink,’ I say apologetically in a little-girl voice, hanging my head like I know Carmen would. ‘Ryan was soooo mad at me this morning. He was dying to get back to you last night and was pissed off at me big time when I finally came around.’ The lie works wonders. The crop haired brunette with the eyeliner and leather fetish and the horsy-faced dirty blonde with the impeccable French manicure fall back a step and Brenda is practically snuggling up to my right side with a delighted, ‘Really?’
‘I so told you,’ insists the brunette from behind us.
‘It was obvious.’
‘Kayla had it pegged,’ agrees the blonde. ‘He’s still into you in a big way.’
‘Shut up, Jackie,’ Brenda says impatiently. ‘What else did he say?’ We’re right outside the classroom now and I’m not even feeling guilty about what I say next, because this girl shouldn’t even be on my case. She’s Ryan’s unfinished business, not mine. He can deal with it.
‘You really should hear it from him,’ I urge guilelessly.
‘You two have so much to work out. All he can talk about is you. I’d give him a call. Today.’ Brenda nods eagerly, while part of me grins inside.
Good luck.
When I’d left him that morning, Ryan had muttered something about checking out one of Port Marie’s only two churches, still fixated on his recent, fragmented dream. I knew he and his friend, the ice pick, would be pretty much incommunicado while it was still light.
‘Just one more thing,’ I say, as we head towards a bunch of empty desks up the back of the class, away from where Tiffany, Delia and the others are giving me snake eyes for cosying up to the locals and not making myself available for their collective wrath. ‘I’m curious, because I’m staying in Lauren’s room and I’m virtually surrounded by photos, and I know you two were besties…’ Brenda’s ‘Yeah?’ is slightly less chilly than usual.
‘Was Lauren dating anyone when she disappeared?’ I say, keeping my little-girl act going. ‘It’s been bugging me which one was her boyfriend.’ There are pictures of Lauren and Richard together, but no pictures of Brenda and Richard together, or Richard with anyone else I’ve met at Paradise High so far, like Kayla, Jackie, Tod, Clint or Bailey. Plus, there are pictures of Lauren with a couple of other guys I haven’t seen around the halls. If Brenda truly was Lauren’s best friend, I figure she’d have a handle on what Lauren’s love life had really been like. Maybe it was a lot more complicated than Ryan realised.
Brenda, still wrapped up in thoughts of her ex, is almost friendly when she replies. ‘Lauren never went for clean-cut guys, only the freaks. She was dating a loser called Richard when she was taken, a real short ass with even bigger loser-ass friends that I wouldn’t be seen dead with; and before that, a geeky mountaineering guy with a ponytail called Seth, who left town before she started seeing the motocross dwarf. Goes without saying I didn’t hang with him either. A choir nerd from Port Marie tried to ask her out just before she disappeared, but she told him things between her and Richard were pretty serious — can you believe it? — and they couldn’t be anything more than friends. Ask him if you like. He’s doing this stupid Mahler concert with us. He’s a “soloist”, just like you are.’ She drawls the words Mahler and soloist as if they’re synonyms for something filthy and unspeakable that could get you arrested. Anyone other than me would take issue with it. But I could care less, because she’s just given me a lead that maybe Ryan has never followed up, never even known about.
The info about Seth the mountaineering geek correlates with the pictures I’ve seen jammed into the right- hand bottom corner of Lauren’s mirror: of her with some incredibly tall and skinny outdoorsy type with a huge Adam’s apple, bushy ponytail, ginger stubble and a friendly expression. So I just need to look out for a round- faced, dark-haired, spectacle-wearing ‘choir nerd’ who’s singing one of the solos in the Mahler piece and who hails from Port Marie. Easy.
Maybe he can give us something more to work with.
He might even be the something everyone has failed to see all this time.
‘Well, thanks for satisfying my curiosity,’ I say mildly, as I slide into an empty seat by one of the windows. ‘You remember to call Ryan now. I can tell you’ve got a lot to talk over.’ Brenda smiles coyly as she cracks open her textbook.
‘Maybe you aren’t such a waste of space, after all,’ she replies kindly.
There is a God, because at the after-school rehearsal for the Mahler concert Mr Masson tells all the soloists to sit away from their usual choir stations and away from each other.
‘Sopranos and altos, spread yourselves out among your opposite number. Spencer, Jonathan and Harley, do likewise among the boys.’ There’s outright laughter from most of the males in the room as three very different- looking boys stand up, red-faced, and fan out through the assembly hall, forcing their way past a sudden sea of extended legs, locked knees and folded arms.
My eyes pick out the dark-haired boy from Lauren’s photo straightaway. He’s of middling height and kitted out like a clothing-catalogue spread, from his side-parted hair and roundish glasses down to his neat navy blazer and polo shirt combination, stone-coloured, pleat-fronted chinos and boat shoes. He looks like the kind of kid who gets his head flushed down the toilet at least once a day by rival forces, and Richard Coates’ total opposite number. If Lauren went for freaks, this guy would have stood no chance.
I stand up as well, taking my place in the back row of the altos as close to the guy as it’s possible to get with a wall of snickering basses between us. A couple of girls make room for me with calculated indifference.
Tiffany Lazer is on the diagonally opposite side of the alto section from where I’m sitting, still simmering at her inability to get to me for the purposes of having it out over last night’s case of spotlightus interruptus.
As Mr Masson moves to turn on the ancient sound system that serves as our ersatz symphony orchestra, Paul Stenborg raises one languid, beautiful hand from the sidelines and calls out pleasantly, ‘Just to up the degree of difficulty, Gerard, let’s have the soloists stand while the general chorus remains seated, hmmm? It will separate the, ah ha, sheep from the lambs.’
‘What a splendid idea, Paul,’ Mr Masson agrees brightly, clapping his hands as the seven of us rise with varying degrees of enthusiasm; four girls, three guys.
Tiffany, the only soloist still occupying a front-row seat, sweeps her shining helmet of blonde hair back over her shoulders and grins in anticipation. She shoots me a confident look over one shoulder that is designed to psych out the real Carmen. But I force Carmen to give her a brilliant, mega-watt smile in return, lips drawn right back over the teeth, and Tiffany’s expression curdles as she faces forward again.
Immediately, I let the lines of Carmen’s face go slack.
Part of me hopes she’ll keep up the pressure when I’m gone, but I have my doubts.
Ready when you are, bitch, I think, taking a deep breath.
The boy from Lauren’s photo pushes up his glasses repeatedly and fiddles with the wristband of his watch, though neither needs any kind of adjusting. A nervous type, then, just like Carmen ordinarily would be. The other two boys are hardly any better, like a slapstick comedy duo with their obvious bobbing, shuffling and gulping. All three are totally surrounded by the enemy as far as the eye can see, and are being given no quarter.
Delia and the second St Joseph’s alto, Marisol, take their places among the sopranos nervously, like skittish thoroughbreds at the starting gates. The orchestra surges back to life, the entire room lurching into Part 1 with the fervour of a sick cat.
As we hit Figure 7, and I soar into my traffic-stopping solo without a shred of Carmen’s usual self-
