Page 101 of Good Girl, Bad Blood

typing. . .

And the second message appeared in a white box below.

You’re getting closer : )

Nineteen

Her throat closed in on her, trapping her voice inside, cornering the words until they gave up and scattered away. All she could do was stare at the messages, unravel them and put them back together until they made some kind of sense.

Hello Pip.

You’re getting closer : )

Connor was the first to find words. ‘What the fuck does that mean? Pip?’

Her name sounded strange, like it didn’t belong to her, had been stretched out of shape until it no longer fit. Pip stared at those three letters, unrecognizable in the hands of this stranger. This stranger who was less than a mile away.

‘Um,’ was all she had to offer.

‘She knew it was you,’ Ravi said, his voice coaxing Pip back to herself. ‘She knows who you are.’

‘What does “You’re getting closer” mean?’ Connor asked.

‘To finding Jamie,’ Pip said.Or finding out what happened

to Jamie, she thought to herself, which sounded almost the same but was very, very different. And Layla knew. Whoever Layla was, she knew everything, Pip was sure of that now.

‘That smiley face, though.’ Ravi shivered; she felt it through his fingers.

The shock had receded now, and Pip jumped into action. ‘I need to reply. Now,’ she said, typing out:Who are you? Where’s Jamie?There was no point pretending any more, Layla was one step ahead.

She pressed send but an error box appeared instead.

Unable to send message. User not found.

‘No,’ Pip whispered. ‘Nononono.’ She thumbed back to Layla’s page but it was no longer there. The profile picture and bio still displayed, but the grid was gone, replaced by the wordsNo Posts Yetand a banner ofUser not foundat the top of the app. ‘No,’ Pip growled in frustration, the sound raw and angry in her throat. ‘She’s disabled her account.’

‘What?’ Connor said.

‘She’s gone.’

Ravi hurried back over to Pip’s laptop, refreshing Layla Mead’s Facebook page.The page you requested was not found. ‘Fuck. She’s deactivated her Facebook too.’

‘And Tinder,’ Pip said, checking the app. ‘She’s gone. We lost her.’

A quietness settled over the room, a quietness that wasn’t the absence of sound, it was its own living thing, stifling in the spaces between them.

‘She knows, doesn’t she?’ Ravi said, his voice gentle, skimming just above the quiet instead of breaking through. ‘Layla knows what happened to Jamie.’

Connor was holding his head, shaking it again. ‘I don’t like this,’ he said, speaking to the ground.

Pip watched him, transfixed by the movement of his head. ‘I don’t either.’

It was a fake smile, the one she put on for her dad later as she walked Ravi towards the front door.

‘Done with your trial update, pickle?’ he asked, clapping Ravi gently on the back; her dad’s way of saying goodbye reserved just for him.

‘Yeah. Just uploaded it,’ Pip said.