Gilly Macmillan - The Perfect Girl

‘You’re going to have to bail her. You can’t keep her in, she’s too young.’

I wondered if he was going to argue this, because of the severity of what Zoe had done, but he didn’t.

‘We’re probably happy with that, subject to conditions of course.’

‘Good. We can discuss conditions. So you’re charging her with “Death by careless driving whilst under the influence”.’

‘Sorry,’ he said, but he meant ‘Yes.’

We stood. Our chairs didn’t move because they were bolted to the floor. A firm handshake and he said, ‘It’s a bad one this. It’s a shame. She’s just a kid.’

I nodded. I agreed with him, but I wondered whether the families of the children who died would feel that way.

Before I left the room, I said, ‘Does she know? About the fatalities?’

‘She knows about the first two, but not about the girl who died at the hospital. Sorry.’

That word again.

After the Concert

I shut the panop app and my hands are shaking, because this is what used to happen, when it all began.

In rehabilitation sessions at the Unit, Jason, my key worker, liked to stress this, and liked to make me go over and over it until he’d satisfied himself that I understood:

‘What must you avoid, Zoe, when you leave here?’

‘Social media.’

‘And which social media in particular?’

‘All of it.’

‘And especially?’

‘Well, that question doesn’t make sense if we’ve already agreed that I’m avoiding all of it.’

‘Humour me.’

‘Panop.’

‘Well done.’

‘Can I have a gold star?’

‘Don’t be cheeky.’

Jason was, basically, mostly awesome. He didn’t take any crap from anybody.

My IQ has been officially measured as 162. This puts me in the category of ‘exceptionally gifted’. It means that I beat Einstein and Professor Stephen Hawking who scored 160.

But the problem is, a high IQ doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re clever enough to avoid being a massive teenage cliché. Which is what I was, or what I became. Before my descent into ‘teen tragedy’, that is.

When Jason looked over my case notes with me, at our first ever session, this is what he said: ‘For somebody with a genius level IQ you’ve made some pretty interesting decisions haven’t you?’

At that point, I didn’t know that he was going to be as close as I would get in that place to having a knight in shining armour, because I’d only been at the Secure Unit for a week, so I said, ‘Screw you,’ which was a phrase I’d already learned from the kids on my corridor.

I didn’t like the look of Jason with his film premiere facial hair, or the sound of his voice, which was boring and nasal like he had an adenoidal cold, or the stewed tea he put in front of me in a stained mug. I thought ‘Screw you’ was a good response, but it turned out that Jason had a bit more life experience than me. Go figure.

Panop is an app where you can anonymously ask questions of others. This is what you read on the page where you can register for an account:

Hey! Welcome to panop!

We hate to do it, but we need to start with a word of caution…

We know that some people can sometimes get ugly and transform into trolls when they get online and we’re asking you nicely: if you sign up, don’t troll up. Don’t do it. Ask anybody a question, but keep it nice. If you can’t be nice, don’t sign up.

And if you sign up and you get asked a nasty question, don’t answer it! In fact don’t respond at all. Panop people (ppeeps!) should know their own minds, and they should be nice. We’re all about amusement, entertainment and good times online!

Happy asking…

After I signed up to panop, aged thirteen, a brand new pupil in Year Nine at Hartwood House School, do you want to know what the first question I received was?

It was this: R u a hore?

I thought it was a mistake. It even took me a few hours to work out that it was a spelling-challenged attempt to write the word ‘whore’. I was that naive.

I didn’t realise that I’d been seen talking to Jack Bell the Popular Boy, who was supposed to be the exclusive property of his sister Eva and her posse of Popular Girls at my school. I didn’t realise I wasn’t supposed to talk to Jack Bell, because nobody had explained to me that by virtue of his parents’ money and his Boy Band Hair and Low-Riding Jeans, Jack Bell was Social Gold Dust, and that, as a recipient of the Year Nine Hartwood House School music scholarship, I was automatically granted the status of Social Pond Life.

Being a music scholar meant that my parents could not afford the school tuition, so I was not part of the Entitled. I wasn’t much better than a beggar. Everybody knew that I paid for my schooling with my piano playing, and it subsidised my ugly uniform too. I had to turn out at every concert and open evening, and be in every brochure, hands poised over the keyboards, and smiling serenely as if the very act of being a pupil at Hartwood House School had bestowed me with any talent and opportunity that I might be so lucky as to have.

I know by now that it’s possible to overcome the status of Social Pond Life if you work very hard and are prepared to make a multitude of fundamental compromises of the soul, but at the time I wasn’t sharp enough even to recognise that possibility.

So I found myself talking one day, during the first few weeks of term, to Jack Bell. And Jack Bell and I got on well, or I thought we did. I didn’t realise that other people were watching, and judging, and testing me in fact. I didn’t realise that Jack Bell was nothing more than a bright white lure dangling in front of me, blinding me to the dark wide gaping jaws of the beast behind, and that those jaws were lined with stiletto-sharp teeth.

There was so much I didn’t realise then. ‘You couldn’t have,’ said Jason. ‘You were naive, that’s all, and probably a bit unfiltered too.’

Jason, bless him, was the master of the understatement, because I was just as dumb as Forrest Gump, dumber perhaps, because I didn’t even work out that what I should have done was run.

But, while I’m sitting there with my phone in my hand, remembering all of this, what totally blows my mind is that I get a text from Lucas right then. This is the most activity I’ve had on my mobile for days, weeks, months even. Check your email, is all it says, and although he’s not exactly the master of sensitivity I thought Lucas might at least have asked me how I was, or something. But I do check my email anyway, and there is one from him.

The only thing the email message says is ‘Please read this,’ and then there’s just a PDF attachment called ‘What I Know’. The title of it freezes my blood for an instant, but I try to stay calm, because there’s no way he could know about me, is there? It’s probably just one of those lists of stupid or funny things from the Web, which is the kind of thing he usually sends me and which makes Mum and Chris annoyed because I laugh out loud unexpectedly when I read them and that is apparently ‘very rude to the people around you’.

I open the attachment. It’s a script, written by Lucas. Lucas is obsessed with film. He’s not really allowed to watch any of the films he wants to in our house, but I know he’s built a proxy website so when he’s at school he can bypass their internet security and watch films on his tablet there. I won’t tell, but I know. Lucas is clever in his quiet way.

I start to read.

‘WHAT I KNOW’

A SCRIPT FOR FILM

BY LUCAS KENNEDY

Dear Maria and Zoe

I’m sending you this to explain a bit about how things were before my mum died.