They probably thought she couldn’t hear them. Her parents, bickering in the living room downstairs.

Pip listened through the crack of her bedroom door: Mom wasn’t happy that Pip was spending so much time on schoolwork instead of enjoying summer break. She thought that obsessing over Andie Bell was unhealthy, and they should discourage it. Then Dad wasn’t happy that Mom wouldn’t give Pip the space to make her own mistakes, if that’s what they were.

Pip closed her bedroom door; she knew their argument would burn out soon, and she couldn’t dwell on it. She had an important phone call to make.

She had messaged both of Andie’s best friends last week. Emma Hutton had finally replied a few hours earlier with a phone number, saying she didn’t mind answering “just a few” questions in a recorded interview around eight o’clock. When Pip told Ravi this, he’d texted back with a whole page of shocked-face and fist-bump emojis.

She glanced at the clock on her computer task bar. It stood stubbornly at 7:58 p.m.

Pip’s knee bounced impatiently against her desk as she waited another whole minute. Then she started her recording app and dialed Emma’s number, her skin prickling with nerves. It picked up on the third ring.

“Hello?” said a high voice.

“Hi, Emma, this is Pippa.”

“Oh yeah, hi. Hold on, let me just go up to my room.”

Pip listened to the sound of Emma’s feet skipping up a flight of stairs.

“OK,” she said. “You said you’re doing a project about Andie?”

“Sort of, yeah. About the investigation into her disappearance and the media’s role in it. A kind of case study.”

“OK,” Emma said, sounding uncertain. “I’m not sure how much help I can be.”

“Don’t worry, I just have a few basic questions about the investigation as you remember it,” Pip said. “When did you find out she was missing?”

“Um…it was around one o’clock that night. Her parents called both me and Chloe Burch; we were Andie’s best friends. I said how I hadn’t seen her or heard from her and told them I would call around a bit. I tried Sal that night, but he didn’t pick up until the next morning.”

“Did the police contact you at all?” asked Pip.

“Yeah, Saturday morning. They came by to ask questions.”

“And what did you tell them?”

“Just the same as I said to Andie’s parents. That I had no idea where she was; she hadn’t told me she was going anywhere. And they were asking about Andie’s boyfriend, so I told them about Sal and that I’d just called to tell him she was missing.”

“What did you tell them about Sal?”

“Well, only that at school that week, they were kind of fighting. I definitely saw them arguing on that Thursday and Friday, which was out of the ordinary. He seemed super mad about something.”

“What about?” Pip asked. It was suddenly clearer to her why the police might have wanted to interview Sal that afternoon.

“I don’t know, honestly. When I asked Andie she just said that Sal was being ‘a little bitch’ about something.”

“Oh,” she said, taken aback. “So Andie didn’t have plans to see Sal on the Friday?”

“No, she didn’t have plans to do anything, actually; she was supposed to stay at home that night.”

“How come?” Pip sat up a little straighter.

“Um, I don’t know if I should say.”

“Don’t worry”—Pip tried to hide the desperation in her voice—“if it’s not relevant, it won’t go in my project. It just might help me better understand the circumstances of her disappearance.”

“OK. Well, Andie’s little sister, Becca, had been hospitalized for self-harming several weeks before. Her parents had to go out, so they told Andie she had to stay in and take care of Becca.”

“Oh” was all Pip could think to say.

“Yeah, I know, that poor girl. And still Andie left her alone that night. Only looking back now can I understand how difficult it must have been having Andie as an older sister.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“It’s just…I don’t want to speak ill of the dead, you know, but…I’ve had five years to grow up and reflect on everything, and when I think back to those times, I don’t like the person I was at all. The person I was with Andie.”


“Was she a bad friend to you?” Pip didn’t want to say too much; she needed to keep Emma talking.

“Yes and no. It’s really difficult to explain.” Emma sighed. “Andie’s friendship was very destructive, but at the time, I was addicted to her. I wanted to be her. You’re not going to write any of this, are you?”

“No, of course not.” Small lie.

“OK. So Andie was beautiful; she was popular; she was fun. Being her friend, being someone she chose to spend her time with…it made you feel special. Wanted. And then she would flip and use the things you were most self-conscious about to cut you down and hurt you. And still we both remained by her side, waiting for the next time she would pick us up and make us feel good again. She could be amazing and awful, and you never knew which side of Andie was turning up at your door. I’m surprised my self-esteem even survived.”

“Was Andie like that with everyone?”

“Well, yeah, with me and Chloe, anyway. Andie wouldn’t let us go over to her house much, but I saw the way she was with Becca too. She could be so cruel.” Emma paused. “I’m not saying any of this because I mean that Andie deserved what she got. No, no, that’s not what I mean at all; no one deserves to be murdered and put in a hole. I only mean that, appreciating now the kind of person Andie was, I can understand why Sal snapped and killed her. She could make you feel so high and then so low; it was bound to end in tragedy, I think.”

Emma’s voice shuddered, slipped into a wet sniff, and Pip knew the interview was over.

“OK, I won’t keep you; those were all my questions. Thank you so much for your help.”

“Sorry,” Emma said. “I thought I was over everything. Guess not.”

“No, I’m sorry for making you go over it all. Um, actually, I messaged Chloe Burch for an interview, too, but she hasn’t got back to me yet. Do you two still talk?”

“No, not really. Like, I’ll text on her birthday, but…we definitely drifted apart after Andie and then leaving school. I think we both wanted it that way, really: a clean break from the people we were back then.”

Pip thanked her again, hung up, and stopped recording. She exhaled and just stared at her phone for a minute. She knew that Andie had been pretty and popular; social media had made that perfectly clear. And she knew that people like that sometimes had their hard edges. But she hadn’t expected this. That Emma could still resent herself, after all this time, for loving her tormentor.

Was this the real Andie Bell, hidden behind that perfect smile, behind those sparkling pale blue eyes? Everyone in her orbit so dazzled by her, so blinded, that they hadn’t noticed a darkness that might’ve lurked beneath—not until it was too late.