Pip placed her knife and fork across her plate with exaggerated precision.
“Now may I leave the table?” She looked at her mom, who was scowling.
“I don’t see what the rush is,” she said.
“I’m just right in the middle of my capstone project and I want to hit my targets before bed.”
“Sure, off you go, pickle.” Her dad reached over to scrape Pip’s leftovers onto his own plate.
“Vic!” Her mom now turned the scowl on him as Pip stood and tucked in her chair.
“Oh, honey, some people have to worry about their kids rushing off from dinner to inject heroin into their eyeballs. Be thankful it’s homework.”
“What’s heroin?” Josh said as Pip left the room.
She took the steps two at a time, leaving her shadow, Barney, at the foot of the stairs, his head tilting in confusion as he tried to follow her to that dog-forbidden place. She’d had the chance to think over all things Nancy Tangotits at dinner, and she had an idea.
Pip closed her bedroom door, pulled out her phone, and dialed.
“Hello, muchacha,” Cara chimed down the line.
“Hey,” Pip said, “are you busy bingeing The Crown or do you have a few minutes to help me be sneaky?”
“I’m always available for sneakiness. What d’you need?”
“Is Naomi in?”
“No, in Manhattan this weekend. Why?” Suspicion crept into Cara’s voice.
“OK, sworn to secrecy?”
“Always. What’s up?”
Pip said, “I’ve heard rumors about old calamity parties that might give me a lead for my capstone project. But I need to find proof, which is where the sneakiness comes in.”
She hoped she’d played it just right, omitting Max’s name and downplaying it enough that Cara wouldn’t worry about her sister, leaving just enough gaps to intrigue her.
“Oooh, what rumors?” she said.
Pip knew her too well, and she hated that she was doing this, manipulating her. When did she become this person?
“Nothing substantial yet. But I need to look through old calamity photos. That’s where I need your help.”
“Hit me.”
“Max Hastings’s Facebook profile is a decoy—you know, for employers and colleges. His actual one is under a fake name and has really strict privacy settings. I can only see things that Naomi is tagged in.”
“And you want to log in as Naomi so you can look through Max’s old photos?”
“Bingo,” Pip said, sitting down on her bed and dragging the laptop over.
“Can do,” Cara’s voice trilled. “Technically, we’re not snooping on Naomi, so this doesn’t technically break any rules, Dad. Plus, Nai should learn to change her password sometime; she has the same one for everything.”
“Can you get on to her laptop?” Pip said.
“Just opening it now.”
Pip heard the tapping of keys over the phone. She could picture Cara now, that giant topknot she always wore when she was dressed in pajamas. Which was, in Cara’s case, as often as physically possible.
“OK, she’s still signed in here. I’m on.”
“Can you click on security settings?” asked Pip.
“Yep.”
“Uncheck the box next to Log-in Alerts so she won’t know I’m logging in from a new machine.”
“Done.”
“OK,” Pip said, “that’s all the hacking I need from you.”
Cara read out Naomi’s email address, and Pip entered it into the Facebook log-in page.
“Her password is Isobel0612,” Cara said.
Pip typed it in. “Thanks, comrade. Stand down.”
“Loud and clear. Although if Naomi finds out, I’m throwing you under the bus.”
“Understood,” said Pip.
“Hey, so I texted that girl I met at the movie theater,” Cara said tentatively.
“Shit, sorry.” Pip exhaled. “I should have asked. Has she replied?”
“Not yet, you know, because I’m destined to be forever alone.”
“Well, you can be forever alone with me,” Pip said. “And she will reply. Tell me as soon as she does.”
“All right, Plops, Dad’s yelling. Gotta go.”
“OK, bye.” Pip dropped the phone and clicked to log in.
Naomi’s newsfeed was filled with cats, recipe videos, and motivational quotes over pictures of sunsets.
Pip typed “Nancy Tangotits” into the search bar and clicked on to Max’s page.
It didn’t take long for Pip to realize why Max had two profiles. There’s no way he would have wanted his parents to see what he got up to away from home. Photos of him in clubs, his blond hair stuck to his sweaty forehead, jaw tensed and his eyes reeling and unfocused. Posing with his arms around girls, sticking his tongue out at the camera, shirt splattered with spilled drinks. And those were just the recent ones.
Pip clicked to Max’s photos and began the long scroll down toward 2014. It was all much of the same: clubs, bars, bleary eyes. There was a brief respite from Max’s nocturnal activities with a series of photos from a ski trip; Max standing in the snow wearing just a Speedo.
She finally reached 2014 and took herself back to January before looking through the photos properly, studying each one.
Most were of Max smiling in the foreground, usually accompanied by Naomi, Jake, Millie, or Sal. Pip lingered for a long time on a photo of Sal flashing his brilliant smile while Max licked his cheek. Her gaze switched between the two drunk and happy boys, looking for any trace of the secrets that existed between them.
Pip searched through photos of Max in crowds, looking for Andie’s face in the background, for anything suspicious in Max’s hand, for him lurking too close to any girl’s drink. She clicked forward and back through so many photos of calamity parties that her tired eyes saw them as flip-book moving pictures. Until she found the photos from that night and everything became sharp and static again.
Pip leaned forward.
Max had taken and uploaded ten photos from the night Andie disappeared. Pip immediately recognized Max’s house and everyone’s clothes from that day. Added to Naomi’s three and Millie’s six, that made a total of nineteen photos from that night, nineteen shots that existed alongside Andie Bell’s last hours of life.
Pip shivered and pulled the duvet over her feet. The photos were similar to the ones Millie and Naomi had taken: Max and Jake gripping controllers and staring out of frame; Millie and Max posing with filters superimposed over their faces; Naomi in the background, staring down at her phone, unaware of the posed photo going on behind her. Four best friends without their fifth.
That’s when Pip noticed the time stamp. When it had been just Millie’s and Naomi’s uploads, it was simply a coincidence, but now that she was looking at Max’s too, there was a pattern. All three of them had uploaded their photos from that night on Monday the twenty-first, between nine-thirty and ten p.m. Wasn’t it a little strange that, in the midst of all the craziness of Andie’s disappearance, they all decided to post these photos at almost the exact same time? And why upload these photos anyway? Naomi said she and the others had decided on that Monday night to tell the police the truth about Sal’s alibi. Was uploading these photos the first step in that decision? To stop hiding Sal’s absence?
Pip typed up some notes about this upload coincidence, then she clicked save and closed the laptop. She got ready for bed, wandering back from the bathroom with her toothbrush in her mouth, humming as she scribbled her to-do list for tomorrow. Write personal essay underlined three times.
With a sniff and a jerk Pip sat bolt upright in bed. She leaned against the headboard and rubbed her eyes as her mind stirred awake. She pressed the home button on her phone: 4:47 a.m.
What had woken her?
Something stirred on the edge of her brain. A vague thought, beyond the span of just-awake comprehension. But she knew where it was drawing her.
Pip slid quickly out of bed, the cold room stinging her exposed skin. She grabbed her laptop and took it back to bed, wrapping the duvet around her. Blinded by the backlight of her computer, she opened up Facebook, still signed in as Naomi, and navigated her way back to Nancy Tangotits and the photos from that night.
She looked through them all once and then back again a little slower. She stopped on the second-to-last picture. All four friends were in the frame. Naomi was sitting with her back to the camera, looking down. Though she was in the background, you could just make out the lock screen on the phone in her hands. The main focus of the photo was on Max, Millie, and Jake, the three of them standing by the near side of the sofa and smiling as Millie rested her arms over both the boys’ shoulders. Max was still holding a controller in his outside hand, and Jake’s disappeared out of shot on the right.
Pip shivered.
The camera must have been at least five feet in front of them to get that much in the frame.
And in the dead silence of the night, Pip whispered, “Who’s taking the picture?”