Destroy Me by Karen Cole (red queen ebook .txt) 📕

same spot exactly. Even its lopsided shape is identical. And the wooden fence that runs around the play area has a panel missing in precisely the same place as in the photograph. Only the sky, today a uniform blanket of grey, is different. There is no doubt. Not only was the photo in the book bag almost certainly taken here, but I believe it must have been taken quite recently.

But who took it? And why?

I check the photo George Wilkinson sent on my phone. The picture of this same park, only from a different perspective. Can it just be a coincidence?

I look around the park feeling suddenly scared, as if someone might be here, waiting for me, watching me. Are you there, George? I think with a shiver and I peer into the thick bushes and trees that separate the park from the main road behind. But there’s no one around, apart from a couple of teenagers in school uniforms hanging out by the swings, swilling cans of Coke. They should be in school by now, I think. As I look at them, they eye me sulkily, as if I’m going to snitch on them, and they slope off towards the gates, dragging their school bags. I watch them go, absent-mindedly. They look thin, slightly feral. They remind me of me and Charlie at that age.

Charlie and I came here many times over the years. We came here as dreamy adolescents, sitting by the lake and poring over books about star signs, working out who was compatible with who. Charlie was a Pisces and I was a Gemini. Not generally seen as well-matched signs. But we got on so well that we agreed there must be something in our ascendant signs. When we were older, we came here with bottles of cider from the off-licence to smoke spliffs and get off with boys.

The last time we came here was just after we finished our A levels. The night of 28 August 2002. The night of Nessa’s party.

As I remember that night, I feel a sharp pain in my heart – like a shard of glass has lodged there. I haven’t thought about what happened for a long time. It’s been buried at the bottom of my mind, locked away safely. But now the memories are resurfacing, things I would rather forget, bubbling up like sewage from a drain.

I walk over to the swings and sit gingerly on the middle seat. And suddenly I’m a teenager again, feeling the breeze against my face as the sun dips behind the trees.

Charlie was sitting on the swing next to me, puffing away on a spliff, her hair glowing amber in the sinking sunlight. She looked beautiful and brave, like a Celtic warrior queen. Jenson and May Ling were here too, sitting on that bench over there, snogging. We’d just finished our A levels and there was a feeling of freedom in the air – a fizzing in my veins and the sense of our lives stretching out before us, full of possibility.

I was holding a roll-up awkwardly in my hand, wondering what to do with the butt once I’d finished. I didn’t want to drop it on the floor and grind it under my heel like I’d seen Jenson do, but then again would I look uncool if I threw it in the bin? More than anything, I didn’t want to seem uncool. May Ling and Jenson were so cool, effortlessly cool. I knew they only tolerated me because I was Charlie’s friend, and I didn’t want to stuff it up. I didn’t want to let Charlie down.

Charlie had arrived late in our school in Year Eight, when we were thirteen. She’d moved from a posh private girls’ school in Cheltenham after her father died. We were drawn together partly because we were both outsiders. Charlie because of her plummy accent and me, well, because I was overweight and nerdy, and my parents insisted on dressing me in second-hand clothes.

We were inseparable for a couple of years. But in Year Ten, Charlie changed. She cultivated a west-country drawl and made friends with a bunch of cool kids. She didn’t exactly drop me, but we drifted apart, and I was left alone, feeling hurt and betrayed. It was only in the last year of school, in the sixth form, that she deigned to become part of my life again and persuaded her new friends to allow me into their group.

‘She’s quite a laugh when you get to know her. She’s just shy,’ I overheard her saying in the toilet once.

That evening in the park, Jenson and May Ling wandered over and started talking about a band they’d seen the summer before. I kept quiet. I’d never heard of the band, never even been to a concert, except for classical ones with my parents, and I didn’t want them to know. People always tell you to be yourself, don’t they? ‘Just be yourself,’ they say, ‘and everything will be fine.’ Well, in my experience, being yourself was not always enough, or maybe it’s more accurate to say it was too much. Sometimes I knew I said things that were too thoughtful, too honest or just too plain weird. By the age of seventeen, I’d learned that you had to filter yourself, keep things hidden, bury the part of you that didn’t fit with the group.

Of course, I understand now that I was luckier than them in many ways. I had a mother and a father who loved me, even if they sometimes had a strange way of showing it. Jenson’s father was in and out of prison, May Ling’s parents were divorced, and Charlie’s father had died when she was thirteen, leaving her mother unable to pay the fees for Charlie’s expensive school. I didn’t fully realise it at the time, but Charlie must have still been mourning her father and all her bravado and reckless behaviour were probably, at least in part, a symptom of her