Follow Me Down (4 page)

She’d laughed when she had realised it was me.

Even Dominic was out of his mind with worry and got into a fight with Sam on the Green when Sam said that she’d run off with another guy. It’s kind of funny because I know what everyone thinks – that she and I fell out because of Dominic – but all we ever talked about was Scarlett, so if she hadn’t run away that day, I would never have gone to him for help and we might never have become friends.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Olivia said, and when I saw the tears in her eyes, I had to look away. ‘But something’s happened to her. I know it has.’

I crossed my arms and made myself look at her. ‘Why?’

‘She didn’t take her passport this time.’

‘So?’ I shrugged. ‘That just means she didn’t leave the country.’

‘She didn’t take anything, her bag –’ she counted off each thing on her fingers – ‘her purse, her keys, her mobile. She just left, Adamma.’

That made me hesitate, but I tried not to show any concern. ‘Was she upset?’

‘She seemed fine. She just said that she’d be back for supper.’

‘Did she say where she was going?’

‘To see a friend.’

‘Who?’

‘She didn’t say.’

‘Did she walk?’

When Olivia crossed her arms and looked away, I realised that Scarlett had taken their Land Rover – a muddied, broken-down thing affectionately known in Ostley as The Old Dear because you heard it wheezing towards you ten minutes before you saw it – and I sighed. She always took The Old Dear, even though she knew her parents needed it for the farm.

The brat.

‘See? She’s fine, Olivia.’

‘But she didn’t take any clothes.’

‘Like you’d know if she took anything,’ I said with a bitter laugh. ‘Her room is a disaster. You need a shovel to find the bed.’

‘I just know, OK!’ She threw her hands up, her cheeks suddenly flushed. ‘She’s my twin sister and I know that something’s happened to her, Adamma!’

‘What do you want from me, Olivia?’ I said, trying not to lose my temper too.

‘I want you to believe me, Adamma.’

‘I don’t.’ I shook my head. ‘I’m sorry. I did this the last time, remember? I cried my heart out, sure that she was dead in a ditch, and she was in New York.’

She wouldn’t listen. ‘Why did she book theatre tickets then?’

A tear rolled down her cheek and she wiped it away with her sleeve before she opened her satchel and pulled out a piece of paper. She handed it to me and I realised it was a ticket confirmation from the Theatre Royal in Bath.

‘How the hell did you get into her email?’

‘It wasn’t hard.’ She shrugged. ‘Scarlett is impossible with passwords so she has the same one for everything:
password
. But don’t worry about that.’ She pointed at the confirmation. ‘The play was last night. Why hasn’t she come back?’

But I wasn’t looking at that, I was looking at how many tickets she’d bought – two – and I felt something in me finally snap. ‘Because she –’ I shook the confirmation at her – ‘and whoever this second ticket was for, probably stayed in a hotel last night,’ I said, trying to hide my disdain and failing.

‘She wouldn’t miss school.’

I tipped my head back and laughed.

‘She wouldn’t,’ she insisted a little sheepishly. ‘OK, she did when she went to New York, but that was the beginning of the year. Her first rehearsal for
Pygmalion
is this afternoon.’ She must have sensed that I wasn’t convinced, because her voice got higher. ‘Plus, she got a written warning the last time. Headmaster Ballard told her that if she did it again, she’d be suspended. Even Scarlett wouldn’t be so stupid.’

I didn’t know that. ‘Well, she’s an idiot. She’ll never get into Yale now.’

‘Adamma—’

‘Olivia,
enough
.’ I held a hand up. ‘I don’t care. I’ve left Planet Scarlett and I’m not going back. I don’t care where she is.’

She looked horrified. ‘You don’t mean that, Adamma.’

‘I do,’ I said, turning and continuing on down the hill to the car park.

‘No, you don’t,’ she called after me. ‘You wouldn’t have come to our birthday party on Saturday if you didn’t still care.’

‘I don’t,’ I said over my shoulder, but
Goddamn Scarlett
, because as soon as I was out of sight, I looked at the confirmation email again.

I was so angry that the words blurred together for a moment, but when they came back into focus, I saw that she had opted to collect the tickets from the box office. Every cell in my body screamed at me not to, not to let her suck me back into her drama, but I took my phone out of my pocket and called the theatre.

‘You’re the second person to call about these tickets today,’ the guy said when I got through to the box office. ‘Are you from Wiltshire Police as well?’

My heart stopped then started again, twice as fast. ‘Yes. Yes,’ I breathed, the lie rolling – too quick, too easy – off my tongue. ‘Did she collect the tickets?’

I hadn’t realised until that moment that Olivia was right – I did still care – not until I caught myself holding my breath as I heard a voice in my head saying,
Please say yes
.
Please say yes. Please say yes.

‘No, she didn’t.’

224 DAYS BEFORE

SEPTEMBER

In Nigeria we have a saying: hold a true friend with both hands. Scarlett does this too, it seems, because it’s been three weeks since I started at Crofton and we’ve been inseparable. We have lunch by the canal every day and I spend almost every afternoon at her house, in that precious hour between classes finishing and co-curriculars starting, swapping clothes and eating whatever her father has made that day.

It’s nice, kind of like it used to be with Jumoke. Even her great, cake-coloured house is beginning to feel like home, despite me being completely overwhelmed by it the first time I went there. It’s not that I’m not used to houses like that; my parents are friends with families like the Chilterns, so I’ve been to parties on the Upper East Side and spent weekends in the Hamptons in vast white houses with porches dusty with sand. I mean, if I could pad around Jumoke’s East 82nd Street condo in sweats and that had been featured in
House and Garden
, I didn’t expect to be intimidated by Scarlett’s house.

But for all of New York’s glamour, for all its marble and black lacquer and fringe, I’d never seen a house like Scarlett’s. If Jumoke’s condo had commanded an entire floor, then Scarlett’s house was the size of a city block. It looked like something from a BBC period drama – big and square with three rows of white-framed windows – and even though I’d heard so much about it (it’s talked about at Crofton almost as much as she is) I couldn’t help but be a little in awe the first time she led me around it; from the hall into the big yellow music room with its glossy piano and wireless, to the library with the buttery leather armchairs that remember the shape of you until you sit on them again.

She announced each room with no fanfare, as though it was normal, as though every girl lived in a house with a name and a chandelier in every room, but when we got to the drawing room, she smiled. Everything in it looked so stiff, from the huge carved fireplace to the heavy silk drapes, that I couldn’t imagine relaxing in a room like that, but I do. We lie in there all the time – her lying on one couch, me on the other – eating fistfuls of popcorn and talking about where we want to go to university, where we want to live, what we want to see. Or, when the sun is out, we open the French windows and sit on the uneven mossy steps that lead to the lawn, the grass rolling out in front of us down, down to the canal with its rickety wooden bridge, and it feels like we have the world at our feet.

That’s the thing with her house, it’s grand, but they really
live
in it. They don’t have a housekeeper (I didn’t know this until I noticed the dust on the piano and the white wax weeping from the candelabras in the dining room), which makes sense – her mother didn’t want her daughters to have the upbringing she had – but my father would have been appalled. An old house like that needs care, he’d say. He wouldn’t approve of the unpolished floors and rumpled rugs. He’d say it was neglectful. But Scarlett’s house is like a vintage bag; it has so many scuffs because it’s used.
Loved
. It’s not like Jumoke’s magazine-perfect apartment with its white sofas and bowl of green apples in the kitchen that no one is allowed to eat.

The Chilterns live in every corner of their house. It has a smell, a nice smell: old, but kind of comforting, like a spent match or a second-hand book. There are photos of the girls on every wall. The one of six-year-old Scarlett in her yellow wellington boots, pouting and clutching her leather suitcase, is by the door in the mud room, presumably where it was taken before they waved her off. And there’s one of the girls in the drawing room, the three of them huddled together and giggling. It’s impossible to tell them apart, their faces and white cotton dresses covered in red, pink and blue powder. I guess they were in India for Holi and whenever I look at it, I can almost hear them screaming and chasing one another.

That’s what I love about her house: it’s a home. There are tulips from their farm in every room and a bowl of browning bananas in the kitchen. Normal things. In the summer, I’m sure she sunbathes on the lawn in her heart-shaped sunglasses – Olivia next to her, reading a book – and slams doors when she doesn’t get her way. Every scratch tells a story, every dent, every repaired vase. Even the paintings say something, because that’s another thing her mother does that infuriates her grandmother: she rents rooms to writers and artists – like Mr Lucas – most of whom pay their way with poems or paintings. I’ve seen the paintings dotted around the house, wild splashes of colour between the dour portraits of the house’s previous residents.

Every time I go to her house, I think of my house in Lagos, of its high gates and marble floors, and wonder what it was like to grow up in a house like that. I’ve never really felt the loss of being an only child, until I imagine the girls skidding in their socks along the floorboards outside their bedrooms and trying to pick out the animals from the dusty tapestry in the dining room while they eat dinner. And I imagined Olivia sitting on her pink meringue of a bed while Scarlett stomped around hers, refusing to tidy it or tugging on the tattered bell pull demanding juice and ginger cake, and I wished I’d known her then, that we’d discovered her hiding places together and counted the steps from the house to the canal.

Everyone at Crofton asks me about it, about what shampoo she uses and what book she’s reading and they want to know what her room looks like. I just smile and shrug, but if they thought about it, they’d know that her room is like her – a mess. After all, she can never find anything in her locker and is always hastily putting chewing gum into a folded-up receipt before class, then tossing it in her bag, only to find the gum stuck to a notebook two days later. Her room is much the same; she never makes her bed and clothes hang from everything they can hang from: door handles, chairs, open closet doors. There’s stuff all over the place – folded paper ships dotted everywhere, magazines on the floor, a pile of orange peel on her nightstand. It sounds disgusting, but it’s so gloriously
Scarlett
with its Mucha posters and aura of Chanel that it’s impossible to turn your nose up at it.

It’s kind of strange how well I know her house already. Nice strange. I know that the cutlery drawer in the kitchen sticks and that they keep a spare key under the mat outside the back door. I know to avoid the creaky floorboard under the rug in her bedroom in the same way I knew to avoid the creaky step on the staircase at my old house in New York that tried to betray me every time I snuck in when I’d missed my curfew.

I know her house better than my new one in London, which I’m yet to sleep in. I saw photos of it before we left New York, so I know that it has square windows like Scarlett’s house and a black front door flanked by bay trees and that my room has a tiny fireplace and a view of the garden, but that’s it. It’s a house in a photograph, not my home. I’d never tell my parents that, though, because it would upset them and I know that sending me away to school hasn’t been easy for them, either. Which is why they’re so relieved that I’ve made a friend, particularly my mother who teases me mercilessly whenever I mention her. ‘Scarlett, Scarlett, Scarlett. Did you do anything else today, Adamma? Perhaps go to a lesson?’

Jumoke isn’t as amused, though. ‘Replaced me already, have you?’ she said the last time we spoke, making no effort to disguise her contempt. I don’t blame her; I was just as petulant when she told me that she was going to Sabrina Earl’s seventeenth birthday party. We used to hate Sabrina Earl. How can so much have changed in three weeks?

If Jumoke met Scarlett, she’d understand. She kind of dazzles you. I’m trying to persuade her to fly to London on Friday for my first exeat weekend so that she can meet her. I think they’d love each other and even if they didn’t, a weekend with them still had to be better than the horror of last night – my first Crofton social. Scarlett had warned me about them, but I didn’t think it would be that bad. After all, it was just a dinner in honour of the
Disraeli
and the sixth formers who want to join the staff, but, as we gathered in the teacher’s dining room in Sadon Hall, I counted twenty-two of us. Twenty-two. One girl I spoke to had a short story published in
Granta
last month and another just won Young Photographer of the Year, so what I thought would be a nice, quiet dinner turned out to be more like a job interview with twenty-two other people while trying not to spill soup down my dress.

That’s Crofton, it seems. I thought my last school was competitive, but Crofton is in a different class. I used to feel so grown up when Jumoke and I went to bars, sipped cocktails and talked about sex, but I felt like such a kid at the social last night compared to everyone else. There was no trace of awkwardness; they were all so charming and funny and told the sort of anecdotes I’m used to hearing at my parents’ dinners at the embassy.

It was kind of weird, though, because while they’re all so polite – so proper, like Stepford kids – if you say the word ‘penis’ to some girls, they immediately revert to being thirteen and collapse into helpless giggles. I think that’s why I like Scarlett so much. There’s something so hopelessly human about her. She isn’t putting on an act; she bites her nails and doodles in class and sulks when she doesn’t get her own way, like every other teenager. She’s normal, I guess, and at a school where everyone says the right thing and wears the right thing and laughs at the right jokes, she’s a splash of graffiti on the wood-panelled walls.

Last night everyone was dressed the same. Even me. I was told it would be informal, but I know that schools like Crofton don’t really do ‘informal’, so I didn’t take it literally and rock up in jeans and sneakers. I also resisted the urge to wear one of the bright, patterned dresses I would have worn to an event at my old school. I opted for a simple black one instead and as I stood among the boys in their tweed blazers and the girls in their pretty tea dresses, I was glad I did. But then she swept into the dining room in a floor-length red gown that was enough to make my philosophy teacher, Mr Crane, spill wine down his shirt and I was besotted.

Only Scarlett.

As she drifted around the room, I looked down at my black dress and wished that I’d been brave enough to wear what I wanted. Headmaster Ballard wasn’t as impressed, though, and handed Mr Crane a napkin and told us all to sit down.

I was so surprised that it didn’t occur to me to question why she was there. It wasn’t until I saw her stop to kiss Hannah on both cheeks that I realised why.

‘I didn’t know you were trying out for the
Disraeli
,’ I said, stepping into her path as she made her way to the table.

She stopped and blinked at me – as though she’d never seen me before – then beamed and kissed me on both cheeks, too. ‘I’m not trying out,’ she said, and there was a slight edge of,
Silly Adamma
. ‘Hannah’s asked me to do the theatre reviews.’

‘Oh. OK,’ I started to say, but she just continued on to the table.

I’m not sure how, but I lucked out and the seating plan sat me between Mr Lucas and Hannah. I wondered if it was Scarlett’s doing, her way of introducing me to Hannah, as she’d promised to, but when she just waved across the table at her, I realised that she wasn’t going to. She had probably forgotten, so I did it myself. I introduced myself to the boy sitting opposite, as well, a guy called Sam Wolfe who held my hand for a moment too long and, when he repeated my name, managed to make it sound dirty, which I didn’t think was possible.

British boys continue to disappoint me.

There was an empty chair opposite Hannah and I was wondering who would be foolish enough to be late for an event like this when Dominic strode in in a black suit, which he wore so well it made Hannah blush a little when he introduced himself with a smile. He then turned to me, his smile a little wider, and told me I looked divine. My reaction wasn’t as obvious so I hope he didn’t see my fingers flutter as I tugged my pashmina onto my shoulders. I hope Mr Lucas didn’t notice, either. If he’s going to be overseeing the
Disraeli
this year, I don’t want him to think I’m a silly schoolgirl easily distracted by compliments.

‘I hope my cousin isn’t being too lecherous,’ Dominic said, then winked at Sam. ‘Hands on the table where we can see them, Samuel.’

I was a little startled; they couldn’t have looked more different. Dominic’s surname was Sim, so I guessed they were related on Dominic’s mother’s side because they were almost direct opposites of one another; where Dominic has dark hair and eyes, Sam has a tangle of white-blond hair and eyes so blue that they were almost unreal. Disney-prince blue. When Dominic saw me looking between them, he winked and I turned away, determined not to let him distract me as I continued my conversation about Wole Soyinka with Mr Lucas.

As I had suspected, the informal dinner was rather formal. It wasn’t unlike the ones at the embassy, but much more English, with white table linen and white plates and perfect medallions of pink lamb, that made me miss my parents’ rowdy parties with the decanters of palm wine and bright centrepieces of lilies and amaryllis.

The conversation was as sober as the food, mostly about school and the upcoming year. Unfortunately, despite chatting animatedly for ten minutes about Wole Soyinka, Mr Lucas wouldn’t look at me after resting his knee against mine under the table while we were being served our soup. I was startled, but when I moved and he flushed, apologising clumsily, I realised that he’d thought my knee was a chair leg and had to swallow a laugh.

He didn’t look at me again, didn’t utter another word, in fact, until the cheese course, when he said how excited he was to be assisting Crofton’s Drama department, which has an excellent reputation. It was clearly for the benefit of Headmaster Ballard, who noted the compliment with a nod, but when he went on to say that he would be directing the production of
Hamlet
, Scarlett’s eyes lit up. She spent the rest of the evening batting her eyelashes at him until she heard Dominic and Sam trying – and failing – to woo me in French, and couldn’t resist joining in.