New Girl - By Paige Harbison Page 0,30

freckles.

Becca left here, alive or not, and left behind a legacy. I wasn’t as good as her, only because she was so…whatever she was. If I walked out now, I’d be telling everyone they were right. If I left now, I’d be a coward who runs scared from the ghost of a girl who haunts the halls.

“Manderley is amazing. I can’t wait until you can see it in person. The classes are pretty hard, but not worse than I thought they’d be. Love you all. Lily, give Jasper a paw-shake and a hug for me, okay?” I briefly envisioned how good it would feel just to scratch his ears and give him a squeeze. “Love you. Miss you. I have to go turn my phone back in now. I still love it by the way, thanks so much for getting it for me.” I was rambling. “Okay, bye now.”

I texted each of my friends, giving them a brief and respectively varied miss you, wish I was home, xoxo, and then turned the phone off. It felt like saying goodbye to my visitors and returning to my jail cell.

The only way I could think of to extend the visit would be to go to the library, to the one computer equipped with the ability to do anything but look up journal articles and other scholarly things, and log on to Facebook for the first time since I’d left home.

I really shouldn’t have. It was just more of the same torturous happiness from my old life. My friends wrote to say they missed me. It was really flattering and nice, but it just hurt. It hadn’t been long since I’d left, but it felt like it had been so much longer. Leah wrote, Already forgotten about us, huh? Ugh! Fine, go make your new friends…what do I care? Haha, just kidding. Miss you, come visit!

I looked at the pictures from the cookout, and everything else my friends had been up to lately. It was like digging into my own flesh to find a bullet. I couldn’t even get through the whole album of all of my friends wearing sweatshirts with shorts and flip-flops, still sporting sunburns at the cookout. Leah had tagged me in one picture as an extra marshmallow on a stick and her and Emma pouting.

I glanced at the other albums, of them just two days before, swimming in Lucy’s aunt’s pool in the afternoon and then in the hot tub at night.

Then I thought of something. I hesitantly typed her name into the search box. And then there she was.

Rebecca Normandy. Her profile was restricted so that I couldn’t see anything but her profile pictures and the comments on her wall. It was really kind of disturbing. She’d been missing for almost five months, and there were still comments from the past few days, from people whose names I didn’t recognize.

Miss you, beautiful.

I love you and miss you every day. Please come back soon.

XOXOOXO

Hey, remember that one time with the shoelaces and the Barbie? Oh, my God, the look on his face… Bahahaha come back, slut, I miss you!

They were all writing to her like she was checking her Facebook regularly. I wondered, with a pang, if she was. What had Dana suggested the other night? That she was off “handling” something.

I kept scrolling, and found Dana’s most recent post: I know you’re not gone. I know it. So stop. Come back. Or at least contact me.

There were tons more comments like those and like Dana’s. It was creepy. Spooky.

And it made me really wonder what had happened. Maybe she wasn’t even missing. Maybe everyone knew where she was, and she was just…hiding for some reason. That would be crazy…but maybe that’s what it was.

But if she wasn’t…what had happened? Blake had said something about a boat that went missing that night in the storm. Had Becca taken it out? She couldn’t have. It was pitch-black down there at night, and in a storm? She could have just called a cab, like Blake had said, on the payphone in the lobby and…left.

To make my brain strain more, I clicked on her pictures. I could only see a few, but they were enough. In the one she had set as her default, Max was kissing her on the cheek, and she was smiling. In the next few, she just looked pretty. She looked like she was trying to look pretty, but she was undeniably succeeding. All the comments on her