White Lies (Book 1)

Chapter 31

Chapter 31

I suppose I can no longer keep putting off the inevitable.

Let me explain to you what I really saw on the night that Robbie and Jenny went missing.

So far, I have been telling the truth. On that fateful night, I had been inside Stewart's Pharmacy.

"Ma'am, would you like a receipt?" the teenage boy behind the register asked. A boy who went to my school. I held the pack of tampons to my chest, like I was guarding them from his prying eyes.

Lie. His eyes hadn't been prying at all. They were as dead and disinterested to my comings and goings as the walls of a house.

"No, thank you," I declined politely, but the damage was done. He and his friends would know all about the psychotic liar's late-night tampon adventures later.

As I turned away and walked towards the door, a figure emerged from the staff room. "Enrique!" the store manager hissed. "Leave the stock taking and come look at this." Both Enrique and the store manager both gathered at the front of the pharmacy, pressed against the window. I watched them for a while in confusion – their attention seemed to be occupied with something in the distance. A nice car.

The next part was also true. I had, in fact, taken the short cut towards my house, which entailed taking the back way through the business district alley. Leaving the two figures to their wonderment, I decided against tip-toeing towards the front entrance lest I disrupted them. Instead, I took the back exit out of the building.

Robbie and Jenny had been there, arguing and unhappy and dressed like they had just come from a party. Their dispute had been about a certain someone.

This someone happened to be the notorious Noah Lincoln, who could possibly have been linked to the night itself, to their disappearing. Our only tangible lead.

Robbie's words had clearly cut Jennifer deep – but something else had brewed beneath the surface of her anger. A deeper cut left by Robbie from worlds away, which had been left to fester during the course of their relationship.

"This isn't even about the flirting. It's about your shitty ego!" Her words are coming back to me now, sharper and more focused than all the other times I'd recounted them. Her beautiful, trembling face. Her sad, seething, mascara-smudged, skittish eyes. "You can be such a dick, you know that? Don't forget that I made you!"

She meant for her words to be vindictive and cutting – and it worked. Robbie looked as if she had slapped him in the face.

"You made me?" he repeated, horrified and incensed by what he'd just heard. The fluorescent lighting which had shone through the pharmacy's windows were suddenly switched off. I'd heard the door bolts slam into position. There was nobody in there who had heard the scene occurring just eight yards away, or knew it was even happening.

Stewart's Pharmacy had closed shop for the night.

"Yeah – I put you on the fucking map, Robbie," she hissed. "And you're too pathetic to have any idea. Nobody would even touch you before I decided to."

"You think that's what you did – that you saved me from social castration? I never wanted to be saved by you!" he cried. "You think I care about my social standing in this shit-show of a town? You think I give a damn about what those jerks think about me?"

"I care what they think about you, fuck-face!"

"No you don't," was Robbie's stinging retort. He took a few more steps closer to her, using his height as leverage. Looking directly downward at her distraught face. He looked ready to inflict some damage. "You only care about yourself – admit it, Jenny. You lie to yourself and to everyone else about who you really are. You're a parasitic fucking sycophant. You orchestrated our whole relationship only because you knew my mom had connections in the film industry—"