The Disadvantages of Making a New Friend

chapter 5

Kate

20thNovember, 2018; morning

Of course, we spent the whole day sitting in the hotel and worrying about her yesterday. Nothing seemed like a fun thing to do. Dad suggested maybe she had a party and drank too much, got wasted and maybe she'll be horrified to wake up in a strange place and then return home.

"Don't you worry, honey. She's not in a situation like 'Taken'; rather it might be like 'Hangover'. It'll be an enormous life experience. You two are gonna have long laughs at every detail of that story." Dad's just trying to console me a bit on our way to LA.

"Hey, Mrs. Fanning, any progress?" Mom just asks Mac's mother standing backwards in front of their garden. "Oh yes," says Mrs. Fanning and when she turns at us, well, she looks like she aged twice her age overnight. It seems like I am not looking at Mrs. Fanning, but her ghost. "Real progress, yeah," she says with twitching her lips into something that looks nothing like a cheerful smile and it kind of shows what's actually going on in her mind. "They found a body of a young girl; some dog walker saw it only two miles from here near the Hyde Park. They called my husband to identify it. I'm just praying, you know?" She says. While Mom and I are just taking our time to process what she's just told us, she receives a phone call. The call ends in a very short time and when Mrs. Fanning looks at us, I can see her face turned pale and bloodless like a blotting paper. "My baby is dead," she says, and I could tell she's going to collapse and hit her head if my mother didn't catch her.

21th November, 2018; afternoon

And we stayed with Mrs. Fanning till Mr. Fanning returned. The Police came to our house this morning. They asked me a lot of things. There were two of them. An arrogant looking woman in her fifties and a friendlier looking younger man, probably in his early thirties. The woman, Mrs. Blanchet and the man was Portman. I still can't believe that Mac has been murdered; my world just seems so incomplete without her that I actually don't believe it. Even though I've seen photos of her dead body, covered in mud; the face unrecognizable in that because of the blood. She's everywhere, in the news and newspapers. So, now, I hope the whole thing about Mac is just a hoax; we've watched our favorite Mission Impossible series lots of times and lots of characters there faked their death plenty of times. It can't be Mac; it's just a face mask or some doppelganger, isn't it?

21th November, 2018; morning

"Ms. Lerman, has she ever mentioned someone to you who had threatened her?" I bite my lips a bit, try to think and I say, "No, I can't remember anything like that. She was nice, stayed out of other people's business. Who would want to hurt her?" The man says, "Of course someone wanted. It's been confirmed she was not a victim of assault which is a blessing. Doctors said she'd been hit by something heavy at her head and that caused the death. We've been informed that you two were really close. You must've heard something you don't remember. Just tell us, okay?" "Did she have a boyfriend? They are always the primary suspects when a lady gets killed."The woman says in a bored tone. "No, she didn't," I say. "Then a girlfriend, maybe? Now-a-days these things are happening too much." "No!" I kind of reply it by screaming. What kind of people can say that about a dead person? I'm not talking with them anymore. I've told them everything I know, that the night before the murder I talked to her and I was the last person. She was a little sad, that could be because she didn't get an A in Spanish. I might never know.

Well, there're these things I've known. Mac went to school that day. She even attended an afternoon birthday party of some classmate. The next morning her parents were back. So it happened that day either evening or night.

The police have interrogated some girls who went to that party, interrogated some from school. None of them could help. Mac attended her piano class the day before she was murdered. Her piano teacher is an elderly woman. She didn't find anything unusual about Mac that day. In her words, "Mac was a sweet girl interested in music. She was also friendly with my other students."Whom to suspect?

Amy 21th November, 2018; morning

I heard about Mackenzie in news. The whole school is talking about it. I really can't imagine about what Kate has been going through. I want to talk to her, but I don't know what I should tell.

And Kendall. She introduced her boyfriend Ray to me two months ago. I've noticed her feelings towards him have changed. She's officially dating him now after eight months of secrecy. Now it is becoming the whole school's trend. She said that her favorite celebrity couple is Niall Horan and Hailee Steinfeld and she's been copying them. They kept their relationship secret for a while and Kendall just found it thrilling. She is a nutcase, that's what I think. .