AllFreeNovel
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Get a fucking job, says @Christine472.
Nice tits. That one courtesy of @KasimXXX.
Why don’t you come over here and I’ll stick my—I stop reading that one halfway through, flag it as inappropriate, and delete all three comments. But nothing from Lucy.
I move to the next post—me again, holding a cocktail in front of a majestic sunset—and check the comments. Nothing from Lucy, but my eyes touch on another comment from @Christine472.White privileged bitch.
Comments like this used to bring me to my knees, but after two years, I’ve become fairly hardened to them, especially from trolls like @Christine472, women—and sometimes men—who channel their envy over my seemingly perfect life into anger and resentment. They all think they know me: the pretty, successful, carefree woman in skimpy clothes posted all over my page. But she isn’t real.
I think of what that little girl from Monroe would think of these pictures and all the followers. She’d probably be in heaven, drowning in the attention that was almost entirely absent in her frigid Kentucky trailer. I knew what everyone there thought I was: the kids at school, my teachers, even my own mother.Trash. So I made it my mission to prove them all wrong. I holed myself up in my bedroom, away from the leering eyes of my mother’s revolving door of boyfriends, and dug into my dog-eared textbooks, breaking frommy studying only to sneak out to the living-room television for the six o’clock news every night. Eventually, I graduated second in my high-school class and earned a full scholarship to college. College was my way out, until it wasn’t. Until it, along with everything else in my life, crashed and burned, sending me running straight into a hell worse than the one I had tried to escape.
No, I’m not the spoiled rich brat most of my followers think I am. I’m just an expert at looking like one. Underneath it all, I’m nothing more than Lucy, with secrets and an agenda, masquerading as someone I’m not.
The thought of her brings me back to the present, and as much as it hurts, I return my focus to Instagram. When it becomes clear that she hasn’t commented on any of my recent posts, I switch back over to her profile page. But no matter how much I try, I glean no new information from it. She’s never been tagged in any photos, nor has she ever posted anything.
Then an idea hits me. I return to the search bar and type in #FullMoonParty. I’m instantly swarmed with results, most of which are affiliated with the bigger Full Moon Party on Koh Phangan. But I scroll through them, stopping at the first one I see that’s geotagged as Koh Sang.
It’s a photo, two twentysomething women, both too old to be Lucy, their heads pushed together, joined at the cheeks, each sucking from a fishbowl filled to the brim with some unnaturally blue liquid. I keep scrolling to the next post with the correct location. It’s a video depicting one of the resort’s staff members—a local guy I’ve seen around the grounds—twirling a long stick lit with fire on both ends. He dances around, deftly jumping away each time the fire nearly kisses his skin. I continue scrolling, contemplating howuseful this whole approach actually is as I pass through blurry selfies and bright neon clips drowned out by dance music.
I’m about to give up when the next post shows another video as part of a carousel of images from the party. It’s silent, and for the first few seconds, everything in the shot is blurry, but then the image begins to come into focus. Bodies pressed up against each other, streaks of neon-painted flesh flashing through the dark sky. The screen shakes, like the person taking the video is also moving—dancing, probably.
I’m about to close out and move to the next result, labeling this as unhelpful as the previous posts, until the image zooms in shakily on one figure standing apart from the dancing crowd. When the zoom function seems to narrow in as far as it possibly can, the image still comes closer, the person recording apparently walking toward their subject. After a few seconds, my breaths start coming in quick, jagged succession.
Because I recognize the person in the film. Her eyes dart from side to side, looking for someone. Her small hands are clenched into fists, and she looks frightened but prepared. For what exactly I can’t tell.
And all at once, her eyes land on the camera. Lucy’s expression is unreadable but fixed with the same intensity I saw from her the other morning as she walked past the Tiki Palms. Before either of us knew what would happen to her.
The video ends abruptly, and I sit for a minute, my mind racing. This could be the last video ever taken of Lucy. In fact, if she died at the Full Moon Party, this could be one of the final moments of her life.
Once I recover from the shock, the questions come again, anavalanche of inquiries. Why was this person following Lucy around the party, filming her, apparently monitoring her every move?
On my screen, I navigate to the profile of the person who posted the video. Their handle is @dab2000, and their profile picture is the Arsenal Football Club logo. But as my eyes trail down the screen, I find the name of the person who followed Lucy around the other night, hours, or maybe even minutes, before she died.
Daniel Ayadebo.
12
CASS
“Whoa, love. What’s got into you?”
Logan stands in the doorway to the dive shop and rests his hands on my shoulders. I try to calm my breathing, to process the fact that I must have imagined the man in the black hooded sweatshirt from earlier peering in the shop window. That it’s just Logan.
Even so, I twist my head back and forth, looking for the person in the black sweatshirt. “You didn’t see anyone out here, did you?”
He looks around, apparently confused. “Nope, just me. Sorry to disappoint.”
I know he’s looking for me to respond, to assure him he could never disappoint me, but I’m too distracted.
“You were gone before I woke up this morning,” Logan says. “What have you been getting up to?”
I mumble something about meeting Brooke for breakfast, adding yet another check to the tally of lies I’ve told over the last few days. Logan nods, but his jaw tightens at the mention of hername. I’ve never understood why, but there seems to be something about Brooke that irritates him. I’ve noticed his eyes narrow, his back stiffen whenever she speaks.
I suspect it has something to do with her being an influencer. He’s protective of this island, our home. Even though word of mouth is undoubtedly what keeps the resort and Frangipani afloat, he cringes every time he sees a post or story on social media hawking Koh Sang as the “hidden jewel of Thailand.”
“Should we go inside?” Logan suggests. “I just saw Doug talking to Frederic in the lobby, and Greta and Neil are on their way.”
Neil, Greta, Logan, and I are all crowded into the dive shop when Frederic enters, Doug trailing behind him. Frederic’s been gone for over a week, evidently negotiating land rights to build a new resort in Bangkok, right on the bank of the Chao Phraya, and truthfully, we’ve all been a bit thankful for the freedom—especially Doug, who seems to come into himself whenever Frederic leaves him in charge. But Frederic’s presence now in the small dive shop is so overpowering, it feels like he’s never left. He’s a short man, but what he lacks in height, he compensates for in width, his wide belly extending far beyond his loosely belted khaki shorts. The sight of him makes each of us sit up a bit straighter.
