Free The Perfect Girl by Gilly Macmillan

Gull home, but only on condition we went to the lighthouse on the way.’
    I thought of Hartland Point lighthouse, because I knew it well. To get to it you had to sneak past some locked gates and descend a rubbly, steep cliff path down to the shore, where black rocks lined the edges of the tide line like shark’s teeth and the lighthouse sat on an outcrop which was fortified by a sea wall, to save it from being beaten away by waves. It was no longer occupied and the light was about to be decommissioned entirely. There were empty buildings beside it, where the lighthouse keepers used to live.
    Four drunk teenagers planning to go down there on a dark, cold night sounded like a bad business to me.
    ‘Why did Jack want to go to the lighthouse?’
    She calculated something behind those eyes before she replied. ‘I don’t know.’
    I changed tack. ‘How do you know how to drive?’
    ‘My dad taught me, on the farm.’
    ‘Why were you driving when Jack was old enough to have a licence?’
    ‘Jack was pissed. He was too pissed to drive.’
    ‘But you were drunk as well.’
    ‘I wasn’t. I only had a spritzer.’
    ‘According to the police your blood alcohol level was twice the limit.’
    ‘I wasn’t drunk.’
    I left the denial for now. I’d tease that out later. If she somehow didn’t know she was drunk, we might have a defence to build there.
    ‘Why did Gull want to leave the party?’
    ‘Because she got sick, and she wanted to go home.’
    ‘Sick from drinking?’
    ‘I think so.’
    ‘Were you with her?’
    ‘She came to find me when she got sick.’
    ‘Are you friends?’
    ‘She’s my best friend.’
    ‘And where were you when she came to find you?’
    ‘With Jack.’
    ‘Where were you and Jack?’
    ‘In the bedroom.’
    I wrote this down while the social worker shuffled in her seat, and I wondered if it was defiance that I heard in her tone. I was going to need to know every detail later, but for now I decided that I wouldn’t push her, because when I looked at her I could see that she was fading, and I thought she might throw up.
    ‘I think we should take a break, because I don’t believe you’re well enough for interview this morning. But before we stop is there anything else you want me to know, Zoe? We’re going to talk lots more, but is there anything you want me to know now?’
    ‘It’s Gull’s birthday today,’ she said, and she began to cry.

SUNDAY NIGHT
     
    After the Concert
     
     
ZOE
     
    ‘Bruschetta?’ I ask Mum. This is a perfect example of why she’s insane to deal with sometimes. We all ate before we came out, so nobody will be hungry when they get back from the concert. I’m one hundred per cent sure that Key Worker Jason would say that making bruschetta at this moment is a classic example of displacement activity.
    ‘Yes, I think we will,’ she says. She’s not actually listening to me at all; she’s just answering herself. She crosses the kitchen, her shoes tapping on the stone floor. She’s still wearing her heels from the concert. She heaves open the door of our fridge. ‘Now let’s see…’ she says. ‘Have we got what we need?’
    My mum has a very big fridge. It’s big enough that you could stuff a body inside it. Lucas says that. He once said, ‘Do you think if we put Grace in the fridge she would stop crying? Or at least we wouldn’t be able to hear her.’
    I laughed really hard at that, partly because Lucas doesn’t often make a joke when we’re all together, so I thought it would be good to laugh, to encourage him, and partly because I pictured Grace in the fridge in a Tupperware box, just like my mum stores all the leftover food. And I don’t mean that in a morbid way – everybody always thinks I mean things morbidly – it was just funny.
    ‘Black humour,’ said Jason the Key Worker to me once, taking off his glasses and massaging his frown lines so deeply it was like he was looking for something lost in there, ‘can be a tool to deal