Free Moth Girls by Anne Cassidy

straight line. She came up to the edge of the property. Mandy felt her shoulders knotting. It
was
something to do with this house and Mandy was stuck where she couldn’t get out. Maybe the woman was from a security company, called out by some electronic alarm that Mandy had stumbled over. That was why she was wearing normal clothes: she wasn’t in uniform, she was
on call.
     
The torch sent a finger of light onto the site. The mist swirled through it. The beam was strong where the woman was but then fanned out and faded as it swept the back of the garden. The woman swung the torch from one side to the other, slowly as if she was looking for something. Was she searching for an intruder?
     
She turned it off and the place seemed darker than it had been before.
     
The woman stood looking at the site. Then she fiddled with the torch so that it lit up for a split second and illuminated her face.
     
Mandy stared. The light went off but she’d already seen the girl’s face, bright white, in the light from the torch. She came out from behind the tree. She walked a few paces. The girl was still there and she’d turned the torch on again. It pointed into the centre of the garden, the place where the house would have been. The girl hadn’t noticed her because she was outside the light, but Mandy found herself drawn by the brightness, moving closer to the beam that cut through the old property. When she was a few metres away, the girl saw her and jumped. She snapped the torch off.
     
‘Petra,’ Mandy said, her voice hoarse, stuck down her throat. ‘Petra, it’s me, Mandy.
     
The girl looked stunned, horrified. Behind her the car started up. The noise made Mandy start. The girl turned and headed back to the car.
     
‘Petra,’ Mandy called out. ‘Wait!’
     
But the car was moving off at speed. In seconds it was gone. Mandy got down on her knees and scrambled under the wire. When she stood up in the street she saw the taillights of the car turning the corner.
     
It was gone.
     

Ten
     
Miss Pearce and Tommy seemed busy preparing for the memorial most of the afternoon. The sixth-form common room was closed off and the only place to sit in-between lessons was the lunch area, which was still grubby from lunchtime and smelt of chips. Mandy had a free period after English so she sat at a table as far away from the serving area as she could. Some other sixth formers were there as well. They were still talking about Zoe’s party. The ripple of conversation had been there all day. Zoe’s older brothers had kept things under control so, although there had been alcohol and dope and loud music, it’d never got out of hand. There had been no fights and no gatecrashers but there had been plenty of drunkenness and lots of people getting together. No one said anything about Tommy and Leanne. Maybe no one wanted to say anything within Mandy’s earshot. Maybe they all knew that she had feelings for Tommy. How could they not? She’d been following him round for weeks.
     
Not that any of it really mattered. Not with what she’d had in her head since early yesterday morning. She was still in a state of shock. That was the only way she could explain the numbness inside her. She had seen Petra Armstrong.
Hadn’t she?
She had stood on that demolition site and watched seventeen-year-old Petra get out of a car, walk up to the fence and use a torch to look around the remnants of the old house that she’d once been fixated on.
     
Or had Mandy been mistaken? She’d spent the week thinking about that time five years ago, and then she’d looked at Alison Pointer’s website and the computer-generated image of what Petra looked like now. She’d had Petra on her mind ever since the house had been demolished. Maybe she’d
wanted
to see Petra there and had conjured her up, superimposed her face onto that of the security woman who’d been on call and was checking the site for vandalism.
     
So why, when Mandy called out to her, had she