Trust No Bitch: Part 1

Prologue

"Today marks the end of a 4 month search for 20 year old St. Edmunds university student, Cleo King."

As if anybody hadn't heard.

"Though the details are yet to be confirmed, our sources say police recovered the body earlier this morning. It was found after they began searching the river that runs behind university grounds due to an anonymous tip-off. As many predicted would be the case, King's death has officially been deemed suspicious by authorities." The attractive young news reporter said, her luxuriant hair blustering in the wind and partly obscuring her face, as she stood in front of the sign to St. Edmunds university. It was a shame; she was trying so very hard to contort her happiness, over being given what would likely be the most watched news story that day, into a sombre yet purposeful expression. Now nobody would notice, the poor thing.

"20 year old King was a popular student, well-liked by her peers, who excelled academically at South Coast based university St. Edmunds. King leaves behind 2 siblings, her mother and step-father, with whom she had an incredibly close relationship. After going missing last June, the initial belief was that King had left the country. The discovery of her body, this halloween evening, is what people are calling "a terrible tragedy"." She continued, not without eye-fucking the camera. It was all going to plan: for starters, the woman looked pretty; the weather was doing its best at a pathetic fallacy, with the burnt orange sky beginning to fade to soot; and she hadn't yet stumbled over any of her lines, all thanks to the teleprompter which was so obviously present just past the lens of the camera. Executives like a good plan. The public liked a good plan. Nobody wanted to be too horrified by the news report, just placated, convinced they were allowed to stop giving a shit about the dead girl they'd never met. And it would've all happened the same as any other news report about dead bodies found in rivers and ditches, if it hadn't been a news report about the discovery of Cleo King's body. Cleo King was not your average human being and it was fitting, therefore, that nothing about her death could be called average, nor could the reactions of the people she left behind, which quickly became apparent. The first individual to demonstrate this was the young, costumed man, who'd broken from his passing group of inebriated peers, wrestled the microphone from the newswoman, and then begun to holler.

"We're celebrating because the wicked bitch of the South West is dead." He bellowed, the newswoman's O-shaped mouth and choking on air doing little to aid her nugatory attempts to regain control of the microphone as the young man got closer to the camera. "Happy halloween, wankers!" He added as the women in his group shrieked with laughter and the men roared, before sloping off out of shot. The news reporter, grabbing the microphone back, stalked off camera and could vaguely be heard hissing "Ofcom are going to bloody slaughter us!" over the whistling wind. The news report in question went what you could call "viral" on a local level, with the masked boy gaining a few hundred new followers on twitter and the news reporter going into glamour modelling shortly after. So the whole ordeal went pretty well for them, it seemed. Not so much for the dead girl, though. No. The only accomplishment she could count was rotting under ground, what was left of her skin cells, after spending 4 months at the bottom of the river, necrosing and burying themselves into the expensive cream silk that lined her coffin. Worms caressing the sockets of the green, feline eyes which used to fall on every man she came across for just a little too long to be friendly. The same eyes which used to thin and twinkle malefically as she exchanged glares with other women. It didn't go too well for her four best friends, Clara Wright, Gemma Akintola, Alice Jenkins and Lilly Philipps, either, as the story goes. And I know, you think you know that story already. 4 pretty girls, a dead friend (who's a bit of an arsehole), and an anonymous blackmailer. Masks that resemble twisted faces, black cloaks, and lots of running away from seemingly omnipresent villains. And then the final act: Happy endings, fresh-faced trauma victims, and complete closure. 

But that shit? It's not real. Real life is messier. It's walking through the ruins of a shattered reality barefoot, and coming out with bloody, mangled heels, not a pair of designer shoes and a pristine pedicure. The true horror of having someone "know what you did last summer", so to speak, isn't the fact that some malignant, shadowy individual does know whatever it was that you did, but what being aware of that fact does to a person.

Because these 4 pretty girls that Cleo King left behind? They aren't either of those things. Girls, nor quite simply, pretty. Pretty in the sense that they look good, maybe, but those are just exteriors. And they aren't girls. They are women. They've had a good 20 years of practice at backstabbing, and lying, and quite expertly, falling apart, as the world has told them they should. Because that's what people say happened to Clara, Gemma, Alice, and Lilly. That like green bottles, sitting on the wall, they fell and smashed to smithereens. One by one, it's said. And that as hard as they tried, they could not reconstruct themselves. But if there's one thing about broken people that everyone should know, it's that they're sharper round the edges.

They stab far deeper.