Trust No Bitch: Part 1

Lilly Philipps

Lilly had been mooching about her flat avoiding looking at her phone ever since she'd arrived back there 15 minutes earlier. She knew that Tess was pissed off with her. She'd heard her phone buzzing, gyrating on her bedside table multiple times since she'd received her first voice mail from Naomi.

"Hi Lil, just wondering where you were tonight. Me and Tess thought you were coming by ours for Malibu and Netflix. I know that what's happened is all pretty traumatic, but you could've at least let us know if you didn't plan on turning up. We could've gone out instead, we were only going to stay in because we thought you wouldn't want to see everybody right now. Tess wants to speak to you, so call her back." Naomi had said, then dropped her voice to a whisper. "And I would do that asap, because she's pretty pissed off with you." Lilly hated confrontation, always had. Even when a situation necessitated her interference, whether it be one of Alice and her boyfriend's semi-physical fights, someone leaving the changing rooms with notably fewer items than they went in there with at work, or Clara beating the shit out of some awkward first year who dared to look at Cleo for a millisecond too long in the student bar, some physical presence held her in place on the sidelines. Back before Cleo had made Lilly her barbie doll, back in the times of the braided hair and the diaphanous dresses, people viewed that as a positive thing. They told her how "chill" she was, how "laid-back". Since she'd undergone her "transformation" and the majority of people had grown to dislike her for her quasi-shallowness, her aversion towards conflict had earned her a new label: "Two-faced". In reality she was no more two faced than the next person but the fact was that the persona Cleo had forced upon her had caused every one of the variation of insults that are typically fired at the feminine to be directed Lilly's way. "Slut", "bitch", "whore" and all that jazz. Before, people had to be a bit more creative with their insults, telling her to "piss off back to Woodstock", for example, with "alright, Legolas?" being a favourite. None of it was really malicious though. Now? Template insults for a "template woman", all the fucking time. Maybe it was her uncanny resemblance to the dolls that had probably made every other woman she came across feel inadequate as a child that prompted them, threatened, to use those insults. To use those insults so favoured by the people who did view women as nothing more than play toys to get crushed under their heavy feet. Maybe, that was it. But that was a little deep for Lilly; she wasn't down with that psychology shit. She'd scraped a B at A-level. She had no idea how she'd made it to the 3rd year of a criminology degree. In her eyes, people hated her for the reasons Cleo had told her they did. Because she was "annoying", "vain", "conceited". She thought of those words as she walked over to pick up her phone, which was buzzing again. She couldn't avoid it forever but she didn't want Tess hurling abuse at her down the phone. What she saw when she did pick it up was much worse than insults from Tess. Of course, there were texts from Tess and none of them pretty, but they were not the messages which Lilly's eyes were transfixed on. There was one from an unknown number. Lilly frowned, pressing on the text. It had an attachment.

"Oh...God." She whispered weakly, her heart feeling as if it just enlarged several sizes within her chest, her lungs too squashed against her rib cage to function normally. "Oh God, oh God, oh God." She repeated, her vision beginning to blur with tears as she enlarged the photo attached. It was of a handwritten letter she had planned to send to Luca Stone around the time Cleo had gone missing, composed over several hours with a thesaurus borrowed from Alice. She remembered leaving it on the side next to her window of her ground floor flat, but typically, she couldn't remember what had actually happened to it after that, cringing as she re-read it.

Dear you,

A friend once told me that bravery is not the absence of fear but one's ability to overcome fear in order to do what is necessary. And she's pretty clever so she knows what she's talking about.