Trust No Bitch: Part 2

Alice Jenkins: Monday, 30th November, 2015

"Hi, you've called George Jenkins, sorry I can't speak right now but I'll get back to you as soon as possible. Cheers!"

Over the past week and 4 days, Alice had heard that sentence what felt like a million times. Her brother, her little, normal brother. The only normal fucking person in her family. None of the self-proclaimed grandeur of her sister, Vanessa, the emotional apathy of her mother, or the perdurable poker face of her father. Someone she'd spent the few years before she came to university, along with Vanessa, unofficially parenting thanks to the spasmodic absences of their mum and dad.

And he had what?

Murdered Cleo? Was by implication the Supplier? Who had tried to strangle her in the middle of a nightclub? Was that was she was thinking? Of course not. Saying George had it in him to murder someone was farcical. Like saying that the moon was made out of cheese or that 2+2=5 or that JFK really had been assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald. And even if George had done it, he was a Jenkins, how could he have been stupid enough to let it get caught on camera? Alice at one point found herself asking, quickly dispelling the possibility of him having done it at all from her mind. It would make it easier, of course, and stop her from questioning every moment they ever spent together and if it was all somehow her fault, if George would actually pick up his phone and talk to her about it. But he wouldn't. 11 days later, the night before her rowing team's race against Durham and she made what she told herself was the last attempt to call him. If he didn't pick up that time, she was going to have to drive up North to the boarding school he was attending and speak to him in person. And oh so predictably, he didn't. She was met with that same convivial voice mail and the same heightened anxiety she'd been experiencing since first seeing that video. So for the night, she busied herself. As the coxswain and general leader of the team, at the end of their 7 hour long pre-match practice it was her duty to check over the boat they would race the following morning and make sure that there weren't any dents or scrapes that could potentially slow them down. Being the fastidious person that she was, she checked over each and every part of the boat innumerous times, only stopping upon receiving an odd look from a passer-by, the murmured repetition of the checklist she liked to go through easily confusable, from a distance, with some kind of involuted religious ritual. She got like that sometimes when the effects of the many different prescription drugs she was taking began to wear off; slightly fanatical, scarily obsessive, to the point where she couldn't stop herself.

To the point where she'd probably hit someone 10 times instead of once just to make it feel right.

Maybe George is like that too, maybe that's why he did it. Maybe you weren't there for him enough because you were shut up in your room, off your head on drugs, copying out the contents of your A-Level textbooks over and over and fucking over again. Maybe Cleo was blackmailing him over something and you didn't even notice. Alice tried every possibility repeatedly in her head; had it not been for the addiction, she wouldn't even have needed the amphetamines to keep her awake. Everything else did anyway, and the added preoccupation with George and his possible motives and how Alice herself may have contributed to it was enough fuel to keep her running for several nights. It wasn't, however, what she needed the night before the biggest race of the year so far. She couldn't let the team down and more importantly, she didn't want to give Vicky Prescott the opportunity to deprecate her leadership on her very first race back. So for that night, the first in a long time, she was hell bent on a full night's sleep. That was why she did it; downed all those ambien. And that's how she slept through it.

Only she didn't know there was anything to sleep through. Not until she woke up the morning of the race, was about to leave, and opened her bathroom cabinet to find all her pills, bottles and all, as well as the spare baggie of white powder tucked behind them, gone.