Forget Me Not: A gripping, heart-wrenching thriller full of emotion and twists!. A. Taylor M.

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      “Anyone could have seen that compass though,” she said after a pause. “Elle had a tattoo of it on her ankle.”

      “She did?” I asked, but as soon as she had said it, it all came flooding back.

      I’d sat there, in that very diner, sometime at the end of the last summer, catching up with Elle and she’d told me all about it. I hadn’t seen her in months, not since the beginning of the year probably, and we’d had a lot to talk about. She’d spent a few weeks of the summer in Austin with Nate and then they’d driven back together so that she could take possession of his old Land Cruiser.

       ***

       “You got a new tattoo,” she says excitedly, reaching for my arm and turning it over so that she can better see the arrow pointing down towards my palm, its tail just scraping the inner crook of my elbow. “Why an arrow?” she asks.

       I look down at my arm, her warm hand still wrapped around my wrist, and it feels as though I’m looking at someone else’s. I’m used to the tattoo by now—I’ve had it since January—but for some reason I feel unhooked from my body, let loose from its rigid confines. “I got it for Nora,” I say eventually, my voice sticky, constricted, and raise my eyes to meet Elle’s, watching as they widen a little. “She always seemed to know exactly where she was going. I could use a little of that in my life I guess.”

       Elle grins at me and she seems to be bubbling over with something. “It’s like we match,” she says animatedly, pulling her leg up onto the diner bench and twisting her ankle towards me so I can see it: an inky black compass with all points ending in “N.” It’s still a little red, sore. “Nate got one too,” she says, “on his arm though. Guess we’ll have to force Noah to get one at some point too. But look,” her finger traces the compass on her ankle gently as she speaks, “it’s like your little arrow matches the pointers on the compass. Part of the family.”

       Something heavy fills my stomach and even though I find it difficult I manage to smile at her. “Don’t you have to be eighteen to get a tattoo?”

       Elle makes a face as if she’s disappointed I’d ask her such a question, and proceeds to roll her eyes. “Yeah, and Mom absolutely flipped. It was ridiculous. As if she doesn’t have more important things to worry about than me getting an effin tattoo.”

       I can’t help but really smile at her then; there is nothing more endearing to me than Elle’s quiet refusal to curse. We move onto talking about her parents, who, Elle believes, are in the process of getting a divorce, although neither one of them will talk about it with her.

       “As if our family needs any more skeletons we’re not allowed to talk about,” she says, all her previous enthusiasm drained.

      “Shit, I can’t believe I forgot about the tattoo,” I said to Jenna, feeling deflated. I’d been assuming that whoever had drawn that compass had been to the lake house, which might have narrowed down the suspects a little, but if anyone could have seen it on Elle’s ankle, then it was far less significant.

      After paying for our coffees I walked Jenna to her car, an enormous dark blue Dodge truck that looked far too big for her, and watched as she climbed into it. Before she drove off I asked her if she was heading back home.

      She was staring out through the windscreen as she shook her head and said: “I can’t stand being in my room anymore. It’s so full of her. I can’t stop thinking … I just can’t stop thinking. About her. About it. I need to be distracted. By anything.”

      “So, what are you going to do?”

      She shrugged, looking lost, looking so much younger than seventeen—far too young for any of this—I thought. “I guess I’ll just go to school. Nowhere else to go.”

      I had tried going to school as normal when Nora first went missing. Those in-between days when we all assumed she’d be found quickly and be back home soon took on a strange, vague quality to them, as if I wasn’t even there. It’s as though someone has told me about them and I’m remembering their telling of it. I remember sitting in the school gym on the Monday after she’d been reported missing, in an assembly for Nora, an assembly called by my own father, who was obviously having trouble getting the tone right. Were we grieving the loss of a fellow student and friend? Were we telling one another that there was still hope, that we could still find her? Were we being warned about the dangers of being a young woman out late at night? Were we blaming drugs? When we got to the drugs part I got up and walked out, Ange close behind me, and we spent the rest of the day crying in the backseat of her car. No one came to get us and force us back to class, and I ended up missing weeks of school.

      I’d raged at my dad that night, stormed at him as soon as he got through the door, face like a distant thunderstorm. He didn’t understand, I screamed, couldn’t possibly understand; Nora hadn’t run away, she wasn’t some messed-up kid on drugs trying to find her way out. Nora was always on her way up, always, and I couldn’t understand how everyone could have suddenly forgotten that and recast her in this new role of troubled teen. He’d answered in a low voice, quiet, levelheaded, sympathetic even, telling me he knew, he knew, he knew, that he knew Nora as well as I did, but he had professional obligations, he’d been briefed by the police on what to say. I can still feel the hot tears that stained my face that whole evening as I realized my father had loyalties that extended beyond me, beyond Nora.

      When I finally went back to school, every glance cast at me and every scrap of gossip thrown my way implying that I’d been given special treatment because my dad was also the principal, it was to a different place entirely. What had once been safe, innocuous, boring, was now unbearable. It was on one of these first interminably long days back at school that I found my first note.

       ***

       It flutters to the floor as soon I open my locker, and I pick it up idly, expecting it to be from Ange.

       It’s written in Sharpie, stark black against the clean, perfect white of the printer paper.

       Your friend probably killed herself why don’t you do the same

       I stare down at it, not taking it in. All I can see for a second or two is the black and white, the curve of the writing, the slope of the sentence. It starts to tremble gently in my hand, but the reaction seems completely divorced from me. I lean my shoulder against the locker next to mine, creating a shield with my open locker door, and read the note again. I almost want to laugh in some way; as if anyone could hurt me now. As if any number of notes stuffed into my locker could make me feel the way Nora being gone makes me feel. I fold the note over carefully, once, twice and then slide it into the back pocket of my jeans.

       I slam my locker door shut, forgetting what it is I went there for in the first place, and walk out of school. The metallic noise of the doors banging into the wall sings in my ears as I step out into the dazzle of sun and snow. I squeeze my eyes shut and feel that familiar anvil pressing me down into the earth, the weight of life suddenly a burden too heavy to bear. I walk home through the snow slowly, slowly and crawl into bed, knowing I won’t leave for over a week. I don’t tell anyone about the note—it doesn’t even occur to me—until Serena comes home a few days later.

       “You’re not asleep,” she says, coming into my room without knocking.

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