Moth Girls Read Online Free PDF Page A

brother is there and he says he’ll make sure the party doesn’t get out of hand. We’ve been invited and you guys as well,’ Toni said, looking from Tommy to Mandy and back again.
     
Tommy immediately started to talk about the party. Toni and Leanne pulled up chairs. Mandy folded the papers he’d given her and slid them into her bag. She slipped away while they were all talking.
     
‘Wait,’ he called.
     
She turned round and saw him walk towards her. Leanne and Toni looked a bit miffed.
     
‘The thing is … I might not have explained it all that well but this talk I’m going to give is meant to be a sort of final goodbye to the girls? And that will mean that you can surely put it all in the past? What with the demolition and this. It’ll all be gone for you. You can get on with your life.’
     
He was looking right into her eyes. She softened. He had it all worked out.
     
‘Course,’ she said. ‘I’ll look at the stuff and get back to you.’
     
‘You will come to this party on Saturday? It’ll be fun.’
     
‘Probably,’ she said.
     
Walking away, along the corridor, she thought about what he’d said about her getting on with her life.
You can surely put it in the past
. ‘The past’; as if it were a box of some sort in which she could lock away troublesome things. He wasn’t to know how often people had said this to her. It wasn’t his fault that he was just echoing words that she’d heard for years.
     
Everyone
wanted her to move on. Maybe one day she would.
     

Five
     
After art, Mandy found a quiet carrel in the library and sat down. There were other students about, some with headphones on, most of them focused on writing or reading. She pulled out the printouts that Tommy had given her. She flicked through. They were in date order: the top one was the oldest, from a few days after Petra and Tina had gone missing. ‘Mystery of Missing Girls Deepens.’
     
The text was simple and straightforward and summed up the facts of the story.
     
    At five o’clock on Thursday 28th October, 2010, two twelve-year-old friends, Petra Armstrong and Tina Pointer, entered a house in Princess Street, Holloway, North London. A third girl, unnamed, was due to accompany them but did not.
     
The house was owned by George Merchant, seventy-nine, a retired accountant. Sources say that Merchant’s health had been poor and he was mostly housebound. He lived in one room of the large property and the girls, according to their friend, were intent on exploring the dilapidated building. There had been talk of ghosts and hauntings.
     
When police entered the property they found George Merchant dead from head injuries. The place had been ransacked and there was evidence of theft. There was no sign of the girls. Forensic examination of the house is continuing. An extensive search of the property and the garden is still ongoing. As yet there is no information on the fate of Petra and Tina. A nationwide search has been set up and their pictures circulated in the media and on social networking sites.
     
In the middle of the article were school photographs of Petra and Tina: small rectangular pictures of two smiling girls, taken a few weeks before they went missing. The photographer had come into school in the early weeks of term. Mandy looked at Petra’s photograph. Her hair was long and parted in the middle. It hung smoothly down each side of her face. She had a half smile. She looked demure, shy even. How different to the photos of her dressed up in her girl-band outfit. The Red Roses pictures were posed and showed a made-up face with white teeth. Then Petra looked pouty and grown-up. In real life Petra didn’t smile a lot. She seemed to spend a lot of time chewing at the side of her lip.
     
Mandy focused on the picture of Tina. Tina always looked the same. She had curly hair which she held back in hairslides or hairbands. Her smile was wide, showing dimples on each cheek. Her eyes were bright, as if someone