Born and raised in Manchester, Evie is a twenty-three-year-old amateur writer who became obsessed with books after finding out that they came before her favourite films. She grew up surrounded by young adult novels set in dystopian worlds, where young people led charges against century old systems.

Her most recent pieces of writing have been inspired by her love of authors like Mariana Enriquez, Joe Hill and Eliza Clark. She finds horror to be the most interesting genre of fiction to write and read about. In her opinion, all horror stories can arguably be metaphors for real-life experiences.

When writing, she only has two laws which are absolute and can under no circumstances be broken. Firstly, she must write what she would want to read in a novel, not what she believes other people would enjoy. And secondly, she must always keep her eyes on her own paper. To worry about how well others are doing, what they are writing and how it is being received is a very fast way to doubting your own work. She strongly believes that writing for herself and her own eyes is the art, and everything else that follows, readers, traction, being noticed, is simply a bonus.

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Fifteen Forever

Ever since we were twelve, the teachers in our school watched Grace longer than any other student.

Their eyes bore into every action she did, their expensive training telling them that something was off about her but not being able to pin it down. They saw her purposefully tripping herself up in the corridors. They silently accepted the notes she handed to them, that people had supposedly written about her, in her own handwriting. Sometimes, they would even drag their heels when going to save her from the tenth piece of food she'd choked on in a week in the canteen. By the time we had turned fifteen, our teachers hated her. They didn’t even bother to hide it anymore.

There was something wrong with Grace. We could all smell it on her when she walked by, and taste it in the air around us when she spoke. She left small, invisible maggots on the floor when she walked by, that slipped into our brains. They planted eggs on the ends of nerves that bore a thousand tiny thoughts of unease.

She was beautiful in an awful way. She had plastic blonde hair down to her waist that always curled in the same direction. Her face looked woolly in texture, her smile sewn on, and her eyes... her eyes... Seeing her was like looking into a black hole.

There was a rumour going around — that everyone knew was true.

Last summer, Grace’s parents had taken her on a ten-day cruise to the Caribbean. On the fourth night, Grace’s father awoke in their shared family cabin to find that Grace’s bed was empty. It was after one in the morning. Her parents woke every staff member and screamed from the top to the bottom of the ship, demanding Grace be found. Half an hour later, a line cook caught sight of blonde hair hanging over the side of a high railing, on one of the quietest decks. After he hauled her back over, Grace claimed she had slipped and was trying to get her balance back. Nobody but her parents believed her. She was the type of girl to try and throw herself off a ship, in the middle of the ocean, in the pitch black, just to have it stop everything to get her back on board. She genuinely thought that was what would happen.

Rebecca Alson once said that if you slapped Grace’s face hard enough, it would spin around and reveal another at the back of her head.

For the first three years of high school, I could not have been further from her.

I was born with scarring alopecia. My hair grew in long, straggly strings from tiny patches on my head. I never brushed my teeth, only popped chewing gums once every day or so. I drank lukewarm milk straight from the cartons in the canteen and never wore deodorant. Huge circles of foul-smelling odour stuck to my white uniformed shirts all day. I was a bruja to everyone who saw or knew me. People loudly dry heaved when they walked by or, another fan favourite, tugged sharply and unexpectedly on one of my strings, snapping a cluster of hair clean off my eczema-ridden scalp. One day, a teacher took me aside and said it was not on the outside that showed who a person was, but how you treated other people. My ugliness had been confirmed by the adult world. I was the girl other girls thought of when they wanted to feel better about themselves. I was used to it.

I had a routine.

Each day during second period, my fingers began to itch. It would get to the point where if I left it long enough, my hands would shake. My teachers knew what I was going to ask before I even raised my hand.

The girls’ toilets were always quietest at this point in the day, meaning I could go to the sinks and pick at my scalp in peace for as long as I liked.

A Monday in November brought a change. I headed to the bathrooms as usual, almost skipping, when I smelt something before I walked through the door. A sickly, floral scent that hung fat in the air and only deepened when I entered the toilets. There was immediately another smell hidden beneath it. Sour and almost dark. I couldn’t pinpoint it exactly. All the breath got swept from my body, when I noticed Grace was hunched over at the sink, wiping at the corners of her mouth erratically and talking to someone who wasn’t in the room with us. When she heard my shoes squeak, she kept her head bowed low and shut up.

I suddenly didn’t know what to do. I had never been alone in the same room with her. I didn’t go into a stall, or go to a sink, I just hovered between, staring at her plastic curls. I noticed that her hair was parted, exposing the back of her neck to me. It was irritated and red, blotchy. If there had been a zipper poking out of her skin, it would not have shocked me.

“You like staring,” she said into the sink, causing me to jump.

I thought maybe I had imagined it because she still wasn’t moving.

“You like to be stared at,” I replied, talking like I was in a dream.

She turned to me quickly, sharply, the corners of her mouth pulling open as she attempted what could resemble a smile. Her teeth were century hidden pearls in the straightest line I had ever seen. It felt like standing in front of a child’s drawing of an angel. I turned and left, suddenly lightheaded from all the smells and stares.

I didn’t see her again for weeks, until one afternoon whilst waiting in line for dinner, I smelt it. The same floral smell as from that day. The perfume that she used, cake and sickly, too strong to be enjoyed.

“Are you following me?” Her siren voice sang close to my ear. I turned only my neck to see her stood too close behind me.  

Her strange smile told me she was joking, even though to me it wasn’t funny. I didn’t reply, but it didn’t matter. She found herself hilarious and wouldn’t stop laughing. I wondered if she was having some kind of episode.

When we reached the front, she shot her hand over mine as I tried to pay for my meal. She intercepted with her own card, gathered our food on one tray, and linked our arms together. She steered us past the stares of teachers and students, to a table that popular girls usually sat at. I couldn’t remember the last time someone had touched me. It brought tears to my eyes, though I couldn’t decide if I liked it or not.

Grace spoke at me for the entire lunch hour. Her conversation was bizarre. She flicked from topics mid-sentence, never finishing one train of pointless dialogue before jabbing into the next. It felt like a new language entirely. I picked at my pasta and watched hers go untouched. The only thing she ate was the skin around her nails every few breaths. When the bell rang to signify the resume of lessons, she flew up from her seat and left without another word.

This ritual repeated itself day after day, week after week. Her, never eating and me, always listening. I nodded along as best I could, but it was hard to follow and most of the stories she told were so clearly lies that my face would heat out of second-hand embarrassment. I could feel people watching us, listening in on the lies she told and sniggering over her shoulder. I could only sink lower into my chair and hope she kept her voice down.

Then came The Lie.

It was a Saturday. My parents were out. I was getting a drink from the kitchen when Grace had suddenly appeared outside my backdoor. She did not knock or acknowledge me, only stood unmoving and stared through the glass to peer inside my living room. I had no idea how long she had been there or how she even knew where I lived.

When I slid open the door, I smiled as best I could and asked what she was doing here. She did not look me in the eye. No matter what I asked her, she did not respond. Grace was mute. She was the furthest from her erratic self I had ever seen, close to how she had been in that bathroom where we met.

Finally, I asked, “Do you wanna come in?”

She responded by bear hugging me, almost knocking us to the ground. She began to hysterically cackle — too close to my ears.

“Yes!” she sang repeatedly.

The Lie started out like all the others. Grace pulled her hair to the right side of her neck — a tell I had learnt. Her damp, blank eyes swirled as she spoke.

“I’m thirty years old.”

I waited for the laugh, but it never erupted. I waited for the smile, but it never stretched. The air between us became wet cement.

“I am a thirty-year-old woman,” she tried again, but I was too confused to bite.

Annoyed, she launched into a dizzying, rehearsed speech on how she had learnt the secret to stop aging. How to be beautiful, forever. How to be fifteen, forever. She could stay awake for days on end and still look the same. She knew what people were thinking when they spoke. Her hair was always perfect, her face always the same. It had started fifteen years ago, when she had begun eating raw meat from supermarkets and drinking the blood that was left over in the packet.

I pulled the story apart almost instantaneously, in the private caverns of my mind. It was such a poor attempt at a lie that I almost laughed. But for some awful reason, I wanted to believe her. The way she spoke about eating, the way her face melted into a dopamine daze recounting it, comforted something ancient inside of me.

There was something wrong withGrace, but what type of person was I to enjoy hearing about it. I didn’t know what was worse, truly believing the lie or only pretending to for the sake of sadistic curiosity.  

Grace invited me around to her house, to show me something. When I arrived, she answered the door and took my hand without saying a word. She began to pull me up the stairs, when I caught sight of her mother stood in the kitchen. She looked like an alien wearing human skin and waved aggressively as I was led away. The image stayed with me for weeks.

Grace’s bedroom made sense. It was pastel pink and looked as though it hadn’t been changed since she was six. Nothing in her room gave tell to the things she was doing inside of it. This could have been any normal girls’ room, except for one drawer in her dresser. Inside were weird things, even for me. I saw a flash of a barbie doll that had been mummified and paper macheted until it resembled a voodoo doll. It had three black holes: two for eyes and one for a screeching mouth. I immediately wanted to hold it. She took it from the drawer and placed it in her lap like a mother cradling a newborn.

Then she retrieved one of a dozen mason jars. The blood was lighter than I thought and thicker. It reminded me of one of my daily milk cartons. She twisted off the lid and handed it to me. The glass was warm.

“Fifteen forever,” she said, greeting me with her death smile.

It only took three gulps before the insides of my mouth began to tingle and vibrate.

I didn’t make it to the toilet; I didn’t even make it to the hall. I threw up all over Grace’s bed for ten minutes straight. The whole place reeked and the pink, foamy liquid refused to stop erupting from my throat.

“It’s alright,” Grace chanted, rubbing circles over the vertebrates of my spine.

When I was finished and delirious, she moved me to the floor and scooped up her bedding by the four corners. She opened her bedroom and threw it to the bottom of her stairs, where her mother shouted up a thank you.

She then started to spray Febreze everywhere, making shapes mid-air and twirling around whilst humming. The droplets landed over me as I placed my burning head to the cool carpet. I eventually came back down, and we both looked at one another before bursting into laughter. Every time I looked at her, her head was thrown back at an impossible angle. I could see right down into the black cave of her mouth.

At first, it was fun.

Grace would bring in an opaque steel bottle and pass it between us during lessons. We would take turns sipping, grimacing after each swig. Sometimes, I placed the bottle to my lips and pretended to take a gulp. We drank a litre of blood a day, every day for three weeks. We would do it anywhere we could, sometimes making games and seeing who could down it faster, then walking around like we were glowing, when all I actually felt was nauseous.

Grace told me that she loved me way too soon and wrote our names in books she dedicated to things I had never heard of. Once, I found one of her hundreds of notebooks in my bag after school. She had written my name backwards across five pages of A4.  

Although I knew the blood was not making any difference, I couldn’t help it. I woke each morning and almost tripped over my feet to check what I looked like in the bathroom mirror. All I wanted to see were little sprouts of hair pushing from my scalp, but of course, nothing was happening.

My skin got worse. I was breaking out with yellow mounds of puss that multiplied overnight. My voice was hoarse from all the vomiting and the Febreze that Grace was making me spray in my mouth, to stop the smell of meat on my breath.

“I don’t want to waste the power on someone who isn’t even trying,” she said one day after I voiced my concerns.

She was beginning to lose her temper with me more and more, which only added to my nauseous state. On one occasion, whilst sleeping over at her house, I dropped one of the mason jars on her bedroom floor by accident. It stained her white carpet like red flowers. She went hysterical. Every vein in her head and neck rose to the surface of her skin as she howled. I had never heard anyone make a noise like it. I kept telling her to be quiet, to shush, that her mother was going to come upstairs to see what was wrong. But no one ever came to the door. I could have been stabbing her to death and no one cared.  

Every time Grace brought up her age, or pretended to use her powers, it pissed me off. I couldn’t deny that something was happening to me, but I didn’t feel powerful at all. I felt scared all the time. Paranoia never let me rest. It burned my brain for all hours of the day. My heart lived in my mouth. My steps felt heavier, louder, clumsier. My eyes were gunshot wide, unblinking. I saw people poking around corners, cars, bushes; men waiting for me that never came. At night, I saw figures in my room and couldn’t move to scream them away.  

I began to hear a male voice saying my name when I went to sleep. Not a whisper, but a bark. It came from the kitchen, as real as though my own mother had shouted it. If someone was in there, I never checked. I could never bring myself to go and look.

When I told Grace about this reoccurring event, she picked me up and spun me around. A piece of my hair got caught on her bag strap and snapped from my head.  

“You’re finally seeing him!” she rejoiced, my lost hair hanging lamely off her shoulder. “It’ll get better from here, that was the turning point for me.”

Except, I wasn’t seeing just one man. Sometimes, I saw ten at once and they always changed. It was never the same one. What made me most angry was the fact that Grace had never told me that I would be seeing anyone. She had failed to include that in her list of lies.

“Don’t be a bitch,” she spat back, knowing I was annoyed. “I can’t be fifteen forever with someone who’s mad at me.”

I was starting to wonder if anyone really wanted that. Fifteen forever.

Whenever Grace saw doubt behind my eyes, her entire face would melt, and she would snatch herself away from me.

“Just leave then. I’ll get someone else to do it.”

The idea made me mouldy with jealousy. The thought of another girl helping Grace made me want to pound my fists into my face. There were days where she would ignore me as punishment for not agreeing to something fast enough, or if I didn’t finish my raw meat, or drank too little. Those days, I would scream into my pillow for hours and smell shirts she left at my house. I needed her the same way she needed those bloodied meat packets.

I began to understand obsession, how easily it made you do things that others would find repulsive. When I didn’t feel like drinking the blood, I would think about how if they sold tiny, little versions of Grace in plastic boxes at supermarkets, I would be buying them too.

Feeling my enthusiasm starting to die, Grace said we needed something stronger. Animal blood wasn’t cutting it anymore and clearly wasn’t working. My body was rejecting it. I agreed. We were like those men who go to sea for months and end up killing one other, mad from the isolation.

We could have chosen anyone from our school. Adam Owens and Sammy Loweson were avid hair pullers of mine. Rebecca Alson said it looked as though someone had run over my face and put it back on. Mel Waters would wait for me behind corners and shove me down flights of stairs as hard as she could.

We could have done it to anyone else.

I realised, too late, that she had only chosen Moe because of me.

“We’ll do it at the beach, on the seventeenth,” Grace explained, “no one will be there when it’s this cold. We’ll bring her down to the rock pools, so that we’re hidden from the people on the pier.”

Moe was in my French class.

She had more friends than me, but not the kind that anyone would be jealous of. She was just about beating me on the popularity tiers, though it was very close. Her hair was short, like a boy’s. She wore pants instead of skirts and knocked the wind out of me each time we made eye contact. There was this look she would always give me, whenever we walked past one another in the hallways. Smiling like she knew what was going to happen between us before it ever did. Like she was waiting for me. It had been building for months. Or maybe I was just hallucinating again.

'What about Rebecca Alson instead?' I wrote on a piece of paper and passed to Grace one day during lesson.

'Who would eat her?' she wrote back, grimacing when I looked up, offended for some reason. Becky was bigger than both of us and would probably have given us more substance than anyone else. Even I was shocked that I had thought that way. I had to crack my wrists to remind myself that none of this was real.

The night of the sixteenth was awful. I was not excited or hungry, only petrified. Amidst the chaos, I had the sickening realisation that I didn’t even like Grace, let alone love her. I was almost certain that she felt the same way about me. Yet neither of us could stop. Stopping seemed impossible when you let Grace talk for long enough.  

I found Moe in the library, pouring over revision notes. I lightly coughed and when she looked up, she wore the face she always had for me.

I knew how easy it was going to be for the police to find out what had happened. Too many people had seen us together. Cameras outside of school showed us leaving through the back gates, talking casually. Cameras on the bus showed us getting on together, Moe paying for my fare and the two of us sitting upstairs. Cameras at the corner shop where I bought two Turkish Delights, which Moe mistook as an offering, when I had actually bought one for me and one for Grace. For after.

By the time we made it to the seafront, it was so dark that the horizon line had disappeared, blending the ocean and sky together. When I began leading us towards the steps that took us down to the beach, Moe asked if I wanted to stay on the pier instead. Her dad would be furious if he found out she had gone down to the water at this time. I told her we could hang out another day if she wanted.

The sand was like clay. It was almost impossible to stand on and I finally slipped after fifteen minutes of stumbling. Moe’s arm darted out and caught me before I got a mouth full of rock. I kept hold of her for the rest of the way, partly in case she tried to make a run for it and partly because I felt like I was going to pass out. The rotting seaweed caught in the now dry rock pools smelt worse than the blood and meat packets.

The whole situation was starting to feel wrong. Moe had gone quiet, and I had a horrible feeling that she knew something was off. I didn’t offer any reassurances. How could I comfort her, the hypocrisy would kill me.

The strangest part was that all of this was already starting to feel nostalgic. As though an older version of myself was watching Moe tell me how pretty my hair looked tonight and me leading her down, further into the dark, to a place neither of us would return from.

I thought I caught sight of Grace’s shadow, squatting eagerly from behind one of the rocks. I could imagine her Chesire Cat grin baring at us through the darkness.

“Fifteen forever,” I thought I heard her whisper, though it could have been anyone.

Even now, it felt stupid to lie to one another. Both of us pretending, playing dress up, when we both knew that the only person who would be fifteen forever, was Moe.