Bad Date

by Ellery Lloyd

Anyway, as regular Ride or Die fans will know, this is the podcast where two basic besties talk about life, love, and our laughably terrible choices.

I take a moment to appreciate how good I look—I’ve grown stubble, got coloured contact lenses in, and am wearing a pink T-shirt from a brand called Prada, a surprisingly good colour on me. Then—ignoring the blisters on my heels from my new, 10slightly too-tight Veja trainers—I

I’ve always believed in love at first sight, but I’ve never actually experienced it until now. The only way to describe it is a serene certainty, your soul saying: There you are, at last.

“Where do you live, Francesca?” I ask, as apropos of nothing she smiles sweetly at me again. I pretend not to notice that she has a little fleck of green something on one of her front teeth, just as I pretend I do not already know the answer to the question I have just asked. Just as, all evening, I have been pretending not to know that it is Fay Roper who is sitting across the table from me.

She has always said that fame is the price she’s prepared to pay for doing what she loves, but her son doesn’t owe the world shit.

A no will always turn into a yes if you only persist—that’s what my mother always said.

Aw hell nah

They really should teach kids more in school about online safety, make them aware that any old weirdo could be out there, talking to them.

They’re never subtle, these guys. Not very bright either, most of them. Some even use their own names, or at least reuse the same fake name across accounts—podcast reviews, social media, one-star fake vet reviews. Online Mortal Kombat. That’s how I identified Oliver Sharpe.

Theo said Wolf had been no bother at all, that he didn’t really see him, as he spent the entire night upstairs, gaming in his room. But then I never heard from Theo again, despite calling and texting. When I asked Wolf about it, he just shrugged. “I never liked him anyway,” he said.

It wasn’t until the local paper landed on the doorstep that I realised the reason for Theo’s radio silence: A mile or so from my house, his van’s brakes had failed, on a slippery bend. He hit a tree at sixty-five miles per hour and was killed instantly. I left the newspaper sitting on the kitchen table. The smirk when Wolf read the headline was unmistakable.

Twenty minutes later when I returned, James was floating face down, Wolf nowhere to be seen. I told myself it must have been an accident. Then I saw the pool skimmer—that long pole with a blue net at the end of it—not where I had left it in its hooks on the wall but lying on the tiles, dripping wet. Then I noticed the small bottle of GHB—a drug that, when I later googled, I realised was probably bought on the dark web, presumably leaving a trail which could lead back to my son—in the wastepaper basket.

Keiran was a really hard loss to take, as we’d already started talking about moving in together, where we might get married. The question that faced me was what to do with his body. I could have called the police, I suppose. Told them my suspicions. Handed over my son to the criminal justice system. Sacrificed my life, my career. I did not. Instead, I bought another suitcase.

what better place to dump them than the back garden of the man who had masterminded their murders?

He lifts the weight to pass it to me. “That looks quite heavy,” I protest. 47 It is the last thing I say for quite some time, because as soon as my hands are on the bar, he lets it go, and it is like nothing I have ever tried to lift, or could ever try to lift. My arms just snap back and it’s instantly down on my neck. I’m choking, being crushed. He stands still, beside the bench; then his face is looming over me, close enough that I can see the blood vessels in his eyes. “I know,” he hisses, sending flecks into the air. “I know what you are. You’ve been lying to me.”

“I know what you’ve done. That man out there, he is the one who made you do it all. He has been pretending to be your father. When the police come, we will say we have never seen him before. That he has broken in, and it is probably not the first time. He will start ranting and raving about being my boyfriend I’m sure, but he will not be able to produce a shred of evidence of a single date, and I will be able to prove I was elsewhere for each and every one. I have done this for you, but this is the end of it, Wolf. Do you hear me? Do you understand?”