Chapter Text
“I’ve got a secret. A good one.”
That’s what Lilly had said at the car wash. Lilly always had secrets. Some of them she told Veronica. Some of them, she preferred just taunting her with.
Later that night, Lilly told Veronica her secret. She hadn’t wanted to meet at her house, and she’d seemed nervous about something, insisting Veronica bring her dog along with her. But all she’d had to say for herself was something about destiny, some higher calling. Lilly had never really been one for the spiritual stuff. She was a real live-in-the-moment kind of girl. Nothing ever really scared her either. So Veronica was more than a little taken aback at how she was acting. “I’m destined for something bigger than this,” she had said. “Something more important than the dresses and the limos and the mansions. Now don’t get me wrong Veronica, I love all those things. But one day… one day, I’m going to do something that’ll change the world! Something real! I can’t tell you what, you wouldn’t believe me anyway, but I can feel it Veronica! One day I’ll be real big, and you’ll be able to point me out and say, hey, that was the first girl I ever kissed. Maybe you can even come too! I guess we’ll see…”
Veronica had tried to pry more information out of Lilly, figure out what nonsense she was talking about, but Lilly always said exactly as much as she meant to, no more and no less. She had brushed off Veronica’s questioning, making excuses about having to get home and not wanting to stay out too late. “Since when has Lilly Kane ever worried about being out too late?” Veronica asked. “Are you sure that’s still you in there Lilly?”
“Oh, you know how it is Veronica. Gotta stay unpredictable!” Lilly was already taking off as she called out behind her. “And what’s more unpredictable than getting home before curfew? See ya later!”
That was the last time Veronica, or just about anyone else for that matter, saw Lilly Kane in Neptune.
Her parents were angry when she never showed up at home that night, but Lilly did have a reputation, so nobody thought much of it at the time. When she didn’t show up the night after, they got the sheriff involved.
So far as Keith, and anyone else they involved, was able to determine, Lilly had driven to the bus station outside town and bought a one-way ticket to L.A. From there, no trail. She might have gotten on another bus from there, she might be wandering the streets of L.A., she might be anywhere, but the fact remained that nobody seemed to have seen her, no matter how often they were asked or how much money they were offered. The Kanes were starting to suspect foul play. The general uselessness, to their minds, of the local sheriff combined with the fact that his daughter seemed to be the last person to have seen Lilly, turned their suspicions in that direction. Veronica pretended to be oblivious, pretended it didn’t hurt to be suspected in the disappearance of her best friend, but she was well aware. Celeste Kane had never been a Veronica fan anyway, she told herself, and had probably just been waiting for the day she could blame something on her.
Veronica pretended it didn’t bother her when the Kanes used their public clout and their vast amounts of money to arrange the removal of her father from the police force when he didn’t deliver their daughter back in a timely manner.
Veronica pretended the looks she got at school every day didn’t bother her either.
Veronica pretended a lot of things didn’t bother her.
She never stopped wondering where Lilly was, but eventually she also started wondering if she was dead. Before she left she sounded like she had something in mind, something she was heading towards. In hindsight, she had sounded a lot like she was about to run away. But even if she had left on her own, how long would she survive like that?
That was Veronica’s October, but she already felt it becoming Veronica’s Life.
Lilly didn’t come back in November, and neither did any of Veronica’s friends.
When December came and nothing had changed Veronica took it upon herself to make something change. She had a party to crash. She thought Lilly would have approved. Of course Lilly, always being invited everywhere, never would have had to crash a party, but it was the thought that counted, and it sure sounded like a Lilly thing to do.
Veronica walked home alone the next morning. She couldn’t pretend that she wasn’t hurting anymore. She also hoped to whatever god was out there that Lilly Kane had more sense than she’d given her credit for. She could hardly breathe, thinking about what happened to her that night. Was it worse, not knowing? Or would every awful detail play out on her eyes every night if she knew?
Veronica decided not to press her luck. The last thing she wanted to do was talk to the people who might have had a hand in what happened to her. Forget about begging someone to tell her what exactly that was.
Holed up in her bedroom, not quite feeling safe even with the covers wrapped around her, Veronica couldn’t stop thinking about Lilly. Anywhere her mind could go that wasn’t Shelly’s party, well, that had to be a plus, right? She wasn’t so sure about that either, but she’d take it. Lilly could be out there somewhere, hurting. She could be dead. What if she was waiting for Veronica to come find her? Hadn’t she said something about that, before she disappeared? There had to be something everyone had missed, some clue that would lead right to her. She couldn’t just be dead, Veronica would not accept that. She couldn’t.
Veronica knew all of Lilly’s hiding places, places where she put things she didn’t want her parents to see. The only problem was, all of Lilly’s hiding places were in her bedroom. Now, this wasn’t normally a problem, when Lilly was around, and Veronica had come and gone from there as she pleased. These days, she’d be lucky if she even made it as far as across the street from the Kane mansion before being, shall we say, escorted away. Duncan had stopped talking to her even before Lilly had gone, so she couldn’t expect any help from him. Nope, that mission was over before it even started, wasn’t it?
It was probably hopeless anyway. Maybe Lilly hadn’t even left willingly. There’s no way she would have left any clues then. And besides, surely every inch of Lilly’s personal space had been examined, all her hiding spots found. Wasn’t that what you did when someone disappeared?
Veronica was still thinking about Lilly at school the next day. She waited for a quiet moment, nobody around to watch what she was doing, and went through Lilly’s locker. Nothing in there stood out as important to her. Except… Veronica was about to give up when she noticed Lilly’s spy pen, half-hidden under a notebook. She grabbed it, slammed the locker closed again and got out of there, not wanting to be caught near Lilly’s locker. She opened it up in the bathroom, checking whether Lilly had left a note in it. Bingo! Usually she used the silly thing for passing notes in class and the like, but this time it just held a small scrap saying “note 2 self: where is sunnydale??” Where indeed? Veronica had never heard of a place called Sunnydale, but it was the first clue anybody had managed to find on Lilly’s whereabouts since she’d gone.
After putting her computer skills to questionably good use Veronica was starting to come to the conclusion that not too many other people had ever heard of Sunnydale either. She was able to find a location for her town at least, and a couple low quality maps (and what, she had to ask herself, was with all the cemeteries in a town that had less than 50 000 people in it?), but not a whole lot of other information. She had hoped to be going into whatever she was going into with a little more preparation but she could find no news stories, no anecdotal mentions, no “must see in” lists, nothing at all about the little place. Weird. She eventually found a couple mentions of the university there, but even the school was not well-advertised. Finally, a short piece out of a newspaper, presumably from one of the next towns over, about a “freak accident” blowing up the high school during the graduation ceremony in 1999. You’d think something like that would get a little more coverage, but apparently not. Interesting.
It was starting to feel like the only people who ever ended up in Sunnydale must have ended up there by accident, because even for someone who was actively searching for it the place sure did a good job of pretending not to exist. Well, Veronica thought, what better place to look for a missing person nobody seemed to have seen than a town that nobody had ever heard of? Now she just had to figure out how to manage a trip there. It didn’t exactly sound like a parent-approved field trip, but she’d figure something out. A place that small, somebody had to have seen her if she made it there. And Veronica had to know if she’d made it there. She had to know, without a doubt, what had happened to Lilly Kane.