“I’m not sure how much you can do for me, Mrs. Hitchens,” I admitted. With none of my classmates around to hear, I was definitely going to tell the truth… even if Ms. Miller was an unwanted participant. “I never sent that photo to anyone. Someone must have stolen it from my phone.”
Mrs. Hitchens raised her eyebrows. “You never—but you were intending to, before it was stolen?”
“I never intended to send it to anyone. I just took it for myself.”
“You took it for yourself,” Mrs. Hitchens repeated. “And that was to…”
“To look at it myself, yes.”
Mrs. Hitchens turned to Ms. Miller. “Judi, is this something that’s happening a lot with the young people now? Taking these sorts of photos… just to look at themselves?”
Ms. Miller shrugged. “It’s a very different world to the one you and I grew up in.”
“This is why I love my job so much, no matter what anyone says.” Mrs. Hitchens was shaking her head. “What a privilege to be able to work so closely with young people, to connect with what matters to them and come to understand their world.”
“Hm, yes,” muttered Ms. Miller.
Walking from there into my first class was strange. Usually in almost every class I went into, I’d have a few people say hi to me as I made my way to my seat, but this morning I was getting uneasy smiles and nobody meeting my eyes.
Callie came up to me, of course. She herded me over to the opposite side of the room, away from everyone else, and whispered, “Have you seen them?”
“Yeah the bus crowd showed me that photo that’s been going around this morning. Look, I’m pissed, I think you can guess how that got out and it should never have happened, but it’s not exactly going to break my heart. It’s not what everyone thinks, anyway.”
Callie scowled at me like she couldn’t make sense of this response… which was when I realised she had said them, not it. And then Mrs. Patterson came in clapping us into order, and the one thing I didn’t need to be told was that this was not something Callie could explain to me at a quick whisper in a few seconds. So all I had for then was the growing certainty that all the whispering and muttering happening around the class was about me.
I tried not to think about too much of anything until class was over, finally put the meditation exercises Marcia had taught me years ago to good use, and when it was time to head to our next class, I grabbed onto Callie before she could slip off anywhere.
“We need to walk and talk,” she said. “Have you noticed Tamara and Steven aren’t even here?”
Of course I’d been too distracted trying to guess what them meant and hadn’t even remembered either of them should be there.
Callie grabbed my arm and started running with me, sending me staggering out of the classroom to a burst of applause and whoops. It didn’t take much for us to track down our missing classmates: Tamara’s shouting carried, even though she and Steven were all the way over in the makeout corner of the grounds. I was surprised nobody else was coming running along with us to see what was going on, but Tamara and Steven had been at it like this for days, so everyone was probably pretty used to it by now. Combine that with there being a much more interesting topic of discussion at the moment, and…
Tamara’s roaring coalesced into words as we got closer. “That is my friend. There is no way you should be looking at that!”
“Look if she sent it to Axel she had to know he was a fucking arsehole. And everyone else has already had a gawk so what the fuck worse is going to happen because I look too?”
“It’s about basic decency, Steven, you—” She turned as we arrived, following Steven’s gaze. “Well, shit…”
Steven was actually smirking. “She’s been like this for the past hour.”
“Well first things first.” I jumped in before anyone else could think to try to manage this situation. “Is Axel saying I sent that photo to him?”
The looks from everyone clarified it just hadn’t occurred to them that there was any other explanation, even before Tamara, in a wary voice, said, “It’s not like any of us are in a position to judge.”
“I don’t think she knows about the other photo yet, Tamara,” said Callie.
Tamara winced. “You mean we’re going to have to show her?”
There had been a few shots I took that night when I was having trouble settling down to sleep, none of them any more risqué than the one that was already doing the rounds. “Well, I guess you’d better let me have it.”
Callie pulled out the expensive phone Lucas had bought her, with its gigantic screen and trillions of colours, and went through some screens. “Lucas sent this to me just before class started, it started circulating first thing this morning. I’m sorry, that probably means a lot of people have seen it…”
When she finally turned her screen to me, I got the best view of what everyone else had been gawking at that morning that money could buy. Only all those guys who would be looking at it on their HD gaming screens tonight would get a better view—and we might all be stuck at school for hours in the interim, but I knew there was no way I’d be able to stop this from hitting every screen.
It was weird. I knew those weren’t my hands, positioned conveniently so it was hard to tell they weren’t really pulling down my shirt underneath. I didn’t exactly spend a whole lot of time staring at my own boobs, but I knew the ones placed underneath my face were far too… glossy to be mine. And I knew those legs were just faked in on either side, as was the…
Well, I didn’t think I’d ever really looked down there on purpose. Maybe my equipment did look like what was on show in that picture. All I knew was that I’d never taken a picture of it.