I stared into the crowd and heard one of the festival organizers telling people to sit down before the concert began. The group that had been close to us a few minutes ago was even closer now, and Beth was still lying there decompressing with her eyes closed, so I looked at my phone again.
I was scrolling for a few seconds before I realized that I was on Shia’s Facebook page. I brushed it off as an impulse due to the months I racked up cyberwatching him. I would just have to break that habit. It would be hard, but I was only torturing myself, and now that we were Facebook friends, it felt even more intrusive for some reason. I could see even more of his life once I approved the friend request he sent me right after my dad came back from Germany. Now I could see his status and other posts he shared. I could also see pictures he was tagged in by Bell Gardiner, and I tried my best not to let them make me throw up the strawberry yogurt I had for breakfast basically every morning.
“Shia’s there,” I thought I heard a voice say.
Damn, I was getting to be a little on the paranoid side. I thought maybe I should have deleted him from my Facebook, but I told myself that would make things awkward since we were supposed to be keeping things civil. We wanted to be in each other’s life, though at a distance.
“No way. Let me see,” a girl’s voice said right next to my ear.
“Swear!” another girl replied. I looked over, and they both were staring at a cell phone. I couldn’t see what they were looking at, so I turned back to my phone. My skin was a little prickly as I continued to listen. It was like I had a sixth sense.
“Damn, whose tits are those?” a man asked. I looked up at him and he wasn’t a man; he was a boy with scruffy brown hair so overgrown it almost covered his eyes, wearing khaki shorts rolled up just above his knee. His boat shoes made me think he was rich, probably from Lakeshore or Lake Vista. He smelled of privilege and Armani cologne.
“Some chick from—”
“Did we miss anything?” Jo’s voice drowned out the response, and I turned to her. Paranoia took hold of me. I felt like everyone knew something that I didn’t know. It made me itchy, and my heart was starting to pick up its beat.
“Not really. The music is about to start.” I debated whether to mention something to Jo, but when I thought about it, I didn’t have anything to say. I would seem insane. Completely.
Jo handed me a bottle of water, and it soaked my hand. Beth got hers, too, and I settled in my spot on the blanket and stretched my legs out in front of me. My hair was so frizzy, I could feel it when I touched it. The humidity was worse than in the morning, and my skin felt sticky and warm. I rubbed the beads of water from the outside of the sweating bottle over my legs spread out in front of me, and the group next to me was still talking about whatever was on that phone.
“How desperate do you have to be?” a girl whose voice I thought I recognized said. I could barely see her because I was sitting down and most of her group were still standing—despite a festival worker’s request to sit the hell down.
“Well, she is a Spring Girl, and that whole family is nuts.”
The words hit me straight in the throat and ached all the way down to the pit that was eating away in my stomach. I felt like I was being picked away at with a chisel as the group got more and more rowdy and the comments kept flooding.
“The one is like being held captive or something.”
“Meg is a whore, and the little one is growing up to be just like her.”
My body quickly turned to them, but not one of them even noticed. I was torn between knocking one to the ground and hoping for a domino effect, or leaving. A masochistic part of me wanted to sit there and just listen to the hateful shit they were saying about me and my sisters so I could obsess over it enough to start to think it was true.
“My mom said they’re getting kicked out of their house because their dad’s getting kicked out of the Army.”
Whose voice is that? I knew it for sure . . .
It only took me a few seconds to find Shelly Hunchberg sitting on the grass a few bodies down from me. I felt the flame of rage flickering inside me.
“Jo,” I said just as the crowd started to cheer over me with the first band coming onstage. Great timing.
“Jo,” I said louder. Neither she nor Laurie heard me.
“Josephine!” I half shouted. and Laurie and Jo both snapped their heads toward me.
“What?”
I scooted closer to her and explained what was happening. The best I could.
Jo’s eyes went wild. “So, they were looking at those pictures? I’ll go over there right now—” She was half yelling, but the sound of trumpets was so loud that she might as well have been whispering.
I hadn’t even thought about the cell phone and what they were looking at on the screen. I think a part of me knew before Jo stood up and it was why I was feeling paranoid, but the rest of my mind didn’t want to go there.
“Don’t.” I reached for Jo’s arm and pulled her back down by her wrist. Laurie sat up more and was immediately alerted.
“Why not? If they’re showing those pictures . . .” Jo’s cheeks were red and she was talking through her teeth.
If they were, who was the source? How did those damn pictures travel from Texas to Louisiana?
The internet, that was how. It had to be.
My chest felt like it had caved in and smashed my heart as I tried to think clearly.
Was it actually happening? Yes, it had to be. They said names. I stood up, not knowing what else to do. I should have just left, but of course I didn’t. Jo, Beth, and Laurie were on their feet, too. Before I could decide what to do, I heard an unmistakable voice from the group.
“And even John Brooke can’t stand her. He’s trying to break up with her, but she’s so desperate.” She laughed. “I heard Shia’s mom talking about Meredith Spring being a drunk now.”
Bell Gardiner. Her voice dripped honey and stung like a wasp.
I thought about the time I was at the pool in sixth grade and saw a wasp cut a honeybee’s body in half and fly away with the lower half of its body, leaving its head just sitting there.
I thought about how Bell Gardiner was a cruel insect of a woman.
“What the fuck?” I said when I stepped into the little circle of bodies they had formed.
Jo was at my side, with Laurie and Beth behind her.
Bell’s eyes didn’t go wide; they turned into little slits like a serpent’s eyes, and she came floating toward me like a ghost. She moved so slowly, like even if she was surprised to see me there, she wasn’t about to show it. I could see a little hint of anxiety over me being there, but it wasn’t as obvious as I would have been if caught red-handed talking shit about someone.
“Meg.” She smiled a slithery grin at me, her eyes going from me to Jo to Beth to Laurie and back to me. “Hey.”
Bell nudged the girl next to her and someone shushed us.
“What the fuck, Bell?” Jo’s voice barked next to me.
“What? I didn’t start it. It’s not like everyone hasn’t seen your sister already.”
The voices around us got quieter, but the band onstage seemed to be getting louder by the second.
I didn’t exactly want Jo to start a fight with Bell, but the realization that a group of strangers were passing around a phone with my naked body on the screen and talking about it less than five feet away from me was sinking in fast. I started sweating, and the air felt a little too thick. Everyone was starting to home in on me and realize what was happening.
Between the whispers of the crowd and Bell’s faux-innocent face, I wanted to scream.
“What’s your problem, Bell? Who the fuck do you think you are digging that shit up and passing it around!” Jo waved her hands at the group of Bell’s friends.
Bell didn’t seem to know what to say to that.
“Oh my God,” I heard someone say from somewhere behind Bell, and then Shia was there. I felt immediate betrayal. Of course he was in on it—how else would Bell even know there were pictures of me in the first place? “What’s going on?”