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It annoyed me that he’d been so quickly able to turn me into a disoriented mess. I tried to force myself to be logical. If Axel was going to target my dad directly, he wouldn’t have bothered dealing with me at all. With his army of secret dirty contacts he almost certainly had the power to do his bullying for himself without my input… but for some reason he wanted me to broker the deal. Perhaps it was most favourable to him to avoid using his contacts for something like this.
That didn’t make me feel better about the situation, but what was Axel going to do really? At the moment he was carrying this business on just out of sight of anyone with the authority to come down hard on him, but lots of other people knew. He could see now that threatening other people around me wasn’t going to make me cave. All I had to do was stand firm, and this would pass.
I knew things had definitely not passed when I stepped onto the bus the next morning, and instead of the smattering of girls from my school saying hi and going back to talking about their plans for formal dresses (which apparently took one’s entire childhood to arrange), they stopped and stared up at me.
“Hi,” I said for them, a gentle prompt for manners that seemed to shake them into acting mostly like normal. Ebony asked me how my previous evening had been, which got her a sharp look from Fiona. That was the little bit of abnormal that had me worried.
I would have rather gotten this information from Tamara and Callie, but I really needed to know what I was walking into before I got to school. “Look, I can tell something is going on, so are you willing to let me in on the secret?”
Fiona, Ebony, and Jen were wincing as they looked at one another. Finally, Jen pulled out her phone, fiddled on the screen for a while, and then turned it towards me, angled carefully so that the guys from the all-boys’ school sitting across the aisle wouldn’t be able to see.
What she showed me was immediately familiar, but I couldn’t make sense of it in this situation. Was I seeing it wrong? Was this all a dream?
“It’s been going around all the group chats last night,” said Fiona. “I’m surprised you haven’t already seen it.”
I was part of several chats, but I didn’t pay attention to them every night. With my dad constantly obsessing over this or that technology, I preferred to keep myself at more of a distance. “Who did it come from?”
It was a question I didn’t need to ask. The picture Jen was showing to me had been taken on my phone and I hadn’t sent it to anyone.
Of course, nobody was going to believe that. It was the sort of picture that was taken to be sent to someone else. I knew I wasn’t naked, but my hands and the fall of my hair and the edges of the shot combined to make it look like I was in a more indecent state than a tank top and short shorts. That was the whole point. I’d wanted to take that picture to enjoy for myself, to make me feel sexy. It didn’t seem to me like there should be anything wrong with that whether or not I sent it to anyone, but I was clearly attracting a lot of interest and I had a feeling it would all turn to judgement if they knew there was no target.
And I knew exactly who’d gotten that photo off me against my will, even if I didn’t have the first idea how. But I wondered what everyone else thought.
What the girls were clearly thinking, shooting one another little looks, was that it was an unwise question for them to answer.
“Tyrell, right?” said Jen finally. “He’s the one who dropped it first.”
“No,” Ebony said, “it was Izzy for sure.”
“Obviously we have no idea who you sent it to,” said Fiona, staring at me while she spoke firmly like she thought I deserved a telling-off for asking at all. “But that person seems to have spread it around quite a bit.”
I wondered how much Callie was going to go off when she saw it. She and Tamara weren’t in any of these other chats, and I didn’t think I’d crossed paths with Steven or Lucas much either, even though they were probably in them all. I’d seen Axel post on occasion I thought, mostly all I remembered was wall-of-text diatribes on things I didn’t understand. Of course, there was going to be very little evidence that Axel had anything to do with this at all. Certainly not enough to actually get him investigated.
Being twisted to face the other girls while the bus was moving was suddenly making me queasy. I turned around in my seat.
“It’s no big deal you know,” said Fiona, “sending something like that I mean. It sucks that they didn’t keep it private but,” she shrugged, “you live and learn. It could be worse.”
It was worse
than she realised, but I couldn’t go accusing Axel of this without at least getting confirmation from him. For all I knew, his plan was to lure me into so many inappropriate accusations I was completely discredited.
“Well the person responsible is going to get some words from me,” I said without turning around again. I sort of liked the approving murmur at my back.
I didn’t get a chance to confront Axel once I got to school. Mrs. Hitchens was waiting for me at the gate to bundle me off into her office, where she already had our guidance staff member Ms. Miller with a very worn-down coffee.
I had a grudge against Ms. Miller because she’d dragged my dad in last year in our first few weeks at Burgundy and made this huge deal of my ‘home situation’, asking all these weird intrusive questions about Marcia and my brothers, whether I had a strong female influence in my life. Dad thought it was the funniest thing and wouldn’t stop bringing it up. Tamara had a run-in or two with her recently too. I thought she was getting in a bit of a frenzy in anticipation of all the bad decisions and heartbreak ahead over the exam period and then the night of the formal, which seemed to be getting under my skin as well even though I was actually pretty eager to go and have a nice lowkey time, even if my date was just a classmate keen to have photos with someone on the night.
I did not want these two to get me on the back foot. “So… what’s this about?”
“Are you aware there is a rather… inappropriate image of you circulating at the moment, Aileen?” Mrs. Hitchens looked as grave as if there were actually some scandalous parts of me on show in that image. There were going to be dresses at our formal that exposed more flesh.
“I was informed this morning, yes.”
Ms. Miller jumped in. “We’re not here to judge the fact of that photo existing, or that it might have been shared with others.” Mrs. Hitchens looked like she might have wanted to do that, but she held her tongue. “It does however seem like a breach of your confidence has occurred, and for that reason we want to put the resources of the College at your disposal. If there is anything we can do in terms of addressing the breach, or providing emotional support, or practically helping you to cope with what might be a very difficult few days until some new scandal rocks the school…”
“I think I’ll be all right, thanks.” I couldn’t make sense of exactly what they thought was going to happen. I would probably face a bit of teasing, but I’d never really been bothered by that. I wouldn’t have been bothered by my dad seeing that photo, so there wasn’t much scope for anyone to really have a go at me.
Mrs. Hitchens eagerly reclaimed control of the meeting. “You are not required to share the identity of the original recipient with us, and you will not face any disciplinary consequences personally from any distribution of the photo. But if the person who leaked it is a student here, and you would like…”
