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How had I been this stupid?
I pulled myself to my feet to begin pulling myself together at least, and my door opened again without warning.
“One more thing,” said Axel, who had just secured himself another good look at everything I had to offer. “Stay away from Matt. I don’t need you getting into that drama. You don’t need to add to your problems right now either, trust me.”
He closed the door again, very gently this time. I sank back down to my knees.
I had judged my friends too quickly for falling in with these men. I was too certain a defense against them should have been easy. Well, now I was in deep and all my avenues of obtaining help were melting away.
Chapter Eleven
Mr. Henderson gave me a real sad puppy look when I told him Axel and I had sorted out the situation privately. I might as well have told him… well, exactly what had happened.
“As long as you understand you can change your mind at any time,” he said, which was obviously an exaggeration, but I think he realised I wasn’t going to reconsider anyway.
Then Mrs. Hitchens poked her head into Mr. Henderson’s office looking for me, and was visibly displeased to find me there. Five minutes later, I was locked in with her and Ms. Miller, hearing about all the measures they’d put in place to ensure the offending photograph wouldn’t be sighted on school property for the rest of the year.
When I said, “I’m going to drop the whole thing,” it was like I’d announced I just farted in the room or something. Both of them kept talking for a bit as if I hadn’t said anything, so I had to repeat it louder, which made me feel like the weirdo of the piece.
“I thought you knew who was responsible for this,” Mrs. Hitchens protested.
“Yeah, I think I do… but I’d rather not go into it any further.”
“Aileen,” said Mrs. Hitchens, “this photograph was distributed throughout the school to such a degree, I’m not sure it’s possible for us to just ignore it,” and Ms. Miller didn’t even call her out for trying to pressure me.
“It’s not real, okay?” I blurted out. The silence that followed went on for so long I was able to think for a few seconds before rephrasing. “I mean, parts of that photo are of me, but not the… explicit parts. Someone edited those parts in after the fact, they don’t even belong to me.”
“Matt,” said Ms. Miller, with an air of having some long-standing mystery solved.
“It…” Axel was right, my saying his name would hardly make a difference in his life, but even he was liable to be pissed if I set the likes of Ms. Miller on him. “Look, that person, I talked to them and it was just a joke that went wrong. Not something that needs to ruin anyone’s life.”
I was growing tired of people who were old enough to know better looking at me like I couldn’t decide for myself whether or not I wanted to take a particular issue further or not. I stared Mrs. Hitchens down, and was relieved when she turned to Ms. Miller. “Is this what the young people are doi
ng these days, then? Doctoring up images of one another? Jokes?”
“Well,” said Ms. Miller, “this is the age of deep fakes, you know. Nothing is ever one hundred percent real these days.”
“It seems like only yesterday they were all sexting,” Mrs. Hitchens murmured. “Now that… I understood it, at least. Youthful lusts… This feels like it’s happening on some level I’m too old to access. Like those apps all the kids are playing with these days. The humour, the culture… it’s all on levels.”
I actually felt so bad for her I wanted to boost her morale. I risked a light pat on the shoulder. “Look, Mrs. Hitchens, if it makes you feel any better, I’m going to be graduating soon with the rest of my class, and then I’ll just be a regular adult confused by what the kids are up to as well. It’s the natural order of things, right?”
Mrs. Hitchens’s lips quivered. “You’re a good sort, Aileen. I hope you genuinely find these… jokes, of yours, funny.”
With half the administrative staff of Burgundy fighting over office time with me, I didn’t get to have some time to myself until lunch, when I hunted Tamara down in the school library. Her little smile as I admitted in a perfect library voice that things had gone a bit too far with Axel was the most humiliating thing I had ever experienced, and the night before that I’d had my arse up in the face of a guy I’d never even shaken hands with.
“You really shouldn’t worry so much, Aileen,” she told me. “Axel is… well, we both know he’s kind of a butthole sometimes, but if a butthole is what you’re looking for, he’s a butthole we know, at least.”
Leave it to Tamara to find a way to bring up butts when butts were the absolute last thing I wanted to think about.
And at that moment, with butts still somewhere near the top of my thoughts, I turned my head… and there was Axel watching us from over a low bookshelf. I nearly did something stupid like trying to duck under the bench of computers in my panic. I felt like maybe Tamara had been talking loudly enough to make it obvious we were discussing him.
But never mind what he thought for the moment: why was he here? Had he come here deliberately trying to target me? I could tell from the way Tamara had stiffened she was wondering exactly the same thing, probably remembering a terrible scene she’d had with her boyfriend in here a few weeks before. It was horrifying that this was just part of the territory with these boys.
“Aileen,” said Axel with a nod. Somehow he was managing to convey in just that look that he remembered everything he’d seen the night before when he was looking at me now. It was making it pretty hard for me to look at him, that was for sure. “I was just in here to check out the technology section. A bit dated, but that’s to be expected I guess. Feeling very inspired after the arrangement I hooked up last night with your dad.”
Tamara couldn’t even pretend her mind wasn’t blown at that. “Oh yeah, I didn’t get around to telling you yet… Axel and my dad are going to be working together on a product.”
This seemed to fill her with the kind of confusion that hurt. “Is that… the patent you were talking about before?” Her face furrowed even harder when I nodded, but Tamara was never the brightest, poor thing. “Well… it sounds like it’ll be exciting, right?”
