so?” She looks down at the phone, frowns. “What is it?”
“It’s me, Ash. Me and Luke. We were…” I trail off, staring at the screen. Luke’s head is cut off, but the pale skin of his chest and hips glows in the dark, and his hands clutch fistfuls of the bedspread. Between his knees, a cascade of waist-length blonde hair striped with black.
Ash pulls the car over to the side of the road and slams on the brakes. She grabs the phone. “Oh, God,” she says. “Who took this?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where were you?”
“Upstairs in one of the bedrooms.”
“Audrey, why didn’t you close the freaking door?”
“We did!” I say. “Someone must have seen us go in. Someone must have opened it.”
“You didn’t hear anyone? You didn’t see anything?”
I try to think. The music was so loud—you could hear it coming through the open windows—and then there was the noise that Luke was making. “No,” I say. “I didn’t hear anything. And I had my eyes closed. I guess Luke did, too.”
“Schweinhund,” she says. “Do you think he planned this?”
“Who?”
“Luke!”
“What? No, I…” My head is shaking no no no, but I’m not controlling my own muscles.
And then it hits me all at once. Cindy Terlizzi’s slow smile in study. The pointing in the hallways. Pete and the rockheads. Jeremy Braverman, braver than he’d ever been before. “Ash, it’s the picture.” My stomach does liquid flips and I thrust the fries from my lap. “Someone’s been sending around this picture.”
The parking lot of the school. I don’t want to get out of the car.
“Look,” says Ash, “let’s skip the rest of the day. I don’t care if we get in trouble. We can hit the movies or something.”
Movies? I can’t think, I can’t concentrate. I can’t understand this. Who took this picture? Who sent it? The return-mail address on the message meant nothing to me. Ash says we can trace it, but I say, “Who are we? The freaking FBI?”
The phone is still open on my lap. Everyone who gets this picture will know it’s me. No one else has hair like this. I wish I’d hacked it off long ago, but I didn’t because it was the only thing that made me special. Real special, now. My stomach is locked down so tight that I can’t even throw up.
“Say something,” Ash says.
This is my private thing, and now it’s porn. I feel like someone stole my diary and read it out loud over the speakers. Except that I don’t keep diaries. I don’t even have a blog. “What am I going to do?”
She doesn’t answer, just takes my hand and squeezes it. I would cry if I had any moisture in my body. My throat is dry and scratchy, my tongue a dustrag.
“So do you want to cut for the rest of the day?” Ash asks me.
I want to cut for the rest of the day, the rest of the week, the rest of the year. I want to cut till I go to college. But I have a history test in the afternoon, and if I cut, I’ll miss it. The history test was important before, but now it seems like the most important thing in the world. I have to take that test. I have to ace that test. It’s the only thing I can do.
“No,” I say. “I’ve got a test.”
“Audrey, come on—”
“No,” I say again. “If I cut today, it will be worse tomorrow.”
“OK,” she says. “I’ll walk you to your locker.”
We get out of the car and walk to the back doors, the doors to the senior wing. The sun has stopped shining, but the air still feels oddly warm and heavy and damp. I’m slogging through molasses, or through dense foliage in some hot, stinking jungle. We push open the doors and immediately the eyes are on me again, the hands hiding wide, smirky grins. It must be all over the school, the bits and codes and ones and zeros flying from one phone to the next, assembling themselves into skin and hair, hands and knees. A hundred blondes between two hundred legs. Me. And me and me, and on and on.
The people part before us and line up on either side of the hallways to watch us go. I hear someone murmur something and Ash’s head whips around. “Shut up, Arschloch,” she hisses.
We get to my locker and I go through the motions of getting my books. Calc, English, history. We are doing the Constitution in history class and I run through the amendments in my head. First, free speech and freedom of the press; second, the right to bear arms; third, the right of a property owner to keep soldiers out of his home; fourth, the right of the people to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures. Unreasonable seizures. Is this a seizure? It feels like one. Someone has ripped my skin off and all my arteries are hanging out. I can only imagine what they’re thinking, what they’re saying. Her? Man, who knew the honours chicks were so easy?
There’s a collective hiss from the crowd in the hall. I hear “Luke! You didn’t answer your phone, dude. You have to check this out.”
I don’t want to look, but I can’t stop myself. I turn and see Luke surrounded by a clot of guys, one of them brandishing a phone.
“What is it?” Luke says. He takes a long, lazy pull on the milkshake he must have bought at lunch.
“Just look at it!”
Luke shrugs and takes the phone. One of the rockheads points at the picture helpfully. “This has got to be Audrey Porter,” the rockhead says. He says it loudly and clearly. He doesn’t care if I’m only metres away. He doesn’t care if I hear.
Luke suddenly stops walking and the rockhead rams into him. Luke blinks at the picture, his brows beetling as if he’s annoyed. Then he thrusts the phone back at the rockhead. “You don’t know who that is.”
“Come on! That’s Porter. Gotta be. Is that you with her?”
Luke walks quickly down the hall towards me. He’s not looking at me and Ash at all. His eyes are trained straight ahead at the doors at the end of the hallway. “You can’t see their faces,” he says. “That could be anyone.”
“No way,” says the rockhead. As the group passes by, he jerks his head towards me. “Look at the hair.”
“Whatever,” Luke says. He doesn’t turn my way, just keeps walking. He flicks a hand at the phone. “You guys can find way better stuff on the Internet, if that’s what you need.” The group floats down the hallway, around the corner and out of sight. I can still hear the gurgling sound of Luke’s straw as he polishes off his milkshake.
Pam Markovitz saunters over, with Cindy Terlizzi bringing
