“Want to go out sometime?” he says.
“What?”
“Go out. Come on, you and me.” He jerks a thumb to his friends. “Well, you, me and some of my boys.”
I’m at a loss. This kind of thing hasn’t happened in a while. When we were freshmen, clique warfare was rampant. It was considered necessary and maybe even fun to seek out and terrorise everyone who was not exactly like you in the school. I thought most of us, even the football players, had grown out of that. Guess not.
“Sure, guys,” I say. “Anytime.”
They all let out a whoop as I push past them. Morons.
I motor towards the gym. Out of the corner of my eye I see a finger pointing my way and hear someone laughing, but when I turn, all I see is a row of backs. I start to get a weird feeling, of the weight of eyes, of newly focused attention. In gym, as me and Joelle are pretending to concentrate on the basketball drills, Jeremy Braverman, who has said all of three sentences in three years, says, “I love how you dribble those balls, Audrey,” over and over again, until Joelle gets shrieky and hysterical and beans him in the head with one of them. I get a note in French class: “Sur vos genoux!” On your knees! I turn around to see who wrote it, but no one will meet my eyes. The French in my book blurs into incoherent babble. Did Luke blab to his stupid friends? Did he tell them what we did? No. No! He never talks about his hook-ups. Don’t ask, don’t tell, he’d say. That was always his deal. So what was going on?
By lunch I can’t take the snickering and the weirdness. I make Ash take us to the McDonald’s just to get out of the school. “I think someone’s spreading rumours about me. I’m getting all these looks. It’s making me crazy.”
Ash steers the car around to the drive-through window and orders us fries and Cokes. “Really? I haven’t heard anything,” she says. “Maybe Pam Markovitz is shooting her mouth off. You know what she’s like. And she was so jealous of you at the party on Saturday. Pathetic.”
“What should I do?” I say.
“Oh, who cares about a bunch of ho’s and dumbheads?” Ash tells me. “They’ll be babbling about something else by sixth period.” Because I forgot to bring cash, she pays for the fries and Cokes and pulls out of the parking lot.
Just as I’m about to open the white bag, my own cell phone buzzes and I scratch around the floor for it. I flip open the phone and check the screen. “Picture mail,” I say.
“Maybe Joelle is sending some of the shots she took at the party,” says Ash, smashing a fry into her mouth. “I don’t know why she bothers. They always suck.”
An image pops up and I scroll down to see it. At first I don’t understand what it is. And then my insides turn to ice.
“Ash,” I say.
“What?”
“Someone took a picture of me.”
“Yeah, 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.