by Tiffany Sala
“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…”
“I’m not sure how much you can do for me, Mrs. Hitchens,” I admitted. With none of my classmates around to hear, I was definitely going to tell the truth… even if Ms. Miller was an unwanted participant. “I never sent that photo to anyone. Someone must have stolen it from my phone.”
Mrs. Hitchens raised her eyebrows. “You never—but you were intending to, before it was stolen?”
“I never intended to send it to anyone. I just took it for myself.”
“You took it for yourself,” Mrs. Hitchens repeated. “And that was to…”
“To look at it myself, yes.”
Mrs. Hitchens turned to Ms. Miller. “Judi, is this something that’s happening a lot with the young people now? Taking these sorts of photos… just to look at themselves?”
Ms. Miller shrugged. “It’s a very different world to the one you and I grew up in.”
“This is why I love my job so much, no matter what anyone says.” Mrs. Hitchens was shaking her head. “What a privilege to be able to work so closely with young people, to connect with what matters to them and come to understand their world.”
“Hm, yes,” muttered Ms. Miller.
Walking from there into my first class was strange. Usually in almost every class I went into, I’d have a few people say hi to me as I made my way to my seat, but this morning I was getting uneasy smiles and nobody meeting my eyes.
Callie came up to me, of course. She herded me over to the opposite side of the room, away from everyone else, and whispered, “Have you seen them?”
“Yeah the bus crowd showed me that photo that’s been going around this morning. Look, I’m pissed, I think you can guess how that got out and it should never have happened, but it’s not exactly going to break my heart. It’s not what everyone thinks, anyway.”
Callie scowled at me like she couldn’t make sense of this response… which was when I realised she had said them, not it. And then Mrs. Patterson came in clapping us into order, and the one thing I didn’t need to be told was that this was not something Callie could explain to me at a quick whisper in a few seconds. So all I had for then was the growing certainty that all the whispering and muttering happening around the class was about me.
I tried not to think about too much of anything until class was over, finally put the meditation exercises Marcia had taught me years ago to good use, and when it was time to head to our next class, I grabbed onto Callie before she could slip off anywhere.
“We need to walk and talk,” she said. “Have you noticed Tamara and Steven aren’t even here?”
Of course I’d been too distracted trying to guess what them meant and hadn’t even remembered either of them should be there.
Callie grabbed my arm and started running with me, sending me staggering out of the classroom to a burst of applause and whoops. It didn’t take much for us to track down our missing classmates: Tamara’s shouting carried, even though she and Steven were all the way over in the makeout corner of the grounds. I was surprised nobody else was coming running along with us to see what was going on, but Tamara and Steven had been at it like this for days, so everyone was probably pretty used to it by now. Combine that with there being a much more interesting topic of discussion at the moment, and…
Tamara’s roaring coalesced into words as we got closer. “That is my friend. There is no way you should be looking at that!”
“Look if she sent it to Axel she had to know he was a fucking arsehole. And everyone else has already had a gawk so what the fuck worse is going to happen because I look too?”
“It’s about basic decency, Steven, you—” She turned as we arrived, following Steven’s gaze. “Well, shit…”
Steven was actually smirking. “She’s been like this for the past hour.”
“Well first things first.” I jumped in before anyone else could think to try to manage this situation. “Is Axel saying I sent that photo to him?”
The looks from everyone clarified it just hadn’t occurred to them that there was any other explanation, even before Tamara, in a wary voice, said, “It’s not like any of us are in a position to judge.”
“I don’t think she knows about the other photo yet, Tamara,” said Callie.
Tamara winced. “You mean we’re going to have to show her?”
There had been a few shots I took that night when I was having trouble settling down to sleep, none of them any more risqué than the one that was already doing the rounds. “Well, I guess you’d better let me have it.”
Callie pulled out the expensive phone Lucas had bought her, with its gigantic screen and trillions of colours, and went through some screens. “Lucas sent this to me just before class started, it started circulating first thing this morning. I’m sorry, that probably means a lot of people have seen it…”
When she finally turned her screen to me, I got the best view of what everyone else had been gawking at that morning that money could buy. Only all those guys who would be looking at it on their HD gaming screens tonight would get a better view—and we might all be stuck at school for hours in the interim, but I knew there was no way I’d be able to stop this from hitting every screen.
It was weird. I knew those weren’t my hands, positioned conveniently so it was hard to tell they weren’t really pulling down my shirt underneath. I didn’t exactly spend a whole lot of time staring at my own boobs, but I knew the ones placed underneath my face were far too… glossy to be mine. And I knew those legs were just faked in on either side, as was the…
Well, I didn’t think I’d ever really looked down there on purpose. Maybe my equipment did look like what was on show in that picture. All I knew was that I’d never taken a picture of it.
It was a pretty pathetic photo editing job, but the bastard had used a slightly different shot so it seemed like this was a follow-on from the first, and I guess in these days of wild sexting it just made perfect sense that it would be real. Maybe it only looked fake to me because I knew it was.
I opened my mouth to tell Callie and Tamara and poor pathetic Steven who had apparently been thirsting over that photo that it was okay, the entire school was not actually staring at and passing around my bits. Then I realised it didn’t even matter.
Just the thought of everyone believing they had seen everything there was to see of me, maybe even making that part of their personal time, was making me want to throw up. At the same time my mind was going into a boiling rage of questions. Had Axel done it himself, or had he bullied someone else into doing it? Maybe he just happened to have another contact who was good enough at photo editing. Maybe he and that other person were both laughing at me right now.
Why was he doing this to me? Because of a stupid patent?
Rage helped to boil away my nausea. “Right, where is Axel?”
“Lucas said he was going to have a word with him,” Callie said.
Probably going to clap him on the back and ask if he’d nabbed any more from the same session. I was not going to let Callie’s dodgy boyfriend handle this situation for me.
I turned on her. “Text him. Let him know I’m going to be crashing the wankfest.”
Chapter Seven: Axel
“What the fuck are you doing, man?” Lucas said.
His eyes were moving all over my face, trying to pick up every detail of my current state while not looking like he was paying much attention at all. Luc alwa
ys wanted to know all of what you were about but give away nothing of himself.
I knew him though, better than he wanted me to for sure. It was all there if you were willing to look: in his face… in the other records he couldn’t help leaving of his activities.
I knew my friends well: Lucas’s unhinged play for Callie’s attention, Mic’s family not being who anyone here would be comfortable with, Steve’s fuck-up with that girl—both the part where he got involved over his head in the first place, and the part where he let her mess him up until he shot what I’m pretty sure was called, in his favourite terminology, an ‘own goal’.
I always do due diligence, even if I don’t have any plan to come after someone or, even, any expectation that I’ll find anything worth looking for. There’s always something to find, no matter who you’re dealing with. And you need that information to have a good relationship with pretty much anyone. Like… when I think about Luc’s group, I know Luc and Steve are close these days, and Steve kicks around with Mic and a whole bunch of other boys. All of them have someone they’re in much tighter with than me. I know none of them are motivated to stick it out for me if it comes to that. So I’ve got to look out for myself.
Lucas was looking out for himself right now, too. Callie would be fuming that I’d dared to engage with her friend, but that wouldn’t have even been his main motivation. He had to be the big guy in the group, the one nobody could quite make sense of. Me running my own game was putting the whole system in jeopardy.
Well, Lucas could afford to stay in the mentality of whatever stage of life he was at currently. He had no ambitions beyond having a good time, so that considered he had it made, so long as he could manage not to actually kill some woman he was beefing with that is. It’s not so easy for the rest of us.
“It’s between Aileen and me,” I told him, which was obviously never going to be the end of the conversation.
“It became my problem the instant you selected one of my girlfriend’s friends to bother. Find another plaything and fix this mess.”
I smiled up at the sky. “Can’t get them to unsee her everything, Luc.”
Of course there were only two people who knew the truth: myself, and Little Miss Stubborn. That wasn’t her body everyone was getting a good eyeful of, it was just the first pair of tits and pussy I’d been able to rustle up that I thought would work with the pictures of Aileen I’d gotten off her phone. And if she didn’t want me adding extra tits to her photos then she shouldn’t be flitting around with a poorly secured phone at parties after trying to give me the shove-off.
At least I’d gone to the trouble of finding her a nice set, not too plastic-looking, and I’d done the editing work myself rather than getting someone in my circle involved. I didn’t do a whole lot of image editing these days, not like back when my friends at my old school liked to make dumb JavaScript games all the time, frequently featuring nice pairs of tits as well. This work was practically a favour.
Lucas had made sure he got a good peek, but somehow he wasn’t amused. “I expect you to move a few mountains.”
“I expected her to not give me shit over something that is absolutely worth more to her if she gives it to me.” I kept her other secrets to myself too, but they were easily brought back into my own mind. Her father didn’t need a patent, he needed money for therapy, for a solid lawyer to thrash out a proper custody arrangement for those younger kids. And Aileen was one hundred percent aware of that, which was what made all of this so aggravating.
Luc looked actually pained. “Find another fucking idea, Axel. They’re cheap.”
Everything was cheap for someone like Lucas. It wasn’t the same deal for the rest of us. We get the same amount of ideas, sure, but ideas need a little something else to push them along. Those shining, golden opportunities where everything lines up perfectly—they don’t come along every day for most of us. We have to be able to grab them and drag them towards us if they won’t play along.
The face I was giving Lucas was a clear statement of no, and I expected him to go all in at me for that, but he just gave me that same smirk he shot at all the girls to make them come. “Hey, if you’ve got better ideas, maybe you can tell her yourself.”
That look wasn’t for me after all, thank fuck. I turned to take in Aileen approaching us at the kind of enraged power-walk that had her real tits wiggling under that thin school shirt.
Before she reached us, I realised two horrible things. It was possible on some level that I had selected the tits I put on Aileen’s picture based on what I thought she was likely to have under that shirt of hers… but also, I really did want to know what her real tits were like now. How they would look uncovered… how they would feel.
This was an inconvenience I didn’t need in my life right now. I needed to be focusing on that patent, not the fucking body of the girl who had the ability to get it for me. Not fucking the—
Aileen stopped in front of us and turned that sharp look on Lucas first. “I’ll take this from here.”
I was pretty sure from the way he backed off that he’d been expecting her. Always keen to shuffle out of responsibility.
“Okay.” Aileen put her hands up and started gesturing with them as she tried to put me in my place. “First of all, I’m not entirely sure if it’s illegal to receive someone else’s photos and then share them with people they weren’t initially meant for, but I’m certain it’s illegal to take photos that were never yours in the first place. So you can be absolutely sure I am going to talk to the school about this and maybe report you.”
I slipped a leaf out of the Lucas Starling Playbook for Women. “That doesn’t make any sense, Aileen. You can’t claim those photos were never mine when you let me have them in the first place.”
“Let you have.” She shook her head at me. “Axel, you utter scoundrel, that’s like saying if I leave my door unlocked I ‘let you in my house’.”
Now she was close I could see she was flushed, fired up. I’d made a low play and it had hit its mark, but she was still going to challenge me. It bothered me a little that she was such a credible opponent. There was something that felt very wrong about being on the opposite side to her on this. “In the circles I go in, if you know someone is outside the door looking to get in, then you would in fact be judged harshly for failing to protect yourself.”
“It seems like a harsh world all around.” I was surprised that she was intrigued… and annoyed when that took my mind off the presently undefined nature of her tits to have me contemplating her brain.
“I suppose it is, but realistically, this is how the entire world operates. This is just a world where we’re a lot more honest about what matters to us and what we’re willing to do to get it.” And perhaps we would be able to talk this situation through like adults after all.
“Hm.” Aileen’s eyes shifted away from my face for a second, and when they came back her face had changed. I realised Luc had wandered off, and that was what she was waiting for to really let me have it. “Okay, so distributing that fake photo of me was a really filthy move. Can you even imagine how embarrassing it is to have the whole school thinking they’ve seen me naked? Never mind what’s going to happen when Mrs. Hitchens finds out… or Ms. Miller.” She groaned. “You’ve fucked up absolutely everything for me, Axel. They’re going to call my dad in over this, I bet.”
I saw her go still after she said it. She was trying to work out if that had been a part of my plan all along.
Well, I wasn’t going to tell her anything. “If your dad is worthy of that patent he holds, he’ll figure out it’s not you. That was a fucking weak edit.”
She actually looked like she was about to cry. I realised I wanted her to hold on, to show she was stronger than the circumstances she found herself in.
I even tried to throw her a bone. “The thing that should really be bothering you about this situation is how eager everyone at Burgundy is to see your tits. I bet you never thought you were this popular.”
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I was a little surprised when she had to stifle a snort. Part of me had wanted to crack her harder, even as I was telling myself I was giving her a break. “I think the real question here is why you’re so obsessed with them.”
A bratty response I had to admire… but instead of acknowledging her balls, my business side came out to play in a way I hadn’t expected.
“Let’s both get the answer to that. Show me what you’ve really got under that shirt of yours, and I’ll forget this whole thing. You and your dad can keep your unethical patent.”
Her jaw dropped. Her cheeks bloomed red, and she put a hand up over her mouth, pretending she was just taking in the proposal, but I could tell the real purpose was to put an arm over her chest to guard against my gaze. In case I’d worked out how to look right through her clothes, perhaps.
“Are you…” Her voice was shaky, but getting stronger the further she went. “Are you seriously trying to get me to sell tawdry glimpses of my body in exchange for something neither of us even owns?”
That seemed to be exactly what I was doing. And the thing with that was… she wasn’t acting like the answer was definitely no.
This was an interesting development. She couldn’t possibly be interested in me, or she would have tried to leverage that patent rather than shutting down negotiations. It wasn’t that she cared so much about the patent she would trade anything for it, either. If she’d understood its value at all she would never have talked to me so casually about it.
Something else was in play here, and I couldn’t put a name to it. But I was going to call her bluff, keep playing this angle, because I wanted some answers.
I folded my arms. “It doesn’t have to be tawdry. We could go do it somewhere nice, I could even buy you dinner beforehand.”
