I pulled my tablet out of my bag as I made my way over to an empty table and sat down. It was kind of annoying to search social media without being logged in to it but finally I got up a list of all the Lucy O'Connors. There were a lot. I found myself a few pages in and clicked on the link.
It was bad.
There was just enough detail for it to seem legit. More than enough. There were posts from months, years ago, well before I came to Amaris. I wasn't sure how they'd done it, backdated the posts, but whoever had done it had been thorough. There were photos too, pictures with my face but not of places I'd ever been or things I'd ever done. Pictures of me with boys, at nightclubs doing drugs, flashing the camera. It was all very incriminating.
The worst part was the statuses though. They were all observations of my classmates and all super nasty. "I don't know who Milo thinks he's fooling with his big gay crush on Tennyson Wilde" and "Hannah thinks she's so cute but everyone knows she's poor and stupid", that kind of thing, about everyone. I didn't care about random classmates being offended, some of the comments about them were super on point, but the stuff about Hannah was bad. There was a lot about Hannah, actually, and it was all super harsh. I didn't blame her for running off because wow, whoever wrote this stuff did not pull their punches.
As I read through, I started feeling sick. I had no way of proving this wasn't me. I clicked on the option to report the account but then I hesitated. If the account was taken down, I'd have no way of finding out who was behind it. Instead, I closed down Facebook and marched back over to Fatima.
"How did you find out about this?" I asked her.
A few of the other people at the table slipped away, as if I had the plague. I ignored them.
"You sent me a friend request," she said, scrolling through something on her tablet that looked like a very boring academic text.
"When?"
She shrugged. "I don't remember. I hardly go on Facebook, it's a waste of time. I only went on today because everyone was talking about it."
I narrowed my eyes at her. Her story seemed full of holes and suspicious. There hadn't been anything about Fatima on there, at least nothing much, not compared to Hannah or Milo, or even some of the random people in our class. That put her as the prime suspect in my book.
"You know, I got 99/100 in our trigonometry quiz last week," I said. "That puts me half a point ahead of you overall in the class ranking, doesn't it?"
She shrugged. "I know what you're implying but I have better things to do with my time than get involved in petty high school rivalries."
Still, she didn't look up from her reading. She was obviously lying. She was smart enough to pull this off and I knew she wanted to get first in the class more than anything. Saying she didn't do it only made her more suspicious.
I couldn't do anything without proof, though.
During morning assembly, I took advantage of Assistant Head Noel's long and rambling speech to more thoroughly explore the imposter's Facebook. I set up a profile of my own as a generic Amaris student and sent fake me a friend request. It was accepted immediately. I looked around to see who else was online but that was literally everyone so I couldn't narrow down the suspects. Oh well, at least I'd be up to date on the antics of fake me.
The imposter posted a lot. Assembly didn't even last that long but during that time there were two updates about the fashion choices of other students – fake me was not wrong about Amanda De Havilland's scrunchie tbh – and then a photo appeared of me with Tennyson Wilde.
Not just me with Tennyson Wilde. Me with Tennyson Wilde the day before in the locker room, when he had me backed up to the sink. It had been slightly altered to make it look worse than it had been, surely, because it looked bad. Wow, out of context that looked really bad. And the caption took it so far out of context, it was in Mongolia. "life will b golden when u my babby daddy t-son! so long to the trailer park!".
There were just so many things wrong with that, I couldn't even. For one thing, I would never say "baby daddy", even if it was spelled correctly. What the hell else would someone be a daddy of?
Also no. No to all of it. I closed it down and shoved my tablet to the bottom of my bag. Just the thought of it made me feel dirty and wrong. Not the teen pregnancy part of it, because I wasn't some judgy Mcjudgerson, but to the manipulating someone for money in that way, it wasn't okay. I mean, it was saying that I'd had sex with Tennyson Wilde with the express purpose of getting pregnant and extorting money out of him, wasn't it. Implying that I was the sort of person who would take away someone's freedom of choice like that, just for starters.
Also the me and Tennyson Wilde thing kind of gave me the heebie-jeebies a bit too. But it was more than that too, something I couldn't put into words exactly, just this feeling of being a dirty little grubby speck, a blight on the face of something pristine. Logically, I knew it had nothing to do with me, nothing to do with reality, but logic did not control how I felt.
When I looked up, every single person in the assembly hall was staring at me. Even Assistant Head Noel had stopped speechifying.
"Is everything all right?" he asked to the hall in general.
Nobody answered. Nothing was all right.
I felt myself go bright red as the weight of the whole situation came crushing down on me. I had lost literally all of my friends. My family would see this. Tennyson Wilde would see this. Tennyson Wilde's rabid fans would see it and hunt me down. Unless I put a stop to it, future colleges and employers could see this. Wow, it really sucked to me be.
Even logically knowing that, knowing what an awful situation I was in, that felt like nothing compared to the coldness in the eyes of everyone staring at me. I felt how a mouse must feel when it is backed into a corner by a cat and it's waiting for the cat to pounce. I really did not want the entire student body pouncing on me. I knew there was nothing I could do or say to convince them that this wasn't me, they wanted to believe the worst of me and so they would.
I was sitting near the end of the row, only a few people between me and the aisle. I grabbed my bag and pushed my way out. I didn't look back as I fled the assembly hall, and as soon as the doors closed behind me, I ran.
I ran until the only thing I could think about was how my legs ached and my lungs burned. I ran until I could no longer see that picture behind my eyes, of me and Tennyson Wilde and what had been implied. I didn't even know where I was going, nowhere seemed safe or nice anymore. Everything seemed tainted.
By the time my energy ran out and I stopped running, I looked around to see I was in the clearing behind the Golden House. That was not somewhere I wanted to be. The absolute last person in the universe I wanted to see right then was Tennyson Wilde.
But it wasn't Tennyson Wilde on the seat in the clearing. It was Sam.
He'd been waiting for me. Or, at least, he hadn't run away when I'd gotten near and it's not as if he didn't hear me coming with all his super senses. Wow, that was confusing of him. He hadn't exactly been seeking out my company lately. I wanted to be angry at him but I couldn't help the way my heart flip-flopped when he looked up at me. I looked away immediately.
"Hey," I said, kicking my foot in the dirt and trying to look as if I wasn't sweating all over the place.
"Hey," he said. I didn't look at him but he sounded as if he was smiling. "You okay?"
I chanced a quick glance at him. "You know?"
The jerk was grinning at me.
"It's not funny," I said.
He shrugged. "It's a bit funny. T-son is your baby daddy?" He snorted.
I wanted to be angry that Sam was laughing at my misery, only I knew that he wasn't, he was laughing at the bullies and it cheered me up a bit. "I can't believe anyone really calls him that."
"I can't believe anyone would think you'd let him within a mile of you, have they not seen the two of you have a conversation? Now, if they'd said you'd punched him in the face, that I'd wonder about."
I held back a laugh, thinking that Tennyson Wilde had obviously not told anyone that I'd flicked him on the forehead. Maybe he'd blocked it from his memory. I hoped so, because I didn't really want to face the consequences from it.
"Besides," he said, "anyone who's ever met you would realize that it's not really you posting that stuff. You're not the kind of person to hold back on saying something directly."
I shrugged and edged my way into the clearing. "You seem to be the only one who thinks that." I wasn't sure how close to him I could get. Things felt natural with him, so much so that it was strange. We hadn't really spent time together since before he had vanished, not really, so much had changed between us that it shouldn't feel so easy to be around him. I wasn't sure where the boundaries were with him anymore, because before there hadn't been any at all.