anyway. What harm could it do?
I spotted Hannah at our usual table. I gave her a little wave and headed over, determined to ignore all the eyes following me. When she saw me, her face went pale. She grabbed her things and fled the room.
What was up with that? I had definitely not done anything to offend her. I cleaned up after myself in our room and I never touched her stuff, and I was fairly sure I didn’t say weird stuff in my sleep. I mean, I never had before so I doubted I’d have suddenly started. Plus, she knew she could talk to me about that kind of thing.
“Wow,” said Olivia Hearst, stepping in my way and blocking my path. Man, were those girls everywhere? Were they stalking me or what? “I knew you were some weird sort of social reject but this is a whole new level.”
I scrunched up my face in thought. Nope, no clue what she was talking about. I wanted to ignore her, but if whatever was going on affected Hannah, I should probably sort it out.
“What do you mean?” I asked her.
She rolled her eyes. “As if you don’t know.”
I rolled my eyes back at her. “As if you don’t know that I don’t know.” Her and her cronies were definitely behind all this, with their creepy Tennyson Wilde loving.
Instead of explaining though, or rubbing her triumph in my face, she turned back to her gaggle of friends and walked away. Weird.
“This is really bad,” said Fatima, who was sitting at a table nearby. When she spoke to me, the other people at the table looked at her in surprise and edged their chairs away. She glanced up at me. “I don’t know if you did this or if someone is impersonating you, but you should put a stop to it.”
“What?” I asked her.
“Your Facebook page.”
I tilted my head to the side, curious. “I don’t have a Facebook.” My only friend had been dead until recently, so I hadn’t seen the point.
“You do now,” she said, then went back to her books, ending the conversation.
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