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