What She Does Next Will Astound You Page 5

  ‘What?’ said Ram.

  ‘Yeah.’ April was angry. ‘’Cos it’s not unhealthy if it’s for charity. It’s all so stupid. Normal life is so fragile. It breaks easy.’

  Ram looked down, seemingly considering which stone to kick next. Then he looked up, and asked, ‘Is this about your mum?’

  April was surprised. She had this image of Ram—athletic, dim, bit brutal—that he kept on undercutting by being nice. Not bleurgh nice, or polite nice, but genuinely nice.

  ‘No, not really,’ she said, though it was. Looking after Mum, living with what Dad had done to them, was a daily challenge. But she didn’t want to start banging on about it. Especially not to Ram. Because, much to her surprise, she was realising that she wanted him to like her as her, and not in a sympathy way. ‘The Mum stuff,’ she said. ‘It’s complicated. It makes life complicated.’

  ‘Lost a leg,’ said Ram, smacking his wrong leg down to the ground. Or rather, he tried to. Instead his leg went ‘I’m not sure you meant to do that’ and placed itself down neatly and firmly and he hated it.

  ‘Yes, sorry.’ April was one of the world’s fastest apologisers for anything and everything. ‘I’d honestly not forgotten about your . . . it . . . I mean . . . the new one is so good.’

  ‘You think so?’

  She caught the edge in Ram’s tone. ‘Yes. Does it . . . hurt?’ Ram shrugged, so she talked on, edging towards babble. ‘I just mean that, well, you know, stuff like that. Makes you think . . . Sorry, that sentence got away from me a bit. Um.’

  Ram smiled at her. ‘You’re trying to say that because really serious stuff’s happened to both of us, we should be against people doing stupid stuff for charity?’

  ‘Yes,’ April said, relieved. ‘That was easy. Thanks for agreeing with me.’

  ‘Actually, I’m not.’ Ram shook his head. ‘You just don’t like people having fun.’ He was smiling, but April didn’t know how to take it.

  ‘Not as such,’ she protested. ‘Just fun within reasonable limits. Not the idiotic stuff. Like that guy with the kettle . . . ’

  As she said that, Ram closed down. She knew she’d somehow said the wrong thing.

  ‘I’m sorry, I know he is a friend of yours.’

  And that made it worse. How, she didn’t know. Conversation petered out and they walked on together for a bit, polite, but with a bit more distance between them, till, at a corner shop, Ram went in to buy a drink. April stood outside, wondered about waiting for him, and then, realising how bad that might look, she turned left and walked home.

  A minute later, Ram came out, clutching two cans. No April. He’d spent the long queue behind someone buying scratch cards trying to work out if he should tell her how guilty he felt about Neil. He’d not made his mind up but he had brought two cans. Still, she’d gone. He put one can in his rucksack, opened the other one, and made his way home.

  FIFTEEN

  YOU WOULDN’T THINK A TEXT COULD MAKE YOU CRY, BUT THIS WILL

  ‘Hey, have you seen my phone?’ Ram asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Charlie.

  ‘You’ve got it?’ Ram couldn’t hide his relief.

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you’ve seen it?’

  ‘Yes.’ Charlie thought about it. ‘I saw you use it three days ago.’

  Ram scowled. ‘That’s not what I meant, jerk. You knew that.’

  ‘No, I did not.’ Charlie’s expression was puzzled innocence.

  ‘Are you winding me up?’ Ram realised that Charlie was in one of ‘those’ moods. He was either being innocently clueless or deliberately so. ‘You and I, we’re going to have to pick a code word.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So that when you’re having me on, I can tell.’

  Charlie nodded. ‘I shall bear that in mind. Tell me more about your phone.’

  Ram thought about it. The one great advantage of Charlie, if you could somehow get beyond his maddeningly irritating alien prince manner, was that you could discuss a problem with him frankly and without fear of it being spread around the whole school.

  ‘I have lost my phone. I’ve not seen it since practise this afternoon. I’ve gone back, I’ve checked my locker, I’ve re-walked the path. I dunno’—he ran a hand through his hair—‘I’ve even gone back to classrooms I was in earlier in the day in case I’m wrong, and I can’t find it.’

  ‘It was a nice phone,’ Charlie said. Admittedly on Rhodia it would have been laughed at, but that wasn’t the point. For a Level 5 civilisation like Earth, it was an incredibly advanced piece of technology. He found it curious that so much effort went into making new mobile phones when there were still diseases to cure, but he guessed it was a cultural thing.

  ‘Yeah, it is a very nice phone,’ Ram groaned. ‘Dad can’t stop telling me how much it cost him. If I lose it, the lectures from him about it won’t stop. You have no idea about how bad they’d be. I could, literally, invent DNA and my dad would still be “My son, the phone-loser”.’

  ‘That won’t happen,’ Charlie assured him. ‘DNA was not invented. It was discovered. And that has already happened because—’

  ‘Shut up!’ Ram shoved Charlie in the shoulder. ‘Not the point. The phone’s insured. No one loses money here. But Dad won’t get me a nicer replacement phone. He’ll get me a brick. Just to prove a point that I can’t be trusted. It’ll be the end of the world.’

  Charlie blinked. ‘No, it will not.’

  Ram found Charlie was being all annoying and missing the point again. ‘Trust me, it will be. I’ve tried phoning it and everything.’

  Charlie smiled.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Charlie said. ‘Imagine if you rang your phone and you heard yourself answering. What would you do then?’

  Ram stared at him.

  ‘As I said,’ Charlie continued, ‘just a thought. Anyway. I do not think you have lost your phone.’ He considered. ‘You’re not careless. Maybe someone borrowed it.’

  ‘Why would they do that? I must have lost it.’

  ‘Well,’ Charlie conceded, ‘the more likely explanation is that it was stolen. It is, after all, a valuable phone.’

  ‘Damn.’ Ram kicked the wall until his good foot hurt. ‘You sure?’

  ‘I am surprised you did not think it.’

  ‘Well, if it was stolen, it was stolen at practise, while my locker was open when I was showering. But then’—Ram looked cross—‘the only people around were the rest of the team. Why would they . . . they’re mates . . . why?’

  ‘And yet, it seems obvious.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Ram muttered. ‘Still, at least there’s nothing bad on there.’

  Charlie arched a quizzical eyebrow.

  ‘Stupid pictures, you know, workout videos, stuff I might have sent to Rachel,’ Ram said.

  ‘Stupid pictures?’ questioned Charlie.

  ‘Naked stuff. Some couples do that. Bad idea. I’m so not into that,’ said Ram then paused. ‘Well, there’s the odd shot of me after a workout, but nothing, you know . . .’

  ‘Oh.’ Charlie frowned really, really deeply. Humans were very strange. They were always taking photographs of themselves. Which was peculiar as people never really changed appearance, and surely knew what they looked like? This was a whole new level. Curious.

  ‘Screw ’em.’ Ram looked relieved. ‘Thinking about that, there’s nothing on that phone that could embarrass me.’

  That evening, before Ram went home, he checked his locker again. His phone was in there. It definitely hadn’t been there earlier. He tried seeing if it had been used to phone abroad or anything else expensive but the battery was flat. He breathed a huge sigh of relief.

  The next day was simply The Worst.

  ‘YOUR HEART WILL BREAK WHEN YOU READ THIS BOY’S TEXTS TO HIS DEAD GIRLFRIEND.’

  Someone had sent it in to truthordare.com. All of his texts to Rachel. All the mushy stuff. Some of their ‘I cant believ u did that!!!!’ rows. The odd apology after a row.
They’d not corrected the spelling. It was all there. That was bad enough.

  But then there were the other texts.

  After Rachel had died, her phone had run out of power. It had never been recharged. He thought it had been safe.

  ‘Damn I look fine in this suit!!!’ Read 5.38pm

  ‘Prom night baby!!!! Cant wait to see you!’ Read 6.32pm

  ‘Yr amazing.’ Delivered.

  ‘You look so good tonight.’ Delivered.

  ‘Where r u?’ Delivered.

  ‘Miss u’ Delivered.

  ‘I cant believe youre gone’ Delivered.

  ‘Cant carry on without u. U know that right?’ Delivered.

  ‘This is the worst thing that’s ever happened.’ Delivered.

  ‘You are just gone and you died in front of me and I saw it.’ Delivered.

  ‘Just took you out of my life and that’s it.’ Delivered.

  ‘Talking to you in my head still. Gone mad!!’ Delivered.

  ‘Your funeral today. Can’t face it.’ Delivered.

  ‘Went to ur funeral. Full house. U owned it’ Delivered.

  ‘Just miss u.’ Delivered.

  ‘Back to school today. Heres your empty desk. Can’t stop looking at it’ Delivered.

  ‘Please come back.’ Delivered.

  ‘Please.’ Delivered.

  ‘Love u’ Delivered.

  Tanya stared at the page on her laptop and her face went full angry. The kind of angry that would send her brothers running and would silence even her mother.

  She tried messaging Ram. No answer. Of course not. There wouldn’t be. She could not believe that someone would do that. Not to him.

  She scrolled down the page. To the bottom. The comments. She wanted to post something furious, angry, demanding the page be taken down. That someone apologise to Ram. That whoever did this was . . . Oh, she didn’t know, but it probably featured a train running over their fingers.

  She was trying to work out what to type when she realised what she was reading. Of course, the comments were all written by people glorying in Ram’s public humiliation. No one, no one at all, thought it moving, sweet, or heartbreaking. The kindest one just read: ‘lol’.

  ‘Whoever did this deserves to die,’ typed Tanya. But she did not press send. She deleted the comment, stroke by stroke, and left the cursor hanging there. They did deserve to die, though, she told herself.

  Still, she thought, there are other ways to get revenge.

  She put a couple more chat requests in to Ram. He ignored them. That’s what boys did.

  Fine. She didn’t need his permission. She got on with it. Hacking properly was, she was steadily admitting, a little bit beyond her. But still. She would give it a go. Sites like this often had a weakness. If they’d failed to redirect the root of each folder, maybe she could poke around, maybe even find the honeypot that was a file called ‘passwords.txt’.

  Nothing. Seriously?

  She changed tactics and launched a denial-of-service attack on truthordare.com. She flung a few virtual funds to a ping farm that bombarded the site with simultaneous requests. With luck, it should slow the site down, maybe even bring it to a crashing halt. If you yelled at a site enough, a bit of it would break. Even if all your content was immaculate, even down to your style sheets, then there’d be a weak link—maybe even something you didn’t have control over like the ad server would just topple over and stop your site loading. Something would go.

  The site stayed. Solid, robust, quick. WEIRD.

  So, Tanya settled for gaming the ‘Most Read’ articles list, pushing Ram further and further down it, until she’d nudged him out of the top ten. She found the least tasteful video she could and punted it up. Someone training their dog to jump over the barbecue (‘THIS HOT DOG IS SMOKIN!’). Nothing like a bit of animal cruelty to turn people off.

  A Vlog by Seraphin

  Hey, guys,

  I wasn’t going to say anything about this, but here goes. Enough with the dogs, okay? Torturing animals is wrong, pure and simple. Don’t need to say it twice. Not going to apologise for whoever did that. Not done in my name. Not how we fight Skandis.

  We cool? We cool.

  Now, okay, I said that I’d do a drawing challenge. ’Cos we all love crafting. Here goes. I’ll draw the maddest thing you’ve done for Skandis. Seriously! I have Sugar Paper and some good graphite and I’m burning for doodling. There’s like five minutes to go before we pick the top truth or dare. Will it be Brock going through his teacher’s laptop, or will it be Nicola objecting to her stepdad’s wedding? As I said, five minutes, people. And then I will be CRAFTING LIVE AND DANGEROUS.

  SIXTEEN

  SIX NAMES FOR WHITE YOU’VE NEVER THOUGHT OF

  This wasn’t what he’d expected.

  ‘I am in Heaven, aren’t I?’

  No one answered him. No voice of God. No angels. He walked through the whiteness a bit more. No seventy-two virgins either.

  Yet it was definitely Heaven. It was so very white.

  The whiteness was surprising. As white as fresh paper. As white as linen or falling snow before it hits the ground. Pure white, he thought. Sinless white.

  That made him stop.

  He didn’t feel bad about what he’d done on the way here. Not at all. I mean, obviously, not everyone would do what he’d done. But it was all for a laugh, wasn’t it? Good clean fun. A few pranks, really. Nothing he wouldn’t do again. Definitely.

  If he could have his time over again, he’d do it all the same way. YOLO. Yeah, YOLO.

  No regrets. Not about anything that he’d posted. Not those pictures he’d found. Not those text messages. Not even about the stuff he’d filmed that, thinking about it, he wouldn’t have dreamed filming a month ago. Then, it would have felt wrong.

  But that was then. This was now.

  And here he was.

  In Heaven. Heavenly white. Heaven was big and white and there weren’t any clouds.

  There was something on the edge of his mind. A question he should be asking.

  Who do you ask?

  Well, God, he supposed.

  He walked on through the whiteness.

  In the distance, somewhere behind him, he could hear someone talking. God.

  You know what, he thought, smiling, let God wait. That’d be something to tell everyone. Jokes.

  He wandered on through the whiteness until he came to a white door.

  He grinned at that. Doors in Heaven. No gates. Well, there we go. Twenty-first century.

  After a while the door opened and, squinting now, he saw it led somewhere even whiter. Double pure white. Fancy that.

  ‘Don’t mind if I do,’ he said, and stepped through.

  As the door closed, he heard the voice of God shouting at him.

  ‘Don’t go through that door,’ God said. Which seemed funny.

  Then he remembered the question he’d wanted to ask God.

  ‘So God, how did I die?’

  He heard a noise and turned around and, before he could even scream, died.

  SEVENTEEN

  THE RISE OF SMART WOMEN AND HOW TO STOP IT

  ‘Why are you looking at that site?’ Ram asked her. He seemed hostile, which she couldn’t blame him for.

  ‘No reason,’ said April, which was a lie. Well, it wasn’t. Not exactly.

  ‘It’s sick,’ said Ram. ‘I thought we agreed.’ He jabbed a finger at Seraphin’s frozen face. ‘He’s just a nice face fronting it, all “what do you think of my hair and hey, here are my favourite friends,” but underneath it all he’s evil.’

  ‘Umm,’ said April. ‘“Evil” seems a strong word.’ She’d been surprised Ram had come into school today. He looked pretty miserable. Like he’d had the whole world thrown at him. Now he’d caught her browsing truthordare.com and he was staring at her like she’d betrayed him.

  ‘You fancy him, don’t you?’ His laugh wasn’t a nice laugh.

  ‘No-o.’ April made herself laugh back, cautiously
.

  ‘Then what? I mean, you spend all your time working so hard to be the cool indie chick but here you are ogling the most white-bread man in the world.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ April said, keeping her voice really very calm. ‘I can see how you’d feel. What they did to you was horrible. But please, don’t take it out on me, or him.’

  ‘You’re sticking up for Seraphin?’

  That was so Ram, zero in on the one weak spot, toss everything else aside like fruit peel.

  ‘No,’ said April. ‘Stories are always more complicated. The article they put up about you . . . you think, because of the comments, that people hate you. Well, not everyone who read that article commented. Yes, a lot of people read it and reacted to it by laughing, but those are the easy people—the people who like their stories simple. Show them a tragedy and they laugh, whether it’s you and Rachel or a man falling off a cliff. But it’s the other people, the quiet ones—they’re the people you want to be interested in. And they’re harder, more complicated, because they’re quiet, you can’t hear them, but they’re out there. And they’re worth listening to.’

  Ram didn’t say anything.

  Neither did April. Not for a bit.

  ‘So,’ she said, ‘my point is . . . Quiet. Complicated. You watch Seraphin. What do you think? Tell me?’

  ‘Uh,’ said Ram. ‘He’s a jerk.’

  ‘Is that it?’

  ‘Pretty much. I wish I had his money. His success. His life is so easy. I wish I was him. I mean, what is he good at? People like him. That’s all. He’s just good at being liked.’

  ‘That’s winning, isn’t it?’ April smiled at him. ‘We all want to be liked. And it’s a struggle, that maybe one day, we’ll get right. But look at him—he’s pretty much our age and he’s doing it. We all like him.’

  ‘I don’t,’ said Ram. His defiance was sliding towards sulky. ‘You want to shag him.’

  ‘Oh no!’ April waved that one away sharpish. ‘He’s pretty. He’s cute. But he’s sooo safe.’

  ‘I thought you liked safe.’ Ram couldn’t resist turning his flirting up a notch. It was an instinct.