thin dark red ribbons through mine and plaited it each side, the plaits swirling around my head to join at the back, Emma kept looking at it. Rachel spoke first.
“We’ve got more video images on the internet, they’re worse than ever. I checked first thing this morning, someone posted up a clip of us in the shower yesterday. It’s bad.”
There was a sharp intake of breath. We all remembered in intricate details that delicious session in the coach’s shower, but to have it on the internet for public consumption, that was beyond the realms of anything we’d ever known. If people found out we were literally doomed, finished in the school, finished in the town. We all looked at Yvonne.
“Can you do anything?” Rachel asked her.
“It’ll be hard, I’d need to hack the account of the fucker that originally posted up the video, then go in and pull it down. Yeah, I suppose I could do it, no guarantees though.”
“You need to get on it straight away” Lisa said to her. We all nodded, this was disaster staring at us in the face.
“Yvonne, get to the computer room and make a start, we’ll cover for you in class for the rest of the day, see if you can get it pulled,” Rachel said.
She nodded, “yeah, ok, I’ll do that. Wish me luck.”
She left us to make a start, I had an idea.
“Look, I’m due to visit my mom’s psychologist colleague, Karen Green, I’ll see if she can throw some more light on what kind of person could be doing this. She was right on the button with the other problem.
“Excellent,” Rachel said. “See what you can get out of her. But won’t it be a bit of a shock, her knowing about the video, what we were doing?”
“Er, no, it won’t,” I said quietly.
They looked at me sharply. Emma’s eyes narrowed, she obviously wondered what the hell was going on between me and Karen.
“Fair enough then, let’s make a start.”
I went into the corridor and used my cell to phone Karen, who said she’d be delighted to see me after school. I told her what the problem was and she said she’d think about it in the meantime.
“I can pick you up if you like, outside the school. I’ll let your mom know.”
I thanked her and hung up. Emma was waiting for me.
“What’s going on with Karen?” she asked. “I thought you and me were, well, you know, best friends.”
She didn’t say lovers, but it would have been true. I decided that it was time for truth.
“Emma, you may as well know that Karen showed me a few things about my sexual side that I wasn’t aware of, but we’re not heavily into each other, not in any physical sense. You know that you and me are more than best friends, don’t you? If we were a guy and a girl, we’d be lovers, isn’t that what we are?”
She nodded.
“Right, that’s the way I feel about you, there’s no-one else.”
She smiled happily, I had to step back to stop her from throwing her arms around me and kissing me there and then, it wasn’t the place. It was awful being so close and yet so far, almost touching each other in the corridor, yet unable to feel the warmth and reassurance of your lover’s body, of her lips pressing on yours. Of reaching under the hem of her tiny school skirt and giving her the pleasure and release you knew she craved.
Yvonne reported to us in the afternoon that she’d managed to pull the video clip, she’d been working all day on it and skipped lunch. It was a huge relief and we all relaxed a little. Karen was outside after school, waiting in her car, a cute little Beamer Z4, an open sports car, two seats, she had the top down.
“You look lovely today, Helen, what’s the big occasion?”
“Nothing special, I just wanted to look nice.”
But she was a psychologist of course, she could put two and two together easily, knowing what she did about the video.
“What’s her name, what’s she like?”
“Who’s name?”
She smiled. “Your lover, of course, the girl that you made yourself look so