Cooper is watching Zac. ‘Believe me, even if they do check up on you they’ll probably be relieved if they find you doing stuff like that. It’s pretty much expected of us at our age.’
‘You don’t know where any of those pictures are from,’ Zac bites back, feeling himself redden. ‘Those girls might be drunk or on drugs. They might not even remember doing that.’
Cooper screws his face up as though he’s eaten something sour. ‘Don’t be sick,’ he says. ‘Those women are all porn stars. And don’t ruin it for me. Guys like us, that’s all the action we’re likely to be getting for years.’
Zac pulls a face. ‘Thanks a lot. I tell you, they’re not all porn stars. Don’t you remember what happened last year at school . . .’
‘Of course I do – I’ll never forget that! All stored up here,’ Cooper laughs, tapping his temple.
Zac rolls his eyes. ‘You’re an idiot.’ Before he can help himself he has thrown a pencil at his friend, managing to catch Cooper in the eye.
‘Ow!’ Cooper’s hand flies up to protect his face.
‘Sorry,’ Zac mutters. When Cooper tries to open his eye it is already red and streaming. ‘Go and rinse it, it’ll be okay.’ He feels guilty now, but he can’t deal with Cooper any more tonight. ‘Then maybe you should go.’
Cooper gets up and grabs his bag. ‘Look, I’m really sorry about Georgia, I hope she’s okay.’ He leaves the room and a moment later Zac hears the front door open and then close.
Once Cooper has gone, Zac reopens his laptop and hits restore on the browser, bringing back all his research as well as the page full of naked women. He hesitates, unable to help himself, his eyes lingering over them, scrolling down a little further. His body begins to respond; his cheeks burn. He sighs and closes the tab.
He can still see her, too, if he shuts his eyes. Verity Parker, a popular girl in his sister’s year, photographed naked and unabashed in a variety of increasingly explicit poses for her boyfriend, unaware that he was sharing these texts with a group of friends, who in turn were sending them on to others. By the time one of the other girls had openly called her a slut, most of the school had seen the photos. Verity had been shepherded into the headmaster’s office, distraught, and no one had seen her since. Her boyfriend stopped coming to school soon after – the rumour was that he had been expelled.
What bothers Zac now was how little he had been troubled originally. Verity had appeared to be enjoying herself in all the photos he’d seen, and that had been enough for him to take pleasure in looking at them. Yet over the following days a special assembly was held at which the students were warned of dire consequences if they were found to have explicit images on any electronic devices. Some people left the hall openly deleting items from their phone, but Zac waited until he was home. Even now, he occasionally catches himself wishing that he had saved them to his computer first, as he knew a few others had done.
Then came the inevitable discussion with his mother. Asked directly if he had seen the photos, he felt unable to lie, so he had just nodded while staring at the floor. ‘Don’t be embarrassed, Zac, it’s perfectly natural to look,’ she’d said, which didn’t make sense considering the school was treating them as criminals. ‘It might seem funny at the time, but it’s not,’ she’d told him. ‘It gives Verity a reputation she’ll find very difficult to escape. The girls need to understand the dangers of this; and the boys need to be mature and responsible enough to protect them. If these images make their way onto the internet it’s almost impossible to stop them from spreading. Imagine if Georgia or Sophia, or even Maddie, got caught out like this,’ she’d added. ‘One mistake can impact the rest of their lives.’
Whether his mother realised it or not, the mention of those three names had compounded his feelings of shame. Particularly where Maddie was concerned.
Zac and Maddie were in the same year at school, good friends as well as step-cousins. Sophia and Maddie’s father had left before Maddie was born, and Zac’s Uncle Liam had married Auntie Helene and taken on the role of dad to the girls when Zac was still a baby. The kids had grown up together, and just as Sophia and Georgia had been close for as long as they could remember, so had Zac and Maddie.
For a long time Maddie was all tomboy – perfectly happy to race him on his bike or go frog fishing. It was only a year or so ago that he had noticed the first changes in her body, the curving of her hips and chest, and since then he hasn’t stopped noticing it. Over the summer, Maddie’s legs have suddenly grown a whole lot longer – helped by the fact that her skirts have grown shorter – but, to his extreme discomfort, she is now a couple of inches taller than him.