Chocolate Box Girls: Sweet Honey (21 page)

‘A few people know my
password,’ I admit. ‘People back home. Look, if I had any ideas,
I’d tell you, I swear … but I don’t. Should I just ask
Surfie16 outright?’

‘No way,’ Bennie says, eyes
wide. ‘He could be some kind of psycho, and he has your address, right? Honey,
this is scary. Have you told your dad? Your mum?’

‘Dad wouldn’t
listen,’ I say. ‘And I don’t want Mum to know – she’d be
worried sick, and she’s too far away to help.’

‘Look,’ Ash says.
‘This is cyber-bullying. I bet your head teacher wouldn’t stand for it.
If you won’t tell anyone else, tell her. Tell the police, tell
someone
!’

Is he right? Is speaking out the only
way to stop this? I think of the damage this hate campaign has done, slicing right
through my cool-girl mask to expose the scared little girl inside. I straighten my
shoulders.

‘I’ll tell Birdie,’ I
agree. ‘First thing tomorrow. I swear. And then I’ll go to classes and
face it all out, and if Liane or anybody dares to say anything to me –’

‘We’ll be with you,’
Tara says. ‘We’ll meet you at the gates. Miss Bird is
OK … she’ll know what to do. Speak out, don’t let this creep
win!’

‘Meanwhile,’ Bennie says,
‘Tara and I can report Surfie16 on SpiderWeb and report the spam on your page.
It might take a day or two to go through, but they take things like this
seriously.’

‘Of course,’ I say,
wide-eyed. ‘That should work. Thank you. Thank you!’

Long after they’ve gone, I lie in
bed watching the moonlight dust the mirror shards in the window with silver.
It’s hot – stupidly hot. The TV news has been reporting bush fires for days,
films of smoke clouds unfurling across the Blue Mountains, homes burnt to the
ground. Logic and confidence fall away and fears crowd my head once more. My iPhone
and laptop are broken, but the chances are that my stalker is still filling the
Internet with hate. I try not to think of Dad’s laptop, Emma’s iPad, but
I can’t help myself. I want to know. I want to see. I want clues, truth, no
matter how scary.

I get up and pad softly through the
house to Dad’s study.

I know I shouldn’t try to confront
Surfie16, but I cannot help myself. Do Australian teenagers lurk online at 5 a.m.
the way he does? I don’t think so. Maybe it’s that he – or she – is in a
whole different time zone.

I open up a new message and begin to
type.

Who are you? Really?

A reply appears straight away.

Wouldn’t you like to know?
Perhaps someone you know pretty well … the person you least expect.
And I’m going to destroy you, just like you destroyed me.

Just like that, my courage crumbles away
and my head fills with doubts and fears. The person I least expect? Could it be
Bennie or Tara? Or Ash? I log out again and snap the laptop shut, but now I’m
back in the spider’s web, trapped and helpless.

By morning, I have dredged up some
strength and determination. Tara and Bennie will have reported Surfie16 by now, and
though I am not looking forward to watching Birdie scroll through the nightmare of
my SpiderWeb page, I am certain that telling her is the right thing to do. I am
pretty sure she’ll help.

Dad and Emma have left already,
promising they’ll be home on time later, pleased that I’m
‘better’ and returning to school. I wonder what they’d think if
they bothered to actually listen, if they knew what I’ve been going through?
Would they care? I bite my lip. I think they would, if I gave them a chance to.

My uniform is perfect, apart from the
Converse; wearing one lone brown sandal is never a good look, but I’m hoping
Birdie will understand and forgive me. I’m about to leave when the phone
rings, and I drop my bag, silent, still. What if it’s the stalker, if
he’s traced my landline somehow?

And then I hear Skye’s voice,
small and faraway and wobbling slightly, on the answer machine.

‘Honey, I need to talk to you. You
won’t answer your phone and you won’t answer texts and I know
you’ve been blocking us from SpiderWeb … now this!’

Answering the call will make me late for
school, but I pick up the phone.

‘Skye?’ I say.
‘It’s me. Oh, it’s so good to hear you!’

There’s a silence, and the faint
crackle and buzz of the line. As far as I can work out, it’s around 10 p.m.
back home, which is an odd time for Skye to be calling, but I am not complaining.
Just hearing her voice makes me feel so homesick I could cry.

‘Good to hear from me?’ she
says. ‘What is wrong with you? How could you do this? How could you be so
cruel?’

Dread seeps through me, cold and
heavy.

‘What are you talking
about?’

‘You know exactly what I
mean,’ Skye says. ‘I was upset when you blocked us on SpiderWeb, but now
I wish you’d left it that way. You’re sick, Honey! What did we do to
deserve this?’

I glance around the kitchen, spy
Emma’s iPad and fold back the cover, still clutching the phone. Luckily,
it’s not locked and I log in to my home page; it looks the same as before.
It’s upsetting, obviously, but Skye’s
What did we do to deserve
this?
makes no sense.

‘Skye, I have no idea what
you’re talking about,’ I say. ‘But if you’ve seen something
bad, it’s because my SpiderWeb page has been hacked. Somebody’s been
blocking my friends and family, sending me threatening texts –’

Skye isn’t even listening.
‘Don’t lie, Honey, it had to be you,’ she says. ‘Nobody else
would have known how to hurt us so much!’

I click away from my home page and on to
Skye’s, recoiling as a series of graphic war images unfolds; death, injuries,
mutilation. My stomach heaves.

‘I can see,’ I whisper.
‘Oh God, I can see …’

‘Why would you do this?’
Skye repeats. ‘I don’t understand! We’ve tried to delete, but the
pictures just keep coming back.’

I click to Cherry’s page, spammed
with pictures of horrible, violent manga; on Coco’s, photos of sickening
animal cruelty are everywhere. I’m crying by the time I get to Summer’s
page, but the pictures there still make me flinch: images of morbidly obese women,
of skeletal, starving children, each one supposedly posted by me.

Who would do such a thing? And who
actually knows enough about my sisters to choose the images that would hurt the
most? No wonder Skye thinks I am to blame.

‘Summer is hysterical,’ Skye
is saying. ‘She’s shut herself in the bedroom, saying that she hates
herself. You’ve ruined everything, Honey. How could you?’

I take a deep breath in. ‘Is Mum
there?’ I ask. ‘Can I speak to her?’

‘She’s out with
Paddy,’ Skye says, ‘at a fortieth birthday party in Exeter.
They’re going to stay over. They don’t know about this yet, but
I’m going to tell them, Honey. You’ve gone too far this time!’

‘Skye, listen,’ I plead.
‘Somebody has control of my SpiderWeb page. They’ve been trolling me for
weeks. I’ve tried to delete my account but it just comes straight back. You
have to believe me!’

‘I don’t know what to
believe,’ my sister says, and I wish with all my heart I didn’t have a
reputation as a rule-breaking drama queen who never lets the truth get in the way of
a good night out, because maybe if I didn’t she’d believe me now.

‘I didn’t do it,’ I
repeat. ‘Take a look at my page and see what’s on there.’

‘We’re still blocked,’
Skye says. ‘Are you lying to me, Honey?’

I think of the shattered mirror, the
fragments of glass glinting in the window. I think of my laptop and mobile lying at
the bottom of the swimming pool, of how this time yesterday I wanted to be at the
bottom of the swimming pool too.

‘I’m not lying, I
swear,’ I say. ‘I thought I could contain it … sort it. I
didn’t want you to know I’ve messed up yet again. I didn’t think
anyone would believe me. I’ve told Dad, but he was tired and I didn’t
explain it properly and he didn’t listen. I’m scared, Skye. Really
scared.’

‘It’s really not you?’
my sister asks.

‘It’s really, really not. I
swear on my life.’

‘So … what if we report
your posts, tell SpiderWeb you’ve been hacked?’ Skye suggests, and I
don’t know whether to laugh or cry. She believes me.

‘Do that,’ I reply.
‘And have a think, Skye. I need to know who’s doing this, who hates me
so much they want to ruin everything I have – and lash out at the people I love
most. It must be someone close to me, someone who knows me well.’

‘I’ll tell Mum as soon as
she gets back tomorrow,’ Skye says. ‘She’ll know what to do.
We’ll work it out, Honey, I promise.’

‘I love you,’ I tell my
sister. ‘And I’m sorry, Skye. For everything.’

I put the phone down, numb. Skye says
Mum will be back in the morning, but ‘morning’ at Tanglewood is still
ten or twelve hours away. I’m not sure I can survive that long. What made me
think that coming to Australia would solve my problems? I carry my troubles with me
wherever I go, an especially toxic kind of hand luggage. And if one set of problems
gets sorted, I just conjure some more out of thin air.

It’s a skill.

Right now, though, self-pity is fast
being replaced with a slow, simmering rage. Tormenting me on SpiderWeb is one thing,
but nobody,
nobody
touches my sisters. If I could see my stalker right now
I would tear them to shreds, but of course, an Internet troll is sneaky and
secretive, hiding behind a spider’s web of lies and fakery. A weak person, a
mean person, a cowardly person.

I want to throw chairs across the
kitchen, smash plates, hammer my fists against the wall until they are raw and
bloody, but none of that will help. I swallow back my fury and storm out of the
house, but instead of turning towards school I head in the opposite direction. I
walk towards town, and every step keeps me from screaming out loud at the nightmare
that is my life.

All around me, people are going about
their lives; I am detached from it all. I hold my head up high and keep walking,
following signposts, asking directions, one foot in front of the other. It takes me
over four hours to walk to Circular Quay, and by the time I get there I have
blisters on my feet and sunburn on my nose. I buy a cold lemonade and walk up
through the botanical gardens, retracing the path I took with Dad and Emma that very
first day in Sydney when I still thought everything was going to work out.

Australia is beautiful, but I
don’t belong here … not now. I need to speak to Dad, make him listen
and understand. I need to go home, to be with my mum and sisters – if they’ll
have me. Too late, I worry that ‘last chance’ could mean just that.

I recognize Dad’s office block in
the distance and walk right in through the revolving doors. I try not to meet the
eyes of the business-suited men and women travelling skywards with me as I take the
lift to the tenth floor, and when I get to reception, I ask to see Greg
Tanberry.

The woman at the desk shakes her head.
‘Sorry, you’ll need an appointment; Mr Tanberry is out to lunch,’
she says. ‘I can book you in for next week, perhaps?’

I didn’t think I might need an
appointment to see my own dad, but hey, I’m way down on his list of
priorities, I know that much. I am sick of waiting for Dad to see me, to listen to
me, to notice I’m even alive. I could shout and yell and let the world know
that my dad hasn’t spared me more than an hour or two of his precious time and
attention in years, but where would that get me?

‘I
have
an
appointment,’ I say with authority. ‘A lunch appointment, with my
father. I assumed we’d be meeting here, but …’

The receptionist looks flustered,
checking through her appointments book. ‘I see. I’m so sorry.
Well … there’s nothing in the book, so perhaps you were meant to be
meeting at the restaurant? I made a reservation for him, for one o’clock, at
the Blue Orchid Bistro.’

It’s past two by the time I get
back down to Circular Quay. The Blue Orchid is one of those expensive places set
right on the bay, and I see Dad the moment I step inside; he is in the corner, at a
table for two, his back to me.

‘Can I help you?’ a waiter
asks, frowning slightly at my blue school dress, my Converse, the look on my face as
I push past. I see Dad lean forward, laughing, stroking the hand of his woman
companion, feeding her forkfuls of dessert from his own plate. She’s younger,
of course – younger even than Emma. Her lips are painted scarlet and her dangly
silver earrings shimmer as she leans forward, ruffling Dad’s hair, trailing a
finger along his jaw.

I feel angry for Emma, angry for Mum;
but most of all, I feel angry for myself. Dad is not the person I thought he was –
cool, charming, charismatic. He’s a cheat. And he’ll never change.

Dad’s companion notices me
staring, and her face registers shock, worry. Then Dad turns, and I see a fleeting
glimpse of pink stain his cheeks and wonder if that signifies shame or anger.

‘Honey!’ he says, fixing on
his widest grin. ‘What a lovely surprise! What brings you here?’

I shake my head, blinking back
tears.

‘I need your help, Dad,’ I
say. ‘I need to talk to you, but I can see it’s not a good time. I can
see you’re busy. I guess I’ll just call the office and see if I can get
an appointment.’

‘Honey, don’t be
ridiculous,’ Dad says. ‘We’ll talk later. Nothing’s so
urgent it won’t keep, eh? I don’t know what you’re doing out of
school, but I suggest you calm down and go back right now. This is a client meeting,
obviously, but I’d rather you didn’t mention it to Emma. She can be
quite irrational –’

I laugh. ‘That’s
funny,’ I say, ‘because I can be irrational too. Maybe Emma and I have
more in common than I thought!’

I take the edge of the white tablecloth
in my fingers, stroking the expensive handmade lace trim. And then I yank the whole
thing towards me, scattering cutlery, dishes, glasses and condiments all over the
shiny parquet floor.

‘So. Nice to meet you,’ I
say to Dad’s companion. ‘Glad you got your earring back. Bye!’

I turn on my heel and walk out of the
restaurant, picking my way carefully through the broken glass and china.