Girl Online(20)

Lesson 6: If you are stupid enough to wear multicolored unicorn knickers that are so old they’ve faded and frayed at the edges and you end up flashing them to three hundred people, do not crawl off, I repeat—DO NOT CRAWL OFF—the stage with them still on display.

My life is over! And the Positively Positive website lied. Trying to find a reason for my humiliation has only made me feel a million times worse. I cringe as I run through the whole terrible saga again in my mind. My life is a disaster. I seriously ought to have one of those government health warnings tattooed on my forehead. The sad fact is the only place I feel happy and confident is on my blog.

Instinctively, I click through to the blog on my phone. I have twelve new comments on my post about outgrowing a friendship. As I scroll through them, I feel slightly calmer. Yet again, they are all so loving and kind.

I totally get what you’re saying . . .

I’ve definitely grown out of friends before . . .

I’ll be your friend . . .

You sound so lovely . . .

It’s her loss not yours . . .

I know this sounds weird but I think of you as one of my closest friends . . .

My eyes fill with tears and I hug my knees to my chest. The fact is I’m totally honest on my blog, totally me—and my readers seem to really like me. So I can’t be all bad, can I? And at least none of them have seen my underwear.

According to Elliot, there are currently over seven billion people alive on the planet. Out of all those billions of people, only about three hundred have seen my unicorn knickers. That’s the equivalent of less than one pebble on the whole of Brighton beach. OK, so a lot of those three hundred people are my fellow schoolmates but still—they’re bound to forget about it soon. I wriggle down in the bed and close my eyes. Billions of people have not seen your knickers, my inner voice whispers gently, as if it’s telling me a bedtime story. Billions of people have not seen your knickers.

? ? ?

I’m having this really cool dream about a gigantic advent calendar with hundreds of doors when suddenly my email notification pings. I fumble around in the dark to turn it off when there’s another ping and another. I squint at my alarm clock. It’s 1 a.m. Why am I getting so many emails at this time? As the phone goes off again and again, my first thought is that people are commenting on my blog but when I click into my inbox all I see are Facebook notifications.

Megan Barker has tagged you in a post, the first one says. The others are all telling me that various people have commented on that post—half of the cast of the play by the looks of things. I feel really sick as I click on the link and wait for the page to load. On the page is a video of the cast taking a bow. I break out in a cold sweat as I watch myself going onstage and then tripping over. The camera zooms in, right in, on my knickers, so close you can actually see a piece of frayed thread hanging down the inside of my thigh. I fling the phone onto the floor.

Oh my God.

I’d totally forgotten that the play was being filmed. This is awful. Worse than awful. My entire body is prickling with horror and embarrassment. What am I going to do? Take a deep breath and keep calm, I tell myself. I can delete the post—can’t I?

I pick up my laptop and turn on my bedside lamp. My phone goes off again. I swallow hard and log on to Facebook on my computer. The tiny red icon in the top right-hand corner informs me that I have twenty-two new notifications. Oh no!

Seventeen people have liked the video already. I make myself look at the comments. “Whoops,” Megan has written in the original post. The other comments are mainly LOLs and red-faced emoticons. Then I see one from Bethany, who was the nurse in the play: “Ew, that is so gross!?” Underneath it, Ollie has put “I think it’s kind of cute.” I don’t think I’ve ever felt so sick. I hover my cursor over the post and remove the tag. This instantly removes the video from my wall, but my news feed is still full of it as one by one, various cast members comment on the link and share it.

How could Megan do this to me? I would never, ever do something like this to her. I quickly fire her a private message. “Please can you take that video down?” I sit and stare at the screen waiting for a response, but nothing.

“Come on!” I mutter over and over again. But there’s not a peep from Megan.

After about half an hour, my Facebook feed falls quiet. My school friends must have finally gone to sleep. I should try to get some sleep too. But how can I? In the morning everyone else is going to see the video. I feel as if I’m sitting on a ticking bomb, just waiting for it to go off.

I lie in bed for hours, checking and rechecking my phone. Refreshing and re-refreshing my Facebook page, in the hope that Megan has seen my message and taken down the video. At 5:30 a.m., when I’m starting to go a little demented from tiredness, I send her another message begging her to remove it. Then I lie back down and close my eyes. It will be OK, I tell myself. As soon as she wakes up and sees my messages she’ll delete it.

I finally fall into a fitful sleep just as it’s turning light outside. Then I hear Elliot knocking—and knocking and knocking—our secret code equivalent of dialing 999. I sit bolt upright, filled with dread. I knock back, telling him to come over. The text alert goes off on my phone. Please, please let it be Megan, I think, grabbing it. But it’s from Elliot.

OMG HONEY! DO NOT GO ONLINE UNTIL I GET THERE. I’M LEAVING RIGHT NOW