Pictures of You

Chapter 19

19

Evie

We sit in a corner booth at the café, and everyone else gives us space in a way that makes me feel like we’re already a couple. Oliver orders a glass of iced water as well as a hot drink, so he can hold it against the bruises on his eye.

“Are you going to tell me about that?” I ask. I’m dying to know how the story involves me, and have spent the last hour carried away with the delicious notion that maybe he’s been fighting off admirers I didn’t know I had.

“Well, everyone was talking about you at school after photography last week.”

Not in a good way, I bet.

“And you know your friend from the party?” he continued.

“Breanna?”

“Those two guys in the fight were talking about having seen her on a website.” He looks at me cautiously, as if he’s testing how much I know.

My heart thuds through the floor. How much I know should be obvious from the way the mention of the site makes my hands tremble in some mashup of panic, fear, and molten anger. They were talking about her? I feel sick, and scared, and helpless that I still haven’t found a way around the problem that chipped away all the most confident parts of her.

“When I saw you at the party and realized you were friends,” Oliver says, leaning closer, “the exhibition theme made sense. You want to avenge for the wrong done to your best friend.” He’s speaking like a knight of the Round Table, which is doing all kinds of things to my insides, but yes. YES. “This is what matters to you most?” he guesses.

“I just want to erase this whole chapter. But I don’t know how to fix it without landing her in trouble too. She was fifteen. The photos were illegal, even on her own phone.”

He listens calmly to every word. It’s the first real conversation I’ve been able to have about it with anyone but Bree.

“Is this from that fight?” I ask, my fingers hovering carefully near his injured face. I lean closer this time, and get a better view of the shiny, bruised skin around his eye and cheekbone and at him. My crush is galloping out of control.

“Evie, this is because I found out who was responsible for the She Loves It site,” he says quietly.

My insides heave, and I instantly imagine blue and red lights flashing at Bree’s front door. “Are you going to report them?”

She can’t be dragged through this. The whole thing is a giant, murky mess reliant on fear and silence to keep it hidden, and suddenly I’m terrified it’s all going to blow up.

“It’s gone,” Oliver says simply.

Gone? How?

I grab my phone, type the address, and instead of recoiling at images that make me shake with rage, I get a business page saying the domain name is available. Then I look back at him, and at his black eye.

“You got the domain deregistered?” I say.

“It’s just an email to the support team,” he explains.

An email he made someone send under duress, by the look of it. And I realize what he’s done, that he’s done it for Breanna, because she is my friend .

Everything is blurry through tears of relief for her. And gratitude for him. The risk he’s taken, not just physically, but in going against culture. “I don’t know what to say,” I whisper.

“Don’t be too impressed,” he says, hanging his head. “I should have done it months ago—I knew about the website.” He looks back at me, guilty. “But it wasn’t personal then, Evie.”

His words are so loaded my mind can barely grasp hold of them. “I don’t want to make a big thing about it, okay?” he follows up. “I wish I’d stepped in before.”

So now he’s heroic and humble and honest about his missteps and he’s confiding in me about rushing in and saving my best friend from an impossible situation and being beaten up in the process … And it’s personal .

“Can I just text Bree?” I ask him.

He nods, and I pick up my phone, ready to type two words that feel spun with gold: It’s over. I attach a screenshot of the domain page, and, as the phone whooshes with the sent message, my eyes return to Oliver’s. She doesn’t know it, but she is eternally in this boy’s debt. And by extension, given just how much I love her, so am I.

Thursday afternoon, Oliver meets me at the library because I have an English essay to write about Shakespeare and it’s his best subject. It’s my best subject too, and I don’t actually need any help, but sitting across from him in the study area, coming up with points about Shakespeare’s use of rhetoric in King Henry IV , is just about the most romantic thing that has ever happened in my time on this planet.

“Why has it taken me until Year Eleven to discover you?” he asks. Something about his use of the word discover instead of meet delights me. He’s helped himself to one of the gel pens I use to take notes, and he’s twirling it between his fingers. I know I’m going to isolate that pen later and keep it as a souvenir of this occasion.

“I’ve been here all along, flying under your radar, obviously,” I reply, even though it’s more that I’ve been totally out of the loop. “Where have you been?”

He puts the pen down and leans forward, looking at me through black-rimmed reading glasses as if I fascinate him. I’ve never fascinated anyone, except maybe my parents.

“I think I’ve been waiting for you,” he admits.

It’s a romantic idea. In reality, I very much doubt that it’s true, what with the parade of girls featured in his Instagram feed, but I hang on to the notion anyway.

Friday night, he impulsively suggests we go to a movie. Our thighs touch the entire time and I can’t focus on a single scene because I’m so busy trying to stop myself from trembling. It’s electric. Then afterward, in the lobby, we run into a group of St. Dom’s boys, and while he talks to them, his hand goes to the small of my back and stays there until they’re gone. It thrills me .

By Saturday morning, the falling-in-love process is pretty much complete. I can’t think or talk about anything else and Bree is bearing the brunt of it. And that’s when her doorbell sounds. It’s a courier with a box, addressed to me. I open it, and inside are several forensic linguistics textbooks from my online bookstore wish list. I’d shared my login details with Oliver at the library, because he thinks someone’s purchase history is a window to their soul.

“Textbooks?” Bree asks. “How romantic, Evie.”

“It is romantic. Textbooks are expensive,” I argue. Getting ahead on this reading is all part of the plan to win a university scholarship. “I’d rather have these books than roses. He understands me.”

“Also, you shared your login details—and my address—with a boy you barely know?” Bree asks, evidently less enamored by the delivery than I am. “Did we learn nothing from my website nightmare? This is … a lot.”

“Your address was already in the bookstore account from last time,” I explain. “And Oliver’s the one who saved you from the website nightmare.”

“If it’s really gone,” she says, under her breath. “How do I know my photos aren’t saved on some hard drive somewhere?”

Why is Bree being so unsupportive? I’ve been there for every crush she’s ever had for years, and this is the first time for me. She of all people should understand my current mindset.

I’m getting out my wide-angle camera lens for the astrophotography night with Drew and his mum—a social event that comes with Bree’s wholehearted approval—when I get a message from Oliver. We were going to meet up for an afternoon walk.

“I can’t come, Evie. I’ve got a migraine.”

Immediately, I want to make him feel better. It’s inevitable that I will go to his place even if I have to move mountains to get back in time to meet Drew.

“I’m on my way.”

Oliver and I sit on a cane sofa on his giant Lane Cove terrace. I’ve got a huge thing for cane furniture and giant terraces. Something about the old-world charm of sprawling Southern mansions, which the Roche’s twenty-first-century Sydney residence rivals.

“You didn’t have to come,” he says, in the muted tone of a person with a throbbing head who did, in fact, keenly want you to come. “This happens every so often,” he tells me. “It’s usually stress.”

I can’t think what he could be stressed about. He gets straight A’s at school, and with all his bonus leadership stuff, an early-entry offer to university is practically guaranteed. He lives in a colossal house and his parents don’t have to scrape money together for uniforms or field trips like mine do, even though I’m on scholarship. He’s been voted incoming school captain in a massive landslide, because literally everyone adores him.

“Can I get you a sandwich or something?” he asks, even though he’s the patient.

“Do you want one?”

He shakes his head, then grasps it, as if to settle the pain, and I make him lie down and rest his head in my lap, looking up at me. I don’t want to have to work out how to eat in front of him, anyway. Things get stuck in your teeth. You can drop mustard on your top. You could choke! I don’t think we’re ready for that level of chaos.

“Is this okay?” he asks, gesturing at his head on my legs. I’m the one who directed his head into this position, so the unnecessary request for consent only skyrockets my crush. First he takes down my best friend’s nightmare website. Now he’s navigating physical touch as if my boundaries actually matter.

The fact is, I want to run my fingers through his blond hair, and then, well … everywhere . But I don’t. We’re not up to that yet. Are we? I’ve never done this before. I do risk a quick brush of his forehead with the back of my hand, under the guise of checking his temperature, like I’m a nurse from World War I and he’s a hero dragged in on a stretcher, wounded on the Somme.

It seems normal. His temperature, that is, not my historical fantasies.

The French door onto the balcony opens, and an enormous man in a suit steps through it, frowning. I get the impression that his frown is not wholly about having found us here like this, but more habitual.

“Hello,” he says, not really looking at me, his voice abrupt.

Despite his headache, Oliver bolts upright and shifts along the bench a little way. I feel exposed, suddenly. And very definitely not enough.

“This is Evie,” Oliver explains, standing now, as if the man’s presence is a cure for his migraine. “Evie, this is my father.”

It’s oddly formal. And as Oliver didn’t tell me his dad’s name, I don’t know what to call him. I’m assuming Mr. Roche? Or was he “Doctor”? I think Oliver said he was some kind of specialist. I settle for saying nothing, which is also wrong, and now the silence is awkward. Oliver’s whole demeanor has shifted, like he’s waiting for the ramifications of being found here, idling with a girl.

His dad tosses a nod in my direction out of minimal courtesy, and I feel about as small as one of the ants marching around on his balcony. I check my watch. It’s getting late in the afternoon, and I need to get back in time to meet Drew.

“N-Nice to meet you,” I stammer. I turn to Oliver. “I can’t stay much longer. I have to be somewhere by six.”

I can tell he’s deflated. The fact that he’s going to miss me is both unbelievable, after such a short time, and enthralling. And flattering, given this is Oliver Roche we’re talking about, king of everything. But there’s something else too. A sense that he wishes I could stay for other reasons, maybe. Safety in numbers?

“Oliver, can I have a word?” his father asks. He closes the French door so forcefully after his son that I feel the vibrations on the deck. I can’t hear what they’re saying, but I can see their body language. Oliver is a solid six feet and a rugby player. Technically he’s standing eye-to-eye with his dad, but somehow he still seems overpowered. His father is doing all the talking, and even from outside I can see Oliver’s broad shoulders dip under the weight of whatever’s being said.

As soon as the conversation is over, he comes back outside, smaller, somehow. “Do you really have to go?”

It’s a strangely vulnerable moment, and I feel like I’m being given a glimpse behind that popular, confident facade that everyone adores. I think of Drew and his mum, and his grateful expression when I agreed to our formal date. I really should go tonight. Plus, it’s obvious something major is going on with Drew. If I’m going to follow through on the offer to be friends, I need to find out what.

“Sorry, of course you should go,” Oliver says when I don’t answer. He starts looking for my bag. “I’ll just miss you, Evie.”

Emergency: he’s moved up so close I’m almost certain he’s going to kiss me!

This has never happened before, other than that one-sided shambles in Year Nine, and I have absolutely no idea how to do this. I can feel the warmth of his breath brush my skin as a heady cloud of pine-scented aftershave swirls into my nostrils. His eyes travel across my face, and he sweeps a strand of my hair behind my ear, where it refuses to stay because of my exasperating curls , but I don’t even care about that.

“Can I ask you something?” he says, pulling back. The lack of the kiss shifts kissing Oliver Roche to the top of my bucket list, immediately knocking off get a book published and be appointed to the UN . This fact disgusts pre-Pritchards’-party me, but the girl I was last week is fighting a hopeless battle against the onslaught of first-love brain chemistry.

“Ask me anything.”

“You and Drew Kennedy?”

Heat rises to my cheeks. “Oh, we’re friends,” I garble. Barely. “What’s the story between you two?”

He glances back inside the house. “That’s all my father. You know how they pick up that there’s a kid at school who might be a threat academically?”

I don’t, but I nod anyway.

“Drew got a higher mark than me on a science test in the first week of Year Seven and I made the mistake of reporting that at home.”

“But that was years ago,” I argue.

“He’s never let it go. Drew is always the one to beat.”

I feel a rush of love for my uncomplicated parents and almost feel guilty for the easy way I’ve been raised. They would never pit me against another student.

“Can I see you first thing tomorrow?” he asks, blue eyes eager behind the blond waves of his fringe.

I think of my several assignments and the in-class test I have on Monday that I haven’t started studying for, and the promise I made to myself never to let a boy stand in the way of my grades.

Will I see him tomorrow? Or any time he wants? And every spare second?

“Yes,” I whisper. Yes.