68. Chapter 4
“I didn’t peek.”
And she believed him. He had skyped and shared his screen. Then he scrolled through file trees, eyes fixed on the screen.
“There.” He clicked.
She turned away when the photo came up. Her stomach turned.
“It’s gone. Looking through the metadata now.
I don’t think he has accessed it since it was taken.
And it doesn’t look like it has been copied anywhere,” he said.
“And I’ve added a mirroring software. Everything he does on this phone - we’ll see it.
I am going to leave it somewhere for him to find.
Meanwhile, I have enough dirt to give him a taste of his own medicine. ”
Lule nodded, “Now you have seen my boobs.”
“At least, I did it with you. How was I supposed to find it?
Besides, you have class-A boobs. The porn industry awaits.” he replied in the same tone he would use if discussing a chemistry assignment.
“You’d better shut up, or you won’t have front teeth.”
The next day, the phone was back in Jack’s bag before morning break.
By lunchtime, it was everywhere. Playing in a loop in all the school computers. In all the official school groups. And all the student groups.
Photos. The kind that Jack had probably taken with the same smug arrogance he wore on the pitch. Naked, groin in frame, flexing like he thought the world wanted it.
And now? They were on every screen in the computer lab .
Looping. Enlarged. Captioned with his own bragging words - “You know you want it”. Someone had synced the file to a shared drive. Someone else had printed one and taped it to the inside of the cafeteria fridge.
The room buzzed with whispers.
Lule’s breath caught in her throat as the image stared back at her from the projector while Mrs. Lawrence struggled to shut it down. She hadn’t expected it to be that public. Her fingers gripped her tray. Somewhere near the exit, Jack's voice cracked, “It’s not me. It’s fake, I tell ya.”
Her gaze locked with Rahul’s across the hall.
He just gave her a look - even, steady-which said, “Told you we can do it… and we did”
The new girl stood and made her way towards Jack.
The cafeteria was buzzing but slowly everyone noticed her walked up to Jack, who was red-faced and furious, still trying to explain something to a group of sniggering Year thirteens.
“Jack Rodgers,” she said,teary voice cutting through the noise, “you are a pathetic manwhore, a creep, and not even close to being worth the time I wasted on you.”
A few gasps. Someone’s juice box exploded. His mouth opened to say something, but she was already walking away.
Lule stood and made her way out. Straight past Rahul, who leaned back against the wall like he’d just watched the ending of a good film.
“With a dick that small, you will need to lose your virginity again,” he murmured as she walked by him.
“You have such a dirty mind, gamer boy.” she said as she moved past him with a smile on her face .
One year later
When they turned eighteen just months apart, Lule and Rahul were inseparable friends.
Not the “help-me-with-homework” kind, because they could never agree on anything academic without coming to blows.
NO, they were real friends who shared gum in exams, traded insults over text, and got kicked out of the library once for laughing too loudly over a Reddit thread.
They had begun to annoyingly finish each other’s sentences.
Lule pretended to not notice that Rahul’s shoulders were broader and the washboard abdomen that she felt against her when they hugged wasn’t giving her wet dreams. Rahul pretended like he wasn’t obsessed with the way Lule’s arse swayed.
He always tried to run behind her in track.
Aran was in the picture now - a part-time boyfriend with great cheekbones, overlong luscious hair and zero ambition.
“We’re not shagging,” Lule told Rahul, unprompted, one late evening at the bus stop.
He didn’t even blink. “That poor man. He doesn’t even get a grope for becoming your trophy boyfriend.”
She punched his arm.
Rahul had a girlfriend too. Priya. Another nerd from a neighbouring school. Lule couldn’t stand her.
“She speaks like she’s trying to block both nostrils while reciting Shakespeare.”
“You’re jealous,” Rahul said, sipping from his reusable water bottle like a sanctimonious panda.
“She’s a walking sinus infection. She will die from asphyxiation if she tries to give you a blow job. And I am not jealous. Why should I be jealous? ”
But even as the teasing went on, they grew closer. Not romantically, but there was an unlabelled something their dynamic that their friends gossiped about behind their backs. There were bets placed about who would cry ‘uncle’ first.
But Lule and Rahul continued to ignore the simmering chemistry.
They told each other things they didn’t tell anyone else.
Like when Lule admitted she still didn’t like her photo taken.
Or when Rahul confessed, he sometimes hated how people only saw “model minority” before they saw him.
And how he sometimes felt he didn’t belong when he visited India and was among his huge extended family and then, he would come back home and still wouldn’t belong because of the colour of his skin.
A winter morning brought their final results.
Rahul kept refreshing the page until it appeared.
Joint degree in Computer Science & Mathematics in Oxford. He planned to take extra courses in management.
He stared at the screen, chest thudding, fingers twitching with the need to tell Lule. Everything was falling in place just as planned. Then why did he feel so empty?
After a moment, he texted her.
Got in.
Lule wanted to work on cybersecurity and cyberbullying.
Her first choice was Northumbria-London campus.
Her reply came fast.
I didn’t
But got my second choice.
She called him two seconds later. “Computer Science for Cyber Security-Oxford. Looks like you are stuck with me, boy-o ”
“That’s amazing”, he said, his voice not quite steady.
His mom was standing at the door, listening.
She knew, though he never talked about it, that he was stressed about Lule staying in London while he was going to be in Oxford.
Was it wrong that he was relieved that she didn’t get her first choice.
He felt like the world’s most selfish friend.
“I want to tackle cyber bullying,” she said, unaware of his inner conflict, “I want to make assholes afraid to hit send.”
He grinned “Remind me not to piss you off.”
“Bit late for that. You are always pissing me off.”