Chapter 13 Iris
Iris
THEN
Later, Iris found it ironic. She’d been sitting cross-legged on her bed, making notes on Deborah Tannen’s theory of ‘genderlects’.
Basically, the idea that men and women learnt different ways of communicating through socialization.
Or, in other words, that men and women could walk away from the same conversation with completely different interpretations of what had just been said.
She was really into the linguist’s book, You Just Don’t Understand, which Mr Lawton, her English teacher, had recommended as background reading, when her phone beeped with a text. She smiled, knowing it would be Josh.
Wanna see how you make me feel?
J x
She thought he’d just send her a selfie. He’d be grinning in it, showing off his perfect teeth, one of the perks of having an orthodontist for a father. She fired off a quick text in reply.
Sure x
Her phone pinged again. She was about to highlight an important bit in the book.
But if she didn’t reply immediately, Josh might get salty, so she stopped reading, picked up the phone and looked at the screen.
She gasped. Not what she’d been expecting at all.
Girls and boys definitely didn’t speak the same language.
So, yes, ironic. A little disturbing, too.
This wasn’t a selfie that showed off Josh’s perfectly aligned, white teeth.
It was a dick pic, a zoomed-in close-up of Josh’s hand on his erect penis.
At first, she felt a bit irritated. She was trying to study and she hadn’t signed up for this. But somehow, she couldn’t tear her eyes from the screen. If she was honest, she was feeling a bit turned on.
It didn’t occur to her straightaway that he was expecting a similar reply. She was still staring at the photo when another message came in.
WTTP?
She dropped the phone on the bed, as if it had burnt her, squealing out loud.
No! She deffo did NOT want to trade photos.
She reached for her phone and typed out an answer.
It took her a while to get the wording right – she wasn’t going to send a nude selfie, but she didn’t want him to sulk or ghost her.
When she was satisfied, she added kisses and exclamation marks to keep him calm and sent the message.
Thx for the pic!!!
Doing homework right now.
Some other time, maybe.
xxx
By which she meant no. No way.
But, predictably, that’s not how Josh took it.
She hadn’t been clear enough or, more likely, he’d chosen to go with a different reading of what she’d written.
He replied, saying he’d hold her to that.
Then, over the next couple of weeks, he gradually dialled up the pressure, reminding her she owed him a nude pic and promising to delete it as soon as he’d seen it.
She didn’t need to be a prude. She had such a beautiful body.
He loved her so much. He’d do anything for her. Didn’t she trust him? Yada, yada, yada.
Eventually, he wore her down, but she was careful not to show her face in the photo. Nothing that gave away her identity. For several days, he was like the cat that got the cream. He was also particularly attentive and loving. He said and did all the right things. The perfect boyfriend.
She thought that would be the end of it.
But, nope, it was just the beginning. Before she knew it, they’d moved on to videos.
He sent one of himself in the shower, all lathered up and spending way too long soaping his genitals.
She knew she’d be expected to return the favour, if you could call it that.
Every time she sent a pic or a vid, she made him promise to delete it after viewing it.
Mrs Davis, the day matron at school had talked to them a few years ago about sexting and sextortion in PSHE – personal, social, health and economic education.
Mrs Davis was clearly out of touch with reality as well as uncomfortable about standing in front of a group of prepubescent teens.
She stared at the floor and went red every time she said words like ‘sex’ or ‘nudity’.
She reeled off definitions of words like grooming, catfishing, upskirting and fake porn.
She repeatedly used terms such as ‘illegal’, ‘without consent’ and ‘against the law’.
She insisted on ‘stranger danger’ when communicating online.
There had only been one PSHE lesson on this, shortly before lockdown, a few years before Iris was even going out with Josh.
Not that that was an excuse. Iris was aware of the dangers of sending nude photos and videos, but to begin with at least, it didn’t really cross her mind that those dangers applied to her.
She wasn’t being taken in by a catfish; she was exchanging intimate pictures with her boyfriend.
He’d seen her naked body IRL, so it wasn’t like she was revealing anything he wasn’t familiar with.
And he said nice things about her body when she sent him pics, which made her feel good about herself.
He made her feel beautiful. Plus, he was sending her photos and videos of himself, too.
They trusted each other. He would never use her photos to blackmail her.
He didn’t need money – his parents were minted and Josh always had rolls of cash on him.
A nagging voice in Iris’s head, that sounded creepily like Matron’s, piped up every now and then to tell her she was being stupid and na?ve.
But Iris did her best to stifle it. She’d overheard Mum saying to Jo once that teenagers needed ‘new and naughty’, that becoming an adult was all about ‘taking risks and pushing boundaries and having sex’.
All her life, Iris had been a good girl.
She’d done everything she’d been told – by parents and teachers alike.
And since meeting Josh, she’d realized something.
Her life had been boring before him. She’d been boring. And bored. Plain vanilla.
But, after a while, when things started to go tits up with Josh, Iris saw how dumb she’d been.
When she finally dumped Josh for the third and last time, not long after his eighteenth birthday party, he texted non-stop.
He would write things that Iris didn’t know how to interpret.
When she didn’t react this time to ‘I can’t live without you’, he tried a different tack.
I can’t stop looking at photos of you. I wouldn’t want anyone else to see you like this. Ever.
xxx
Was this a thinly veiled threat? Why did he say ‘I wouldn’t’ instead of ‘I don’t’? Was she reading too much into it? But since she’d known him, Josh had alternated punishments with rewards. That was his nature. That was how he behaved. Was he going to punish her?
Iris thought about blocking Josh – his phone number, his email, his social media accounts.
But that wouldn’t make the problem go away.
And it might be better if she got his messages.
That way, if he was going to blackmail her, at least she’d receive the threat and know about it.
From that day on, Iris lived with a knot in her stomach.
It tightened whenever she was likely to encounter Josh – at school, at cross-country training or competitions.
But time passed and nothing happened. He didn’t blackmail her. The messages kept coming. Sometimes the tone was angry; at others he was apologetic, nostalgic or even loving. His words were never threatening. After a while, he wrote less frequently and the knot in her stomach eased.
His punishment, when he did inflict it months later, was ruthless. And the fallout turned out to be worse than she could ever have imagined.