You’ve got to understand, first up, that I was obsessed with this boy mainly because he wasn’t the sort of boy anyone else would be obsessed with, which left him all to me. He’d kick a football with his friends up the road to school, right up the middle of the road, mind you, weaving round the suburban traffic. There are definite downsides to being a boy, but god, when I was in the dairy picking out lolly mixes and vanilla cokes with my friends and saw that gang of scraggle-headed boys dribbling their football, I would have killed to be one of them. I was sliding change for my coke over the counter when I saw him passing the window with his tatty blue school bag and his stupid haircut, kicking the football, headbutting it into the street, then giving a whoop with one fist in the air. And the boys around him all started laughing and jostling him and mimicking the whoop, flailing their fists around. I snapped the can and took my first cold sip, thinking, yeah. You.
It was his outsider status that caught my attention, and the weird mix of inner anger and total inability to channel it anywhere that won me over. His name was Steele O’Connell, a fact I discovered after uncovering his school report in a pile of shrink-wrapped magazines and junk flyers in his mailbox. He wasn’t doing so good at school. Every subject was labelled ‘working below average,’ and the nice little summary, which you’d expect to be a handful of copy-paste phrases (‘pleasure to teach,’ ‘good attitude,’ ‘warm smile,’) was replaced with a worryingly personalised appeal to his parents. His behaviour, I remember reading, concerns a number of his teachers. He is unable to apply himself or articulate his concentration difficulties to those trying to help him.
His house was on the side of the valley with no sun: black mould on the undersides of the curtains, weatherboards flakey and fattened with moisture, a lawn that looked like it had the mange. His mum was always shouting at him. I can see her now: hollering on the porch, whip-snapping a tea towel. Lucky woman, sitting opposite him at dinner every day. My fascination with him was so deep that it extended to all people in that house: his balding dad who I’d see pushing a trolley round New World sometimes, his little sister called Molly, his older brother who was learning to drive and crashed into a lamp post outside a police station. They all had this sheen to them, this golden glow. I’d see one of them and my heart would jump, and I’d have to look away because they glowed so bright.
I didn’t tell my friends about my crush, but I did rope them into following him around with me. We were the homeschooled crew: the two twins with big, freckled faces who lived on the corner; Maddie Beckham who wore her limp mousey hair in plaits and sucked on the tips. Me. Loretta Combes, who gave major cool-girl vibes but was just born with a raspy voice and a resting bitch face. Quite the posey. Maddie’s parents got her started on lessons at nine-on-the-dot, but the rest of our parents let us wander round in the mornings. If we waited by the U-shaped pohutukawa on Donald Street at 8:30, we were guaranteed to catch Steele O’Connell and his friends as they dribbled their football to school. We tormented them: jeering, whistling, catcalling. Loretta had the foulest names for them. They seemed a bit thrown off, at first. I don’t think they knew what to do about girls a year or two younger calling them names.
It really got to Steele O’Connell. He had one of those faces that flushed easily, and he was flaming red as he passed us most days. One time he was distracted enough to kick his football under a car, where it stuck. We all jeered at him: us in the U-shaped tree, his football friends, and him, beet-red, down on his knees sweeping his hand under the car. I was red too, buzzing with delight, thrilled. As he stood up, I threw my Coke at him, and it hit his shoes and fizzed up white and spitting over the road. Notice me, I thought, and he did: he turned and glared and held my gaze for three thrilling seconds. Then he stamped down hard, squishing the can flat like a bit of roadkill. Chills, actual chills.
XXX
Around this time mum decided I needed to start school. She was a bit shaky on maths and had hit her limit teaching me. I was enrolled in the year below my age group, my knees hitting the gummy underside of the desk, looking over the tops of the heads of the kids around me. They called me ‘homeschooler,’ which as names go is pretty inoffensive. But the second I was in the clutches of that school, free from my friends, those football kicking losers made a beeline for me. They put wood chips in my backpack and poured yoghurt in my PE gear. They chased me with a dead rat and started a game where I was contagious, and touching me made you diseased. I don’t think I could have weathered it, to be honest, if Steele O’Connell wasn’t the ringleader. One day he came up to me, point blank, and threw a lemony drink in my face. Payback for the coke, I guess. I just stood there blinking with drink stinging in my eyes, and I guess he must’ve thought I was a bit weird just standing there goggling at him, so he dropped the empty cup and ran away. Even the way he ran fascinated me—kind of loping, like his feet were slipping round in his shoes. Older brother’s hand-me-downs, probably.
I can’t remember exactly when we began writing the stories. It might have begun back when we stalked him down Donald Street, though it only took off in earnest after I was at school under a strict no-phones policy. The easiest method to communicate with my friends while I languished in class—less clunky than emails, inauspicious enough to avoid slamming the laptop closed when a teacher passed—was Google Docs. The stories started off simple: mostly me imagining how Steele’s day at school was going from the brief glimpses I caught of him, while my friends left comments. Then I got imaginative: Steele’s home life, the obsession he had with Rick and Morty (I’d seen the luminous reflection hanging double-mirrored in his living room window), the crushes he probably had on all of his friends. I, the author, wrote furiously at lunchtime or in class when no one was paying attention to what was on my screen, while live at home my four friends read along, and Loretta Combes, who was wickedly good with a one liner, threw in an edit here and there. Steele O’Connell dropped out of school and joined the army. Steele O’Connell saved a man’s life and got shot in the knee. Wounded and bedecked with a Purple Heart, Steele O’Connell limped back to school, haunted by horrifying PTSD that no one understood, no one but me.
We were characters too. I made sure shit happened to us too, to make sure it was, you know, fair. We were hunted by drug cartels and had to rob a bank to pay them off. One Direction played a surprise concert at our school, and the blond one started dating Loretta Combes. A moving death scene of my English teacher. One of the twins got run over by a truck, I can’t remember why. I killed myself off at some point too, because the others kept complaining that I was giving myself and Steele too much page-time, which I wasn’t. It was a particularly mean accusation because Maddie Beckham made me write about her and this guy down the road hooking up, which was definitely more wish-fulfilment than anything I’d written about myself. Loretta wrote most of that scene, in the end.
For me, the story was therapeutic more than anything. I mean, just try taking bullying seriously if you can look the boy who’s mocking you dead in the eye and think about the kinda shit you’re gonna put him through when you open your laptop. They died, most of those boys, but I kept Steele O’Connell alive. I made him a tortured genius. I killed his parents. I gave him a billion-dollar tech startup: an app he built himself that let you stalk people’s browser histories by taking a photo of them. All his teachers realised they’d missed the makings of a young visionary. I would have given him anything.
Anyway, we were only fifty thousand words in when Maddie’s mum found the document and read a bit. Like, of course it was gonna be Maddie who forgot to log off. Her parents go through all her internet history. And it turns out they read the sex scene Loretta wrote, about Maddie and the guy up the road, and they totally blew up about it. Loretta rang me like, shit girl, come round, emergency meeting. We didn’t invite the twins—they were kinda on the fringes at this point, just lurking and reading without commenting. They were probably pissed about the whole vehicular manslaughter thing.
Anyway, Loretta Combes and I lay on her rug for hours eating skittles and trying to figure out what to do.
I just think we should delete the whole doc, Loretta kept saying. I mean, we could get in major trouble.
And I kept being like, no, we’re not deleting it. This is a piece of vital archaeological evidence. Imagine being fifty and looking back on this! We can’t burn the Library of Alexandria because some bitch read, like, one sus scene.
And in the end Loretta was like, chill, it’s just a story. Which pissed me off, because I was the one who’d written the whole thing. Easy for her to say, when she’d just chucked in a few that’s-what-she-said jokes and the one chapter that got us caught.
I was so scared she’d delete it out of the blue that I printed it first thing in the morning at school. Only I must have accidentally hit print twice, because a warm stack of double-sided pages was left on the out-tray of the school printer. And here’s the kicker: some girl found it and gave it to Steele. Which was really funny to me: imagine finding this elaborate story about a guy getting psychologically damaged in war and then founding a tech company, and assuming he wrote it himself.
I knew Steele had the story, because I saw him reading it in the gutter outside school. Like, in the gutter, sitting on the curb, feet on a storm-drain cover, flipping through a huge stack of paper with a kind of look on his face that I’ve never seen before or since. He lifted his head, and suddenly we were looking dead at each other. I caught my breath; my whole body tingled like someone had poured cold water down my back. His eyes were chill grey (‘silver-Audi grey,’ I’d called them in the story), and he was looking at me with total and absolute recognition. He knew me: not for who I was, but what I was, the way a wolf might size you up as predator or prey.
I was in a wild panic all evening. This was a boy who’d targeted me for months, who had no concerns about doing me bodily harm—if getting a drink thrown in my face counted as bodily harm. Did he know I was the author? From the way he’d looked at me outside school, I guessed he did. All night I tossed and turned, running through the story in my head—the dead parents (struck by lightning), the war scenes, the Rick and Morty references. Surely it wasn’t that bad? Quite complimentary in places, especially the bajillions of dollars he made from his tech startup. Still, I didn’t want to face him. I coughed up a storm the next morning and told mum I could under no circumstances be expected to go to school, but she saw through the charade and sent me off anyway. Doomed, done for.
The first strange thing I noticed was that Steele O’Connell wasn’t hanging out with his friends anymore. They circled me in the corridor at lunchtime, laughing weakly, unzipping my pencil case and upending it on the floor, but without Steele there to ringlead they didn’t seem to know what to do next. I went to look for him, leaving my pencil case, while they stood around kicking my stationary, confused.
He was in the library. He was reading, eating an apple with total nonchalance. He glanced up from his book, and I dived for a magazine, face aflame, alight with panic. I could feel him looking at me.
Game on. I lay low, waiting for his next move, while he stayed cooly above it: not acknowledging me, separating from his friends. He joined extracurriculars so he didn’t have to sit alone at lunch—debating (second speaker), big band (the triangle), peer tutoring (maths). He walked to school with his older brother, the one who crashed his car outside the police station, and I—who was not on speaking terms with my old friends anymore—would keep half a block behind them. At night he kept his curtains open, and I saw the same Rick and Morty episode play three times. I pirated the show and skimmed through every episode til I found the right one. Season 4, episode 7: Promortyus. Quick google—a wordplay on Prometheus, an ancient Greek hero who gave fire to mortals. What did it mean? Death by fire? Acquisition of secret knowledge? He was playing games with me.
One Monday, I arrived late to school to be met with thirty heads turning in my direction as I walked in the classroom door. Whispers rippled around the room as I sat down. The girl beside me circled her stuff with her arms and shot me a suspicious look. The guy who sat opposite me was staring, mouth half-open. He tore a bit of paper from the front of his maths book, wrote something, and slid it over to me.
Have you read it?
I raised my eyebrows, confused, even as the first inklings of dread unfurled in my blood. Oh no, no. Making the story public was too far, even for Steele O’Connell.
At morning tea, the school was alight with gossip. A Google Doc had been shared, and the link was being passed round like a throat infection. I wrangled the link off a girl two years below by cornering her in the bathroom and holding her phone over the toilet. She relented. I stood in the toilet stall, scrolling, burning with horror. The full thing, all fifty thousand words, up on an open access doc. A hundred and fifty accounts viewing it simultaneously, more appearing every moment. The war. The drug cartels. Steele O’Connell’s parents getting struck by lightning. Comments were flooding in on the right-hand margin, new ones appearing every time I refreshed the page.
Steele was at band practice. I ran halfway there, then slowed down, stopped. No; a confrontation would mean an admission of my authorship. I leaned against the wall, breathing slowly. He couldn’t have shared the doc anyway; he only had a paper copy. Who had shared it then? Loretta? Maddie? I double checked the doc and saw that it was a copy of the original, not linked to my own account. Technically, technically, no one knew I was behind it. A girl down the far end of the corridor was reading the scene where Steele gets shot in the knee aloud to a group of rapt friends. Gasps. Shrieking laughter.
I was called into the principal’s office that afternoon, by which time it seemed the entire school had read the story. The school’s unofficial meme page on Instagram had run polls on what everyone’s favourite chapter was. The lost-and-found Facebook group had posted an announcement that One Direction would be performing in the cafeteria next week. As I walked to the principal’s office, two breathless girls ran up to ask if I’d written the story. I brushed them off, even as I stood very obviously outside the principal’s door.
The principal’s office was small and smelly and had a bookcase of ring binders, and the principal was dressed in a way I can only describe as psych-ward chic: white shirt, white pants, rubber soled shoes. Mum sat in front of the desk, her handbag on her knees, staring daggers at me. The principal cleared his throat. He had (he told us) received a worrying email from some friends of mine, who were concerned about a story I’d written involving them and some of my fellow students. Not only had I depicted one of these friends being run over at high speed by a truck, but I had written numerous other concerning passages about a fellow student, Steele O’Connell.
He rotated his monitor and asked if I recognised the document. It wasn’t the open-access doc that had been shared with the whole school, but the original: shared only with my circle. In one corner hovered the active profiles of the twins. Shitheads. I should have guessed.
The page onscreen was Loretta’s sex scene about Maddie Beckham. I guess he’d been reading it. Perv. He asked, with grim authority, if I’d written it. Which is a stupid question: it’s easy to check the edit history. Given that he seemed to not have discovered this feature yet, I flat out denied it. Nope, sorry, never heard of it.
Mum asked if he could clarify: he’d said fifty thousand words? She sounded impressed. I’d never managed to write an essay longer than the five-page mark.
I told him, coldly, that I didn’t know Steele at all. Total strangers.
Perhaps, the principal said, we could get Steele in here to check.
My heart was in my mouth; a giddy swoop came over me. Done for. Screwed.
When they brought Steele in he was awkwardly scrolling up the purple class-absence slip. He looked at the floor while the principal explained the situation. Then he asked: can I read some?
Dead silence for two minutes as he leaned over the principal’s chair and read. He was sounding out the words in a whisper under his breath, and I looked at the carpet and prayed for death. The secret signs, the TV screen, the look he’d given me—had I read too much into it? Had he tossed away the story and forgotten me? Was I, after all, just a footnote to him, utterly beneath his notice?
He glanced up, and for a whisper of a second our eyes met.
Oh yeah, Steele said. I recognise this. I wrote it.
You wrote this about yourself, the principal said.
Yep.
The war scenes? The drug cartels? The, erm… this rather explicit scene which appears to be about real people?
Steele nodded along, half-smiling, and I stared at him with terror and hatred and amazement. Was he sticking his neck out for me?
The principal scratched his head, looking baffled. He asked, uncertainly, what had driven Steele to write such an unusual story.
Well, Steele said, still with that self-satisfied smile, it’s not like anyone else is gonna write a story about me.
I’m sorry, mum cut in. But does this boy admit to writing a novel involving my daughter without her consent?
Yep, Steele said, looking at me. I guess it does.
And in a flash I knew what he was doing. He was taking credit for my artistry, my work; reclaiming the narrative and making himself the main character of the school’s biggest drama, wresting my stardom from me before I’d even had the chance to enjoy it.
It’s a real shame, the principal said, that this has happened, Steele. Your teachers tell me your marks have improved dramatically in the past month. You’ve been outstanding in extracurriculars recently. It really seemed like you were turning over a new leaf.
He didn’t even bother looking at me, but if he had, he’d have seen every fuck-you in my soul channeling straight out of my eyes like lasers. I made you, Steele O’Connell. I noticed you first. Any friend you ever make, any girl who loves you, they’re gonna be meeting my creation.
Oh, Steele said, smiling widely. No—I have turned a new leaf. This is very much part of the new leaf.
