and Wesley was determined to pass. He scooted his chair across, almost dizzy with pride and fear and excitement.
The first click saved all changes to the website.
He hesitated, just for a moment, before his second click sent the email.
They all spun their chairs around to watch the fallout.
An email notification popped, and Kat expected it to be from Miss Jalloh, sending through her ‘improvement expectations’. Instead it was from a sender she didn’t recognise, so it had to be the trolls. Usually she deleted without reading, but it was impossible to ignore the subject line: THE WALDGRAVE WANK BANK IS OPEN FOR BUSINESS. The panic in her chest, the corrosive demon of anxiety she always had to fight to suppress, began to stir awake.
It was different to any email they had sent her before. All it contained was a link to the home page of her website. And instead of being addressed only to her, it had been sent to the entire school directory.
With shaking hands, she clicked the link.
For a moment, Kat could not quite comprehend what she was seeing. The trolls had somehow hacked her website and replaced the welcome video with pornography. A photograph of a dark-skinned woman, naked but for long white socks, her hand between her legs.
And Kat’s face, deftly superimposed over the woman’s own so you could hardly see the join.
Around the room, people began to gasp and laugh.
*
Wesley couldn’t keep his legs from dancing as they waited for her to react. She stared at her screen, body rigid, before she lowered it from view and spun to look around the room.
All three of them turned away just in time, Luke stifling a laugh in his thick palm. Wesley stared hard at the assortment of paper spread over his desk.
‘She’s going to lose it,’ whispered Luke.
It seemed that everybody had opened the email now, those at the centre tables gravitating to the nearest screen to see what the fuss was about. Most looked shocked, glancing uncertainly at Kat, while others laughed and whistled.
‘Wahey, Waldgrave!’ cheered one of the boys.
Mr Buttercliff looked up from his phone. ‘What’s all this noise about?’
Wesley risked glancing back. Kat was staring at her screen, paralysed, as the noise around her continued to grow. He felt a stab of panic that she might have figured it out, that she would point the finger at him and this would all come crashing down on his head.
It was only when she finally moved to log in to her website that he wilted with relief.
They had won.
Kat’s whole body seemed to vibrate and her skin felt white hot. The images were doctored, fakes designed to mess with her head. Still, seeing herself like that, everybody seeing her like that, made her body feel as if it might disintegrate, and she would let it so that everybody would stop looking.
Behind her, Buttercliff heaved himself up from the desk and began walking towards the nearest PC. There was only one thing she could do to stop it. If the trolls were willing to do this, there was no way she could beat them.
Kat took a final look at the website she had built herself: her name in custom pixel art for the banner, animated sprites of Backwash characters dancing underneath, the developer diaries and blog posts, random videos and memes she had shared. It was supposed to be a sanctuary for her personality, her true self squeezed into a glass bottle and entrusted to the departing tide.
She wanted to scream, stand tall in front of them all and demand to know who had done this. Instead, she opened her website options and navigated to the delete menu.
Here, at the end, was nothing but defeat.
Are you sure? it asked.
There was no other choice. She pressed the button.
Luke refreshed the tab. Her website was gone.
‘Fucking yes, mate!’ he hissed.
Across the room, Kat had closed her MacBook and pressed her forehead into the edge of the desk. The adrenaline that had surged through Wesley moments before was quickly ebbing, his triumph eaten away by a growing nausea.
Buttercliff was leaning into a screen, demanding to be shown what had caused the commotion, but the girls there refused to relent.
‘I’ll show you, sir!’ shouted one of the boys.
Looking back, Wesley saw Kat grip the edge of her desk as if trying to tear chunks of it loose. Her whole body shook, too violently to be caused only by tears.
Melodrama, Wesley told himself. TrumourPixel had warned them about this; girls like