A Girl Called Shameless. Laura Steven

sawdust. I could even start a savings account. Imagine!

      And so I rise to my feet. “I volunteer as tribute,” I say, voice clear and confident.

      “Er, what?” Chef Man huffs haughtily, folding his arms across his snowdrift of a chest. He looks disgruntled. [Can you be gruntled? Because that’s a highly entertaining word.] “Look, do you want a job or not?”

      “Affirmative, sir. Absolutely I do. Very much.”

      “Good. You start Friday.”

      “Roger that, sir,” I reply, unsure why I’m behaving like an army cadet all of a sudden. Thankfully I resist the urge to salute and/or begin leopard crawling toward the kitchen.

      With that he barges back into the kitchen, so forcefully the swinging doors are almost wrenched from their hinges. I sink back down into the chair, blinking with disbelief.

      “Dude. That was awesome,” Ajita says, patting me awkwardly on the shoulder. Physical affection is roughly as appealing to her as squatting on a cactus, so I appreciate the gesture.

      There’s a faint buzzing in my ears. I assume this is what adrenaline feels like, but as a person who has never participated in sports I cannot be sure. “What in the actual name of fuckery?” I ask, stunned.

      “Eloquent as ever,” Ajita congratulates me.

      “Seriously. I’ve tried to get a job since the day I turned fourteen. How was that so easy?”

      “I’m trying very hard not to make a joke about your mom being easy,” Ajita replies.

      “Considering that my mother has been dead for over a decade, I appreciate your self-restraint.”

      Honestly, I cannot believe this. I have a job. I mean, there’s every chance I could royally screw up training. This is me we’re talking about. If I lay eyes on a tub of Greek yoghurt, for example, I may just start rocking in a corner due to post-traumatic stress. [This is an in-joke from Book One. If you recall, I accidentally touched my foofer after chopping chilies and had to seek relief in a pot of . . . Well, you get the idea.]

      But if I manage not to ruin this gig like I do all other facets of my existence, I might actually have money for the first time in my life. I may actually be able to pay for my own milkshakes, for once. Like, I’m not going to go crazy and stop leeching off Ajita’s Netflix account or anything, but still. Think of the possibilities. A new toothbrush! Bras with underwires! Limitless potential!

      “So, where were we?” I ask, not wanting to derail the Bitches Bite Back meeting by turning my entire life round. “Something about website wizardry and . . . corum fodes? Or forum codes, even.” I’m so excited the words are falling out of my mouth like potatoes.

      However, at some point between me turning my life round and my potatoey sentence Meg has blanched pure white. Ajita, who’s sitting on the same side of the booth, peers over her shoulder at the laptop screen, immediately beginning to chew the inside of her lip.

      “Oh fuck,” she murmurs, horror written all over her beautiful face. “Um, Iz . . .”

      Immediately I’m terrified it’s something to do with my scandal. The website has resurfaced, or the nudes have been picked up by another gossip site, or Senator Vaughan is back on his soapbox about family values. Familiar dread blooms in my gut, cramping painfully.

      “What is it?” I ask, too scared to even crack a joke about the fact Meg is so tense she looks like she’s trying to pass a kidney stone.

      “Another girl’s nude leaked,” Ajita mumbles. “It’s bad. Oh shit, no, not just a nude. A sex tape. Oh . . . oh fuck.”

      Meg goes to turn the laptop to show me, but I gesture frantically, shaking my hands no. “Please. Don’t. I can’t look. I don’t want to.”

      “I get it,” Meg replies softly.

      “Who is it?” I ask.

      “Another senior. Hazel Parker. You know her?”

      I shake my head, but then realize her name is familiar. “She’s a cheerleader, right?”

      “Judging by the pompoms, I would assume so,” Meg says gravely.

      Acid churns in my stomach. “Is it on a blog? Or YouTube?” I remember the World Class Whore website Danny made to publicly shame me, and it’s still so fresh I can feel the sharp pangs of horror all over again.

      Ajita shakes her head. “A group chat. They added everyone from school.” Sure enough, one glance at my phone shows a bunch of new notifications from a group chat entitled “Hazel ‘Pompom’ Parker.” After the original video, which I blur my eyes in order not to look at, there are a few dozen comments – mainly from guys, because guys – about the nude. Critiques of her body, her technique, and, inevitably, the eggplant emoji followed by the water squirt emoji. Her friends from the cheer squad have posted angry messages demanding that the chat is deleted or they’ll go to the police, but that just makes me feel even more sick. There’s nothing the police can do when revenge porn is legal.

      Oh God. Hazel made some shitty comments online when my garden-bench picture was leaked. Something about how shameless I am, about how dirty my behavior was. And now the same thing is happening to her.

      A dark, spiteful part of me feels an iota of satisfaction at the way the world has dealt her revenge, but the bigger, overwhelming part just feels terrible for her. No matter how shitty a person she is, she doesn’t deserve this. Nobody does. Sympathy crests in my chest.

      What’s Hazel doing now? Has she seen it yet? Or is she enjoying her last moments of blissful ignorance before her world is turned upside down?

      I remember the way I felt when the nudes first dropped. Disbelief, along with roiling nausea and a desperate desire to wake up and find this is all just a bad dream. And the paranoia, sharp and immediate. The feeling that every single person I made eye contact with had now seen me naked, from the principal of Edgewood to the homeless man who sleeps rough on our housing estate. My skin crawls at the memory, as vivid as the day it happened.

      No. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone.

      “Are you okay?” Ajita asks. Her teeth work away at her inner lip. Meg’s eyes are wide and sympathetic. Their pity makes me feel two inches tall.

      “Yeah, fine,” I lie. Then, despite my best efforts to bury it deep down in my chest, emotion explodes through me in savage waves, so intense it leaves me gasping for breath.

      Anger. White hot, furious. Pure, unfiltered rage, so potent and visceral it makes me feel more wild animal than teenage girl.

      Nothing is ever going to change. No matter how well our sex-doll sketches go down, no matter how many chords we strike with the BBB fanbase, this shit will continue to happen to girl after girl after girl.

      I grip the table, knuckles whitening like the flames inside me. I want to smash something, want to feel something shatter in my fist. I eye the glass pepper shaker longingly.

      “This is going to keep happening as long as it’s legal,” I spit out. “Teenage girls are going to keep having their lives ruined, and if they’re over eighteen, the douchebags who leak their nudes are totally off the hook. It makes me sick that you can ruin someone’s life and face no consequences.”

      “Maybe if we keep going with Bitches Bite Back, we’ll make guys see that –”

      “No, we won’t,” I burst out, interrupting an alarmed Meg. I pound my fist on the Formica table, cutlery rattling in its jar. “We won’t make guys see anything. We don’t have the scope.”

      Ajita and Meg exchange a worried glance. I don’t think either of them have ever seen me like this. Honestly, before the scandal, I wasn’t an angry person. Self-absorbed and immature, maybe, but I’ve never felt this way before. So easily irritated, so quick to erupt. It’s like my blood has been replaced by molten lava, scorching me from the inside out.

      The