Little Sister

by Aimee Said

  I tilted my head a little to read the message, which was still open on the screen:

  Hello, Miss Popularity. Everybody’s talking about you on Facebook, and they’re begging for more. I’m saving the best for last. Hugs, Camille

  My stomach lurched.

  “Who is she?” demanded Mum.

  “I don’t know.” Larrie’s eyes welled with tears. “Someone – this Camille, whoever she is – texted me a photo the day after the end-of-school party. It came from a withheld number.”

  “This photo,” said Dad. “Was it of you and Beth, er …”

  Larrie nodded. “She said she’d send it to Mr Masch and the school board, that I’d be stood down as school president.”

  “Larrie! Why didn’t you tell us about this?”

  “Beth thought Camille’d give up if she saw that we weren’t bothered about it, so I ignored it.”

  “But she didn’t give up?”

  Larrie shook her head.

  “Are you being blackmailed?” asked Dad.

  “No. I thought so at first but when I asked what she wanted in return for deleting the photo she said there was nothing I could do. Then, last week, she sent it to the members of the student council and when that didn’t work she put it on Facebook.”

  “And you have no idea who this Camille girl is?” said Dad.

  “It’s a fake name,” I told him. “There’s no Camille at Whitlam, and there hasn’t been for over ten years.”

  “What kind of person would want to put so much stress on you during your final exams?” asked Mum.

  “If it’s that Mitch Doherty,” began Dad, “I’ll–”

  “It’s not Mitch,” said Larrie. “I asked him about it after the very first message and he swore he knew nothing about it. Mitch and I didn’t split on the best terms, but he’s not the sort of person who’d do something like this.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” asked Mum.

  Larrie blinked, trying not to cry. “I wasn’t sure how you’d react about me and Beth, and about the photo. You’re so used to me being your perfect little girl, I didn’t want to disappoint you. Especially not this year.”

  “You could never disappoint us, Larrie,” said Dad. His eyes met mine across the table. “Neither of you could.”

  While we were talking, Mum’s Yorkshire puddings rose and then collapsed and shrivelled in the oven, next to the dried-out leg of lamb and withered vegies. It didn’t matter since no one was hungry any more. Dad said that he and Mum and Larrie had a long overdue talk to have and asked whether I’d mind leaving them to it.

  I threw the uneaten food into the bin while the three of them discussed what Larrie should do about Camille. Ordinarily, I would have been furious to be relegated to the kitchen, but tonight there was something comforting about the familiar routine of scraping and rinsing and loading the dishwasher.

  Mum came in when I was wiping down the counters. She reached over and squeezed my hand. “You’re like a bull in a china shop sometimes, Allie. But you also say what needs to be said.”

  Al Miller let the cat out of the bag.

  35

  The house was silent the next morning. Mum, Dad and Larrie had stayed up talking for hours after I went to bed, so I figured I was probably the first one up. I was relieved; after last night I didn’t know what to say to any of them. I’d dozed off to the sound of their muffled conversation sometime after midnight, but I’d heard enough by then to know that Larrie and Beth had been together since Easter and that they planned to defer uni next year to volunteer at an orangutan sanctuary in Borneo.

  I switched on my computer and went downstairs to make some breakfast. There was a bag of croissants from Petite Cafe on the kitchen bench, next to a note from Larrie saying she’d gone to Beth’s to study. I took two croissants and a glass of orange juice back to my room.

  Usually, my Sunday online routine went something like: check email; check Facebook; check Celebrity Meltdown – unless Maz was online for a chat, in which case gossiping about the latest news on Facebook took precedence. There was no sign of Maz this morning and I couldn’t face either my email (which at last check had been clogged with Larrie-related message forwards and nagging messages from Simon about the genetics assignment) or Facebook.

  I selected Celebrity Meltdown from my list of favourite sites. Splashed across the home page was a photo of the latest young starlet caught frolicking with a married actor on a beach in St Tropez. Yesterday’s top story (nude photos of last year’s Best Actor Oscar winner, taken ten years ago, when he was an out-of-work drama student) was already relegated to a headline in the sidebar.

  I was thinking back to what Mr Dempster said about people inviting scandalous publicity into their lives when a chat window popped up. I began typing without reading the greeting, keen to fill Maz in on the latest developments.

  Al-oha: Mum and Dad know about Larrie and Beth!! I blurted it out at dinner last night.

  I paused for a moment to let Maz register the gravity of what I’d done, knowing there’d be a string of OMGs followed by a demand for gory details.

  Simon_says: Did you get the reaction you’d hoped for?

  Al-oha: Oh. Never mind. Thought you were Maz.

  Simon_says: Sorry to disappoint you.

  Al-oha: What do you want?

  Simon_says: World peace, an end to poverty, action on climate change …

  Al-oha: I have to get offline now, Mum’s calling.

  Simon_says: Wait. You haven’t responded to my emails about the assignment. It’s due tomorrow.

  Al-oha: Shiz. I forgot. I don’t have all my data yet.

  Simon_says: It’s. Due. Tomorrow.

  Al-oha: I. Know. But I’ve had a lot on my mind lately. Sister scandal, ex-boyfriend boasting on Facebook, grounded till I finish uni, etc., etc.

  Simon_says: Do you want me to come round now and help you?

  I paused before agreeing. There wasn’t much I felt like doing less than spending a few hours with Simon. Other than spending a few hours trying to do the work by myself.

  When the doorbell rang, I gave my bedroom the once-over to make sure there weren’t any undies hanging out of my drawers or anything else that might give Simon the idea that this was anything other than a professional appointment. Satisfied that everything was in order, I went downstairs and let him in.

  Mum raced out of the kitchen, “Allison Miller! What part of grounded don’t you – oh, hello, Simon.”

  “Hi, Mrs Miller,” said Mr Manners Simon. “I hope you don’t mind me coming over, but our Science assignment’s due tomorrow and I said I’d give Al a hand.”

  “Of course that’s fine,” said Mum, her expression softening. “I’ll bring up some tea in a little while.”

  The way things had been between us lately, I wasn’t sure whether Simon coming over was a sign that he wasn’t angry with me any more, or if he just wanted to see me suffer for the sake of getting my assignment done. But it seemed like he thought I’d been punished enough on Facebook, and he was back to his usual, tactless self.

  “Maz said you were pretty upset about what Josh wrote,” he said when we got to my room.

  “I’m fine now,” I said stiffly.

  “If it helps, Nicko told me that after we left, Josh got stuck into the punch and passed out on the floor with Prad’s sneaker for a pillow.”

  It did make me feel a tiny bit better, but I didn’t want to talk about Josh with Simon. Under any circumstances. “Can we get on with the assignment?”

  Simon pulled a wad of diagrams and notes out of his bag. “I brought the report I did on my family last year. I thought it might give you some ideas.”

  I flicked through the pages he handed me. There was a complicated series of graphs made up of LLs and Lls and Rrs, followed by long paragraphs under subheadings like “Mendelian traits” and “heterozygous alleles”. My eyes hurt even skim-reading it.

  “I’ll read while you fill in your gene wheel,” he said. “Then we
can see which results are significant enough to include in your report, and decide how to illustrate them.”

  I took out the worksheet I’d completed with Mum and Dad and opened my textbook, but I’d paid so little attention in class for the past couple of weeks I had no idea where to start. There was nothing for it but to flatter Simon into helping me.

  “Good book?” I asked.

  “Very.” He held it up for me to see the cover. It was called Computer Forensics for Beginners. “It’s for a course I’m taking in the holidays.”

  “Interesting,” I said, even though hearing about Simon’s adventures at summer geekschool bored me to death. “What’s computer forensics when it’s at home?”

  “It’s a type of forensic science. It uses evidence from computers and digital storage devices.”

  I stifled a yawn. “Fascinating. What’s it used for?”

  “Loads of things,” said Simon, leaping at the chance to show off his nerdage knowledge. “It’s often used in legal cases to prove that there was some kind of electronic activity, or that a file’s been manipulated or a server hacked, but it can also be used to analyse documents or data, say if you need to prove who authored them.”

  This was starting to get surprisingly interesting. “Really? Could it be used to track down who put that photo of Larrie and Beth on Facebook? Or the phone number the anonymous messages Larrie’s getting are being sent from?”

  “Yeah, probably. None of what they’ve done is exactly sophisticated. I mean, all you need to set up a fake Facebook account is an email address, and anyone who knows the login details can manage Whitlam’s group …”

  Listening to Simon speak, I could’ve smacked myself for not working it out sooner. I interrupted his list of ways someone could hide the sending phone number in text messages.

  “Why?”

  Simon looked at me like I was mentally deficient. “So that the person you’re messaging doesn’t know–”

  “You know what I mean, Simon: why are you doing this to Larrie? To me!”

  The colour drained from Simon’s face. “Are you accusing me of … ? Why would I … ?”

  “I don’t know why. Maybe you were trying to make me look bad so Josh would dump me. Or maybe you thought I’d suddenly fall in love with you if the rest of the school turned against me and you were my only friend. Was that it?”

  Simon sat very still. His eyes flicked over my face as if he was trying to work out whether I was serious. The intensity of his stare made me turn away.

  After a minute, he stood and stuffed the papers and his book back into his bag. “You have no idea,” he said quietly.

  I expected to hear the front door slam, but, in true Simon fashion, he closed it politely behind himself.

  Al Miller smells a rat.

  36

  Mum appeared in my doorway five minutes later with a cup of tea in each hand. “What happened to Simon?”

  “He, uh, had to go,” I told her, taking the steaming mug she held out to me. I wasn’t ready to reveal my discovery to Mum for fear she’d say it was my fault; that I’d driven Simon to take drastic measures. “Mrs Lutz called about an emergency at the pharmacy.”

  “But what about your assignment? Simon said it’s due tomorrow.”

  “It’s fine. I can finish it on my own.”

  Mum’s doubtful frown made me regret all the times I’d used needing Simon’s help with homework as an excuse to not do it myself. “Okay, but I think you’d better ask Larrie to give it the once-over tonight. She’ll be back from Beth’s in a few hours.”

  Shiz. That was all I needed. Even though Larrie claimed to be too busy to help me with anything around the house, I had no doubt she’d make time in her schedule to show Mum and Dad how rubbish I was at her star subject. I reopened my textbook, highlighter in hand, determined to prove them all wrong.

  Four hours later I thought I had it figured out; I’d even managed to work out a punnet square showing how Larrie and I had both inherited the gene for green eyes from Dad’s side of the family. I marked the sections on one gene wheel with my characteristics, and the sections on another with Larrie’s, and compared them side by side. It was no surprise that they were almost identical, but it was what the wheel didn’t show that interested me more.

  I’d hoped Mum would forget about getting Larrie to check my assignment, but there was no such luck.

  “Okay,” said Larrie when Mum asked her at dinner.

  “Are you sure?” I said. “Don’t you have to study for your History exam tomorrow?”

  “Studying can wait another fifteen minutes. Anyway, if I don’t know the key dates of the Russian Revolution by now I never will.”

  “But you–”

  Mum cut me off. “Allison, it’s very generous of your sister to offer to help you. Now say thank you and go and get on with it. Dad and I will clear the table.”

  Larrie wheeled her ergonomically correct desk chair into my room and scrolled through my assignment on screen. I sat next to her, studying her face for telltale headshaking and tsks at my mistakes, waiting for her to tell me that everything I’d written was wrong.

  “This is actually pretty good,” she said when she finished. “My only suggestion is that you use more colour. Morales is a sucker for colour.”

  We went through the assignment together, adding bright colours to the charts and tables. It was the first time in months Larrie had been into my room for any reason other than to tell me off or demand I do something for her. So long that it felt weird to be sitting together at my desk receiving sisterly advice. But good weird.

  Larrie closed the document and turned to face me. “I’m really sorry you’ve been dragged into this mess with Camille. If we’d known things at school would get this out of hand, Beth and I would’ve told someone about it sooner.”

  “S’okay,” I muttered, studying the stitching on my jeans.

  “What’s wrong, Al?” Larrie sounded concerned.

  “Nothing. It’s just … I don’t know how to react when you talk about ‘Beth and I’. It’s taking me some time to get used to the idea.”

  “If it makes you feel any better, it took me a while too. But being with Beth makes me really happy, and I’ve realised that’s all that matters. I spent two years with Mitch, trying to be the ideal girlfriend, and dress the way he liked and act the way he thought a girlfriend should. With Beth, I can be myself. Isn’t that what everyone wants?”

  “I s’pose, but …”

  “But what?”

  I asked the question that had been on my mind since I saw the photo of them together: “Would Beth still make you happy if she was a guy?”

  Larrie shrugged. “I can’t answer that. If Beth was a guy, she wouldn’t be Beth. But if you’re asking whether I’m a lesbian, I think so, yes. Are you okay with that?”

  I thought about it seriously for the first time. Not about what people would think of me if Larrie was gay, but how I felt about it, and about Larrie. The two things had been so entwined in my mind, that it was hard to separate them now.

  I meant it when I told people that Jay and Dylan were the most in-love couple I knew. And I hadn’t thought twice about signing the petition for the gay–straight alliance. So why was I having such a hard time when it came to my own sister? Patchouli’s theory about comparing myself with Larrie came back to me. Maybe she was sharper than she seemed.

  I’d been silent for so long that Larrie looked worried, as if she was scared to hear my answer.

  “Whoever you choose to be with is okay with me,” I told her.

  She hugged me. “Thank you, Al. I really needed to know that.”

  “But Beth’s way too nice for you,” I whispered in her ear.

  “I know,” she whispered back. “I’m very lucky.”

  I was finishing my cornflakes when Larrie came into the kitchen the next morning. Judging by the jumbo-size bags under her eyes, she’d hardly slept. I wanted to put her mind at ease by telling her that by the tim
e she finished her History exam I’d have “Camille” sorted out once and for all, but she was engrossed in her study notes and I couldn’t risk wrecking the delicate truce we seemed to have reached.

  I was about to beat a friendly-but-hasty retreat before we had a chance to start bickering out of habit, when Larrie sighed and pulled her phone out of her pocket. Her face crumpled when she saw the message that had just come through.

  “Camille?” I asked.

  She handed me the phone.

  Good luck for the exam today, sweetie. Not that any uni will let you in once they know what you’re really like. XOX Camie

  “You know it’s not true, though, Larrie. You heard Mum and Dad. Unis aren’t like Whitlam, or even Kingston – they don’t care about some random photo.”

  “I know, but it still hurts to know that someone hates you so much that they want to wreck your life.” Larrie slumped facedown onto the table, her shoulders heaving with every sob.

  Mum came in to refill her coffee mug on her way to get dressed. “What’ve you done now?” she asked me.

  “It’s not Al,” sniffed Larrie. “There was another message.”

  While Mum comforted Larrie, I did the only thing I could think of to stop things getting any worse and slipped Larrie’s phone into the front pocket of my bag. At least that way Camille/Simon couldn’t upset Larrie any more before her exam, and if he tried to send her any more messages from school I might even manage to catch him in the act.

  On the bus I sat in what had become my usual seat, behind the driver. I was too busy thinking of ways to make Simon pay for his antics to even notice whether Rochelle Sullivan was there.

  The more I thought about it, the more obvious it became that Simon was behind the whole thing:

  He had the motive (me).

  He had the means (he spent so much time fixing the computers in the office he’d have no trouble getting the admin details for Whitlam’s Facebook group to give “Camille” access).

  He had the knowledge (nerd factor: google times a hundred to the power of infinity).