by Oli White
Ella opens her mouth to lay into Hunter again, but I shoot her a stern look. We need to keep this on track or it’ll all be for nothing.
“Oh come on, Jack, it’s not that bad,” Callum says. “You and your little GenNext mates are all going to make a bit of money out of this; stop being so noble, before I throw up.” He takes a pen out of his top pocket and hands me a sheet of paper, already signed. “Now here’s the assurance you asked for. Read that first, and then sign the contract.”
I look at the piece of paper—the “assurance”—which, of course, doesn’t specifically state what the content of the video actually is, just refers to it as “the contentious matter under discussion.” Callum’s covering his back until the very end, of course. I might not understand all the fancy legal jargon, but this document looks well dodgy to me. It’s not exactly watertight. He must think we’re completely stupid. He’s still talking, gesturing to the contract.
“Of course, there’ll be more detailed paperwork to follow, but this preliminary agreement confirms the sum of money we agreed and my controlling interest in the GenNext website, channel and brand. Is that understood?”
Ella and I nod slowly in unison and Callum hands me the pen and one of the contracts.
“So, you two are signing on behalf of the entire team for now.”
“That’s right,” I say, sitting down at the desk and flicking through the contract to the spot where I’m supposed to sign my name.
“Good. Let’s hurry it up then.” Callum makes a grand sweeping gesture, motioning to me to sign. I lift up the pen as if I’m about to do just that . . . But as it touches the paper, I pull away again. Then, my heart going nineteen to the dozen, I get up and throw the pen down on the desk.
Callum’s eyes widen. “Something wrong, Jack?”
“Yes, something is wrong,” I say, my jaw tight. “What’s wrong is you and your Herald Media lapdogs thinking that GenNext would ever, ever get involved with a tragic, misguided criminal like you.”
“I . . . I beg your pardon?” Callum says, clearly unable to believe what he’s hearing. “Is this a joke?”
“Are we laughing?” Ella snaps.
Callum loosens his tie and steps forward, his mouth tight and angry.
“Jack, tell me you’re not stupid enough to think you can jerk me around. You know very well what’s going to happen if you don’t sign this.”
“You’ve been told enough times,” Hunter says. “Just sign it, Penman.”
I can hear the desperation in Hunter’s voice; it’s obvious to me that he doesn’t want the tape going out any more than Ella does, but he’s completely out of his depth. Callum, on the other hand, doesn’t care who he hurts—that’s very clear.
“The thing is, I don’t really believe you’d actually go ahead and put a sex tape of a seventeen-year-old girl all over the internet just to make us sign a contract,” I tell Callum. “Even you. I just don’t believe it.”
“Of course he will, you freak, and then it’ll be your fault!” Hunter sounds like he’s about to explode.
Callum remains subzero cool. “Trust me, Jack, the tape will find its way out there, and the best part about it is, no one will be able to trace it back to me. So go on, you just try me.” His eyes are drilling into mine. “When it comes down to it, I don’t think you’re willing to risk it, are you? Not really. You’re savvy enough to know when you’ve been beaten.”
There’s a tense silence as the four of us face one another in the center of the room. I feel dizzy with what Ella and I are about to do, but there’s no going back now.
Callum steps forward again, losing his cool at last and spitting out his words.
“I’m sorry, but this is getting boring. Are we doing this, or do I put the video out? It’ll only take one text message. What do you say, Ella?”
Ella paces the room, pretending to consider.
“You know,” she says thoughtfully, “I don’t think I’m going to sign after all. Jack, what about you?”
“No, I don’t think I’m going to sign either, Ella,” I say, matching her tone.
“Are you two taking the piss? That’s really not a good idea,” Callum says, the cool facade slipping completely. Now he sounds vicious. “Look, if you don’t want Ella’s friends, her family, seeing the video, then you’d better listen to me . . .”
Ella spins around, moving toward Callum furiously.
“No, you listen to me. I don’t care if you release the video, do you understand? I. Don’t. Care. It won’t be easy for me if it goes out, it’ll be completely hideous in fact, but do you know what? It won’t be anywhere near as disgusting as having to hand over our brilliant, smart, innovative, wonderful idea—an idea we’ve built and nurtured and loved for months—to a heartless corporation headed up by a horrible human being like you, who’ll turn GenNext into mainstream mindless rubbish and ruin it. Do you understand me? I’d rather just get it all over with and then go to the police and tell them everything you’ve both done. So go on: do your worst.”
Hunter leans back against the desk, his eyes flicking nervously from Ella to Callum to me and back again.
“Ella, I’m sorry,” he blurts. “I never wanted this. It’s just . . . he will do it. I’ve seen him blackmail people before; hurt people even . . . he’s a maniac . . .”
Callum laughs. “You are pathetic, Hunter. Seriously, I’ve never thought much of you—you love to talk the talk, but when it comes down to it, you’re a weakling. Now all of a sudden you’ve developed a conscience. I don’t remember you feeling too guilty when you got dumped and were so desperate for revenge.”
Hunter opens and shuts his mouth, but says nothing. He glares at Callum, his eyes burning. If the situation wasn’t so serious, I’d have a good laugh at seeing him the victim rather than the bully for once. But actually, I feel kind of sorry for him. Callum’s clearly played him as much as he’s tried to play us.
Callum turns on Ella again.
“And you. What a brave, inspirational speech. Bravo, really.” He claps his hands sarcastically. “Now, are you sure you know what you’re doing?”
“Ella knows exactly what she’s doing,” I jump in. I screw up the contract and toss it over my shoulder. “But I’m not sure you do, Callum. I mean, a video is damaging and embarrassing, but at least it doesn’t show anyone doing anything illegal. Which is more than I can say for your Skyward scheme.”
Callum does his best to stay composed, but at the mere mention of the word, the corner of his mouth starts twitching like mad and his eyes narrow to slits.
“What are you talking about, Penman?” His voice is soft, dangerous.
“You know, The Skyward Trust, your charity,” I say. “The one that’s been funding the education and training of all those kids, all over the world. The one that’s been building media training centers and studios in impoverished areas. That one.”
“What about it?” Callum snaps.
“Well, we thought it was such a great, charitable thing you were doing that we tried to find some of the beneficiaries of this generous grant,” Ella says. “And when we really started digging, we found that those beneficiaries were surprisingly difficult to track down. Actually, over the last five years there hasn’t been a single recipient as far as we can tell. Isn’t that strange?”
Callum composes himself again, shrugging his shoulders.
“So? Skyward’s something we started up and decided not to continue with. What’s your point?” He smirks, clearly confident that we don’t have anything concrete.
I reach into my back pocket and pull out a wad of tightly folded paper.
“Yeah, well, Herald’s accounts here say different. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants paid out over the last few years for new media training facilities that don’t seem to have been built. I don’t understand all of the finer details, but I’m sure you do, so I’ve taken the trouble to print it all out for you. Plus there’s a record of several interesting emails between you an
d your mate Tyler that point to the fact that you knew about all of this and were personally benefiting from it financially.”
Callum’s expression changes from one of self-satisfaction to one of total fury; he rips the paper out of my hand.
“Emails? How can you possibly have got hold of my personal . . . ?”
Hunter’s mouth falls open. “That’s what he does, Callum, he’s a hacker. He used to be known for it.”
“The taxman’s going to love you once he finds out about this,” Ella says while Callum scans the pages of the printout. I decide to press home our advantage.
“So what’s going to happen now is we’re going to leave and we’re never going to hear from you again,” I say. “And if there’s any sign of that video anywhere on the internet, ever, we will make sure everyone knows who put it out and why—and then we’ll go public with what we’ve learned about you and your charity scam.” I’m saying the words as calmly as I can, but my heart is banging away like it’s trying to escape through the wall of my chest. “What do you reckon all your mates in Hollywood will think about Herald Media after that?”
Callum’s face is white, like a vampire’s. I can almost see his mind racing, computing, putting all the pieces together to see if he has another move left in him or if it’s checkmate.
“There’s one more thing,” Ella says. “As decent human beings, we don’t feel like we can sit by while such a big company lines its own pockets in the name of charity. So Herald is going to start The Skyward Trust up again, and this time you’re going to run it as a proper charity. Otherwise this”—she holds up another printed copy of a particularly incriminating email exchange between Callum and Tyler, waving it in Callum’s face—“is going straight to the police.”
That’s the moment I see the look of resignation fall across Callum’s face. The moment he registers that we’ve won. You can almost taste the tension as he weighs up Ella’s words.
“Fine!” he spits out before he shoves past me, storming across the room and out into the hall.
We all follow him down the stairs to the front door, where Fran is waiting, looking anxious. When she clocks Callum’s fury and sees the relief on my and Ella’s faces, she smiles triumphantly.
“Fran?” Hunter says, confused. “What . . . what’s going on?”
“Callum is just leaving,” Fran says, swinging the front door open. “That’s what’s going on. And he won’t be joining us for any more family gatherings either. Right, Uncle Callum?”
Callum clenches his fists. “Get out of my way, you stupid little girl,” he spits, and shoves past Fran, flattening her against the wall as he heads toward his car, which is sitting in the drive. The rest of us gather at the front door, watching him. Sure, we might have got one over on him for now, but he’s still bloody terrifying.
A few yards down the drive, Callum turns to face us. “If I ever find that this information has gone outside this house, I will make sure that your lives become a living hell. All of you, flesh and blood or not.” He looks at Ella and his lip curls. “Exposing your sordid little video will be the tip of the iceberg, sweetheart, trust me.”
“Yeah, that works both ways,” I say, still shaking. “You leak the video, we let everyone know what a scumbag you really are.”
Callum doesn’t respond, spitting out a bitter laugh before jumping in his car, slamming the door shut and revving the engine. The car disappears down the drive, the gates swinging open.
It’s over. It’s actually over.
Back inside the house, Hunter sits down on the stairs, head in hands. Ella, Fran and I watch from the front door for a while, and then Ella takes pity on him, walking over and touching his shoulder.
“Chin up, Hunter,” she says. “It’s all done now.”
“Can you forgive me?” Hunter says, looking up at her, his voice quiet. It’s probably the most genuine thing that’s ever come out of his mouth.
“I can,” Ella says, “but that’s about all I can do for now. I don’t want to see you and I don’t want to be friends, OK?”
Hunter nods sadly as I turn to Fran, who’s smoking a post-action cigarette and leaning against the door.
“Are you OK?” she says, her eyes dancing.
“Just about,” I say. “But we probably wouldn’t be if it wasn’t for you.”
She smiles and puffs out a ring of smoke.
“Listen, mate, no way was I going to let him get away with putting that disgusting, exploitative video out. Not on my watch. And the minute you mentioned Skyward, I knew exactly how you could stop it. It’s been a running joke in the family for years that Callum’s Skyward Trust was a front for him to siphon off funds without paying tax. My dad always used to go on about it, saying he’d get caught out eventually. I kind of think he wanted him to get caught, actually—they’ve always secretly loathed each other. Callum’s basically a crook who manages to hide behind a respectable front; that part of it’s a no-brainer.”
“All the same, we owe you,” I say. “You even helped me crack his private password.”
“Yeah, that was more of a bloody good guess,” she says. “Callum told me when he was drunk once that I was his favorite and he’d used my name for all his passwords—the creep—so I suspected it might still be Francesca with a couple of numbers on the end.”
“You’re actually a pretty amazing woman, one way or another, do you know that?” I say.
Fran nods toward Ella, who’s busy texting the rest of the team.
“She’s lovely, your girlfriend, and a lucky girl, too. You look after her, or else.”
“I will, Fran,” I say, giving her a friendly peck on her cheek. “I promise.”
Half an hour later, in Austin’s kitchen, Ella and I are filling Sai, Austin and Ava in on everything that went down at Hunter’s. We keep talking over each other, high on adrenalin, giggly and breathless as if we’ve been holding our breath under water for hours. We’re both verging on slightly hysterical, to be honest.
Ava shakes her head in disbelief. “I can’t believe we’ve actually pulled it off,” she says in awe.
“You know what? I reckon they thought Ella and I were so scared about the video coming out that we wouldn’t dare do something like that,” I say. “People like Callum are so up themselves they literally think they can get away with anything.”
“Exactly,” Ella agreed. “He would never have expected me to tell him I didn’t care whether the video came out or not.”
“And would you have really stuck to that?” I ask her seriously. “If it had come down to it and they told us they were going to release it anyway—would you still have told them to get lost?”
Ella nods. “What did we say in the park yesterday, Jack? No more letting the bullies have their way, right?”
“That’s what we said,” I agree.
A sudden bang renders us all nervous wrecks for a few moments, but it’s just the front door. Austin jumps up from the floor just as his mum crashes in carrying a load of Waitrose bags.
“Oh, hello, you lot!” She looks surprised to see us all together in the kitchen; usually we’re beavering away down in HQ. “What’s going on? What have I missed—anything exciting?”
We shoot knowing looks at one another across the kitchen, shrugging our shoulders innocently.
“Nah, it’s all been pretty quiet, Mum,” Austin says, opening the fridge and grabbing a bottle of water. “To be honest, I’ll be glad when it’s time to go back to school.”
Ava stifles a laugh and I feel Ella take my hand and squeeze it hard. I look up at her, smiling, and she winks at me and mouths, “Thank you.”
And at that moment, I feel so happy that we did it, that we got up and fought back and didn’t let the bullies win. It feels pretty amazing, you know?
THE HOMECOMING
I can hear rain on my bedroom window when I wake up, and on top of that it’s the last week of the school holidays. These two things together would normally constitute a downer, but after
the enormous relief of Mum’s operation going well last week, I feel on top of the world. Actually, after the last couple of weeks, going back to school doesn’t seem like too bad a proposition. I mean, I think a bit of structure and normality is exactly what’s called for, don’t you? It’s been a pretty surreal summer all in all: stratospheric success, fame, being humiliated in front of the world’s media, blackmail, revenge, my mum’s illness. I’m kind of looking forward to school, to be honest.
Things have gone a little quiet on the GenNext front recently, too, ever since the backlash over the disastrous interview with Harriet died down. It’s a relief, as you can probably imagine. After tape-gate, taking a break from online notoriety doesn’t feel like such a bad thing. The site is still doing OK, and hopefully we can build it back up once we manage to salvage our reputation. Ella, Sai, Ava, Austin and I have agreed that whatever happens, we’ll concentrate on our A levels and continue to work on GenNext on the side. Ella even got in touch with Mr. Allen, who agreed that our work on GenNext can double up as a major piece of coursework for our media production A level. Win. And after we finish school, if GenNext is still going strong . . . then who knows what’ll happen. All I know is, I feel pretty good about the possibilities.
Meanwhile, I’ve got something even more important than GenNext to think about. Mum’s been at the hospital this morning for her first round of chemo. Just as I’m thinking about it, I hear the front door slam shut downstairs and I jump out of bed, tearing out of the room in my boxers and a T-shirt.
“Is she home?” I shout from the landing at the top of the stairs.
“Yes, she’s home, Jack; it only took a couple of hours,” Dad calls up.
“I’m coming down!”
I throw on last night’s clothes and hurry down to the kitchen, where Mum is perched at the breakfast bar.
“Mum, you—you don’t look too bad!” I say, going over to give her a hug.
“Charming,” is her response to the obvious surprise in my tone, but then she laughs. “Oi, don’t squeeze me too hard; my battle scars are still a bit tender.”