*** Authors Note: Any similarity to real persons or places described within this story is probably not an accident, although I've made the effort not to expose anybody too much. The story circulates around a girl I met once, who told me some of her story. I will always regret not having spent more time with her. Enjoy & please leave your comments, good or bad! ***
*****
With shaking fingers I started the process of unravelling whatever shit storm must have broken overnight.
I scrolled through the calls first in order. Last night there was one from Robbie, my brother, then from Davo, my boss at Halligans. Then this morning there was one from my mother and two from Kelly, all in the last hour or so.
I didn't look at the texts before I made a quick decision and called my brother back first. He answered on the first ring.
"Sam, what the hell was going on last night? You're all over the internet with your bits showing on the balcony of the pub you work at! And mum knows about it too."
Oh. My. God. What the hell has happened? My first thoughts went back through the events of last night on the balcony with Conor.
"Sam?" Robbie's voice brought me back to the present.
"I'm sorry Robbie, I'm not sure what's happened. Can you tell me whatever you know? Slowly now. From the beginning."
"Well Johno called me last night and told me he seen you naked on Instagram. It's gone all over school and I've got so many messages from my friends this morning. At least, it really looks like you. And I can see your bits...well, you know your..." I decided to cut him off and relieve him of the challenge of elaborating on that last line at least. Robbie always treated me like a princess, unlike most siblings from what I hear. I could well imagine how hard this was for him from the preview he had already given me.
"Yeah OK, I get the picture. All over school eh?" I closed my eyes and swallowed deeply. "Sneaky little shits" I thought to myself. What better fantasy for a bunch of pubescent boys than a picture of a naked former senior from their high school? What pic? It couldn't have been someone from my old school out in the Western Suburbs surely. But who knows how the internet cut its links between one social world and the next?
"What else?" I figured I needed to know the whole spectrum before I could come up with anything to help us both deal with it.
"Well did you see my texts?" he said back to me straight away.
"Not yet. Hang on a moment" I replied. I dropped my phone from my ear and quickly navigated to Robbie's last text and scrolled through several that had arrived between last night and this morning. They basically just described in brief what he'd just told me with desperate requests to call him back. Poor lad must have been up all night.
I clicked the link that was embedded within his first text that arrived around 9 pm last night. My browser opened and up popped a post from some social media site that must have been flavour of the month for teens. And there was me facing Conor on what was clearly the balcony of Halligans, my dress hiked up to my waste and a strikingly pale breast exposed from under one shoulder strap of the yellow sundress. Damn. Straight away I knew I was busted and there was no way I could claim this wasn't me to anyone who knew me. The image was slightly fuzzy and looked like it had been taken from a mobile phone on high zoom.
I zoomed in to my face and then scrolled down. The picture was too fuzzy to pick out much detail and the poor quality thankfully rescued me from too much detail when I zoomed in on the bits that mattered.
Then I looked at the post that accompanied the photo: "Halligans barmaid gets her ginger pubes out for the man of mystery!"
Well now. More auburn than ginger surely!
"I'm sorry Robbie, I don't know what I can say. The guy I'm with is really lovely and I guess we got a little carried away. I don't know what else to say."
There was a pause on the other end of the phone while Robbie was no doubt trying to process (or more likely trying not to) the idea with me doing naughty things with a boy. Then: "Sam. Mum's already on the phone again this morning. She's talking to everyone she knows and saying things like 'that's not how I raised my daughter' and 'she's a little slut' and stuff like that.
"She came home raging from The Rissole last night where she must have first heard about it and was giving Dad all kinds of grief about his 'slut daughter' and stuff. Dad just sighed and went to bed and he didn't get up to pick up his truck this morning.
"Sam, I'm really scared! I don't want to go to school on Monday".
Shit. How did a little wee fantasy with one man on a balcony get to this? I needed to do something about Robbie's situation first and then worry about myself later. I mentally put myself in a 15 year old boy's shoes.
"Robbie, you need to do something for me. Or really, for us OK?"
"Yeah OK Sam whatever. What do I need to do?"
"Your mates and all the other arseholes around you are only interested in some fucking gossip to liven up their little boy days. You need to spin this around to give them all a good kick up the arse and maybe they'll move on to the next thing OK?"
"Yeah OK Sam, that makes sense. So what do I tell them all?"
"You tell them this. You post this as soon as you hang up! You listening?"
"Yeah OK. Hang on while I go on speaker and type. Go".
"Sam says all you boys at Badgery's State High better enjoy coz it's the closest any of you will get to tapping heaven!"
I heard his fingers stop flicking across the screen as he finished typing and then a pause as he was obviously re-reading the line over and over.
"Sam." He whispered after a minute. "I can't write that! Mum will go ape-shit!"
"Well Robbie, it's true. Mum can go fuck herself. Dad will understand once I get a chance to talk to him.
"Whichever way you cut it, the whole of Western Sydney just doesn't matter anymore to me. Except for you and dad Robbie, OK?"
I paused then and just listened to his breathing. "Sam. Are you sure?"
"Yeah Robbie, I'm sure. Trust me on this one. I'm guessing within a couple of hours you'll be off the hook".
"Sam?" I almost wept as I felt his pain melt through my whispered name. He was clearly terrified of leaving the house or going to school on Monday when the next term was starting. I was taking a gamble with what I asked him to post, but with a little bit of luck he might end up as the kid with the cool older sister at school once that post got around.
"Send it Robbie. I call you in a day or so either way, but make sure you get to me first if things go badly OK? Right now I have to go and sort out a few things."
"I reckon you do Sam. OK It's done. How long before mum is beating on my door do you think?" The last add-on was the most painful to me. What hell would my mum put him through? I'd just have to rely on dad on that score. I knew he would only let mum go so far, before he'd intervene.
"Just keep your head down kiddo and ignore the guys from school. They'll have forgotten all about this in a couple of weeks once they're back at school and footy season starts up again."
"OK Sam, I'll try. Bye."
"Bye mate."
I hung up and went back to the opened photo in my browser. I had a quick think about the angle it must have been taken from and pretty quickly realised where it was taken. Through the glass from across the road at the Tavern. That would also explain some of the fuzzy quality of the image. Someone had looked up, seen what was going down and zoomed in with his camera phone and taken the shot. I'm saying "his" camera because it was almost certain this was the handy work of a bloke. I'd been so taken in the moment and protecting my back from the patrons on the balcony, I hadn't spared a mind of what you could see from the bar across the street. The unfortunately lucky placement of the camera was such that the railing of the balcony of Halligans perfectly dissected my body, thus exposing the top and bottom parts of my body that mattered, given what Conor and I were up to.
You could see the back of Conor's head - a shock of black hair, with his hand clearly between very white thighs almost perfectly framing my thick patch of red hair. Likewise above the railing his other hand had cupped the bottom of my pale round breast almost as if he was offering it up to whomever was behind the camera.
"Fuck me twice!" I thought to myself. How lucky was this fucker with his timing. He must have had his phone in his hand or was already watching us to have been so quick with his happy snap. The whole moment couldn't have been more than a minute or two.
How was Conor going to respond to this? At least apart from the "man of mystery" part of the post, something which only a local at either of the two pubs would say, there was no other indication as to Conor's identity or any clear angle on his face.
I made a very quick decision then. Kelly could wait. I guessed from what she must have also seen, she'd understand. I scrolled back through my missed calls and hit reply on the one from Davo. Right now I thought I needed to save my job first.
A single ring. "Sam? This had better be good!" Davo was seriously the best boss I have ever had to this day. Right now he sounded kind of "pretend" pissed off.
