AdelAIDE by Melinda Salisbury

Author:Melinda Salisbury [Salisbury, Melinda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2024-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

I didn’t reply. The temptation was almost too much, but I stayed strong, even as RevolutionEarth reached 15,000, 16,000, 17,000 followers. I didn’t post anything else and didn’t respond to any messages – nothing. Instead, I held my nerve, carried on being Boring Freya, and after a few days the fuss died down, the council windows were cleaned and everyone moved on to the next scandal.

Meanwhile, I was looking for my next opportunity. I didn’t want to lose the momentum RevolutionEarth was gathering, but I needed to do something that was as big as spraying graffiti on the council offices, if not bigger. Something current and exciting.

I’d really come around to the secret-identity thing. It had been so much fun hearing everyone talking about it while I was the only person in the world who knew it was me. I didn’t even mind that I wasn’t growing engagement on my real profile, not while RevolutionEarth was exploding. Now I understood why superheroes had alter egos.

It helped that Hye-jin had been quieter than usual after the graffiti incident. She’d posted a video strongly condemning criminal acts, but aside from that only selfies and inspirational quotes. She stopped coming to the common room too, appearing only at lessons and vanishing afterwards.

But then she went live, three weeks after I’d sprayed the council building, to talk about our local MP.

There had just been a vote in Parliament about measures to prevent climate change. Our MP had voted against them, of course. Micah, Maya and I were in our group chat, storyboarding a video about it, planning to email the MP for a direct quote about their vote, but Hye-jin just couldn’t wait to call him out. She went live almost as soon as the vote had happened. Hye-jin was furious on the screen, raging about our leaders betraying us. About how they didn’t seem to care about ensuring we had a habitable planet to live on and how irresponsible it was.

And I realised RevolutionEarth needed to do something too.

I went downstairs to find the living room empty. My stepdad was still at work, and I could hear my mum in the garden, video-calling Ella for her weekly check-in.

“AdelAIDE.” I spoke softly.

She opened her eyes and looked at me.

“Our local MP just messed up a vote in Parliament,” I said. “I thought maybe I should do something about it for RevolutionEarth? Maybe spray-paint the MP’s office? I still have two cans left.”

I knew where his office was – or “surgery”, as he called it. My mum had taken me there once when she was trying to get a pedestrian crossing installed outside my old school.

AdelAIDE was silent for a moment, then she said, “My analysis shows repeating the same action as before will be less effective.”

“What about consistency in branding?” I asked. “I thought graffiti could be RevolutionEarth’s thing.”

“Given the type of audience you are building, escalation would almost certainly increase engagement more effectively than repeating yourself,” AdelAIDE said.

“So, like what?” I said, and racked my brains for anything I’d heard of people doing before.

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