Thousand Words by Jennifer Brown

Author:Jennifer Brown
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780316209724
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2013-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

DAY 22

COMMUNITY SERVICE

I was almost done with my research. Even if I hadn’t had the starring role in Ashleigh Maynard: The Slut Chronicles, I now knew everything there was to know about my own case, including all the rude, opinionated things people say about issues they know absolutely nothing about. Almost every online news story about the Chesterton High School sexting scandal had comments on the bottom of it. Stuff that would have made me cry if I hadn’t already gotten used to being beat up on by people I didn’t know.

People called me a whore. They said my mom and dad were horrible, lazy parents, and that I shouldn’t ever have been left alone with my cell phone. They said I was a bad influence and that I was an example of everything that was wrong with the world today. They said I was lucky I wasn’t pregnant or dead of some disease by now. That I had low self-esteem and that I was a poster child for eating disorders. They said I should get punished. Many thought my community service wasn’t punishment enough, not by a long shot.

And that was nothing compared to what they said about Kaleb.

I also knew everything there was to know about a similar case that happened to a girl in Florida, who sent naked photos of herself on a dare, and another girl in Alabama, whose story was eerily similar to mine.

I had all the websites memorized, had studied facts and figures, knew statistics and definitions. Had it all down pat. I was a sexting expert, though I would argue that I was already one of those the very minute I got the first text from Vonnie with my naked picture attached.

Now all that was left was to start designing my pamphlet, and I had sixteen hours to do that.

In a way, that made me sad. Not that I loved having my every afternoon filled with community service, but there was something I didn’t mind about sitting next to Mack, sharing candy and listening to music and, most importantly, not having to talk about what had happened to me. It was safe here.

In some ways, Mack had turned into my new best friend.

Not that Vonnie and I hated each other or anything, but we’d definitely grown apart. Which is easy to do when one of you is eating Tootsie Pops on a bus heading to a volleyball game and the other of you is eating Tootsie Pops with a juvenile offender heading toward the end of court-ordered community service. We’d drifted, that was the best way I could put it.

It was odd when I thought about it. Vonnie and I had both lost the same thing: me. I’d lost myself when Kaleb sent that photo to his friends. Or maybe it was when we broke up. Or it could have been when I started to fear losing him over the summer. Vonnie had lost me when all the trouble went down and I became the biggest story Chesterton High School had ever known.

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