She scoffs. ‘And publishing under a pseudonym isn’t?’
I hesitate. ‘Fine. But signing up Amelia Westlake on those lists? Nominating her to play tetherball? Nobody wants to play tetherball!’
Will exhales a long sigh, which stretches out into silence.
‘I’m sorry Natasha found the Instagram account. I really am,’ I say at last.
‘I guess the whole Amelia Westlake project is over,’ says Will.
Upon hearing her declare this so casually, panic unexpectedly fills my throat. Amelia Westlake is potentially fraught and certainly extremely risky, but we are starting to see results. Hadley is finally being pulled into line.
And then there is the unanticipated – indeed, surprising – success of our partnership. Will’s and mine. Our creative partnership is what I mean, obviously. The breathless feeling returns. ‘Surely this is just a setback!’
Will shrugs in a defeatist manner. ‘It’s a bastard, I agree. Just when everyone was starting to pay attention.’
‘We’ve got to be able to think of a way forward.’
Will shrugs again.
‘Think!’ I cry.
‘Okay, okay,’ she says irritably. She stares at the blank wall behind me and jiggles around on her chair. She pulls her legs to her chest. She stretches them out again. She picks at a stray thread. She slams the chair base with her heel. She sucks at her bottom lip, grabbing it with her teeth and pushing it out again slowly.
The room really is incredibly stuffy; are these storerooms even air-conditioned?
She is rocking to and fro now.
Clearly Will is getting nowhere fast. Luckily, an idea occurs to me. ‘Amelia Westlake doesn’t have to publish cartoons, you know,’ I say.
‘What are you talking about?’
I fold my hands in my lap. ‘She doesn’t have to publish anything.’
Her forehead creases. ‘I don’t get it.’
She really doesn’t. She is looking at me as if I’m speaking in Swahili. ‘What I mean is, we can leave Natasha Nguyen out of it altogether,’ I explain. ‘It doesn’t matter that people know Amelia Westlake isn’t real. In fact, it will probably make them more interested.’
‘What are you suggesting we do instead of cartoons?’
‘Amelia Westlake can make a point about Miss Fowler’s marking practices in another way,’ I venture. ‘One that will hopefully have even more of an impact than a cartoon.’ I watch carefully for Will’s reaction.
She studies me. ‘I’m listening.’
I take a moment, remembering what got us into this trouble in the first place. ‘Before I tell you, I need to say something. If we’re going to keep this Amelia Westlake project going, we need some ground rules.’
Will groans and slides down in her chair. ‘Priceless, you are.’
Like I haven’t heard that one before. I forge on. ‘If we’re doing this together, neither of us can engage in any Amelia-related activity without telling the other one first. That will stop both of us going off on a frolic that inadvertently undermines the common goal.’
She sits up again. ‘Fine. I can live with that. But if we’re going to have rules then I’ve got one too. The enemy here is exposure. If anyone finds out we’re behind Amelia Westlake, the project’s dead. We’re dead, too, probably. Croon is already on my case. And now that Nat’s worked out Amelia’s not a real person, she’ll do everything she can to find out who’s behind her. Which means you’ve got to stop approaching me outside the newsroom. We’ve got to pretend things between us are the same as they’ve always been.’
‘You mean in public, we need to continue to act towards each other with indifference verging on outright hostility?’
Will grins. ‘You should make jokes more often, Price.’
I press a cool palm to my flaming cheek. Gosh, it is airless in here.
‘No contact outside this room, okay?’ Will says. ‘We meet here and nowhere else. I’ll give you the room code. Other than to arrange a meeting, we don’t talk, we don’t text. We don’t even look at each other. Got it?’
‘Fine,’ I say, my heart pounding.
‘Okay. So what’s your great Fowler idea?’
Chapter 11
WILL
Harriet may be a superior suck, but her idea is bloody brilliant. It makes me think of the time I saw Louise Bourgeois’s massive bronze Spider sculpture in a gallery square. I’d seen a picture of it in an art book, but the picture didn’t do justice to the spider’s awesome scale, its dizzying breadth and height.
It’s the same with this: if our Fowler cartoon was the picture, Harriet’s idea is the picture brought to spectacular life.
After Duncan and Nat’s discovery of Amelia Westlake’s Instagram account, it takes less than a day for the word to get out that Amelia Westlake isn’t an actual person. When it does, interest in her explodes, just as Harriet predicted. I begin to hear the name ‘Amelia Westlake’ mentioned in the corridors. She is a constant topic of conversation in the year-twelve common room. Amelia even makes her way into my Art class on a morning that Mrs Degarno is sick. When the relief teacher asks our names so he can mark them off the roll, Janine Richter tells him that hers is ‘Amelia Westlake’ and the class cracks up.
When Harriet checks Amelia Westlake’s Instagram account on Wednesday, she finds that she has more than a hundred followers. We arrange to meet in the PAC storeroom at lunchtime to work out what to do with our sudden popularity.
‘Who are all these people?’ I say, scrolling through their profile pics once we’re settled in our chairs with the sunlight streaming in from the row of high windows.
‘Most are from our year,’ Harriet says.
‘If the page is getting this much interest, I think we need to make some changes,’ I tell her.
My first priority is to remove the creepy silhouette Harriet has used as a profile pic. I find an arty picture to replace it of a girl wearing an animal mask at a fancy dress ball. We post a bunch of other pictures of girls with their faces obscured – a girl with a paper bag over her head, a
