Read Following Flora for Free Online Page B

Twitter tweeted about it, posting a link to the video.
    A whole bunch of her followers retweeted it.
    A girl Flora used to know, who goes to Zach’s school, read the tweet, saw the video, and posted it to Facebook and Instagram, then retweeted it and texted and e-mailed the link to everyone in her address book, including Flora’s best friend, Tamsin. By morning break, pretty much everybody in both schools had seen it.
    Flora has not responded well to global celebrity.
    U. Hve. Ruined. My. Life.
    That was her immediate reaction on discovering she was famous. She sent it via text ten minutes into first period, just after Tamsin showed her the video on her iPhone.
    I am litrly gonna mrder u.
Flora is the world’s fastest texter.
I will nvr forgive u.
    â€œIgnore her,” Dodi whispered when I showed her my phone under the desk.
Every1 is laughing at me. Graham keeps singing at me. I am going 2 tear u lmb from lmb.
    â€œCan I come and live with you for a bit?” I whispered back to Dodi.
    U r no lnger my sister! Once I hve kld u I am nvr, evr gonna spk 2 u again. Prepare for yrs of misry.
    That’s when Madame Gilbert confiscated my phone, which, quite frankly, was a relief.
    Zach’s response to his newfound fame has been to get into a fight. A load of people in his class were teasing him, and when they didn’t stop he threw a punch at one of them, and then a whole bunch of boys got involved until their teacher came in. Someone in his class filmed the whole thing and posted that on Facebook as well. It got taken down later, but not before everyone was talking about it. Zach got sent home and has been suspended till the end of the week, and Zoran is even more furious with me than Flora is. In fact he came around this afternoon just to shout at me.
    â€œI asked you to delete that scene!” he yelled. “Not post it all over the Internet like some dating agency advertisement!”
    I said I was really, really sorry.
    â€œYou knew how much that concert meant to him, Blue. He poured his heart and soul into that song, and then you . . .”
    â€œI’m
sorry
,” I said again.
    â€œAnd now he’s in trouble at school. I had to go in this afternoon to make all sorts of excuses for him about extenuating circumstances. His
sick grandfather
. His
missing mother
. And you make fun of him!”
    I started to cry. Zoran sighed, and sat down next to me on the bed.
    â€œYou have so much talent,” he said quietly. “It makes me mad to see you waste it.”
    â€œIt was Dodi’s idea,” I sniffed.
    â€œYou have your own way of looking at the world, Blue. You see things other people don’t. That’s why you like filming, and writing. You pick up on things. You don’t need to hide behind people like Dodi.”
    â€œDodi’s fun,” I said.
    â€œAnd you are serious.”
    â€œI don’t want to be
serious.
”
    â€œSerious people can do great things.” He nudged me with his elbow and pulled a sad, serious face. “Stop to think before you do something like this again, okay?”
    I looked at my films again after he’d gone. Mum and Flora laughing together at the bathroom window, Alina and Peter holding hands at the concert, Jas in the garden draped in kittens—is this what Zoran means about picking up on things? Because if I posted those on YouTube, I bet they wouldn’t get viewed by thousands. For a moment, I felt annoyed with Zoran because it feels like quite something to have so many people looking at what I’ve done. Then Jake sent me a message on Facebook to tell me Tom had sent him the link to my video and all his family were laughing their heads off about it in Australia, and I immediately felt bad again.
    It’s not funny,
I wrote back.
    Jake wrote,
lol.
    I wrote
that
I didn’t think he understood the seriousness of the situation, and when was he coming home anyway?
    Jake wrote,
Sunday,
and