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look straight ahead as if Amber were still showing her presentation.
    I grabbed a plate and some chips and drizzled cheese dip over the top of them. My stomach growled.
    I piled a few doughnuts on my plate and started to head toward my computer but almost ran into Kenzie and Angel, who stood behind me, their shoulders touching. Kenzie had a weird grin on her face.
    “We know why you’re here,” she said. She licked some cheese dip off her finger. A little splat of it dripped and landed on her stomach, but she didn’t seem to notice.
    “Okay,” I said, because I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to say to something like that. But they didn’t look away or move. I glared. “And your point is?”
    “It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad,” she said. “Like you didn’t get enough attention being all miss-perfect-got-money-athlete, you gotta go get more attention by sending crotch shots to everyone?”
    My face burned at the word “crotch.” “It wasn’t a crotch shot. Don’t be disgusting. And I didn’t send it to anyone but my boyfriend,” I said, then amended, “
Ex
-boyfriend.”
    Kenzie and Angel exchanged a glance. Kenzie looked amused, but Angel looked pissed.
    “You’re the disgusting one. Sending naked pictures to your ex-boyfriend?” Kenzie said. She laughed derisively. “God, how desperate! Even I’m not that desperate, and I got a baby coming.”
    “He was my boyfriend at the time,” I said, as if it mattered. I could feel my fingers shaking and hear the little rattle my chips made as the plate shook, but I refused to back down. I didn’t know what these girls were in community service for, but it definitely wasn’t for being honor roll students. They had no room to talk. “Not that I need to explain it to you.”
    “I don’t care about your boyfriend. What I care about is now
my
boyfriend has that picture on his computer,” Angel said. “And I think that’s what you wanted. Ho.”
    Of course, I knew that when a photo is uploaded onto a computer, anything can happen to it. It can float around forever, even if it’s deleted off the original website it was put up on. I just didn’t like to think about that. The thought made me nauseous. God only knew how many more people had it.
    “You’re nasty,” Kenzie said, smirking at me over her plate of food.
    I didn’t know what to say. I was all apologized out, and even if I hadn’t been, I sure as hell wasn’t going to apologize to these two for something that had nothing to do with them. “That’s your boyfriend and your problem,” I finally said, and tried to move around them, but they shuffled a step sideways to block me. My hand holding the plate continued to shake, and I hoped they didn’t notice.
    I searched for something to say to get them to go away, but I didn’t need to say anything, because before I could open my mouth, someone else did.
    “Leave her alone.”
    The voice was loud and made everyone jump. Even Mrs. Moselyand Amber looked up. The room got silent and all eyes turned to Mack, who still sat in his place in the semicircle. He didn’t even acknowledge that anyone was looking at him.
    Kenzie and Angel glared at him and then eventually turned back to me and glared at me, as if I’d had something to do with Mack speaking, but to my surprise they didn’t say anything to either of us. After a few seconds, they sauntered off, back to their desks, moving their chairs out of the semicircle and sitting close to each other.
    They were whispering again, but I did my best to ignore them, took a deep breath, and carried my plate to my space by the computer. My appetite was gone, and I wanted nothing more than to bolt out of there, but I supposed that Mrs. Mosely, and the court, would be less than willing to write off my community service if I hadn’t done it.
    I logged on to my computer and went back to researching, doing my best to put them out of my mind completely.
    I’d plowed through most of the articles about