Free Louder Than Words by Laura Jarratt Page B

it was too much of a tangle of confused ideas and feelings in my head.
    As a fourteen-year-old girl, finding a way to ask one of the great mysteries of life, like whether boys who think girls are just sex objects have feelings too, is completely impossible. I would’ve had to sit down and draft that question several times before I got it to make anything approaching sense.
    Silas glanced over at me and then opened up an internet browser. ‘I want to show you something, Rafi.’
    I sat up and shuffled to the end of the bed. I didn’t recognise the website he was on. He opened up what looked like a very long series of conversations, some of them with links to pictures.
    ‘Read this.’
    I scanned down the page and he scrolled as I read. After only a few posts, I wanted to turn away, uncomfortable at how these boys spoke to the girls.
    ‘Read it,’ said Silas.
    I continued. They were trying to get the girls to post pictures, just like the kind Lloyd had taken of Josie. If they didn’t post them, they’d be shunned and nobody on the site would want to speak to them. Some girls had obviously just left and not come back. Others did post, and then there were comments after discussing how they looked, some complimentary, some anything but. One of the girls got upset and they all laughed at her.
    ‘Read enough now?’ Silas asked.
    Nod.
    ‘Good. Remember that. And don’t ever, ever let a boy treat you like that. If they try, you tell them where to go. Like Rachel – she takes no disrespect from any boy. You don’t have to do stuff like that. No girl does. A boy who really likes you, he’ll do whatever you want. A boy who tries to get you to do this stuff, he’s got nothing you want. OK?’
    Nod.
    Silas nodded back, satisfied. ‘Anyway, what’s up? Can’t sleep?’
    Nod.
    ‘You want to watch me kill stuff on here for a while?’
    I thought about it. Probably wasn’t the thing most guaranteed to send me off to sleep but I’d never watched him gaming before and I was quite fascinated to see him in action. This was a side of Silas I didn’t know first-hand.
    Nod.
    He grinned. ‘Tuck yourself up then.’ He tilted the screen so I could see from my prone position on the bed and then he logged on to some war game and started.
    And I learned that the look on his face when he made a kill was deadly.

CHAPTER 13
    It was in morning break the next day, when I was thinking over what Silas said, that I remembered the girl in the gallery. Lara.
    She wouldn’t take that kind of thing from any guy, of that I was sure. She made me think of a quote Josie had posted on her page: ‘I’m not a princess to need saving, I’m a queen and I’ve got this stuff handled.’
    Yes, that was Lara. She walked out of that gallery like a queen leaving her subjects.
    Even now I was wondering who she was, where she was from. Did Silas think about her? I was guessing yes.
    I looked around me at the other girls milling about in the canteen. Not one of them seemed to have that air of completely self-contained assurance that she did. You could tell they worried if they were too fat or not pretty enough or too smart or their boobs were too small. Lara looked as if she’d never had such a thought in her life. On reflection, maybe she was the one who’d got it right.
    It was as I looked around that it hit me just how much of a weirdo I was. I spent all day in this school alone, except for when I saw my brother, who hadn’t appeared yet with his friends. All day I spent in silence, holed up in the solitariness of me. I hadn’t wanted this, but it was a trap I’d sprung all by myself. The thing was, I didn’t know how to get out of it now. Imagine if I came into school the next day suddenly speaking. Nobody, absolutely nobody, would shut up about it – it’d be all round the place in minutes. Hey, Silas’s freak sister SPOKE!
    The thought of that much attention made me want to curl up in a corner and die to escape notice. It was