“You got it.” Now I’m beaming. “And look, here we are.” I swipe my ID badge along the keypad to unlock the door and hold it open for the students. After the last student enters the building—it’s always Mandy Vandelay—I follow them all up to the room just as the final bell for the day rings. “Nicely done today, ladies and gents. Grab your stuff and you can head on out for the day. I’ll see y’all tomorrow. If anyone tries the pumpkin muffin recipe I posted on our group chat, let me know. Or better yet, post pictures. Maybe if we get enough, I’ll create a Pinterest board for all of us.”
“I made the butternut squash quinoa last night with my mom. It was amazing. Even my little brother ate it, and he eats nothing.”
“Oh, that’s fantastic, Katie. Did you happen to snap a pic?”
She nods her head like a bobble doll. “I’ll post it to the chat when I get home.”
“Thank you. I appreciate that. Can’t wait to see how it turned out. Have a good night, y’all. And remember to write in your journals and post your entries so I can read through them before next class.”
The class empties, and I leave my stuff in my room while I scoot down the hall to the ladies’ room. But the second I open the door, I come to a screeching halt when I catch the sound of crying quickly followed by a soft whimper. Whoever is in the stall shuffles, raising their feet up and trying to pretend they’re not here.
I walk over to the counter, grab a couple of tissues, and hold them under the door of the stall.
A sigh. Then a, “Thank you,” as the girl takes the tissues from my hand.
“You okay?”
Sniff. Sniff. “Uh-huh.”
“It’s just us in here, and I’m a fantastic listener.”
“Miss Wilde?”
“Yes…” I trail off, scrunching my eyebrows at the familiar voice, trying to place it. “Stella?”
A second later the door unlocks and out comes pretty Stella Fritz, her face tear-soaked, her eyes red and puffy. She’s huffing and puffing and trying for brave as she quickly loses the battle and falls back into a fit of tears, covering her face with her hands.
I gently place my hand on her shoulder, unease skating across my skin and through my veins. “What’s wrong, honey? Did something happen?”
It takes her forever to talk through her tears, but finally, after a few wet hiccups, she clears her voice. “I got my period,” she whispers it so low I have to strain to hear her.
“Oh. Okay.” Well, that’s a relief. “Is this your first one?”
She shakes her head in her hands. “My sixth. But I didn’t expect it. I had my last one two weeks ago and… and…” And she breaks down again.
“Honey, what? You have to tell me or I won’t know how to help.”
She doesn’t stop crying as she spins around, and that’s when I see it. The large stain visible even through the thick material of her skirt. Not to mention the streaks of red all down the backs of her legs.
“It happened in class, and everyone saw,” she wails.
“That happened to me once,” I tell her, turning her back around and prying her hands from her face. I walk her over to the sink, turning the faucet on to cold and wetting some paper towels. I hand them to her so she can press them to her face. “I was in eighth grade too, in science class, sitting in the back of the darn class. I bled right through my jeans and all over the chair I was sitting in. Right next to the boy I was crushing on too. It was a total nightmare. I had to race out of the classroom, but of course, everyone saw what my butt looked like.”
She pulls the sodden paper away from her face, staring at me with those large blue eyes of hers. Obviously I’ve never seen her mother, but she looks so much like Landon right now with the way she’s staring at me, it makes me jumpy. Her father is someone I have to actively force myself not to think about and, more often than not, it doesn’t go so well.
I haven’t seen him since the coffee shop Sunday morning, but that doesn’t mean he’s far from my thoughts. Foolishly I hope he’ll seek me out. Why? I truly don’t know. He hates me, and I don’t care for him all that much, and we fight cruelly. It’s not the makings of anything healthy and, for that very reason, I know I need to blacklist him from my brain.
It’s a work in progress.
“What happened after everyone saw?”
I shrug. “It sucked.” I smile, and she giggles lightly at my minor swear. “But you know what? People teased me about it for that day and by the next, something else happened, and no one cared anymore. It happens to all of us ladies at some point. Truly, it does, and to this day, I’m positive no one else remembers it but me. The next year that boy gave me my first ever kiss, so clearly it didn’t mean that much to him.”
“It happened in English. The one class I have with every single hateful girl in my grade. They were awful.”
I can imagine they were. I’ve heard some of the girls in the school, and if this is how they are now, I cringe to think of them as teenagers or even adults.
Anger burns my throat, but I keep my tone light and my words careful. “Stella, life lesson time. Anyone who makes fun of you instead of helping you isn’t the kind of person you want on your team.” And I will find out exactly who those girls were and keep an eye out.
“I know. But they all laughed and made fun. Said that maybe I’ll finally start to grow boobs now that I got my period. Everyone stared and laughed harder.”
Little bitches. “Yeah, that part sucks, and I’m sorry that happened to you. But those girls? What are they to you if you don’t like them? Their opinions are meaningless and hold no power over you unless you let them. You just have to find your people.”
She shifts her weight, staring down at the pale blue tile floor. “I don’t really have that here. They call me princess and think I’m weird.”
In the two plus weeks I’ve been teaching here, I have yet to see Stella with any friends. Not in the halls. Not at lunch. Not even outside in between classes. She’s alone. Always. And it breaks my heart. Stella is quiet, kind of nerdy, reading by herself instead of sitting with the other girls and gossiping about boys. In the long run, she’s better off for it, but it makes her the subject of ridicule because she’s beautiful and an Abbot-Fritz, and jealousy at the age of thirteen—at any age—is real.
“You just haven’t found the right ones yet. Girls like them feel that by making fun of others no one will see the ugly they’re trying to cover up. By tomorrow or the end of the week, they’ll be on to something or someone else.”
She sniffs, wiping her nose with wet paper towels.
“Don’t tell my dad, okay?”
I think about that for a minute. “Do those girls harass you regularly, or was that just with this?”
“They used to try to be my friends, but I knew it was because of my family and not because they liked me. Since then, they switched and turned mean. But it’s not like they’re threatening me or anything. They’re just nasty. Please, though. I don’t want to bring my dad into this.”
“Okay. For now, this will stay between us. But that’s subject to change.”