When they passed, I waited, and eventually the icy flames inside me passed too. And though I was hurting like those girls had punched me and kicked me and left me for dead, I was somehow still standing. If anyone saw me, there’d be no evidence that anything had even happened.
That’s the thing about words: they can leave you both unscathed and completely gutted.
Girls wage endless wars with their voices, tearing you apart without touching you at all.
* * *
—
I spent all of homeroom trying hard not to listen to every word Sloane was saying to Layla a few feet behind me, but I heard most of it anyway, and plenty of it was awful things about me. About halfway through the period I couldn’t take it anymore, so when my phone buzzed with an email notification that my application status for the Shakespeare program had changed, I was so relieved I lost my breath. I raised my hand and asked for a hall pass, and when Mr. Yoon granted me my freedom, I raced to Novak’s classroom desperate for some good news.
I couldn’t help but imagine the open-air performances I’d attend in London; the people I’d meet and what their accents would sound like. I daydreamed constantly about being away from this place—away from Layla and Sloane and all my family’s drama. And here it finally was—my way out. Ms. Novak was just as excited as I was.
“Well,” she said. “Open it!” And so I opened the email so we could read it together. I logged into the application website and we both held our breath. But instead of seeing words that would give me an escape from everything that was going wrong, I was only offered one more disappointment.
“I…didn’t get in,” I whispered, and the words were like a tiny tornado in my subconscious, knocking things off shelves and shattering all the windows in my mind. I wasn’t going to London for the summer when it was the one thing I’d been counting on as every other part of my life spiraled out of control.
I stood there in disbelief, rereading the screen, though there was nothing confusing about the words We regret to inform you…I looked at Novak, feeling like this was all her fault in some way. She was the one who had told me I was a shoo-in. She was the reason I’d known about the program at all.
“How is this possible?” Novak asked herself, or maybe the air around us. I knew she wasn’t talking to me. She lifted the phone from my hands and scrolled through the entire length of the rejection, like reading it again would change what it meant. “Your application was perfect. Your statement was brilliant. I wrote you that recommendation. I just…don’t understand.”
But I hadn’t understood most of what had happened to me lately. It felt like my life was turning into a bit of a joke. So I laughed a little. I actually laughed.
“It’s okay,” I said to Ms. Novak. I let the blow of this settle in my gut with the rest of the hurt that was eating me alive. “It’s fine.”
“Let me make a few phone calls,” Novak said, but I shook my head.
“Don’t worry about it.” And just as I turned to leave, Layla burst into Novak’s class, grinning.
“Ms. Novak, you’re not g-g-going to believe this, but—”
When she saw me, she fell silent. Her smile disappeared, and she crossed her arms. I wanted to know what she was about to say, but I knew she wouldn’t say more while I was standing there. I ached to apologize for what I said, but after this morning I felt she owed me much more than I owed her.
“I gotta get to class,” I said to Novak. But when I stepped past Layla and into the hall, my feet carried me elsewhere.
I went to the library. I hung out in my favorite corner for the next two periods, rereading King Lear, and then I skipped lunch too. The substitute librarian didn’t know that people hid in the stacks and that she’d need to do hourly rounds just to make sure no one was making out or skipping classes on her watch. So there I stayed, undiscovered for hours.
* * *
—
At the end of the school day, I didn’t even stop at my locker. I just needed to get out of the building as quickly as possible. But I bumped into the Chorus Girls as I was trying to make my escape, and they started up again, laughing at me and saying impossibly horrible things that shredded whatever was left of my insides.
I stood there and took it. I didn’t say a word, because I hoped there was a finite amount of meanness they could send in my direction before they got bored. And there was. They stopped and walked away from me after a few nauseating minutes and I could breathe again, if only until I thought about Layla’s silence, my dad’s boxes, the Shakespeare program, and as always, like a current under everything, Gigi.
The Chorus Girls were trying to ruin me. But they didn’t realize that I had nothing left to lose.
THE PATRIARCHY
It was actually pretty simple to ruin another person’s life, once I decided to do it. All it took was a moment, a few words sent to the wrong people, and a little bit of nerve.
After a week of being tormented in big and small ways by the Chorus Girls, my patience had run out. I’d tried ignoring them. I’d blasted my music to drown out the sounds of their voices, but they just got louder, or they stopped and waited until they could find me when I didn’t have the protection of headphones. They continued to whisper terrible things in my ears and leave nasty comments all over my posts. When I blocked them everywhere so they couldn’t even see anything I shared, they created new accounts to torture me. My stuff started disappearing, too—a book here, a water bottle there. Layla had probably told them my locker combination. And then there were the rumors, which were both true and untrue, but all of which made me feel like my skin wasn’t my own anymore, or like I didn’t deserve to have a day free of sadness.
I couldn’t tell my mother about any of it because we still weren’t speaking, and I didn’t want to bug my dad, who was still in the midst of settling into his new apartment, what felt like his new life. There was no way I was going to tell a teacher—it would just make everything worse. So I had to take matters into my own hands.
I drafted an email to send to the full student-body email list from the school library, on one of the computers. I figured that way, no one would be able to find out it was me who sent the email—it could have come from anyone. I made a new email address and composed a message that included everything I knew about Sloane Sorenson, Todd Wellington, and their illicit romance—everything that Layla had texted me in the bathroom after Todd showed up at Sloane’s Halloween party.
When they first started dating, I typed, Sloane was only a fourteen-year-old freshman, and Todd was a seventeen-year-old senior and star player for her old school’s basketball team. I wrote about how Sloane felt special—that this senior who could have had anyone picked her. She got instantly popular, I wrote. She started partying a lot and skipping school, so much that her parents started to worry. They found out about Todd after they saw a dirty text he’d sent to her.