“What do you say?” Weston all but purred.
I could barely manage a coherent “Okay” before things were happening. It was rainbows and explosions and diamonds and sparkles. It was better than eating a whole pizza and a cake and French fries and watching Pride and Prejudice.
I clung to Weston when it was over, panting.
He grinned. “You’re pretty good at that.”
“Ah hah, yeah,” I said weakly, suddenly feeling awkward. I adjusted my clothes.
“You want to do it again?” he suggested.
“Er…” I was feeling… everything too much.
Ding.
Saved by the bell. I swung away from him and wrenched open the oven door. Then I set the cake down on the cooling rack, turned off the oven, grabbed my bag, and walked out.
“And you guys just did it right there in the home ec room?” Amy asked again early the next morning. In my post-sex delirium, I had not frosted the cake. I had to finish it before Mrs. Miller arrived.
“You’re lucky you didn’t get caught,” Elise admonished. “Honestly, that’s the last time I leave you to your own devices.”
“But you guys, maybe this means he likes me!” I said. “Maybe this is my moment. I could be homecoming queen.”
The sports teams had early-morning practice, and the athletes were already roaming the halls of the school, bored hall monitors ignoring their antics. There were knowing grins and laughs as my friends and I walked down the hall. One guy wearing a varsity football jacket made a fake porn-star orgasm noise.
Oh no. He didn’t.
“Did he videotape it?” Elsie whispered in horror as I bent my head to scurry past the gauntlet. All my earlier reveling in the fact that I was no longer a virgin had fallen by the wayside. I wished I had never met Weston Svensson.
“Oh my God!” Sharla’s high-pitched giggle rang down the hall. “You should have heard her. She sounded just like a dying seal. Weston said he was so shocked that he almost didn’t finish when she let out that noise. Mary Coleman, play the audio again. It’s a good thing he’s about to graduate early. He said he had PTSD from listening to her.”
I needed to get out of here, cake be damned.
But there were people behind me, crowding me toward Sharla as she took Mary Coleman’s phone and triumphantly hit the play button. The sound of me losing my virginity echoed around the halls, accompanied by laughter. I was too shocked and humiliated to cry. Elsie and Amy grabbed me and half carried me to the home ec room.
“I’m going to kill him,” I sobbed as Elsie slammed the door shut and locked it behind us. “I’m going to ruin his life. Weston Svensson is going down. He’s going to pay for this!”
1
Zoe
There’s a funny thing about bullies. Everyone tells you to ignore them, that their time is coming, that karma will get the best of them, but it’s not true. It’s a lie that those of us who were viciously mocked for their last two years of high school tell ourselves to keep us from consuming copious amounts of junk food and desserts to stave off the humiliation-induced depression.
You want to know what happens to your high school bullies? They start billion-dollar companies. They attend fancy Ivy League colleges, paid for by their rich families, and live in quaint historic dorms. They travel to exotic locations on a whim. They stay trim and healthy and pretty. They have lots of friends. Everyone loves them.
Unlike the bullies’ victim, aka me, whose life went swirling down the toilet after the incident. I had stress eaten myself to a double-digit dress size. I did not go to a fancy university and instead attended a mediocre community college culinary program. I had also failed to make it big as a chef in Manhattan. Instead of living my best life, I had had to move back to Harrogate, apron in hand. I was not only working at my grandmother’s failing restaurant, Girl Meets Fig, just like I had in high school, but was also now living in the laundry room of my grandmother’s dilapidated cottage, because clearly the world only existed to make me miserable.
“It’s not fair,” I said to Amy. She and Elsie had started their company, Weddings in the City, a few years ago, and they spent their days planning weddings for the wealthy and powerful of Manhattan. Amy was the florist and used flowers grown at her grandfather’s farm for her magazine-worthy floral arrangements. It meant she was in town a lot and stopped by the restaurant often.
“At least you have space here,” she complained. “I want to move, but I have no savings. My apartment is way too small. When I lie on my bed, I can reach out and open the fridge door.”
“I mean, is that a bad thing?” I asked as I cut up tarragon for a grilled fish salad. Girl Meets Fig was one of the original farm-to-table restaurants in the Hudson River valley. However, with the influx of people attracted to Harrogate by the jobs and high-paying tech industry, which had been spurred by the Svensson brothers, there was a lot more competition. We were struggling to pay the mortgage and property tax.
“Sharla just landed a sponsorship deal with lululemon!” I complained as I took the plate over to the couple on their date. “Her Instagram account is to die for. She already has a sponsorship with that eco travel agency. I wanted her to be married to some gross dude and be working at a job she hates. Instead, I have the terrible life I had wanted her to suffer with.”
“But you have a giant kitchen, and you made jam yesterday,” Amy said. “All our brides love your preserves; we put them in the gift bags.”
“I wish I hadn’t flamed out in Manhattan.”
“It’s hard to make it as a chef,” Elsie reassured me. “Honestly, it’s hard to make it as anything.”
“Harrogate is nice,” Amy told me. “The air is cleaner, there are more parks, and you have a yard.”
“I don’t have a yard. My grandmother has a yard. And the fresh air only does so much for you when you’re five hours into berry picking on the side of the road and have to haul buckets full of blackberries to town on your bike.”
“But it’s the best blackberry jam ever,” Amy said, dumping a spoonful on a cracker holding cheese and prosciutto.
“You need to find the positive in your situation,” Elsie reminded me. “Use this time in the countryside to refresh and regroup.”
“Yes!” Amy said around her mouthful of food. “Give me three positive things about Harrogate. Go!”
“Uh, well…” I thought for a moment. “Food is cheaper, I’m not paying rent, the internet is weirdly faster, and there’s no Weston.”
“That’s the spirit!”
“You haven’t seen him when he comes home to visit his brothers?” Elsie asked me.
“Nope. I haven’t seen him since that day.”
My friends went silent.
I had never gotten my revenge. Weston had somehow managed to graduate early—he probably paid someone off. Then he went off to Harvard and started some sort of billion-dollar consulting firm.
I had a block on my internet and phone so that nothing related to him or his company would come into my news feed. I was already in a precarious place emotionally. Surprise good news about Weston’s life would have been enough to send me over the edge of wine- and fried food–saturated self-care.