My phone vibrates in my lap.
“Ms. Ward, would you please turn your phone off?” Mr. Hoolihan is exasperated.
“Sorry,” I mutter. I grab my phone and jam it off, put it back in my backpack.
The whole class period, I can feel that word crawling up at me through the pages of the book.
It can’t be meant for me. It can’t.
* * *
—
Hallway.
More stares and snickers.
I think: this will pass. No one knows. It’s just Gage and his broken arm. Or maybe they heard Joey got high.
Think of ocean fish, like Joey once told me, so I do. Dottyback. Barracuda. Seahorse.
I make it through my other classes, but it’s weird, the stares I’m getting. I don’t think I can make it through lunch, so I hide in a bathroom stall until it’s time for Lit.
* * *
—
In Watson’s class, there’s a piece of paper on my desk when I sit down. There have been stares and whispers all day. I hid in the bathroom during lunch. I turn the paper over, stomach clenching.
Let me know when you reopen the pool house for business The paper is snatched out of my hands by Daniel Wankel.
Daniel glances at it and then tears it up. “You jerks!” he shouts. “You think this is funny? Huh? You proud of yourselves? Look at yourselves. I see you, Mary Mitford. I know stories about you, you want me to share them with everybody?”
Mary Mitford flushes bright red. She turns back around in her seat.
“I thought so,” Daniel says. He lets the pieces of paper flutter to the floor.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
My face is frozen. I can only nod, even though I’m not. I just don’t get who would even care about me and Gage and the pool house, in the real scheme of things. Why should it matter? People hook up all the time.
Liza rushes into the room, worry creasing her face. She shakes her head.
I’m so sorry. I texted you, she mouths.
Mr. Watson rushes in, coffee cup in hand. “My apologies for being late.” He laughs and looks around at all of us.
No one joins in.
When the bell pings to signal the end of class, Mary Mitford turns around.
“You can run, but you can’t hide. Slut.”
“Shut your mouth, Mary Mitford, or I’ll shut it for you.” Liza is standing with her fists balled.
Mary Mitford scuttles away.
“I texted you,” Liza says. “I’m so sorry.”
“We should leave,” Daniel says. “I’ll get my car, meet you by the side door. That’s the quickest way out.”
“I don’t understand,” I say, my voice trembling. “I can’t just leave.”
“It’s just going to get worse,” Daniel says. “You should go home. Come back in a few days, when it dies down.”
“Actually, I don’t think she should go home,” Liza says.
“Are you crazy?” Daniel says. “Look what people are doing!”
They give each other a look I don’t understand.
Kids are starting to file into Watson’s room for the next class. Liza grabs my arm and hustles me out the door. Daniel follows.
In the hallway, she pulls me into an alcove. “I don’t get it,” I say. “What’s going on? Who the hell cares if I hooked up with Gage in the pool house? We didn’t…it was hardly anything. No worse than what other people have done. I’m a no one.”
Liza bites her lip. “Listen, Emmy, remember when I told you you were going to have to get a spine if you wanted to survive the year? Well, now is the time.”
She turns to Daniel. “She shouldn’t have to leave. She didn’t do anything wrong. She hooked up with a guy. Are you telling me she should be ashamed and driven out of school for that?”
Daniel says, “Well, no, but the—”
“There isn’t any ‘but,’ Daniel. If she leaves, it’ll get ten times worse when she comes back.”
She turns back to me. “Emmy, if you want to go home, go home. But you if you want to stay, I’m with you.”
The warning bell for next period blurts through the hallway, making me jump.
I don’t want to stay, because this is the worst thing that could happen to me, having everyone notice me all at once, and not in the most positive way.
“He didn’t make me, you know,” I say softly to Liza. “I wanted to.”
“I get it,” she says. “It’s just words. That’s all it is right now, words. But…”
The way she tightens her face worries me.
“Liza, what? What aren’t you telling me?”
“There’s…there’s something else.”
But the bell rings then, the last one before class starts. The warning bell, and we all scatter like mice.
But even as I sit in my next class, snickers around me, I keep thinking of what she said.
There’s something else.
* * *
—
Liza is waiting for me in the hallway after class. She grabs my arm.
“Tell me,” I say. “Just tell me.”
“There are pictures,” she says slowly, walking me down the hall, her arm crooked in mine. She’s keeping me on the inside, by the lockers we never use, protecting me from the crush of hallway kids.
“No,” I say. Oh, god, no. He said he deleted them. “They weren’t…it was just…he said he got rid of them. I asked.”
She pulls me into the bathroom no one likes, the one at the end of the hall by the science labs. The sinks are always dirty. It smells.
“It will blow over,” she says firmly. “I haven’t seen them. You don’t even have to tell me what they are. It doesn’t matter. But they’ll feed on this. And you have to be ready.”
I slide down the wall to the dirty floor, tears crashing down my face.
“I can’t do this,” I mumble. “I just can’t. I can’t take any more.”
I should just leave. I should just go home.
“It will be okay,” Liza murmurs, patting my hair.
“J-Joey…，” I stammer. “Joey got high on Friday. Everything is a mess.”
“Oh, god,” Liza says, sitting down next to me. “Oh, god, I am so sorry, I am so sorry, Emmy.”
We sit like that the whole free period, in the dirty bathroom.
* * *
—
I’m exhausted by the time Liza and I get to Drama Club. Simon Stanley is showing kids how to work the lights when Lucy Kerr appears beside me.
I stiffen, try to prepare myself for more words. Liza dried my face in the bathroom, fixed my eyeliner, and told me to suffer through it. It will pass, she promised. It will pass.
If I can just get through this, then I can go home. I can go home and have some peace. Everything will die down. Me and Gage in the pool house will be old news. The photos might be another thing, but how long can that last, really? Then I shudder, looking around.
How many of these kids have seen me now? Naked, in a window? I cross my arms across my chest.
“Wow, so you and your brother, everything you touch, you hurt or kill,” Lucy whispers.
Liza and Jeremy are practicing with the lights across the stage. One swings high over my head, momentarily blinding me.
“Just go away,” I whisper back harshly. “Leave me alone.”