Thousand Words

by Jennifer Brown

If only I could find consolation in that.

  I hung up and leaned back against my pillows. My hands were shaking. I was totally on edge. And totally angry. How could Kaleb, who’d been telling me a week ago that he loved me, who’d once promised he wanted us to grow up to be a cute little old couple together, who’d asked me to prom with cupcakes, do this?

  He’d never given me a chance to explain that I hadn’t been the one to write those things on his windows. He’d never even listened to what I had to say. He only wanted to get back at me. And even as payback, this was a pretty hateful thing to do to someone.

  I didn’t expect him to answer, but I called him anyway.

  To my surprise, it only rang once.

  “Leave me alone,” he said.

  “So guess what just got texted to me?”

  He chuckled. Chuckled! I wanted to hit him. “Wow, that traveled fast.”

  “Wasn’t that your goal?”

  “My goal was to make you stop being psycho and leave me alone. It didn’t work, apparently, because here you are calling me again. It’s kind of pathetic.”

  “Who did you send it to?”

  “Just some people in my contacts list.”

  “All of them?”

  “No. Not my mom.” Again, he laughed. My heart sank even lower. Right now, I hated him so much it felt like something molten boiling through me.

  “How could you do this to me, Kaleb? I wasn’t even with Vonnie when she wrote those things. I didn’t know anything about it until this morning. I never would have done anything like that to you.”

  “Yeah, okay, whatever, Ashleigh.”

  “It’s true! I didn’t ask her to do it!”

  I heard keys jingling in the background and the slam of his truck door. He was going somewhere—going on about his night like nothing had ever happened. “Look, the point is to leave me alone. Don’t text me, don’t call me, don’t think about me. And don’t have your friends do shit to my parents’ house or my truck. That’s all. Just leave me alone. And don’t send me any more of your skanky pictures, either.”

  “That picture was only meant to be seen by you.”

  “Well, that was your mistake.”

  And he hung up.

  I flung my cell phone across the room. It bounced off the closet door and landed on the floor. No sooner had it landed than it buzzed again. I squeezed my eyes shut tight and tried to take a deep breath, but every time I attempted to suck in air, I could feel angry tears pushing behind my eyelids, fighting and punching to get out. I hated Kaleb. How could I ever have thought I loved him?

  “Ashleigh!” I heard from downstairs. My dad was calling. “This is enough. Come finish dinner.” I had no idea how I was going to go downstairs and eat broccoli and listen to my dad’s school board problems when I knew I had a huge problem of my own brewing.

  Slowly, I got up and made my way to my phone. I picked it up and it buzzed again. Two text messages. One was the same photo, sent from Cheyenne, which made me wince. Was she being a friend and warning me, or had she simply forwarded the photo to everyone in her contacts list?

  Slut up for grabs!

  The second was from a number I didn’t even recognize.

  All it said was: GROSS. SLUT.

  DAY 22

  COMMUNITY SERVICE

  I was almost done with my research. Even if I hadn’t had the starring role in Ashleigh Maynard: The Slut Chronicles, I now knew everything there was to know about my own case, including all the rude, opinionated things people say about issues they know absolutely nothing about. Almost every online news story about the Chesterton High School sexting scandal had comments on the bottom of it. Stuff that would have made me cry if I hadn’t already gotten used to being beat up on by people I didn’t know.

  People called me a whore. They said my mom and dad were horrible, lazy parents, and that I shouldn’t ever have been left alone with my cell phone. They said I was a bad influence and that I was an example of everything that was wrong with the world today. They said I was lucky I wasn’t pregnant or dead of some disease by now. That I had low self-esteem and that I was a poster child for eating disorders. They said I should get punished. Many thought my community service wasn’t punishment enough, not by a long shot.

  And that was nothing compared to what they said about Kaleb.

  I also knew everything there was to know about a similar case that happened to a girl in Florida, who sent naked photos of herself on a dare, and another girl in Alabama, whose story was eerily similar to mine.

  I had all the websites memorized, had studied facts and figures, knew statistics and definitions. Had it all down pat. I was a sexting expert, though I would argue that I was already one of those the very minute I got the first text from Vonnie with my naked picture attached.

  Now all that was left was to start designing my pamphlet, and I had sixteen hours to do that.

  In a way, that made me sad. Not that I loved having my every afternoon filled with community service, but there was something I didn’t mind about sitting next to Mack, sharing candy and listening to music and, most importantly, not having to talk about what had happened to me. It was safe here.

  In some ways, Mack had turned into my new best friend.

  Not that Vonnie and I hated each other or anything, but we’d definitely grown apart. Which is easy to do when one of you is eating Tootsie Pops on a bus heading to a volleyball game and the other of you is eating Tootsie Pops with a juvenile offender heading toward the end of court-ordered community service. We’d drifted, that was the best way I could put it.

  It was odd when I thought about it. Vonnie and I had both lost the same thing: me. I’d lost myself when Kaleb sent that photo to his friends. Or maybe it was when we broke up. Or it could have been when I started to fear losing him over the summer. Vonnie had lost me when all the trouble went down and I became the biggest story Chesterton High School had ever known. But even though we’d both lost the same thing, her life really hadn’t changed much at all. Only mine had. She was going on as always. I was floundering.

  Darrell had finished his community service hours, but he hadn’t completed his project yet. His biggest problem was that he couldn’t spell, so everything took him ten times longer than it did the rest of us. Mrs. Mosely had signed off on his paper and we’d told him good-bye, but he surprised us all by showing up day after day and going right to his computer, even though he no longer had to.

  “I want to finish this,” he’d said to Mrs. Mosely. “I never did nothing like this before and I want to see how it turns out.”

  Mrs. Mosely didn’t mind, and she pulled her chair up next to his some days and helped him with his spelling. And when she wasn’t around, we all helped him. He would yell out when he got stumped and we would call the answers back to him.

  All except Mack, who, typically, really didn’t say anything.

  Meanwhile, my dad’s whole life had become meeting after meeting. Forget Superintendentman out saving the world; he was busy enough just trying to save his job. He was rarely home in time to read the paper in his lounge pants before dinner. Half the time he wasn’t home for dinner. But sometimes that was a relief. On the nights he had to go to a late meeting, I walked home, glad to not be in his car trying to figure out how to fill the void where conversation used to be. I loved my dad, and I felt insanely guilty about what was happening to him, but I didn’t know how to say those things. I didn’t know how to talk to him at all.

  It was a surprisingly warm evening when I left room 104 after completing my forty-fourth hour. The fall chill had lifted for what we all figured was the last time before winter rolled in, so I was kind of happy to be walking, even if I still felt really self-conscious every time a car rolled past. Did the person inside recognize me? Had they seen the photo? Those were the thoughts that repeated in my brain.

  I pushed through the glass double doors into the fresh air and found Mack unwrapping a Starburst outside.

  “I ate all mine,�
�� I said.

  He popped a yellow one into his mouth. “Greedy,” he said around it.

  “You got any pink left?” He rolled his eyes and acted all put out but dug into his pocket and came out with a handful. I took a pink one off the top. “My favorite.”

  We started down the sidewalk, side by side, chewing our candy.

  “You walk home every day?” I asked, mostly because I’d never seen him out on the sidewalk before. Usually he either left through the downstairs side door or was still at his computer when I called it a day.

  “Not really,” he said. “I’m not going home right now.”

  “Where you going?”

  “Nowhere exciting.”

  “I’m coming with you.”

  He swallowed, considered me, and said, “You got a few minutes?”

  “Sure.”

  I followed him down some side streets, at first headed toward my neighborhood but then veering off to the south, over to where the smaller houses were. Some of them were run-down, and as we kept walking, I noticed that a few were boarded up and others had tons of junk lying around in their yards—old, broken toys and beat-up appliances. Chesterton wasn’t a very big city, so I knew these houses existed. I knew there were poorer kids in our school, but we stayed pretty separate most of the time. Kids from my neighborhood never really had any reason to go to this area, and vice versa.

  “You live over here?” I asked as we turned the corner onto a dead-end street.

  “Used to.”

  We walked to the end of the street, past a house with an overgrown yard and a shutter that was hanging askew. The lot on the other side, obscured by a dilapidated RV that someone had parked on the street, had been converted into a skateboarding park. The park looked as if it hadn’t been used in a long time.

  Worn brown ramps of various shapes and sizes jutted up into the sky, their faces chipped and spray-painted with graffiti. Dandelions grew in the cracks of the pavement between the ramps, and the rails were rusted almost through. Mack headed for a ramp and ran up to the top of it, his shoes sliding on its smooth surface. I stood on the pavement and looked up at him as he turned and sat with his legs stretching down the ramp.

  “This is where you were taking me?” I asked.

  “Don’t be a snot. Come up,” he answered.

  I thought about it for a second, then dropped my backpack to the ground and tried to walk up the ramp. I didn’t make it and laughed as I slid backward down to the blacktop on my knees.

  “You’ve gotta run at it,” he called down. “You can run, right?”

  I gave him a sarcastic head-tilt, my hands on my hips. “Har har, yes I can run. I do it every day of my life.” Well, used to, a voice inside my head corrected, but I batted it away. I backed up a few steps and ran at the ramp, barely making it to the top, scrabbling with my fingers to get some traction. When I finally did, I pulled myself to standing and brushed my hands off dramatically. “See? I can do it.”

  He applauded, then reached into his pocket and handed me another pink Starburst. “Your reward,” he said.

  I sat next to him and let my legs hang down over the ramp next to his. From up here you could see as far as the high school, hay bales dotting the pastures between the skate park and the football field. “I had no idea this place even existed,” I said.

  “That’s because everyone skates over at Mulberry Park. Nobody comes here anymore. The weeds.” He gestured at a patch of grass poking up right at the bottom of one of the ramps. “There’s a creek back here, too.” He pointed off into the woods that created the dead end.

  “Do you skate?”

  He shook his head. “Nope, never. My dad used to bring me here when I was little and we did this sometimes, though.” He leaned back and pulled off his shoes, setting them next to him on the top of the ramp. His socks, which were a grungy off-white color, were loose and thin. He tugged them up, then stood, held his arms out at his sides as if he were surfing, bent his knees, and slid down the ramp on his feet. At the bottom, he turned, grinning at me from beneath his curly, unkempt bangs. “Try it.”

  I shook my head. “I’ll kill myself.”

  “Seriously, if I can do it, you can do it. Just try.”

  I stared at him, then shook my head and kicked off my shoes, placing them on the ramp, next to his. “If I end up with a broken leg, you’re going to have to carry me to the hospital,” I said.

  “So don’t break your leg.”

  “Fine.” I got up and stood at the top of the ramp, which looked a whole lot steeper now that I was getting ready to slide down it. How did anyone get the courage to do this on a skateboard?

  “Bend your knees,” Mack coached. “And lean forward a little bit. And don’t go over that torn-up chunk or you’ll fall.”

  “Stop talking,” I said, and inched forward. “Okay. Okay.”

  “Do it, you weenie!” he called out, and I flinched.

  “Stop it, you’re going to make me fall!” I cried, but we were both laughing. At last I put my foot down on the ramp and leaned into it, then slid all the way to the bottom, falling backward onto my rear at the very last minute. “Ha! I did it!” I said as Mack pulled me to standing.

  “Good job. Now try that one,” he said, pointing to a taller ramp across the pavement. “If you’re such a pro.” He trotted over to it, and after a slight hesitation, I followed.

  Up and down the ramps we slid, our socks getting black on the bottoms and our legs getting tired from running up the ramps with no traction. It was the most fun I’d had in a long time, and I loved the feeling of doing something dorky and stupid without having to worry about any sort of fallout. Finally, physically spent, we crawled back to the top of the shorter ramp and hung our legs over the side like we’d done when we first arrived, only now breathing heavy and shedding our jackets.

  We were silent for a minute, gently tapping the backs of our legs against the ramp and making little thump thump thump noises with our heels. “So, you almost done with community service?” he asked, breaking the silence.

  “Sixteen hours.”

  “Bet you’ll be glad to get done. You got a raw deal. No way they should have busted you like they did.”

  “They wanted to make an example out of me,” I said. “They supposedly went easy on me, though.”

  “Who’s they?”

  And suddenly I was desperate to tell someone about everything that had happened to me. I hadn’t told Vonnie or Cheyenne or Annie or anyone about those horrible days when I found out how big the whole scandal had gotten. I’d been so embarrassed and frightened and alone, and I’d wanted to keep it to myself—not that any of them were really asking, anyway. But now I wanted someone to know.

  So I told Mack about the parents who’d pressured Principal Adams, the same ones who’d called the police, the same ones who were quoted in the newspapers, demanding action from the DA.

  I told him about my first meeting with the police. How freaked out I had been as I walked into the police station.

  The police were nice about it, and, as scared as I was, I felt grateful. At least they didn’t handcuff me, they didn’t yell at me, they didn’t lock me up in a dirty cell—all the things I’d been frightened they’d do.

  The officer had taken us into the meeting room and told us to have a seat. Mom’s eyes had been red and swollen, and Dad had that same grim, stoic look that he’d had so often by that time. One that looked like he was holding in a mouthful of marbles or chewing on something unpleasant and dangerous.

  I’d sat down between them, across the table from the officer, whose hair was slicked back and perfectly combed, like a game show host’s.

  “That was the first time it really occurred to me,” I told Mack.

  “What?” Mack asked.

  “That I’m a criminal. I mean, I’m used to it now, but that day was the first time it hit me. I never thought I’d, like… be questioned by a cop, you know?”

  He shrugged. “I guess. But it’s n
ot like you were out robbing banks or something.”

  “I know,” I said. “It’s not the same. But still… the way the cop talked to me…”

  And I went on to tell him about how the police officer had folded his hands together on top of the table when we got settled, and then had gotten all toothy smile on us and told us that they were going to go easy on me because I didn’t mean to be an offender.

  I told Mack about how when the officer said they were going to work with me, Dad boomed, “Work with her? You call dragging her here and grilling her working with her? She took a damned picture, and she’s scared to death. Look at her. Child pornography. That’s bullshit. Kids are pulling this shit all the time and you know it.” And how I’d been thankful to my dad for saying that, even though I wasn’t so sure he really believed it.

  And I told Mack how the officer used my name too many times and how he talked down to me like I was stupid and how I felt like I was about an inch tall when I had to admit in front of my parents that I’d been drunk when I took the photo and that Kaleb had liked it at first and that I knew he’d liked it because we’d made out all day afterward.

  Mack didn’t say anything while I talked. He sat there, looking out toward the high school, thumping his legs against the ramp, nodding every now and then or making a disbelieving noise, but not interrupting, just letting me talk. Letting me tell the story and get it all out.

  I finished by telling him how the officer wrote a bunch of things in my file, then closed it and tapped it a few times on the table. How he gave a smile, like everything was good, and said, “Thank you, Ashleigh, for cooperating. We’ll be in touch.”

  And I told Mack the worst part—how when the officer left the room, it felt much larger, much barer, much more open in his absence, and how I’d shivered and wrapped my arms around myself, feeling stupid and humiliated and alone.

  “Your parents were there, though, so it’s not like you were alone,” Mack said.

  I nodded. “I know,” I said. “I wasn’t technically alone alone, but”—I paused—“but I ruined something.” That was the best way I could put it. I’d ruined something with my parents, because before this I’d never really done anything wrong. We’d had our occasional arguments, but I’d never really done anything to disappoint them before. Not like this.