Thousand Words

by Jennifer Brown

  “We broke up,” I argued. “It’s not like I’m going to be sending him any more texts. Especially not that kind.”

  “You shouldn’t ever have been sending that kind in the first place. We thought you knew that already, but apparently we should have been monitoring you like a four-year-old,” Dad said, and then he, thankfully, stormed out. I heard the cabinets opening and closing in the kitchen, and ice cubes dropping into a glass.

  The room felt empty without him there. No, more than empty. It felt sucked out. Devoid of oxygen. With him gone, so was my defensiveness. Now I was left with just Mom, and embarrassment and sorrow.

  “You got kicked off the team,” she said.

  “I know,” I answered. “I don’t really think that’s fair. This had nothing to do with cross-country.”

  “Fair isn’t for you to decide now,” she said. “You lost that privilege.”

  “Mom, it wasn’t my fault that it got sent around. That was Nate’s and Silas’s and Rachel’s fault. And Kaleb’s. He shouldn’t ever have sent it to anyone.”

  “But they wouldn’t have had anything to send if you hadn’t taken the photo in the first place,” she said, but she didn’t sound argumentative so much as scared. Which scared me.

  “What’s going to happen?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she answered. “But it starts with your phone.” I saw movement in the shadows, and could barely make out her hand, stretching across the desk toward me, looking pale and fragile in the evening light. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and turned it off, then placed it in her hand. “And I would say that you’re grounded. For a long time,” she said. “We’ll go with indefinitely on that, too.”

  I’d figured as much.

  The TV blared to life in the living room, and I heard the squeak of the recliner’s footrest snapping into place. Mom didn’t say any more, and Dad was clearly done with me. All I wanted to do was go to my room.

  I got up to leave but turned back. “Mom, please don’t be disappointed in me.”

  “How could I not be?” she asked in that same tired, wet voice.

  I guessed I couldn’t blame her for that. How could she not be?

  “What more do you think Dad means?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she answered, and that was what worried me most of all.

  I climbed the stairs to my room, where I didn’t turn on the light all night. Just stayed in the dark, wrapped around myself, waiting for more to happen.

  Whatever horrible thing “more” was.

  SEPTEMBER

  Message Inbox Full

  The next day I slept in. On the one hand, this was a good thing, because it meant I didn’t have to see Mom or Dad before they left for work. On the other hand, it meant I woke up to a quiet house.

  I had no cell phone, so I couldn’t text Vonnie to see what was happening at school. I still had my laptop, but everyone else was in class, so there was nobody to talk to.

  All I had was the TV—which sucked during the day—and my running shoes.

  Even though I was grounded, exercise didn’t really count as “going out,” did it? Especially not to my mom, who was so upset that I’d been kicked off the team. Maybe seeing that I was willing to keep working at it would make her a little less mad at me.

  I ate lunch and then got into my running gear. I stuffed a few dollars into my shoe and took off.

  But once I got outside, I felt like everyone was looking at me. Staring at the naked girl whose picture had ended up on their kids’ cell phones.

  I knew it wasn’t the truth—probably nobody was looking at me—but the very thought still made me feel nervous.

  I hit the trail and raced through the woods faster than usual, trying to pound out all the emotions I was feeling with my footsteps.

  Finally, I ended up at the thrift store, which was open, though the parking lot was empty save for one car. I went inside, my shirt soaked with sweat, my breathing still coming in gasps.

  “Hello,” a white-haired woman in a fuzzy sweater said as I came inside. Who wore a sweater in heat like this? I stood in front of a fan she had going next to the register.

  “Hi.”

  “Purple tags are twenty percent off today,” she said. “Are you looking for something in particular?”

  Anonymity. Freedom. Peace. Do you sell any of those here? Are those purple-tag items? Because I would think they’d be full price if anything was. Hot commodities.

  I shook my head. “Just looking.”

  She went back to attaching price tags to things, and I ducked into the racks of clothes and shoes, idly digging through old skirts and blazers from the 1990s and sneakers with curled-up toes.

  I passed the board games and old television sets and voice recorders. They all seemed ugly and dusty and out of style. They made the past seem depressing, and I was at once thrilled that I had not been a part of the time when those things were the best we could do and sad with the knowledge that all too soon our technology would seem as old and outdated as theirs.

  I turned the corner into housewares and rambled around in there for a while. Old china teacups and saucers lined the shelves. Chipped, ugly, mismatched. Someone would buy them. Someone would find a use for a single pea-green teacup. There was a ceramic creamer with a cow wearing a bikini lounging across the lid. A fondue set with no skewers. A whole stack of dog food dishes painted with cartoon paw prints. And a bin of pillows, the top one of which had a photo of three muddy kids mugging for the camera silk-screened onto the top of it, along with the saying A PICTURE’S WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS needlepointed in fancy script. I picked it up and studied it. Why would someone get rid of this? Why would someone all of a sudden not want a photo of these children anymore?

  Clutching the pillow, I turned in a slow circle and took in all the clothes and toys and shoes and dishes and furniture around me. None of it was wanted anymore. Most of it was probably forgotten. How sad.

  Yet something about that realization also heartened me. As frustrated as I was with Vonnie and her “it’ll all blow over” attitude, and as much as it didn’t feel like it would ever blow over, maybe it really would. Maybe this would eventually be forgotten, this trouble I was in. Maybe people would forget about it like this old VCR and the cassette tape player that I wasn’t even sure if I’d know how to work. Back when I was born, my parents didn’t own a computer yet. They didn’t send emails or surf the Internet, and they certainly didn’t send texts, much less picture texts. How much had changed in that short period of time. This would change, too, and soon nobody would care about the dumb photo I’d sent to my boyfriend back when people were doing something so outdated as texting. The thought gave me hope. If someone didn’t mind tossing out a photo of their children having fun, surely eventually my photo would end up in recycle bins, too.

  So while she was wrong about how quickly people would forget, maybe Vonnie was right; eventually this, too, would pass. If only I lived through it in the meantime.

  I checked the tag on the pillow. Three dollars. And it was a purple tag. I had enough.

  I slipped off my shoe and pulled out the money I’d brought, then slipped it back on and made my way to the register.

  “Find something?” the old lady asked, and I placed the pillow on the counter. “Oh, that’s cute,” she said, studying it.

  The fan whirred toward me, blowing back my hair and sending a gust of cool air down the nape of my neck. I shuddered, my skin rising up in goose bumps. After being in here, it was going to feel outrageously hot outside.

  She rang up my pillow and I paid her.

  “Tomorrow we’ll have green tags fifty percent off,” she offered. “You should come back. We have some cute junior clothes that will get put out tonight.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and had to tamp down the fear that I would be coming back to the thrift store tomorrow. And every day after that. That this would be my only respite, my only social life, talking about cute throw pillows to a seventy-year-old. Su
rely, I thought, “indefinitely” doesn’t mean forever. I can’t be hanging out in a thrift store forever.

  I plunged back outside into the heat and started jogging the minute I hit the parking lot, the bag with my new pillow in it hanging over my wrist and smacking into my knee with every step.

  Empowered by it, I turned into the woods and took the trail back to my house.

  When I got home I went straight up to my room, kicking my shoes off in the doorway. I placed the pillow at the head of my bed, on top of my other pillows, then stood back and studied it. I liked it there. It gave me something to hope for.

  I took a shower and got dressed, did some math that I figured we were probably doing in class that day. I read a little. Watched a movie. Poked around online until I worked up the nerve to look for the website where my photo had been posted. Someone had taken it down, along with all the nasty comments, which was good, though I wondered if that only meant my photo had been moved somewhere else.

  After a while, I heard a car coming down my street, someone pulling into my driveway, and then two short honks. Vonnie.

  I ran downstairs and opened the front door to let her in.

  “Oh my God, Buttercup, you wouldn’t believe,” she said, pushing past me and heading straight for the recliner. She plopped into it sideways. “There were like twenty parents up in the office this morning. People are pissed off.”

  “About what?” I sat on the arm of the couch.

  She shrugged. “About the texts. About the school taking away phones. About it being the superintendent’s daughter. People’s parents want him fired. Sarah’s mom is saying it should go to court.”

  “Well, that’s rich, considering it was Sarah’s brother who started the whole thing,” I said. But on the inside I was trembling. The peace I’d felt when I’d gotten home from the thrift store was gone. I was slammed back into reality, where I’d screwed up majorly and everyone in the world knew it. “Besides, court? What for?”

  She waved her hand. “I don’t know. You know Sarah. It could have been all drama. You got any soda?”

  I brought her a soda, and she opened it and took a sip, shaking her head. “What are you gonna do, Buttercup?”

  “What do you mean? I’m suspended, remember? It’s not like I can do anything.”

  “No, I mean… what if this gets serious? What are you gonna do if Sarah’s mom gets this to go to court or whatever?”

  My heart was leaping around in my chest like a wild animal, but I swallowed it down and waved my hand dismissively. “Drama,” I reminded her. “I mean, it can’t go to court. It’s not like I committed a crime or something.”

  “I guess,” she said. “But I probably ought to tell you, this is totally the only thing everybody is talking about right now. It’s in the newspaper and people are writing all these letters to the editor and stuff. And the text is still being sent around. I heard that some people over in Mayville have it.”

  Mayville High School? How many schools had this gone to? Chesterton, the junior high, two colleges, and now Mayville.

  “No way. I don’t even know anybody in Mayville.”

  She nodded, took another sip. “Probably a good thing, right? Adams is trying to figure out who’s still sending it around. The shit’s getting really deep. Saturday detention if you’re caught talking about it, suspension if you’re caught sending it. But of course nobody’s going to tell if they got it sent to them. They don’t want to be caught up in this.”

  “Neither do I,” I said, and I felt my chin start to quiver again. I willed the feeling away.

  We sat together for a while, and a couple times she tried to bring up another subject—somebody was dating someone new, someone had gotten into a wreck in the parking lot, somebody was fighting over something stupid—but I honestly couldn’t pay attention, and she didn’t even really have much conviction behind her stories. It was like my story was the only story worth telling right now, and if we couldn’t talk about that, there was really no point in talking at all.

  Finally, she set her empty can on the table next to the recliner, stretched, and got up. “I probably should go,” she said. “You gonna be okay?”

  I shrugged. “I guess it sounds like I’m going to be here for a while.”

  She looked sympathetic. “Buttercup. Take it from me, you don’t want to be there. Have you talked to Rachel?”

  “No,” I said sullenly. And I had no plans to ever talk to her again.

  “She says she’s sorry she did it. She says it was supposed to be funny. Your face was in the picture, so she figured everybody knew it was you anyway. She wasn’t thinking it would go this far.”

  I laughed. “Like destroy my reputation and get me suspended? Well, I don’t forgive her.”

  Vonnie looked torn. “I get it,” she finally said, but I didn’t believe that getting it meant she was going to see it my way and stop hanging around with Rachel. And it was at that moment that I really understood how my relationship with Vonnie had changed.

  Not long after Vonnie left, Mom came home. Her hair was kind of fuzzy, like she’d run her hands through it a lot during the day, and she looked tired.

  Instead of getting out a book or heading straight to the computer in the den, she went to the bedroom and climbed into bed, slinging one arm over her eyes.

  “Mom?” I asked, standing in the darkened doorway. “You fine?”

  At first she didn’t answer, but then I heard a muffled “No.”

  I went in and lay down next to her, stiff and alert next to her defeated body. “Bad day at work?”

  She moved her arm and looked out at me with one eye. “Bad day in general,” she said. “Your dad is going to be late tonight, and I have a migraine, so just grab yourself something for dinner.”

  Her tone sounded angry and bitter. And tired. Really, really tired. She sounded a lot like I felt.

  “Okay. Why’s Dad going to be late?”

  She sighed, letting her arm fall to her side, staring up at the ceiling. “You really want to know, Ashleigh? He’s having a meeting.”

  “About the text?”

  “Of course about the text.” I hated the way she sounded. Mom had been mad at me before, but she’d never sounded so much like she wanted to get away from me.

  “I’m sorry, Mom,” I said again, even though I’d already said it once and had really meant it. I was getting really tired of apologizing, and I’d noticed that I was the only one doing it. A lot of people were involved in this, but only one of us was saying she was sorry. And nobody was apologizing to me. “I heard there’ve been reporters hanging out around the school. Is that who he’s meeting with?”

  “Yes, he’s had to talk to reporters. They’ve scooped up the story like vultures. I think they’re forgetting that this involves children.”

  “You think they’re going to put it on the news?” I got a lump in my throat and tried to concentrate on the afternoon shadows sliding around on the ceiling and walls of my parents’ darkened bedroom, the slits of light pushing through the edges of the drawn blackout shades. “Do you think they’ll come here?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “They’re already at Central Office. Part of what makes the story so sensational is that you’re the superintendent’s daughter, so who knows how they’ll handle it.” She moaned. “But who cares what the reporters are going to do, anyway?” she said.

  I sat up. “I do, Mom. This is so humiliating. I think everybody’s so worried about how this looks for them, they’re forgetting how embarrassing this is for me. I’m naked in that picture.”

  She pulled herself to sitting and faced me, the lines around her eyes soaking up the shadows of the room, making her look older and slightly witchy.

  “It’s embarrassing for all of us. But this is bigger than just embarrassment.”

  I blinked. “What do you mean?”

  “Ashleigh,” she answered. “This isn’t going to stop at embarrassment. What you’ve done… you’ve distributed chi
ld pornography. Your dad… he’s going to be late tonight because he’s meeting with the police. You’re going to be arrested.”

  We stared at each other in disbelief.

  More was so much scarier than I’d ever imagined.

  DAY 27

  COMMUNITY SERVICE

  I brought the pillow with me to Teens Talking.

  I felt kind of stupid walking in there with a silk-screen picture of little kids peeking out of my backpack like a security blanket, but I had an idea and I wanted to run with it.

  “What’s this?” Darrell said, coming up behind me in the hallway and pulling the pillow out of my backpack. He studied it. “Awww, cute. Your brothers?”

  I shook my head. “I’m an only child.”

  “Oooh, spoooiled,” he sang, and stuffed the pillow back into my bag like he couldn’t care less about it.

  “Please, like you couldn’t tell she’s spoiled by looking at her,” Kenzie said, brushing past me with her big belly. I rolled my eyes but let it go.

  Mack was already at his computer. Instead of sitting next to him, I went straight to the back of the room, where a table was set up right next to the art cabinet. I’d already checked ahead of time, so I knew exactly what I needed and where to find it. I got to work, arranging a bunch of random items haphazardly across the table—crayons, a pencil cup, a stuffed bear, a rubber band ball, a flashlight, and my cell phone. Right in the center, tilted almost diagonally, I placed the pillow on top of all of it, then stood back and snapped a photo.

  “Check it out,” I said, pushing the camera’s review tab as I walked past Mack’s computer station. I bumped him in the back and he turned around and looked at the camera’s screen. I saw his lips move as he read the words across the pillow. “For my pamphlet. What do you think?”

  He nodded. “Nice.”

  The time flew by as I worked on editing the photo until it was perfect. I took three more shots, adjusting the items here and there to get it just right. But something about it seemed bland. I couldn’t quite land on what was missing.