by Amy Reed
Her friend looks at her in disbelief. “Jenny, we were friends with her since kindergarten.”
“Were you with her at the party that night?” Margot asks.
“Yes,” says the girl who is not Jenny.
“We weren’t with her when it happened,” says Jenny. “She was totally flirting with Spencer Klimpt all night, and then she, like, ditched us to go do whatever with him. You remember that, don’t you, Lily?”
“She drank a lot that night,” says Lily, looking down. “He kept giving her drinks. She’d never really gotten drunk before that night.”
“Yeah,” says Jenny, but her voice is different from her friend’s, as if they are remembering two completely different girls. “She was drunk.”
“So you blame her?” Rosina says with an edge to her voice. “Because she was drunk?”
“She could barely keep her eyes open,” Lily says, her voice cracking. Tears well up in her eyes as she stares at Jenny, who refuses to look up at her. “He was practically dragging her up the stairs.”
“Jesus,” someone says.
“We should have done something,” Lily says. Her lips are wet with tears. “Jenny, why didn’t we do anything?”
Jenny just shakes her head. She looks folded, like she’s trying to squeeze herself into two dimensions, like maybe if she is small enough, she can slip away from all these girls staring at her and demanding answers.
“She called me the next morning,” Lily says through her tears. “She was crying so hard I could barely understand her. She said something bad happened, something really bad, but she wouldn’t say what. And I kept asking her, ‘What happened, what happened,’ and she kept saying, ‘I don’t know.’ ” Lily pauses and looks over at Jenny, who still won’t look up. “I was still so mad at her for ditching us at the party. We both were. Lucy was the one who made us go in the first place. Jenny and I didn’t want to.”
“She always wanted to be popular,” Jenny says, but now she doesn’t seem so angry. Now she just seems sad.
“I said, ‘Did you hook up with Spencer Klimpt?’ ” Lily says. “And she didn’t say anything, she just kept crying. So I hung up on her.”
“She would do anything to be popular,” says Jenny, but now she’s crying too.
“She kept trying to call back, but I wouldn’t answer,” Lily continues. “Then she just stopped trying.”
Lily takes a deep breath. “I didn’t hear anything until Monday, when she wasn’t at school, and neither were the guys, and everyone was talking about how she and her parents talked to the cops, and there were so many different stories and no one knew what to believe. But it didn’t matter because everyone knew it was three guys who mattered against one girl who didn’t. I mean, no one even knew her name. They were calling her ‘some freshman girl.’ They didn’t even know her name and they already decided she was lying.”
“What did you think?” Grace says softly. “Did you think she was lying?”
After a long pause, Lily says, “No. I believed her.” She looks at Jenny. “But I pretended I didn’t, just like everyone else. I was still so mad at her.”
“I didn’t believe her,” Connie Lancaster says. “I’m sorry, but I didn’t. I believed what everyone was saying, that she made it all up to get attention.”
“I don’t get it,” Rosina says. “Why didn’t you want to believe her?”
“I don’t know,” Connie says, looking down, ashamed. “I hated her for talking about it. It was like she screwed up my life somehow.” Connie looks up briefly, then looks back down with a shudder. “I know how bad that sounds.”
“I remember she only lasted half a day when she came back to school,” Elise Powell says. “People were tripping her in the hall and calling her a slut everywhere she went.”
“And we just watched it happen,” says Sam Robeson, wiping her eyes with a purple scarf.
“Didn’t the ambulance come to get her?” says Trista or Krista. “I heard the school nurse called them because she was having a nervous breakdown in the office.”
“An ambulance showed up, but she didn’t go with them,” Connie says.
“I think her parents picked her up,” says Allison.
“And now she’s gone,” sniffles Sam.
“That is so fucked,” Rosina spits. “This is so incredibly fucked up.”
“I should have done something,” says Lily, quietly. “That night. I shouldn’t have let her go upstairs with him. I knew how drunk she was. I knew something bad was going to happen.” She starts sobbing. “But I thought it was her fault. I blamed her. She didn’t deserve that. I should have done something.”
“We all should have done something,” Sam says softly. “It wasn’t just you. We all ignored her when she came back to school. Nobody helped her. No one stood up for her.”
“A lot of people were at the party that night,” says Melissa Sanderson. “I was there. I saw her talking to Spencer. I knew what he wanted. I had no idea it was going to be anywhere near as bad as it was, that Eric and Ennis were going to be involved, but I knew enough. I knew Spencer was an asshole. I knew he had a habit of taking advantage of drunk girls. I knew she was a freshman. I knew it was wrong.” She closes her eyes, shakes her head.
“But it doesn’t have to be like that,” Rosina says. “It can’t be like that.”
“It’s only like that because we let it be,” Melissa says, locking eyes with Rosina. “We can help each other, but we don’t.”
“It’s time for things to change,” Margot Dillard says, with energy in her voice, like she’s getting ready to make a speech.
“But what exactly are we going to do?” Rosina says.
No one says anything for a very long time.
And then, in the silence, a small voice calls out: “What about a manifesto?”
“A what?” someone says.
“A manifesto,” Grace says a little louder. “Let’s write our manifesto. Let’s tell them exactly what we think.”
“We have to do more than that,” Rosina says. “We have to punish them. We have to do something to make them hurt too.”
“I have an idea,” Grace says.
ATTENTION:
Boys and Young Men of Prescott High School
We are sick of your shit. We have been putting up with it for too long. That ends now.
Our bodies are not toys for you to play with. They are not pieces in a game for you to manipulate and trick. We are not notches on your bedposts.
We believe Lucy Moynihan. She was telling the truth. In your hearts, you know it too. You know who hurt her. You see her rapists at school and in the community every day. You sit by them in your classes. You party with them on the weekends.
But you do nothing. You look the other way and let your friends hurt, use, and rape more girls. Or worse, you encourage them. You cheer them on. Or worse, you do it too.
Guys, we know you can do better. Call out sexism when you see it. Tell your bros their rape jokes aren’t funny. When you hear guys talking shit about girls behind their backs or bragging about their lays, call them on it. Help girls when you see them being harassed or taken advantage of. Be the bigger man.
Don’t keep silent when you know something wrong is happening. Don’t look the other way.
We won’t. Not anymore.
So until you face these facts and take action to change your behavior, and to hold your friends accountable for theirs, you do not deserve us.
Our demands are simple. We require:
1. Justice for Lucy Moynihan
2. That the male students of Prescott High School treat us with the respect we deserve
We do not want war. We want you on our side.
But until that happens, and until our demands are met, we will not engage in any sexual activity with the male students of Prescott High School. This includes but is not limited to: sexual intercourse, oral sex (aka blow jobs), manual sex (aka hand jobs), kissing, frenching, necking, making out, heavy petting, dry
humping, wet humping, porking, screwing, banging, boning, boinking, and any other ridiculous word for hooking up that you can think of.
Do we have your attention yet?
Let us be clear: Rape is not about sex. It is about power and violence and control.
We know a sex strike cannot stop rape. Our strike is meant to get the attention of those of you who think you are off the hook, those who do not rape but who allow it through your silence about those who do, through the tiny things you do every day that make girls feel like they are less than you, that make girls feel afraid. Even if you do not rape, you still hurt women. Even if you do not rape, you feed rape culture by not actively trying to stop it. It is time for you to know this. It is time for this to end.
We hereto declare that the young women of Prescott High School are officially on a sex strike.
Make friends with your hands, boys.
Sincerely,
The Nowhere Girls
US.
The notes are everywhere—on walls, on ceilings, on floors, inside lockers and backpacks and purses—bright fluorescent late-night printouts from some unsuspecting parent’s printer. The school is littered with them. They will be cleaned up, but they cannot be unseen.
“What the fuck is this shit?”
“Is this serious?”
“Have Eric and Ennis seen this?”
“Fucking bitches!”
These are the words said out loud, with laughter, with rage, with ridicule. But there are also slight smiles, imperceptible nods of the head, invisible support that is so far hidden.
Girls walk through the hallway a little taller. They meet one another’s eyes, share smiles with girls they never would have thought to acknowledge before. They keep their secret, and it burns like sunlight in their chests.
* * *
Erin sits at a desk in the back corner of the school’s front office entering data into a computer spreadsheet. Her desk is not quite hidden, but it is pretty close. She is almost comfortable.
One thing Erin has learned during her time in the office is that Principal Slatterly likes to keep her office door open, and she always has a fan going. “She’s going through the change,” Erin overheard Mrs. Poole say while gossiping with one of the guidance counselors.
Erin overhears a lot in her corner. Sometimes people forget she’s there. Or even if they know she’s there, they somehow think she’s not capable of hearing them.
Like right now, Erin can hear every word of a phone conversation Principal Slatterly is having in her office. She heard Slatterly say, “This is Regina Slatterly returning Chief Delaney’s call.” She heard her silent waiting. Then she heard a series of almost meek “Yes, sirs,” as if Slatterly were a child being scolded.
“We’re working on getting all the flyers down,” Slatterly says. “The situation will be contained.”
Erin stops typing.
“I don’t think we have anything to worry about,” Slatterly says. “The girls aren’t doing any harm. It’ll fizzle out in time. . . . Yes, sir. . . . No, sir. . . . It’s just, I’m not so sure they’re actually doing anything illegal. . . . No, of course not. . . . I understand. . . . Yes, I’ll take care of it. . . . Okay, I’ll talk to you later. Tell Marjorie and the kids I say hello.”
Erin hears the phone rattle back into the console. Then she hears quite possibly the loudest sigh in the history of sighs.
She turns her head very slowly until she is looking over her shoulder, straight into the principal’s office, straight at Slatterly seated behind her big desk with her head buried in her hands, her fan ruffling the thinning hair on the top of her head like soft feathers.
* * *
Amber Sullivan has Beginning Art for second period. It’s already a throwaway class, even without today’s substitute teacher. They’re supposed to be working on self-portraits, making a collage of the things they most care about, things that define them. Some students are texting or playing games on their phones; a few are asleep, heads cushioned by arms and jackets. But, mostly, people are talking.
Amber sits at her table in the corner and silently flips through old, wrinkled magazines, looking for pictures to add to her collage. She cuts out a picture of a tree. A mailbox. A cat. She glues them on her piece of red construction paper in no particular order. She cuts out no pictures of people, nothing resembling skin or body parts. The only intention she has for this project is that it should be impossible to read any meaning into it, that it should reflect nothing real of herself, that it should not give her away the way art always claims to do.
The only other person in class who appears to be working on their project is Grace, who is sitting on the other side of the room. School has been in session for three weeks already, but Amber only just started noticing the plain, chubby girl who always seems to be staring at her whenever she looks her way. It’s like she suddenly appeared out of nowhere, and now it’s impossible to ignore her. She doesn’t look at her the way other girls look at her, with a mix of ridicule and hostility in their eyes, the words “slut” and “white trash” on the tips of their tongues. Maybe this girl just doesn’t know any better.
“Fucking chicks, man,” says the asshole named Blake at the table next to Amber’s. It is impossible to ignore him, too. “I bought Lisa a quadruple grande caramel some kind of bullshit that cost like six dollars, and she wouldn’t even give me a fucking hand job.”
“Lisa?” says another guy. “She’s in on that Nowhere Girls bullshit now too?”
“Yeah, can you believe it? She was all, ‘I don’t have to hook up with you if I don’t feel like it,’ so I was like, ‘Then why are you wearing that skirt that’s so short I can practically see your ass?’ and she was all, ‘I can wear whatever I want,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, but if you wear something like that, you can’t expect me to behave myself,’ which is like totally reasonable, right?”
“Totally.”
“But then she started bitching about how blaming women for sexual assault because of what they’re wearing is, like, bad or something, and I was like, ‘Who said anything about sexual assault? I just wanted a hand job,’ and then she threw the fucking drink in my face!”
“She has a point, though,” says a third guy at the table. “It is kind of a dick move to just expect her to want to hook up with you whenever you feel like it.”
Blake and the other guy look at him, like they’re waiting for him to say, “Just kidding.”
“What the fuck, dude?” Blake finally says. “She, like, totally ruined my car seats.”
The guy just shrugs.
“But at least there’s still one girl left who won’t say no,” Blake’s friend says, not even bothering to lower his voice. “You should have called Amber.”
Amber tenses as soon as the words pierce her skin; she arms herself against their laughter. They know she heard them, but they don’t care, or maybe they even wanted her to. Like she’s not even a person, not someone with feelings, not someone who can get hurt. Just an object. Just something they can use. And she does not try to prove them otherwise, does not speak or otherwise engage, neither denies nor confirms their statements. What she does is harden, her own special defense mechanism—fight or flight or turn to stone.
The bell rings. Students put away the art supplies none of them was using. The boys leave without acknowledging Amber’s existence, laughing all the way out the door. Even the guy who defended Lisa is in on it, because Amber and Lisa are very different kinds of girls.
Amber takes her time cleaning up. She is giving the guys a head start. The worst thing is to get stuck in the hall with a pack of them.
The classroom finally empties. Even the sub has disappeared. Amber zips up her bag and throws it over her shoulder. Only five more periods until the end of school, when she can sneak away to the computer lab and hide at her favorite desk in the corner while the tech club nerds congregate on the other side of the classroom pretending she’s not there. It’s her secret—this small joy, that
tiny space behind the computer where she feels capable and creative, where she can leave her body and enter a world that makes sense, a world made of ones and zeros that she can manipulate, a world where she is in control.
“Hey,” a voice says behind her, making her jump. She turns around to find Grace, who somehow sneaked up on her without her noticing. “You’re Amber, right?”
Amber doesn’t say anything, just looks at Grace with an angry squint in her eyes, ready to deflect the inevitable abuse that’s coming, that always comes. She is ready to snarl back, ready to prove the other side of her reputation true: cruel, mean, nasty. There are reasons she doesn’t have any friends.
Grace lowers her voice even though there’s no one around to hear her besides Amber. “You’ve heard of the Nowhere Girls, right?”
Amber nods, and for a brief moment the squint in her eyes softens.
“Do you want to come to the next meeting?” Grace says. “I think you’d like it. The meetings are actually pretty fun.”
“What do you guys do exactly?” Amber says sharply, but the real question in her head is, When was the last time a girl invited me to anything?
“We talk mostly. You can talk about anything. We talk a lot about guys, I guess.”
“So you just sit around complaining about guys?”
“That’s part of it,” Grace says. “But other things, too.”
“Like what?” Amber’s body is angled toward the door, instinctively ready for a getaway.
“Like how to not let them bother us anymore.”
Amber’s bag is packed and over her shoulder, but she’s not walking away. She won’t look at Grace, but she wonders if Grace can feel her wanting to, can feel her full of questions, can sense Amber wanting to feel something besides anger and suspicion.
“You don’t have to decide right now,” Grace says. “If you give me your phone number, I can text you info about the next meeting.”
Just then Amber’s phone beeps with a new text message. She pulls it out of her bag. From a number she doesn’t recognize: Hey, want to hook up tonight? Amber sighs. She is too tired for her seventeen years. She opens her bag and rips out a piece of notebook paper, scribbles something on it, folds it, and hands it to Grace. “Okay,” Amber says, without looking Grace in the eye, then turns and walks out the door.