by Holly Bourne
I smiled sadly. “But the point isn’t to win. It’s just to make people aware…”
“Which you’ve done. You’re all over the papers, Lottie.” Will butted in now. He stood up and came over to the bed, taking my hand.
The relief I felt, with him taking my hand. What it meant. He stared right at me – all his defences gone. There was just sincere care there. Yikes, what had happened to Will? I’d broken him!
“Just send out one last response, saying something like, Everyone who’s sending me hate is a sexist pillock who deserves to be shat on by a giant bird with diarrhoea—”
“That’s an odd metaphor,” Amber interrupted and Will laughed.
Will laughed?!
I’d definitely broken Will.
“Well, you’ll think of something better than that,” he said. “But you get the gist. Then close your account, stop the reposts and reblogs from spreading… It will cool down quickly then.”
I kept shaking my head. “I can’t. It’s giving up.”
“It’s not. It’s looking after yourself,” Evie said.
I started crying again, and Will clasped my hands tighter – his fingers entwining with mine.
“I can’t…I can’t…”
“Nothing is worth you sacrificing your mental health,” Evie said, her voice all therapy.
“But women did so much more and endured so much more,” I protested. “The suffragettes let people force feed them, lots of feminists around the world are laying down their lives. I mean, look what happened to Malala! And what? Me? I give up the moment someone says something mean to me on the internet?”
I sounded so pathetic. So, so pathetic.
How was I this pathetic? I was supposed to want to be prime minister.
And yet, the thought of those replies, sending them out, seeing what came back. My skin went hot, my breathing went…
I was giving up.
I was going to give up.
Because I wasn’t strong. I wasn’t a fighter. At the first sign of it getting hard I was going to roll over and give up.
They had silenced me. Just like they wanted to.
I was weak…
I cried on them for a long time. Cried so much that I didn’t even have an appetite for the chips and salsa, which shows how broken I was.
Seriously…
But, in time, they won me round. And at about ten, just as Mum and Dad were making cooing noises outside in the hallway about it being “college tomorrow”, Will filmed me typing out my final catch-all response. While crying.
“Do we really need to show me crying?” I asked.
“Yes.” He nodded.
“But they’ll know that they got to me.”
“No,” Amber scolded. “It will just show you’re an actual person having a completely legitimate reaction.”
“Me crying will just make them send more hate,” I pointed out. It was true.
They all knew it was true.
Will was clicking about, doing stuff I didn’t understand.
“We’re turning off comments on the videos. You’re temporarily closing your accounts. Yeah, they’ll still say stuff, but the important thing is, you won’t see it… Woah…hang on…” He stared at the screen with his eyes practically bulging.
“What is it?” I asked. “Is it bad? What are people saying now?”
“It’s not bad, Lottie. It’s…” He turned around in my spinny chair and shook his head.
“What is it?” we all yelled.
“It’s our channel,” he said… “It’s just passed one million views.”
forty-three
I eventually fell into bed in a confused stupor, trying to make sense of the good and bad things.
GOOD THING – you’ve had over ONE MILLION views!
BAD THING – at least ten people have promised to rape and/or murder you.
GOOD THING – Will! You had mindblowing sex with Will.
GOOD THING – and he’s already sent you a message saying he had an amazing night and that he’s proud of you…
BAD THING – amongst all the death-threat business, you’ve missed yet another day of college before your Cambridge interview.
GOOD THING – your friends will always be there for you.
BAD THING – you gave up. You’re too weak, you messed up.
I scrabbled around in the covers, opening my window, shutting my window, staring out of my window to check a potential murderer wasn’t hiding in the bushes.
I cried. I remembered things with Will… I smiled…
I cried…I smiled…I cried…I smiled… One million views…
When I finally found sleep, I was smiling.
forty-four
I slept heavily and, when I woke, I felt lighter. Just knowing no one could send me anything else did help…
Hang on, why was it still dark?
Hang on, why was my phone ringing?
I reached for it in the darkness, grabbing at where it was charging at the wall.
6.30 a.m. What? It was the middle of the night!
And it was Will’s number?
My tummy melted, replaced straight away by nerves.
People don’t ring in the middle of the night (well, before 7 a.m.) unless something bad has happened. I slid the screen up to answer.
“Are you dead?” I joked, my voice husky from not being used yet.
Will’s voice was not jokey in reply. “Have you been online yet today?”
All my hairs stood up instinctively. Something was wrong. Something else had happened.
“It’s not even today yet,” I joked again, lamely. “Why are you up so early?”
“Lottie…” He took a deep breath and I knew my instincts were right. It was the sort of breath you take before delivering bad news.
“What is it?”
A pause. A pause so pregnant it was going to give birth already.
“It’s Teddy, he’s done something… Lottie? Lottie?”
I didn’t need him to tell me anything else. He’d given me the only word I needed. Will gabbled at the end of the phone, all flustered, anger lacing every word. I couldn’t tell if it was at me yet, or Teddy.
“There were journalists hanging around at college yesterday. I didn’t want to tell you, as you were already so upset…I…I…I didn’t think anyone would talk to them anyway. We told people not to.”
I slowly rolled onto my stomach, pulling the laptop down in front of me, starting it up as he carried on ranting. I typed Teddy’s name into Google then clicked on News.
My hand went to my mouth.
It was a trashy tabloid site, but still a national newspaper. There, there was his sorrowful-looking face. Next to a huge headline that read, FEMINIST TEEN’S BLACK WIDOW PAST.
I gasped in actual horror.
“Lottie?” Will’s voice was frantic on the phone. “Lottie, are you there?”
I was reading the story under my breath.
“Teen feminazi, Charlotte Thomas, has become a viral sensation this past week with her month-long video project to call out sexism. But, according to her devastated ex-boyfriend, gender equality isn’t something she takes into the bedroom…”
This. This was awful.
“Lottie? Lottie?”
I dropped my phone, ran to the bathroom, stubbing my toe in the dark and vomited into the toilet. I stayed there for a while, clenching the sides of the toilet bowl.
Teddy…
How could he? How could he? How could he…
I hadn’t even read most of the story yet.
Mum and Dad were making waking-up noises in their bedroom and I stumbled past them, croaking, “Good morning,” so they wouldn’t suspect anything, back into my room, shutting the door behind me. My phone was glowing. My call with Will had rung off, but he’d tried ringing back four times.
I couldn’t talk to him.
Not yet.
Maybe not ever.
I brushed a tear from my face and forced myself to s
it upright at my desk with the laptop, thinking maybe if I tried to view this professionally, I wouldn’t get so upset. I wiggled the mouse to activate the screen, and there was my face again. Teddy had obviously given them one of the photos he’d taken last year. There weren’t many, we had hardly dated. But there was that one day when we’d gone to Brighton and shivered by the sea all day in the non-existent winter sun. He’d taken a few selfies of us on his phone… Here they were. The sea and Brighton pier in the background. They’d picked a bad one of me, my eyes squinting from the wind, my hair all over my face. Teddy looked nice though. My insides froze with hatred.
I dragged my attention away from the photo and started reading the story again.
Edward Burrington, eighteen, says he dated the notorious Charlotte last year before he heard about her man-eating reputation.
“Once we got together, everyone told me what a slut she was,” he said. “I didn’t believe them at first. I was in love. I wish I had listened to them now.”
I was shaking my head.
Slut. I was being called a slut in a national newspaper.
A fresh wave of nausea hit me, tears pouring down my cheeks. My phone kept buzzing but I ignored it. I knew I should stop reading, but I couldn’t. It was like I was in full-on self-flagellation mode.
So I scrolled down.
But soon after saucy Charlotte had taken Edward’s virginity, she lost interest and cruelly dumped him.
“I was heartbroken,” Teddy told us. “I honestly thought we were soulmates.”
No you didn’t, Teddy, I thought. Nobody would treat someone the way you’ve treated me this year if they thought that.
“When people came to comfort me, they told me this is what she does. She has sex with boys and then dumps them afterwards. It’s a feminism thing. She says the only way to beat men is to behave like one.”
Where was he getting this from??? How? How was this thing printed? They hadn’t even rung me to listen to my side of the story!
They were still giving Teddy column space.
“This stupid project of hers, she says it’s all about equality, but really she’s one of those man-haters. This is all about revenge for her. She’s a black widow spider. She’s dangerous.”
I didn’t read any more.
I was too stunned to cry properly. I just stared at the screen, shaking my head.
Mum called through the door. “Lottie? You’ve not gone back to sleep, have you? You’ve got college soon.”
“I’m up,” I called back, my voice cracking.
There was no way I was going to college. Not with this, not with lies about my sex life splashed all over the papers and everyone reading it. The way Teddy would look at me all triumphantly – revenge for something wrong I did to him that he’d totally imagined.
And I’d only just got through yesterday…
Oh God – Will would read this! Of course he had already – he was the one who’d phoned me about it. What must he think?
What must anyone think?
I’d always tried not to care before. That’s how you give away your power, by caring what other people think. As long as nobody thought I was a nasty person, I didn’t worry about the rest. I mean, why bother? You couldn’t control it anyway.
But this had broken that.
I knew I wasn’t a slut… Was I?
And it’s a totally horrid word anyway, that I’m totally against. I’m against the whole concept. A slut isn’t even a real thing – it’s just a thing society has made up, an imaginary noun used to shame and control women. If I’d read this story and it wasn’t about me, I would’ve been publicly declaring how awful it was.
It was about me though.
And now, now…everyone thinks I’m a slut…
I lay my head on my hands, collapsed forward and really started to cry then. The sobs heaving up out of my back – my phone still ringing like crazy.
Was it Will? Probably. Pretending this hadn’t altered how he thought of me. Probably thinking how quick I’d been to have sex with him, multiple times, the day before.
Probably thinking that’s a pretty slutty thing to do.
Or it would be Amber and Evie. Caring, always caring. But whatever they said or did, it couldn’t take any of this away. Not even with a lifetime supply of cheesy snacks.
Mum called through my door again and I started. College. I was supposed to be going to college.
No way in hell. But they couldn’t know that. They’d been clucking a lot about this Cambridge interview, saying how important it was I knew the syllabus inside and out. In amongst all my public glory (and shaming that they didn’t know about) they were still making sure I kept my eyes on the prize.
I wondered if Cambridge would read this.
Then I laughed through my tears. No chance. At least their intellectual snobbery would stop them ever reading this paper.
I began getting dressed, wiping the tears from my eyes the moment they fell, hoping my face would clear up enough before I went downstairs so my parents couldn’t see I’d been crying.
There was another thing to think about.
What had just happened. This. Teddy. That whole mess.
It was sexism.
A tiny sliver of my brain that wasn’t in total free fall could identify that.
And, if it was sexism, that meant I needed to call it out.
Which was exactly what they wanted me to do.
Enough…
I didn’t have the strength.
I was broken. I was willing to admit that I, Lottie the unbreakable, was totally and completely annihilated.
I wasn’t going to call this out.
I was going to hide.
I’d been silenced.
And you know what? I was relieved.
forty-five
My parents didn’t suspect anything through breakfast, and I was out the door before them anyway.
I wasn’t going to college. Nope. I didn’t have whatever insane mental strength you would need to go into college the day you’re publicly shamed for being a girl and having sex with more than one person. I’d turned my phone off too and left it in my bedroom.
Yes, I was sure Evie and Amber would be worried, but I was so humiliated I couldn’t even face having that conversation with them now.
Will might be worried. Or he might worry I’m a black widow slut…
It annoyed me how much I cared what he must think.
It was a cold and damp morning, the wind swirling my hair around my face. I walked without much clue where I was going, just as long as it wasn’t in the direction of college. I passed a new sexist poster at the bus stop.
I didn’t do anything.
I was done. I was spent. I’d given it everything and all it had done was bite me so much in the arse, I was surprised I had any arse left – just a hole that poo fell out of.
That’s really gross, Lottie.
I found myself climbing Dovelands Hill, the spot where me and my other spinsters had first made friends. It took up most of my energy, my breath frosting as it left my mouth in rapid sobby heaves. I collapsed on the bench at the top and surveyed the landscape below me, my teeth chattering from the chill.
I was lost.
I wasn’t usually able to admit that, but then, there, alone, I could.
I’d tried to do something good and now I was being publicly shamed. The sheer unfairness of it hit me in waves of fury and I screamed out over the view – scattering some birds from the trees.
Why wasn’t Teddy being publicly shamed for doing this to me?
I was innocent. The only thing I was guilty of was not liking him as much as he wanted me to. Of maybe taking too long to figure that out. I’d broken up with him with respect and care.
Now he was calling me a nasty slut in the national press, ruining my reputation, and I couldn’t do anything. Well, I could do something. I could fight back… I was supposed to fight back. But I had no fight left in me.
I thought
of how it had all started – with those two men in the van. How strong I’d felt when I’d taken them on.
But it wasn’t worth this. The fight wasn’t worth how I felt right now. Damaged, ashamed.
Humiliated…
Maybe this is why people don’t bother changing anything. It’s not just having your hope crushed in the palm of society’s hand, but having your spirit crushed too. Your sanity questioned.
Am I crazy?
Is this really a problem?
Is it really worth all this to try and fix it?
Especially when it’s likely this won’t fix it?
I started to cry again – tears jumping off my face like paratroopers. Really depressed ones.
I thought I was strong but I’m not.
I thought I could change things but I can’t.
I thought I didn’t care what anyone thought, but I do.
Maybe I should just roll over. Shut up. Calm down. Zip it. Stop whinging. Cease and desist.
Maybe I should just look out for me, put me at the top of the pyramid. Focus on revision, focus on Cambridge. Get in, get a brilliant job, earn loads of money, drop some pound coins into a collection tin when I passed to ease the guilt that I was letting the universe eat itself but it’s okay because look at this lovely new lipstick I’ve bought.
It would be easy.
It would be nice.
I wasn’t going to change anything anyway.
I stayed up there until I couldn’t feel my limbs from the cold – I’d gone past the point of numb. I was just going to stop the project. Not announce it or anything. Just stop posting videos, stay offline…go back to college maybe in a few days’ time…with a hammer to smash in Teddy’s skull…no…not murder. Murder bad.
It was so cold my brain was broken.
The house was empty when I let myself in. Dad off teaching people stuff they’d never need to know, not really. Mum rubbing the physical knots out of people that life had given them.