by Leila Sales
Emily paused for just a second, and then she said, “Okay, that makes more sense.”
Mr. Witt couldn’t believe that someone would write a blog pretending to be me, because he is an adult, and adults don’t do things like that. And Amelia Kindl couldn’t believe it, because she is a nice girl, and nice girls don’t do things like that either. But Emily Wallace believed it immediately. Because she’s a mean girl. So she knew exactly the things that mean girls do.
“Who writes it, then?” asked one of Emily’s friends.
“I have no idea,” I said. “Mr. Witt is supposedly trying to figure that out.”
Everyone at the table snorted as one. “Oh, yeah,” said a girl. “I bet he’ll get real far with that.”
“Remember that time he thought I’d stolen Colin’s phone?” said a guy. “Mr. Witt doesn’t know shit about how this school works.”
“Anyway, Elise,” said one of the girls, “tell us more about the club. It was hidden in a warehouse, right? How did you even find out about it?”
So I told them, sort of. I talked about Start for the rest of the lunch period, but the safe parts: what kind of music we played, how people there dressed. I didn’t mention Char, or Vicky, or anyone specific. Sally and Chava delightedly shared their celery sticks with all our guests, and contributed to the story wherever they could, like by saying, “Yeah, Elise has always liked music a lot!” and so on.
It felt good, this sense of power. I had something, or I knew something, that these kids wanted. And for that reason, they were treating me with respect. They had seen I wasn’t the person who they’d thought I was, so now they were treating me differently, like the new person who they thought I was. Perhaps this was how it felt to be popular all the time.
But power was not friendship. And these people were not my friends.
When the bell rang, everyone got up to throw away his or her trash. But before I could leave the table, Sally and Chava each grabbed one of my arms.
“Thank you,” whispered Sally.
“That was the best lunch I’ve ever had,” whispered Chava.
I guess I had managed to give them something, after all. “Thanks, guys,” I said. “Me, too.”
* * *
Sometime during last period, the PA crackled to life. “Please send Elise Dembowski to Mr. Witt’s office,” the staticky voice said. “Elise Dembowski, to Mr. Witt’s office.”
Everyone in my history class went “Oooh,” which is pretty much the only appropriate response when one of your classmates gets called into the vice principal’s office.
I don’t know what I expected to find in Mr. Witt’s office. But what I know I did not expect to see was Amelia Kindl’s friend there. The one who had won the prize for making that documentary film about people at mummy conventions.
“Oh, hey,” I said to her, and, “Hello again,” to Mr. Witt.
He replied, “Elise, we have something important to discuss with you. Marissa, would you like to start?” He gestured toward the Wrappers documentary girl.
Her face was almost as red as her crocheted scarf when she said to me, in a mechanical tone, “I wanted to apologize. For the blog. Elise Dembowski’s Super-Secret Diary.”
“What?” I said.
She looked at Mr. Witt and he nodded. “I wrote it,” she muttered.
“You…” I stared at her. She was short, with a bob cut and cat-eye glasses. Her fingernails were stubby, with chipped nail polish, and the toes of her Converse sneakers were scuffed.
“You wrote it?” I said. “Why? You don’t even know me. I didn’t even know your name until two seconds ago.” I took a breath. “How could you not even know me and still hate me enough to do something like this?”
She drew herself up to her full height, which still left her a couple inches shorter than me. “It’s postmodern,” she explained, drawing out the word as if she were speaking to someone who had only recently learned English. “It’s a piece of experimental art.”
“It’s not art,” I told her. “It’s my life.”
“Watch that tone, Elise!” Mr. Witt murmured.
“Oh, you want to hear a tone?” I asked. “Here’s one for you. ‘Nobody likes me. Why would anyone ever really like me?’ Does that tone sound familiar to you?”
A feeling was welling up inside of me, so strong that I felt it spilling out of my eyes and mouth and nose. It was strong, but it was nothing I was accustomed to, so it took me a moment to identify it.
I was angry. Not at myself. I was angry at someone else.
“It’s an exercise in storytelling,” Marissa appealed to Mr. Witt. “Trying to get in the mind-set of someone else, trying to see the world through their eyes.”
“Don’t you dare tell me what my mind-set is,” I said.
“I’m using the blog as part of my application for the Gutenstein arts fellowship,” Marissa said to Mr. Witt. “They really like this sort of thing. Giving voice to the voiceless. I’m sorry you didn’t like the writing, Elise, but you have to remember it’s not really about you. It’s about a character who just happens to share your name.”
“Marissa,” Mr. Witt said, “this is bullying, and here at Glendale High, we take bullying very, very seriously.”
This was news to me.
He went on, “I’m going to call your parents so we can discuss how to proceed. But for now, I can tell you that you’re suspended, and this will go on your permanent record. You will take down the blog and replace it with an explanation and apology post, to be approved first by me. You will not be allowed to attend the graduation ceremony or the Freshman/Sophomore Summer Formal. And the school will no longer support your application for the arts fellowship.”
“What?” she shrieked. “Are you serious?”
“Very,” he said. “Now I’m going to let Elise get on with her day, while you stay here and we sort this out. But before she goes, is there anything else you want to say to her?”
Marissa stood still for a moment, her mouth moving, like she was trying to figure out what words to form. At last, she settled on, “Nobody at this school appreciates artists.”
“Give me a break,” I said, and I walked out.
And what I realized in that moment, as I turned my back on the voice of Fake Elise, is this:
Sometimes people think they know you. They know a few facts about you, and they piece you together in a way that makes sense to them. And if you don’t know yourself very well, you might even believe that they are right. But the truth is, that isn’t you. That isn’t you at all.
The final bell was minutes away from ringing, so I didn’t see any point in going back to class. Instead I walked outside to wait for my mother to pick me up. I stood for a moment on the wide stone front steps of the school, turning my face up to the almost-summer sunshine. And I smiled. Because I had met Fake Elise. I had seen her face-to-face. And she was nobody.
I heard a voice behind me. “Did Mr. Witt talk to you?”
I turned around to see Emily, alone. Two words that do not go together. “Yes,” I said.
“Cool.” She stepped out of the shade of the building and immediately pulled her Gucci sunglasses down over her eyes. “I told him,” she added.
“Mr. Witt?”
“Yeah. I told him who wrote that blog.”
“You knew?” I asked, surprised that someone like Marissa would discuss her insane creative pursuits with someone like Emily.
“Of course not.” Emily made a face like she’d taken a bite of raw meat. “I’ve never talked to that girl before. She’s weird. I just found out.”
“How?” I asked.
“What do you mean, ‘how’? The same way anyone knows anything. I ask. People tell me stuff.”
“Well.” I cleared my throat. “Thank you, Emily. That was really … like, surprisingly kind of you. I appreciate it.”
“You’re probably wondering what I want in exchange,” Emily said, immediately undermining any credit I had given her for surprising
kindness.
“Now I am.” I shut my eyes for a moment. If there’s one thing I never asked for, it was to sell my soul to Emily Wallace.
Emily turned her head to glance around, as if to make sure no one was there to hear her. Then she leaned in and said in a low voice, “I want to go to your party tonight. You know, the one that was listed in the paper. Also, Petra’s coming. And Ashley. Do not get us kicked out again. That is not acceptable.”
Emily flashed me her pearly white teen-model smile. If she’d been trying to sell me toothpaste, I might have even bought it.
I considered telling her that I didn’t even know if I was going to my party tonight—didn’t know if I wanted to, didn’t know if I was allowed—but that was, frankly, none of Emily’s business. “That’s it?” I asked.
She pursed her lips, like it hadn’t occurred to her that she might wrangle yet another payment out of me from this one good deed and she wanted to make sure she used it wisely. At last she asked, “So did you actually try to kill yourself? Or did that weird bitch just make up the whole thing?”
Silently, I held up my left arm, wrist facing Emily. She crossed her arms and kept her lips squished together as she examined me for a moment, sizing up those three perfect scars. Finally, she said, “You know that you’re supposed to cut down to kill yourself, right? You did it wrong.”
I looked at Emily and thought about what would have happened if I’d cut the other way. Or what wouldn’t have happened. Char wouldn’t have broken up with me. Alex wouldn’t be mad at me. Pippa wouldn’t hate me.
And I would never have met Vicky. I would never have had my first kiss. I would never have worn rhinestone pumps. I would never have heard Big Audio Dynamite. I would never have discovered Start. I would never have known I could be a DJ.
Emily Wallace didn’t know what she was talking about. She never had.
You did it wrong, she said.
“No,” I said to her. “I didn’t.” Then my mother’s car pulled up in front of the school, and I turned my back on Emily, and I walked away.
18
“You could have told us,” Mom said as she drove me to Alex’s fair. Before my mother picked me up, Mr. Witt had called her to reveal the identity of the blogger and reassure her that Glendale High was once again, as promised, a Very Nice School. “You could have shown that diary to your father, or me, or Steve, and we would have put an end to this long ago.”
You couldn’t have put an end to it, I wanted to tell her. You don’t have the power of Emily Wallace.
“Don’t you think having a conversation about what was going on would have been more productive than ruining Alex’s school project?”
“I thought I was helping her,” I said. “At the time.”
“And now?” Mom asked.
“Now … no. I don’t think that anymore.”
Mom nodded. “You’re a smart cookie, Elise.”
I had always loved when she said that to me, because she was one of the only people in the world who didn’t make it sound like a put-down.
“So can I stop being grounded?” I asked.
Mom laughed lightly as she paused at a stop sign. “No matter how much you’ve seen the error of your ways, you really hurt your sister. And you really hurt this family. I can’t let you off the hook so easily. It wouldn’t be fair. You can’t be ungrounded, but here’s what you can do: you can come home.”
The idea of walking back into my mom’s house after a week away, lying in my big bed there, wrestling with Bone and Chew-Toy, sitting with Alex and Neil and Steve around the breakfast table, having Dinnertime Conversation … it made me smile.
“I’d like to come home,” I said. “I’d like that a lot.”
Mom parked the car at Alex’s school’s parking lot, and together we walked into the fair.
At Glendale East Elementary School, everyone was in high spirits. The soccer field was filled with the second graders’ booths. Older kids ran around selling popcorn and cotton candy. There was even a bouncy castle. Steve, Neil, and Alex had already arrived, and they were standing at Alex’s replacement booth, which consisted of a few cardboard boxes duct taped together with a handful of quickly scrawled poems sitting on top of them. It was nothing like the real poetry castle. It was more like a condemned poetry shack. Looking at it made my stomach turn.
“Hey,” I said, bending down to address my little sister. “Can I talk to you for a second?”
Alex shook her head and hid behind Mom’s legs. I briefly wished that my genetic code did not include quite so much stubbornness.
“Just hear your sister out, Alex,” Mom said, stepping aside. “Let her say her piece.”
Alex scowled and followed me a few paces away from her booth. She was tightly clutching one of her favorite Barbies, glaring at me like I might lunge out and start tearing her doll limb from limb.
“Alex,” I said, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have ruined your poetry castle. I’ll never do anything like that again.”
She pretended to ignore me, mumbling to her Barbie as she made it crawl across a nearby tree branch, clearly playing some imaginary game.
This gave me an idea.
“You know that game you play, Underwater Capture?” I asked her.
“I can’t play it anymore.” Those were the first words my sister had spoken to me since last Friday. “Because of the new couch.”
“But you know the evil sea witch in Underwater Capture?” I pressed on. “The one who gets inside the dolls’ heads and turns them all evil?”
Alex nodded once, not looking at me.
“That’s like what happened to me, Alex.”
She looked at me then, her forehead wrinkled.
“It wasn’t a real sea witch,” I explained. “It was people I know. But that’s how it felt—like all these bad thoughts were in my head, and I didn’t know they weren’t really mine. And that’s why I wrecked your castle. It wasn’t the sea witch’s fault, since I’m the one who did it. But I did it because I was listening to her too much. Does that make sense?”
I couldn’t tell if I had taken this analogy too far, or if seven-year-olds even understand analogies, but after a moment, Alex nodded. “I’m sorry you had a sea witch,” she said.
“Me, too.”
“But—” She shook her head, as if shaking herself free from feeling any sort of sympathy for me. “You ruined my poetry castle. That’s mean, Elise. That’s the meanest thing anyone has ever done to me. And I know sea witches are evil, but I don’t care why you did it. You shouldn’t have done it.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m so sorry, Alex. I know.”
But it was too late; Alex had already stalked off.
And after that, I didn’t know what to do. What do you do when you say sorry, but that still isn’t enough?
I walked slowly around the fair. I saw a post office and a cookie store and a booth that sold worms and caterpillars, although the second grader in charge told me they were all out of caterpillars.
I smiled at all the kids and told them what good jobs they had done. But inside, I felt like my heart was breaking. Because Mom was right: Alex’s booth would have been the best one.
The thing was, Alex’s replacement booth was no worse than half the other ones out on this field. In a week, she had thrown together something that was just about as good as what her classmates had done. Just about as good as theirs, but a fraction of how impressive she was capable of being.
Because of me, and what I had done to her.
In that moment, paused between a booth that sold papier-mâché flowers and a booth advertising mud sculptures, I knew this, suddenly but finally: I wanted to DJ my party tonight. Not to prove Char wrong, not to put Emily and her friends on the guest list, not for anything like that. Simply because Alex deserved to be the best that she could be. And I did, too.
* * *
After the fair was over and all the booths had been broken down, Mom and Steve took me, Alex, and Neil out for pizz
a.
Pizza is a rare treat in the Myers household, reserved for special occasions like winning art contests, performing the lead role in the school play, definitively triumphing over the oil industry, or making it through the most traumatic second-grade school fair in all of history.
“Let’s get it with pepperoni,” Alex said as we headed to the parking lot.
“Let’s get it with maple syrup,” Neil said.
“Let’s get it with pepperoni and maple syrup,” Alex said.
We would get it plain, and with soy cheese. We always did.
Alex and Neil rode in Steve’s car, while I traveled to Antonio’s Pizzeria with my mother.
“Mom,” I said as we left the school, “I know I’m still grounded. But—can I be a little ungrounded?”
“Tell me what that means, and I’ll tell you yes or no.”
I took a deep breath. “Can I get, like, a furlough, just for one night? Tomorrow I swear I’ll go back to being grounded. But tonight I’m … supposed to DJ a dance party. At that warehouse where Dad picked me up last night.”
Mom sighed. “I know.”
“You do?”
“Your father told me he saw it listed in the paper.” She glanced at me sideways, and my face must have conveyed my surprise, because she said dryly, “Just because we’re divorced doesn’t mean we don’t know how to exchange a civil e-mail, you know.”
“So can I?”
Her fingernails drummed against the steering wheel, and her voice was tense as she answered, “You shouldn’t be out of the house that late at night. You’re way too young to drink—”
“But I don’t drink,” I protested.
“—and I can’t have you hanging out with drunk people either. Especially not ever drunk people who are driving you somewhere.”
“I don’t,” I said. “I wouldn’t.”
“It terrifies me to think of you wandering the streets alone at night, because you’re a sixteen-year-old girl and you’re an easy target. And I don’t want you spending your time with so many people who are so much older than you, because I worry they are going to take advantage of you, just because you’re young. I don’t think you appreciate how recklessly you’ve been acting, and how lucky you’ve been so far. I can’t let this kind of behavior go on.”