by Susan May
Running as fast as we could, we made the end of the corridor and turned the corner before stopping to look back. I inched my face around the corner edge, confident the line of lockers and crowd of kids concealed me.
She was standing in the middle of the corridor, holding her lunchbox, which no doubt carried her name. Her body swung back and forth as she searched up and down the hall for her designated babysitter. With each turn, her arms swung out, twisting loosely around her body. She could have doubled for a scarecrow. After a few moments of searching, she sighed, and—as I laughingly told Karen and Anna later, in the library—she stomped off in the other direction, her mouth screwed up in a pucker.
As I entered the classroom after lunch, Beetle pounced on me, pulling me aside to the corner of the room. He folded his arms, and I knew this would not be good.
“Angela, I asked you to look after Emma. I am very disappointed in you.”
Before I could offer my prepared she must have lost us in the crowd reasoning, he continued. “Now, there is no excuse for this. When a teacher asks you to do something, you better do it. You and your little gang need a lesson in hospitality.”
I wanted to reply Yeah, like we’re the school tour guides. Instead, with the threat of detention swinging so close that I could feel the air whistle about me, I held my tongue and meekly blurted, “Sorry, Mr. Roach. We forgot about Emma.”
He raised his bushy gray eyebrows, folded his arms even more tightly across his chest, and said, “I don’t believe you. I’ll let it go this time. Tomorrow, though, I want you to make sure she feels welcomed, or you know what will happen.”
As I walked back to my desk, Diane mouthed “What?” at me. I shook my head and went to slide behind my desk, but not before detouring to stand behind a sitting Emma—“Cabbage,” as we had dubbed her—and bumping her head with a solid whack of my elbow. Her head and orange mop were jolted forward.
Immediately she whipped around to stare at me, her eyes wide as her hand reached up to rub the spot where my elbow and her head had connected.
I smiled at her, then nodded toward Beetle. His back was to us as he wrote some motivational poem, meant to inspire us, on the electronic whiteboard. Cabbage followed my gaze and then turned back to me, her forehead furrowed as if she couldn't understand what she had done wrong. Ugly and stupid!
I stared at her and smiled as I pulled my chair into the desk. It made a loud scraping noise, just as I wanted.
Jotting a note quickly, I passed it to Diane. It read, “She squealed.” Diane looked over toward Cabbage and caught her attention. Then she ran her outstretched finger across her neck. This Emma Carter had picked the wrong girl to cross.
The next day, Diane and I plotted the excuse we would use for avoiding The Cabbage. (We’d put “The” before her name now. It just seemed to fit.) We would tell her we needed to practice our running because of the upcoming fall festival. We’d be out on the soccer field, which would be no good for her pale, freckled skin.
In the end, we didn’t need our brilliant excuse. The Cabbage took off the minute the lunch bell chimed. It was Diane and me left standing in the hall among the scattering kids.
“She’s so creepy white,” said Anna. “That’s a good enough reason to ignore her.”
“You can’t trust people with that many freckles,” said Karen. “If your skin can’t take the sun, you should live with the Eskimos.”
“The hair gets me. Does she not own a mirror?” I added.
Now my friends were starting to hate Emma Carter, too. that felt good, even exciting.
The one good thing about The Cabbage was that she gave us a new target for fun. We hadn’t had this much entertainment since Simon Berry had had his asthma attack in the middle of class. For days afterward, we ran competitions for the best “Simon Berry attempting to breathe” imitation. A kid in the eighth grade who did a half-breakdance, half-dead fish action won. We gave him a dollar, and Karen gave him a kiss, which wasn’t part of the deal. It was hilarious watching him run away rubbing madly at his cheek.
Diane and I were laughing as we entered the classroom after lunch, our bodies molded together as if we were conjoined twins. We separated the moment we saw Beetle standing behind his desk, hands on his hips, talking and nodding to none other than The Cabbage. As she walked off toward her desk, Beetle looked at us, and motioned to me with a worm-like curving finger.
Dodging toward her desk, Diane left me there, standing in a stream of students eager to get away as well. What could I have done wrong now? I looked over at The Cabbage. She was looking down, reading from a book. Stiffening my shoulders, I marched toward Beetle, who was swaying from one foot to the other, his mouth twisting from side to side.
“Yes sir?” I said, hoping the “sir” might buy me some points.
“You know,” he sighed, “I don’t get you. You think by now you would have learned your lesson. Is it that you really want detention and a note home to your parents? What do you have to say for yourself?”
The idea that he had gone mad entered my head. Then I thought, maybe he has me mixed up with someone else. For one funny second, I thought maybe, just maybe, this was a joke. Something to pay me back for not looking after the Cabbage Patch kid. Sucky slut Emma—The Cabbage—Carter.
His lips twitched as though an electric current ran through them, so this was no joke.
“Mr. Roach, I don’t really know what I did wrong.” I tried hard not to stutter. Usually I wouldn’t be worried, but detention this week was an issue.
Detention meant my parents grounding me this Friday. A grounding this Friday meant no sleepover at Diane’s. No sleepover at Diane’s—which was really just a cover—meant me not going to the huge club party at The Pump House, an abandoned city warehouse. So whatever Beetle was going to say next had better not include the word “detention.” If it did, someone would pay.
“Angela,” he said, sighing as he shook his head.
Just get on with it, you mutant insect. Stop dragging it out.
“I asked you to look after Emma, and you willfully defied me.”
Yes, we went through this yesterday. I didn’t defy you today. Not today! The freak took off. We did look for her.
“You have no right to be cruel to a new student. Emma has told me everything you said to her. That is bullying. You should be ashamed of the things you said. They were hurtful.”
My face burned red, and I started to say, “She’s lying,” but I only got out “She’s” before he stopped me.
“I don’t want to hear your excuses. You live on excuses. I have warned you enough. It’s detention for the rest of the week. Your parents will be informed. Now back to your desk.”
Closing my mouth with the word “lying” still hanging from my tongue, I bit my bottom lip, rolling it under my teeth. I held it there, biting even harder, afraid that if I let go, everything I was thinking might come out before I could stop it.
Bullying her? BULLYING HER?
He had to be joking. She had to be joking. If I were bullying her, she would know about it. Sure, we called her names behind her back. We would have progressed to saying it to her face. We hadn’t. Not yet. So what game was she playing, telling Beetle we bullied her?
I stomped back to my desk, not looking at Diane—she looked desperate to know what he’d said—or The Cabbage. Already I had begun to create my plan. This Emma Carter didn’t know us. She had made a big mistake. Obviously she was too stupid to realize she had messed with the wrong girl. I wasn’t just anybody at this school. I had five hundred and twenty-three friends on Facebook. I was popular.
She was about to discover what happens when you take on popular.
By the time Friday night rolled around, I’d endured my afternoon detentions, written my one-thousand-word essay (Why Bullying Should Not Be Tolerated), listened to my parents ask me repeatedly where they went wrong, and listened some more as they proceeded to answer their own question.
As I sat in my room, feeling
more and more as if I were imprisoned than grounded, I stared at the photos on Facebook. Diane and the girls were posting live shots from the party. I could see I wasn’t just missing a good party; I was missing a great party. Further inflaming the gnawing pit in my stomach, Diane kept posting that she missed me. I knew that, in the coming days, I would endure the blow-by-blow of the excitement I had missed. The great music, Jonathon Rester the hunk, and all the gossip. All of it never to be experienced by me.
That made me mad—really, really mad. It was then that I decided I absolutely, with every fiber in my body, hated Emma Carter. Emma Carter was going to pay. It only took me thirty minutes to put my plan into place.
By Monday morning, things were coming together. As I walked into the classroom, I looked over at The Cabbage. I wanted to give her my best so you thought you could mess with me smile, but she didn’t look up.
Instead, unmoving, she stared straight ahead at the whiteboard. It was clear from the dark smudged hollows under her red-eyed gaze that she was already feeling the impact of my plot. I didn’t feel sorry for her. She had lied. Now she was paying.
At lunchtime, if I could have, I would have thrown her up against the sports shed wall and screamed at her until she explained why she lied. That lunch hour, and every one after that, she disappeared somewhere, somewhere we could never find her. Despite our best search efforts, it was as if she had vanished into thin air at the start of the lunch break, only to materialize again at the end.
“She must realize,” I declared, “That we don’t want people like her at our school. She needs to take her ugly little roly-poly body and roll herself somewhere else.”
We all laughed. Then Carol added, “After what you did, Ange, I think she’ll get the message.”
She didn’t get the message. Every day Emma Carter continued to turn up at school and sit quietly at her desk while staring straight ahead. As if ignoring me would protect her. She had begun to appear more disheveled than ever before. Her clearly unwashed hair had turned into knobs of wiry red bristles, and at the back of her head it had matted into a bush.
On her arms, small dark marks had appeared. At first we thought they were bruises, but as she rubbed at them—making a horrible dry-skin scratchy sound—I saw they looked more like the black mold that grows around the base of a leaky tap. there was a smell coming from her that, ironically, did faintly remind me of rotten cabbage.
“What is that stuff on her arms?” said Diane, as we made our way to the gate Friday afternoon. She gave a mock shiver. Some of the marks were joining up, forming larger blobs between her elbow creases, which made them look really disgusting.
“She’s a cabbage gone bad,” I said. “Soon, she’ll smell so bad she’ll need to be thrown out with the trash.”
“Surely they’ll kick her out of school,” said Diane. “She’s filthy.”
“Whether they kick her out or not, she’s going,” I said.
Later that evening, I checked my Facebook page creation and its growing number of members and posts. I leaned back in my chair, a sense of accomplishment spreading through me.
There was a distinct touch of style about my page. Pictures of Cabbage Patch dolls and blood drops filled the photo section. Cabbages sliced into pieces with large knives—that was a touch of brilliance. The Cabbage must be wishing she’d never messed with me.
My I HATE EMMA CARTER Facebook page was a big success.
It had quickly expanded from my immediate friends and taken on a life of its own. In only a week, over two thousand people had liked the page. Many, whether they knew her or not, had posted their own taunting messages to The Cabbage.
In the online world, it didn’t take long for complete strangers, many using cartoon avatars, to take up the baton. Even as I watched, two more comments suddenly appeared.
Emma Carter do the world a favor. Donate your body to science.
And—
Ban genetic food modification. We don’t want more Emma Carters.
Suddenly a little number one appeared above the message icon. I clicked on it, fully expecting it to be a friend congratulating me on my huge page membership.
It wasn’t.
Immediately, I recognized the user by the photo: a pudgy, freckle-faced image. What was she thinking, messaging me? She sure had some nerve. First she invades our school with her ugliness, then she lies, and now she messages me. The mangy, scabby animal did not know when to quit.
The message was only six words.
Angela Please, leave me alone. Emma.
Those words were the equivalent of waving a red flag at a bull. Within minutes I had sent a global message to all the members of the page. It would take only a few hours before messages and posts would flood The Cabbage’s Facebook account.
How about you leave us alone. Like permanently.
On Monday, I danced into class, sure that all that would remain of The Cabbage would be an empty chair. I was stopped mid-skip because, incredibly, she was there. To make matters worse, she was crouched over my desk, writing on something.
When she looked up and saw me staring at her, a startled expression sprang across her face, and she dropped her pen. It rattled to the floor and rolled several desks toward the front. Then she hop-jumped to her seat without even stopping to retrieve it.
I squeezed my eyes half-shut and scrunched up my nose and face—creating the best evil-eye stare in my repertoire—and held it the entire way to my desk.
Once at my desk, I picked up the scrap of paper lying there and shook it vigorously, as if that action would remove all the Cabbage germs she had left behind. Scrawled across it in big chunky letters, as if a kindergarten baby had written them, were the words:
Please leave me alone. Or what happens won’t be my fau—
Scrunching the paper into a little ball, I made a gesture as if to throw it at her. I would have, too, if I hadn’t caught sight of her eyes. They weren’t just red anymore; they now had a bright orange tinge to them. It was almost the same color as her hair, which was almost the color of a rotten carrot. Then I saw her arms, and I was almost sick.
The black mold splotches had grown even more. Now the skin on parts of her arms, especially around her elbows and wrists, had turned an iridescent black. A blue-black bulge throbbed in her elbow crease. It was as if an alien life form had grown inside and was now attempting to escape.
The Cabbage just kept looking at me, and as she did, it almost looked as if a black mark grew on her neck. It went from the size of a thumbtack to the size of a dime in the few seconds it took me to turn away from her stare.
I looked over at Diane and tilted my head back toward The Cabbage, whose head now hung limply, her chin resting on her chest. Her orange-red hair flopped over her face in a mass of tangled fuzz that looked like a frenzied tumbleweed bush on a neck.
Diane pulled a face as if she’d eaten something sour. I knew we were both thinking the same thing.
This has to be her last day.
In a way, it was.
That afternoon, I rushed home to check the status of my I HATE EMMA CARTER page.
There were 372 more likes and dozens more posts and photos of cabbages.
I was patting myself on the back for achieving so much, so quickly, when the doorbell rang. Diane was coming by after dinner, but I figured for some reason she must be early. I was just thrilled that I wouldn’t have to wait to share the new posts.
I bounced down the stairs two at a time and flung open the front door. Fixed on my face was a huge grin. The words “What are you doing?” faded quickly from my lips. Taylor Lautner the guy who plays the cute werewolf in Twilight would have surprised me less. It wasn’t the fact The Cabbage stood at my door that stunned me—although it was shocking—it was her appearance.
She stood there, filling the frame of the door, her fingers sliding viciously back and forth across the black throbbing lumps all over her skin. The action made a squelching, sickening sound, like windshield wipers on a dry day.
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In that terrible moment, I realized I no longer hated Emma Carter. Fear overwhelmed every other emotion, and my legs began to shake.
She no longer looked human. There was still the orange hair and the ugly features of her Cabbage Patch face, but her skin was moving and writhing, as if something were incubating inside her.
Slamming the door in her face, I stood there on the other side failing to control my own breathing. My chest heaved as I chugged in gulps of air.
Would she dare knock again? What the hell was wrong with her? She must be dying of skin cancer or something.
The bell didn’t ring again. And she didn’t knock.
Slowly I backed away, my stare never leaving the door. When I reached the stairs, I turned and ran back to my room. That thing was a mutant. As the shock wore off, I suddenly wished I’d had my phone. I could have taken a photo. I couldn’t wait to tell the girls.
I returned to my computer, my heartbeat now returning to normal. I shook the mouse on its pad and stared at the screen. Another few comments. Ten more likes. My heart skipped. Now I could tell them all that she’d come to my door, that the freak was stalking me.
I’d started frantically to type, the tapping sound loud and hollow, when a cold feeling inched up my spine.
Emma Carter was behind me. I knew it even before I turned.
Standing in the doorway, fingers still scratching at her skin, she looked past me and scanned my room. When her gaze came to rest on the computer, opened to my I HATE EMMA CARTER page, she stepped toward the desk. Her outstretched hand pointed at the screen and made quick small circles, as if she were whipping the air into a whirlpool.
Then, through gritted teeth, she said, “I asked you to leave me alone.”