“Are you two seeing each other?” Jane asks, and I shake my head. My tongue feels swollen and numb. I mean, so what if they saw the video, right? They’re both progressive, understanding parents, aren’t they? And it was just sex … Or maybe I’m overreacting and there’s no video at all? “From what Luke tells us, he bullies you. Why have you never mentioned it to me or Cathy?”
“When did you talk to Luke?” I ask, feeling my trepidation fade a little. The anger comes clawing back, raging through me like a monster on a rampage, like the mask on my face is a real thing, sweeping over and consuming me.
“We called you a few hours ago, but you didn’t answer,” Jane says, and I wonder how many times they called, and I didn’t notice, too intent on revenge against the Knight Crew. Because obviously they had to have talked to Luke before we dropped our phones at the gate. “So, we called Luke and talked to her about it. Apparently, she already knew.”
“Knew what?” I ask, looking to Cathy. Tears prick the edges of her eyes as she stands up from the couch.
“We’re not mad, honey,” she says, but Jane looks it. She looks furious. “But someone posted a video of you and that boy online …” My heart plummets to the floor and shatters, spattering the walls with metaphorical blood; my body begins to shake.
“Where? When?” I choke out, wishing I had my phone so I could look it up.
“We’ve been working to get the videos removed for hours,” Jane continues, “but it could be some time before they come down. Karma, is there something you want to tell us? Did that boy coerce you into sex? Did you give your consent?”
My head is spinning, and I have to put a hand up against the wall to steady myself.
“If he hurt you, baby …” Cathy starts, but I can’t breathe. Did Calix coerce me? Well, he lied to me, but that’s not a crime is it? It’s not against the law to be an asshole. And I wanted him. I wanted him so badly I couldn’t breathe. The way he cupped my face, put his fingers beneath my chin, looked into my eyes. The words he spoke were so raw and real, so impossible to fake, and yet …
“He didn’t hurt me,” I choke out, “not physically.” But into my heart, he stabbed a knife, twisted it, laughed as I bled. “It was consensual.”
Jane doesn’t look convinced. No, she looks about ready to storm over to the fancy dormitories that house every Crescent Prep student but me, and make some blood rain down from the sky. I should love her for that, for wanting to protect me. Instead, I just feel sick to my stomach.
“You don’t have to be afraid to talk to us,” Cathy says, moving around the coffee table to come toward me. But I don’t want to be touched right now. All I want is a hot a shower and to be left the fuck alone. Part of me wants to go online and search for the video; the rest of me knows what a terrible idea that’d be. How many people have seen it? Has it gone viral? Will this shit haunt me for the rest of my life?
“Can I go to my room, please?” I ask, but Jane frowns, not quite finished with our conversation.
“What happened, Karma? Why didn’t you come to us?” I give her a dark look that she returns. There’s a struggle in her face as she tries to figure out why I’d hop into bed with a bully. Whatever possessed you to do it? That’s what her face says. The answer though … I’m not sure I have that. I don’t know. I consider myself a strong person; I was raised to demand respect and give it when earned. Calix has never earned it.
“I don’t have to tell you every little thing I do,” I say, moving over to the table and snatching up the destroyed canvas. The words are an echo of what I told the Knight Crew earlier.
“What happened with your art, Karma?” Cathy asks, studying me as I clutch the painting to my chest. “You’ve been working on it for months.”
“Sometimes things just don’t fit anymore,” I snap, feeling frustrated, overwhelmed, trapped. And I’m going to kill Luke. She talked to my parents and didn’t bother to tell me? Betrayal sits like lead in my stomach, making me queasy. “It’s my art; I can do whatever I want with it.”
“Karma?” It’s Emma, standing in the hallway in colorful Pusheen pajamas, decorated with plump little gray cats. “Do you want to see our mural?” she asks, rubbing at her eyes, obviously missing the entire point of this conversation. Katie stands just behind her in Star Wars pj’s.
“No.” I bite the word out, too harsh, too violent. “I don’t.”
I storm past them, ignoring Jane’s shouts for me to stop, and lock myself in my room. My phone is gone, but I stick my headphones in anyway and use Bluetooth to connect them to my laptop, blasting my music and hating my life.
Even though I know I shouldn’t, I Google the video. It comes right up when I type in Crescent Prep, Calix Knight, and Karma Sartain. It’s everywhere, under my real name, plastered on every social media site there is and then some.
My stomach drops, and I choke on bile as I click the first link that pops up.
The video begins to play, and I’m horrified to see that it starts right at the beginning, with me crossing my arms and demanding to know what Calix wants, with the soft tenderness in his face. “You don’t understand … for years, I’ve been wanting to tell you how I feel. It’s just … the crew, and Raz, and Barron …”
I skip further along in the video, watching his cool, pale hands undress me with reverence, watching as our mouths clash in a swirl of heat and desperate, clawing need. It gets worse after that, image after image of him entering me, going down on me, coming in me … I scroll past to the comments, choking on the vile hatred in them, the dark vitriol, the judgment.
A message pops up from Luke on the side of my screen.
I just saw the video. Are you okay?
I stare at her message for a moment, quiet and still on the outside, an explosion taking place inside of me.
Am I okay?
Fuck no, I’m not okay.
You spoke to my parents and didn’t tell me. How could you?
She starts to type a response, deletes it, starts over again.
Fuck you. Don’t talk to me for a while. I hit send, slam the lid closed on my laptop, and crack the window. I hop down, the icy wind blowing against my face, making the tip of my nose hurt. I’m shaking now, and I have the desperate urge to just get out, to be anywhere but here. The thing is, how can I run from something on social media? Even if that video gets taken down—it’s pretty goddamn sexually explicit so I’m assuming it will—people will have downloaded it, screenshotted it, shared it. It’ll be everywhere, always.
Always.
Forever.
Heartbreak clogs up my throat as I turn and look into the eyes of the Horned God, his outline painted on the inside wall of our carport. Seated in a throne beside him is the goddess, his lover. In one of her hands, she holds a chalice, representing femininity, and in his, he holds a knife, representing masculinity. I bet he never hurt you like this, I think, knowing that my moms probably put the outline up for the girls to color in.
On the ground in a wooden crate, there’s a whole rainbow of spray paint. Before I can think better of it, I grab one and pull the top off, spraying the mural with red that looks like blood. By the time I’m done, tears are streaming down my face that I can’t seem to stop. It’s like there’s a monster inside of me, making me do bad things, and I can’t fight it. Maybe I’m just too weak?
“Karma?” I turn to see my sisters looking out their window at me, staring at the damage I’ve just done to their art. Katie already has tears streaming down her face. “Why did you do that?” Emma asks, looking at me like she doesn’t know who I am. Not the first time I’ve gotten that look today.
Without a word, I drop the spray paint to the ground and head for my mom’s car. She has a tendency to lock herself out of it, and it’s old enough that it doesn’t have a keyfob or auto-unlock or anything like that, so she keeps a spare key under a small concrete statue of a goblin. I snag it and let myself into the shitty ’95 Taurus with too many miles, starting the engine and backing out of the
driveway fast enough to wake the whole park.
I don’t care.
I just need to move.
I start driving, with no particular destination in mind, the windows rolled down, the breeze whipping my purple hair around my face. And still, still I wear the mask. Because if I had trouble taking it off before, I most definitely can’t bear to remove it now.
Even though I know I shouldn’t, I head back to the Devils’ Day Party, parking next to Calix’s dented Aston Martin, and marching through the woods to the bonfire.
Even though it’s now close to four in the morning, the party barely shows signs of slowing down. The whole clearing smells like weed and booze, sex and smoke. I storm right through it all and back to the train cars, looking for the Knight Crew.
When I find them, they’re all sprawled out across the seats in the rear passenger car. Raz has a girl on his lap while Barron sits in the corner, sucking on a bag of cough drops and sketching. Calix, meanwhile, holds a bottle in his hand and smirks while some girls dance naked around a much smaller fire just outside the door, wearing their masks and panties and nothing else.
I shove my way through them, taking the steps up into the train car with my chest heaving. I’m sure they can all tell that my face is streaked with tears from crying, but I don’t care.
“Who did it?” I snap, my voice cutting through the music and the laughter. All eyes turn to me—Calix, Raz, Barron, Sonja, the demon-faced girls, and the boys wearing monster masks. “Who posted it?”
“Who posted what?” Calix drawls, looking bored out of his mind. He tosses the full bottle of liquor in his hand and lets it crash to the floor, soaking the leaf-covered ground in vodka. He’s clearly drunk as he squints at me from behind his mask, dark eyes narrowed but bloodshot. I’ve caught the Knight Crew at the tail end of their party, and every single one of them is trashed.
“The video,” I grind out, barely able to force the words past my clenched teeth. Raz is looking at me like he can’t believe I’m standing here, like he thinks I should still be locked in the mouth of the Devils’ Den, while Barron’s face is as impassive and empty as usual. Sonja sneers, but she’s got a girl on one side kissing her neck, and a boy on the other. Pretty sure none of them have the energy or mental fortitude to come after me right now. “Who posted it?”
“How the hell did you get out of the cave?” Raz asks, staring at me like I’ve materialized from space.
“They were gone hours ago,” Barron says, his voice like steel and velvet, both hard and soft at the same time. “But we don’t know what video you’re talking about. Our phones are in the tree, just like everybody else’s. Well, except for yours; we smashed it.”
“Bullshit,” I snap, choking on tears. I look from Raz’s blue eyes behind his glasses, to Barron’s multi-colored gaze, and then back to Calix’s dark one. “Somebody posted a video from last year’s party,” I say, trying to get the words out but failing miserably. I can’t say it; don’t make me say it.
“There shouldn’t be any videos from last year’s party,” Raz growls out at me, pushing the girl from his lap and standing up. He stalks over to glare down at me, the whites of his eyes still slightly reddened from the pepper spray. “To get into the party, you ditch your phone; everybody knows that.”
“Yeah? Like it’d be impossible for anyone at Crescent Prep to have a second phone? Grow up, Raz.” He reaches out to grab my arm, but I jerk out his grip, keeping my back to the doorway but putting some much-needed space between us.
“What was in the video?” Calix asks, blinking at me from his position on the old, torn cushions of the train car. His eyes bore into mine, like steel spikes, blinding me to the rest of the world.
“Us,” I say, and there’s the slightest tightening of that pretty mouth of his.
“Somebody posted a video of you two fucking?” Sonja asks with wide eyes, and then she throws her head back and laughs. She’s not the only one. Within seconds, the train car is filled with it. Every member of the Knight Crew howls with pleasure at the thought of my humiliation. It takes Calix several seconds to join in, but then he does, too.
The sound rings in my ears, a deafening cacophony that makes me want to claw my own eardrums out.
“This is gold. We need to bail on this party, so we can look it up,” Raz says, and I realize that I’ve made a mistake in coming here. A big one. “Maybe we could take Karma here with us, so we can all watch it together?”
I shove him out of the way—hard—and take off running. Shouts echo behind me, and I just know that some of the crew are giving chase. The last thing in the world I want is to be there when they all see it, when they watch it together and laugh at me. It’ll be like the comments section in real life.
God, she has an ugly body. She should just be glad he’s willing to fuck her.
That girl is a straight-up ho. He says the magic words—I love you—and she just falls into bed with him?
I go to school with these people. Karma Sartain is white trash, through and through. She must really hate herself to sleep with someone who despises her.
I’d tell the bitch I loved her, too, if it’d get her to screw me.
I skid in the gravel as I come to a stop beside the car, using my palm to slow myself down, and tweaking my wrist at the same time. But when I glance over my shoulder, I see several of the monster-masked boys catching up with me, and fling the door open.
This time, when I peel out of there, I’m driving twice as fast as before. Tears stream down my face as I push the pedal down harder, all the way to the floor. I take Highway 62 toward Eureka Springs because … why not? I don’t want to go home, and I don’t want to see Luke at the dorms, and I sure as fuck can’t stay here.
The road winds through the trees and then skirts the edge of a steep cliff, passing by Thorncrowne Chapel on one side. The signs flash beneath my headlights as I sweep past, warning me to slow down, to stay at fifteen miles per hour.
I don’t listen.
I’m not thinking.
I’m not sure that I care.
And then it happens. I hit the brakes, but I can’t take the curve at the speed I’m going, and I can’t slow down fast enough. The tires skid as my heart leaps into my throat, and the old Taurus slides to one side. More, more, more. It hits the edge of the road, and then I’m weightless, flying through the darkness and into nothing.
There isn’t even time for a scream.
Just regret.
I fucked today up, I think, but really, not just today. Everything. Everything.
My thoughts spin to my mothers, my sisters, Luke, April, the Knight Crew …
And then nothing.
Because the universe just doesn’t give out second chances.
Chapter Six
THERE’S BLOOD ALL over my steering wheel.
I sit up, shaking, disoriented, certain that I must be dead. I reach my quivering hand up to my head and pull it away, staring down at the splotches of ruby red as I blink through the rush of memories. Getting locked in the Devils’ Den, finding out about the video, confronting the Knight Crew. My stomach lurches as I remember driving along Highway 62, the tires skidding, the weightless feeling as I plunged into blackness.
I look around, but I’m not sitting in the woods, surrounded by the mangled remnants of my mother’s car. No, I’m at the gas station again, tucked inside of Little Bee, her front end buried in the side of Calix’s Aston Martin.
What …
I barely get a chance for the thought to form before my door is flying open and Calix is yanking me out, slamming me back into the side of my car. I stare into his dark eyes, rife with anger, and try to remember how I got here. This isn’t like yesterday, when I had a momentary lapse of forgetfulness. Today, I’m just surprised that I’m alive at all. Did I drink something at the party that I forgot about? Did I smoke something?
“Are you fucking insane?!” Calix snarls, releasing me as a crowd gathers once again, the rainy weather eerily similar to ye
sterday morning. I blink back at him, but I’m not sure how to respond. Why did I come here? Why did I hit his car again? How am I still alive?
“How did I get here?” I whisper, my entire body shaking as my knees go weak, and I collapse. Surprisingly, Calix catches me before I fall, scowling as he sets me down on the pavement and steps back. The look on his face is impossible to read, but at least he’s not wearing that black leather devil’s mask anymore. “How did I get here?” I repeat, feeling my eyes tear up.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Calix growls as an older woman approaches, leaning down to put a hand on my shoulder.
“Are you okay?” she asks as Calix glares at me from behind her, scowling and turning to look at the entrance to the convenience store.
But today, this time, I’m not okay. It’s one thing to forget a split-second in time, between driving down the road and seeing Calix’s car, to hitting it. I’ve forgotten an entire night this time. I have no idea how I got here.
Glancing down, I see that I’m dressed in my uniform instead of the outfit I wore to the party. My mask is gone and, after a quick look over my shoulder I see that Little Bee is fully intact. No more spray paint, no more smashed windows. Her tires are back on and, obviously, if I just used her to hit Calix’s car again, she must run okay.
“Should I call the police?” the woman asks, and déjà vu washes over me. She asked me that exact same thing yesterday.
“That won’t be necessary,” Calix replies smoothly, standing up and plastering a fake smile on his face. It’s sickening, the way he does it, affixes that look to his full, lush mouth. “We’re classmates; I won’t be pressing charges.”
Bully Me: Class of 2020 Page 57