“Look who it is,” I heard a high-pitched voice trill as soon as I closed my locker. A few people snickered, and I didn’t need to turn around to know who was speaking. “Chloe Baker the Bitch,” Sage whispered as she passed me, still not knowing what my name actually was, and clearly not caring.
“It looks like someone threw up on her face,” Melody said next. She spoke quietly, just loudly enough for me to hear. I hadn’t heard that one in a while, but my faceful of freckles had prepared me for those kinds of insults. I’d been hearing them all my life.
Maybe starting a day cursing in front of my parents had made me ballsy, had made me stupidly brave. Because without looking at them, I said, “Funny. That the best you got?”
“It looks like she just came from a shitty funeral,” Cadence muttered next, like I hadn’t spoken a word. “Do your parents always wear black too? You know, because they’re mourning your birth?”
At the mention of my parents, I lost most if not all of my nerve. I thought of the boxes back home and my heart began breaking all over again. I started walking a little more quickly down the hall.
“And her hair,” Sage said, and I knew what came next would sting, especially because Sage was black too. She knew what it was like to live with black hair—with feeling like it was never straight enough or long enough or good enough—so she knew exactly what to say to cut right to the heart of me, quick and deep. “It’s so nappy and gross-looking. Say it with me, Chloe: Shampoo. Condition. Rinse and repeat. And have you ever heard of a flatiron?”
They laughed, and I wanted to pull their hair out at the roots. I clenched my fists so tightly that I could feel my nails digging into my palms.
I looked up then, because I knew that Layla had to be with them. My chest felt heavy, and I couldn’t get enough air into my lungs when my eyes met hers. She wasn’t smiling and she wasn’t adding to the flurry of insults they were hurling in my direction, but she wasn’t doing anything to stop them either.
“Come on, guys,” Sloane said. And I thought, Is it really going to be her that puts an end to this? I made the mistake of looking hopeful—of glancing over at her instead of keeping my eyes on Layla, or looking back down. Sloane stared right at me, through me, and said, “Anyone who says the shit she said to their ‘best friend’ isn’t worth our time.” She turned to Layla. “She’s…literal trash and you don’t need her.” And then, to me: “Fucking nobody.”
I was hot with fury, cold and achy with hurt. And I didn’t know a body could contain such a storm of feeling until they kept talking; kept laughing. Sloane threw her arm over Layla’s shoulder, and Layla looked down at her shoes, her curtain of too-straight hair falling over her face. And still she stayed quiet. Her silence was the worst part of all.
When they passed, I waited, and eventually the icy flames inside me passed too. And though I was hurting like those girls had punched me and kicked me and left me for dead, I was somehow still standing. If anyone saw me, there’d be no evidence that anything had even happened.
That’s the thing about words: they can leave you both unscathed and completely gutted.
Girls wage endless wars with their voices, tearing you apart without touching you at all.
* * *
—
I spent all of homeroom trying hard not to listen to every word Sloane was saying to Layla a few feet behind me, but I heard most of it anyway, and plenty of it was awful things about me. About halfway through the period I couldn’t take it anymore, so when my phone buzzed with an email notification that my application status for the Shakespeare program had changed, I was so relieved I lost my breath. I raised my hand and asked for a hall pass, and when Mr. Yoon granted me my freedom, I raced to Novak’s classroom desperate for some good news.
I couldn’t help but imagine the open-air performances I’d attend in London; the people I’d meet and what their accents would sound like. I daydreamed constantly about being away from this place—away from Layla and Sloane and all my family’s drama. And here it finally was—my way out. Ms. Novak was just as excited as I was.
“Well,” she said. “Open it!” And so I opened the email so we could read it together. I logged into the application website and we both held our breath. But instead of seeing words that would give me an escape from everything that was going wrong, I was only offered one more disappointment.
“I…didn’t get in,” I whispered, and the words were like a tiny tornado in my subconscious, knocking things off shelves and shattering all the windows in my mind. I wasn’t going to London for the summer when it was the one thing I’d been counting on as every other part of my life spiraled out of control.
I stood there in disbelief, rereading the screen, though there was nothing confusing about the words We regret to inform you…I looked at Novak, feeling like this was all her fault in some way. She was the one who had told me I was a shoo-in. She was the reason I’d known about the program at all.
“How is this possible?” Novak asked herself, or maybe the air around us. I knew she wasn’t talking to me. She lifted the phone from my hands and scrolled through the entire length of the rejection, like reading it again would change what it meant. “Your application was perfect. Your statement was brilliant. I wrote you that recommendation. I just…don’t understand.”
But I hadn’t understood most of what had happened to me lately. It felt like my life was turning into a bit of a joke. So I laughed a little. I actually laughed.
“It’s okay,” I said to Ms. Novak. I let the blow of this settle in my gut with the rest of the hurt that was eating me alive. “It’s fine.”
“Let me make a few phone calls,” Novak said, but I shook my head.
“Don’t worry about it.” And just as I turned to leave, Layla burst into Novak’s class, grinning.
“Ms. Novak, you’re not g-g-going to believe this, but—”
When she saw me, she fell silent. Her smile disappeared, and she crossed her arms. I wanted to know what she was about to say, but I knew she wouldn’t say more while I was standing there. I ached to apologize for what I said, but after this morning I felt she owed me much more than I owed her.
“I gotta get to class,” I said to Novak. But when I stepped past Layla and into the hall, my feet carried me elsewhere.
I went to the library. I hung out in my favorite corner for the next two periods, rereading King Lear, and then I skipped lunch too. The substitute librarian didn’t know that people hid in the stacks and that she’d need to do hourly rounds just to make sure no one was making out or skipping classes on her watch. So there I stayed, undiscovered for hours.
* * *
—
At the end of the school day, I didn’t even stop at my locker. I just needed to get out of the building as quickly as possible. But I bumped into the Chorus Girls as I was trying to make my escape, and they started up again, laughing at me and saying impossibly horrible things that shredded whatever was left of my insides.
I stood there and took it. I didn’t say a word, because I hoped there was a finite amount of meanness they could send in my direction before they got bored. And there was. They stopped and walked away from me after a few nauseating minutes and I could breathe again, if only until I thought about Layla’s silence, my dad’s boxes, the Shakespeare program, and as always, like a current under everything, Gigi.
The Chorus Girls were trying to ruin me. But they didn’t realize that I had nothing left to lose.
THE PATRIARCHY
It was actually pretty simple to ruin another person’s life, once I decided to do it. All it took was a moment, a few words sent to the wrong people, and a little bit of nerve.
After a week of being tormented in big and small ways by the Chorus Girls, my patience had run out. I’d tried ignoring them. I’d blasted my music to drown out the sounds of their voices, but they just got louder, or they stopp
ed and waited until they could find me when I didn’t have the protection of headphones. They continued to whisper terrible things in my ears and leave nasty comments all over my posts. When I blocked them everywhere so they couldn’t even see anything I shared, they created new accounts to torture me. My stuff started disappearing, too—a book here, a water bottle there. Layla had probably told them my locker combination. And then there were the rumors, which were both true and untrue, but all of which made me feel like my skin wasn’t my own anymore, or like I didn’t deserve to have a day free of sadness.
I couldn’t tell my mother about any of it because we still weren’t speaking, and I didn’t want to bug my dad, who was still in the midst of settling into his new apartment, what felt like his new life. There was no way I was going to tell a teacher—it would just make everything worse. So I had to take matters into my own hands.
I drafted an email to send to the full student-body email list from the school library, on one of the computers. I figured that way, no one would be able to find out it was me who sent the email—it could have come from anyone. I made a new email address and composed a message that included everything I knew about Sloane Sorenson, Todd Wellington, and their illicit romance—everything that Layla had texted me in the bathroom after Todd showed up at Sloane’s Halloween party.
When they first started dating, I typed, Sloane was only a fourteen-year-old freshman, and Todd was a seventeen-year-old senior and star player for her old school’s basketball team. I wrote about how Sloane felt special—that this senior who could have had anyone picked her. She got instantly popular, I wrote. She started partying a lot and skipping school, so much that her parents started to worry. They found out about Todd after they saw a dirty text he’d sent to her.
I wrote that they forbade her to see him and that she snuck out to meet up with him anyway.
And then came the day her father walked in on Todd in Sloane’s bedroom. In her bed.
I explained how her dad went completely apeshit and told Todd that if he ever came near his daughter again he’d press statutory rape charges against him, because of course, by then Todd was eighteen. And that was enough to keep him away.
Todd already had a scholarship to his first-choice school to play Division 1 basketball. He couldn’t risk that, not even for the girl he loved.
Somehow, everyone at her old school found out about her father’s threat. And they made Sloane’s life a living hell. How dare she, a freshman, threaten the future of such a talented young man—a beloved star athlete, the boy next door, the all-American Todd Wellington? He was from a good family, and who was she? Just some slutty fifteen-year-old. A fucking nobody. And in an instant, all those “friends” she’d made when she started dating Todd were gone, if not complicit.
The patriarchy, I typed. Am I right?
She became severely depressed, because of all the bullying. Had to leave school in the spring and be hospitalized. Then she moved in with her aunt and uncle and cousin Valeria; transferred to Shirley Chisholm Charter for a fresh start.
But I didn’t stop with the hard-and-fast facts, because Sloane never had. I made the story better, or maybe a tiny bit worse. I added details that I didn’t know were true but could have been. I kept my lies small so they’d be more believable.
I stared at what I’d written. I read it over and over again—secrets laid out for anyone to see, anyone to repeat. The thing was, there wasn’t anything inherently bad in any of it—a girl falling in love with a boy; a girl being victimized until she broke; a girl who was sick and who needed to start over. But Sloane would never want to be seen as weak, and I knew she thought these experiences made her look like she was.
She’d ruined my whole world, even after she knew what it was like to be hurt in this exact way, so I didn’t hesitate. I didn’t care.
Feeling diabolical and pissed as hell, I enabled a tool that scheduled the email to send over the weekend. I didn’t want anyone to be able to use the time stamp to figure out who was in the library when it went out.
I hit send.
I didn’t know how many kids even checked their Chisholm email inboxes, but I was betting that my plan would work. At least a few people would read it and tell everyone, and in addition to ruining Sloane, it would ruin Layla too. Because, according to Layla, Sloane had told no one this information except her and Valeria. Then Sloane would know what I was just learning—Layla wasn’t loyal to anyone.
I stood up. I looked around, and it was strange that the world around me had remained unchanged. My backpack was still heavy, and my weathered copy of Othello was still beside the keyboard. I shoved it hard and low into my bag before I walked away, thinking about jealousy and lies and betrayal—all things that had felt so far away from my life the last time I read the play. All things that were consuming me now, from the inside out.
now
THE BEST FRIEND I CAN BE
I don’t want to drag Willa along on a new-memory-making errand just yet. I’m not sure I’m ready to tell her about my plan, about my past, about how I’ve been systematically undoing the last few years of a now-dead friendship. When I whisper this to Sydney, the fact that I’m not ready, she understands. But I want them to know I’m making a real effort. I want Sydney especially to feel like I’m not running away from her again.
So I invite them to come with me to Dolly’s after school.
This isn’t a completely altruistic move. I’m thinking that if Dom is there, he’ll have a harder time being pissy to me if Sydney and Willa are around. I might even be able to squeeze a word or two out of him. But I want them there, too. I want them to experience the beauty that is Miss Dolly’s pies and Pop’s fried chicken. And if Dom is there, maybe even a small plate or two.
When we walk in, I seat them at my favorite table, the one in the corner near a window. Then I head to the break room to drop off my stuff. There’s no sign of Dom’s backpack or coat, and I feel a little bad about that. I hope I’m not encroaching on a safe space that was his first. I know how much I hate it when that’s done to me.
“Hey, Mr. Henry. Where’s Dom?” I ask Pop when I step back into the dining room. He’s behind the counter, refilling a customer’s mug with fresh coffee.
“Oh, he said he had a bunch of homework,” Pop says. “But I’m glad you’re here.” He squeezes my shoulder and hands me two glasses of water.
I carry the water over to Willa and Sydney’s table and they’re arguing about something, which is nothing new.
“There’s no way in hell I’m letting you call me Cox the Fox,” Sydney is saying.
“Come on, Syd. It’s the perfect nickname for you.” Willa looks up at me. “It’s perfect, right?”
I laugh and set the glasses on the table. Sydney grabs one and takes a big gulp. “Why does she need a new nickname, exactly?” I ask. “You already call her Syd.”
“Yeah, see? I’m fine with Syd. Can’t I just stay Syd?”
“No,” Willa says. She looks away from Sydney and over to me. “This is her jazz nickname. You know, like if the three of us were in a jazz band, what would our nicknames be?”
I grin. “Oh, you mean like how people called Billie Holiday Lady Day and Sarah Vaughan Sassy?”
Willa points at me. “See! Cleo just gets it.” She grabs my wrist and pulls me down into the chair beside her. She throws her arm over my shoulder. “I think your name would be Cleo the Kiddo. We’d call you Kid for short. You’d be on the keys, and Sydney would be the singer. I’d be drums.”
“I don’t hate it,” I say. I like this game. “Willa, your nickname could be The Big Bang, if you’re the drummer. Willa ‘The Big Bang’ Bae. Goes with your epically long bangs too,” I say. Willa shakes them out of her eyes with a flourish and Sydney tosses her curls too.
“It’s perfect. And fine, Sydney, you can just be Syd, but only because it would make our intro sick as
hell.” Willa stands up, like she’s introducing us at a gig. Her bangles ring like bells. “We’re Big Bang, Syd, and The Kid, and we’re excited to play for you tonight.”
Sydney and I look at each other and crack up laughing.
For the rest of the evening I bounce between Sydney and Willa’s table and the front of the restaurant, where I greet customers as they come and go. It’s nice to be here—to be distracted from what might be happening with Sloane and Layla, to not have to think about Dom being mad. All the little hurts building up inside like block towers get pushed into a little corner of my mind as I show Sydney how to roll silverware, and talk to Willa about music, and tuck a few customers into the diner’s coziest corners.
When it starts to get really slow about an hour before closing time, Pop lets me hook my phone up to the sound system they normally only use to play the radio, and when “La Vie en Rose” comes on first, he eyes me like I’m an alien.
“This is the music you like?” he asks, his hands flat against the counter like he can’t believe it. I shake my head and spin around on one of the barstools.
“It’s the music I love,” I correct him, and he laughs. “My Gigi listened to it all the time,” I say, remembering her collection of records, her rough hands and how they’d lay the disc on her record player as gently as she braided my hair when I was small. Pop pulls Miss Dolly from the break room and dances with her in the narrow space between the barstools and the back windows, and for a second I’m sad my phone is playing the music, because if it weren’t I’d be taking photos of them.
It’s nice, sitting there watching people who have loved each other longer than I’ve been alive. I feel something that the last few months have left wrecked and ruined being restored little by little.
When You Were Everything Page 18