She ran.
Moments later, she was alone in the elevator, headed back downstairs. She stared at the geometric design on the rug until her eyes began to burn. James was right. Eric wasn’t going to go away. This would never be over, until she did something about him. Even if it cost her everything.
*
“Seriously, that shit is unreal. Sorry.”
Shay didn’t even look up. The sight before her was so awful she couldn’t look away from the reason for the passerby’s comment.
Etched into the paint of the driver’s door of her car in crude capital lettering were the words DIE CUNT.
Under the parking lot’s lighting the jagged words gleamed silvery where the blue paint had been scrapped down to the door’s metal.
It was too much. Tears welled in her eyes, blurring the insult. All she could think of was that her car had been violated, again, and that she could not afford to erase the damage this time.
She could not drive home like this.
On legs that felt wooden, she stiff-walked her way to the trunk of her car and pulled out the roll of duct tape she kept for emergencies, along with an old map. Within minutes, she had covered the scrawl. Yet it seemed to her as if the hideous words might burn through for all to see.
She sat behind the wheel, staring out at the darkness. Night had fallen with the suddenness of late autumn. It didn’t matter. She was blind with rage.
Pick on someone your own size, dickface!
Bullies never chose the strong. They had a mean hunger that could only be fed by taunting the weak. Even after she had forced herself to finish her job, sitting in plain sight all afternoon as if nothing had happened, did she still look like a victim?
The long-ago day came tumbling back into her mind with a clarity that ripped through her blind rage.
When she’d mentioned the skit to James, she hadn’t felt a thing. But now her heart accelerated. She closed her eyes. Her hands flexed over the steering wheel as she held on for dear life. She was no longer remembering the past. She had dropped into it.
It was a skit for homecoming weekend. Her junior year. New school. New town. New life. Nine weeks into the semester, she was doing okay. At least, she was not being looked at weirdly, as she had at her former school. She didn’t worry about friends yet. The only person who talked to her regularly was the junior varsity team captain, Ned Jackson, who was failing precalculus. Because she wasn’t, he’d been paired with her to do in-class practice assignments. Boys made her nervous but Ned didn’t seem to notice that she was a girl, so it seemed to be working.
The only time he’d said a personal thing to her was the day before the homecoming game. The school always held a pep rally, he told her, and he was going to be in one of the skits. She should come and see it.
So she went and sat in the bleachers, ignored by anyone who thought enough to even look in her direction.
Midway through the rah-rah speeches and drill-team-led cheers, the skits began. Finally, there was Ned in his football uniform, sitting at a desk before a blackboard. A chill slipped up Shay’s skirt as a girl student joined him. She wore jeans and a big baggy sweater, and a fake ponytail hiked so high it look like a horse’s tail growing out of the crown of her head.
The snickering began in the audience but Shay didn’t really pay much attention to it. Her gaze was glued to the stage. The girl wrote a math problem on the board then stopped to listen as Ned made lame attempts to solve it. Each time he got the answer wrong, the girl got twitchier.
Shay began to fold up inside. They were making fun of her. But that wasn’t right. She thought Ned was becoming her friend. How could he betray her like this?
The girl wrote another, easier problem. Ned hammed up the dummy role. As he voiced more wrong answers the girl started to writhe in frustration. When he finally got even 2 plus 2 wrong, the girl suddenly screamed in primal rage, whipped out a giant pair of scissors from behind the chalkboard, and began stabbing the team captain. On cue, the band began to play. It was the music from the shower scene in Psycho, shrieking clarinets punctuating the stabs.
Paralyzed by shock, Shay sat there, her heart pumping so hard her body shook with every beat.
When Ned was sprawled on the floor, the girl stepped forward and cried, “Don’t mess with Psycho Shay!”
A blur of faces had turned toward her, many laughing, others staring at her in doubtful surprise or horrified recognition of what the skit meant.
In that instant, shame burned her to the ground. All her mother’s efforts and planning and secrecy had come to nothing. Everyone knew!
Someone rapped on her car window.
Shay nearly jumped out of her skin.
Doris Butler was peering in at her, her gaze sharp and mouth primmed. “Are you okay, Ms. Appleton?”
“Yes. Of course.” Her words sounded awkward, as if the muscles no longer knew how to work together to form words.