The feeling vanishes the instant I walk into the lobby.
Artsy photographs are hanging in the hallway that leads from the front door of the school to the assembly hall. They are oversize and framed in gold, making the whole thing look like a New York City gallery instead of a lame private school started by a bunch of tree-hugging vegans.
Which means upon first glance I’m loving it.
Upon first glance I’m thinking: Sweet. Maybe Circle Community isn’t totally lame. Maybe I’ll make it through the next year here.
Then I see a nipple.
It is that nipple that forces everything to click into place.
Two nipples, actually, and small breasts, but all so perky and smooth it does look, legitimately, like art for even an instant longer. Sexy art, art that shouldn’t be hanging in a high school, but art nonetheless. That’s the first picture or two.
But the third one has a face, and a body, and a nipple, and some gauzy skirt that is all too familiar. And Sasha’s honey hair and long lashes on top. Sasha, in the nude, biting her lip. Sasha, half covering
her breasts with crossed arms that still show basically everything. Sasha crawling toward the camera like Victoria’s Secret models do in commercials for the newest lacy, structured, push-up bra. Except there’s no lace, no structure, no push. Just the expanse of her body and the total joy she seems to have at exposing it.
And the fairy wings.
Holy. Shit.
I sit on the floor. Collapse onto it, practically. Cross my legs. Put my head in my hands.
And I’d scream at the pictures if I could, I’d deface them, I’d draw mustaches on them. But the more pressing issue right now, the much, much, bigger problem, is that I have clearly been an idiot.
Didn’t I see Sasha taking these photographs of herself late at night?
Didn’t I squirm with discomfort at her poem?
Doesn’t this seem like something no normal person would choose to do to herself?
Didn’t Agnes say we BOTH had big, scary Assignments today?
NO, my mind yells at my body. NO. AGNES LIVES IN FLORIDA OR SOMETHING.
My phone’s low on batteries, so I practically sprint to the computer lab and hold my head in my hands while I wait for LBC to load. I don’t care who sees. I don’t care about anything right now except learning that Agnes and Sasha Cotton are not the same person, because they can’t be the same person, because the world is not that tiny and I am not that stupid.
I hit the mouse a million times—I’m shaking so hard that I keep clicking the wrong links. But when I’m on Agnes’s page, staring at her sad-girl avatar and the hundreds and hundreds of posts she’s written over the last year, I start to see it all.
Agnes, talking about suicide and falling in love, and jealousy and sexuality.
Agnes, testing the boundaries of herself, her family, her boyfriend, her schoolmates.
Agnes, writing a poem about sex and printing it in her school’s literary journal. An Assignment, of course, from before I joined.
Agnes, doing a nude photo shoot a few weeks ago, admitting it to her LBC friends last night, and then being assigned the task of hanging the photos, in frames, in the school’s lobby.
Secret: My BF thought the naked pics were weird. I freaked him out. Big-time.
—Agnes
ASSIGNMENT: Get a second opinion. Hang them up in school.
It’s right there. It’s been there all along.
Now that I see it, it’s impossible to unsee. I can hear her breathy, uncertain voice speaking the words on her page. It’s all there in the dense writing of her storytelling and the Sylvia Plath worldview. I review every interaction we’ve had online, and bile rises from my spinning stomach to my squeezing-tight chest to my now dry, jaw-dropped mouth. She’s been advising me on Joe. She’s been supporting me and telling me I should go for it and reading along as I kiss him.
I swallow down the vomit that is insisting it come out. I’m sitting, but I couldn’t get up if you paid me. Everything from my knees down has gone numb, and everything from my knees up is trembling.
I put my head between my legs, the way that I’ve seen people do on TV and movies but that I’ve never actually witnessed in real life. I’m not sure what exactly it’s supposed to do, but it gives me vertigo, a blood rush to the head, and makes me heave. Nothing comes out, but I cover my mouth with my hands anyway.
And then I step out of the glass cave of the computer lab and into the buzzing, laughing, high-five-giving world in the hallway. I stagger my way through to find Elise, who is bright red and watery-eyed next to Heather. Both girls look at the photos with something way too close to awe.
“I need to talk,” I say, slipping my hand into Elise’s. She cringes a little and pulls away. Heather clears her throat, and I know they’ve been talking about me.