— 28 — THEY called her names. They called her ugly names, and stupid names; any cruel name they could think of, and there were many. It didn’t matter what names they called Shyann—there was no logic to it. Like, when she gained that weight over the summer they called her Shamu, and then she went and lost all the weight, and they still called her Shamu. They had no imagination.
For every name she’d been called by the age of 17, Shyann Johnston could have forged a fake ID for every sleazy bar in the city and gotten her drink on, even though she’d never tasted beer and she probably wouldn’t like it. She could have left, too. She could’ve collected enough passports to travel the world a dozen times over, escaping so far from her neighborhood she’d never have to go back, not to finish out high school, not to attend her graduation, not to carry her stuff out of her mom and dad’s and cart it to somewhere new. She wished she could do that, but she was stuck there, with these kids she hated because they hated her. These kids who made her life a living nightmare, who followed her around sometimes, in school and after school let out, trailing her down the street, across the crosswalk, pelting her with whatever they had in their pockets when she came down the steps of the library or out of that grocery place on the corner with a bag of food in her arms. Her tormentors.
There were enough bad names swirling through her mind that some mornings she looked in a mirror and saw what they saw. How could she not?
She believed the bad things more than she knew she should. She took in those words and let them burrow. Let them bat back and forth inside her brain. She began to think she’d never be able to spit them out, even if her mom and dad and the anti-bullying counselor assigned to talk to her fourth period told her none of it was true and building some self-esteem was how to fight back.
Bullcrap, Shyann thought. Maybe she should fight back by blasting them in the face with the gun her dad hid behind his porno collection. But she hated guns, and she didn’t want to go sifting through her dad’s personal items, besides, so she fought back by using the most anti-violent method she knew. She turned tail and she ran away.
It was soon after I first read about Shyann that she reached out to me to confirm it. To show she was one of the girls.
All I got at first was her voice on my cell phone. The blur of her body and the shriek of her voice saying, Leave me alone. Stop it already. Stop.
It came from an unidentified caller that said only “New Jersey.” There were no words in the message, but a video was attached.
It was a Monday, lunch period in the cafeteria. And when the text message came up on my phone, when I saw there was a video, I had a feeling, a sense that I was coming into contact with another girl. I stood up, holding the phone close to me so no one could see what was on the screen. “You can’t have that out, it’ll get confiscated,” I heard one of my friends say.
I rushed through the caf, almost knocking over some kid, causing him to drop his tray. I’d reached the edge of the room and I was pushing through the double doors and I was out in the hall and then, finally, finally, I was alone and could hit Play.
Leave me alone, I heard first, coming out my phone’s speaker. Stop it already.
Stop it. Stop.
The camerawork was shaky, the picture distorted. I couldn’t tell who was talking except that it sounded like a girl.
The frame showed ground covered in gray, murky snow. It showed two running feet. It focused in, for just a moment, on those feet: a pair of sneakers in the snow. The laces were yellow, which seemed wrong somehow, too cheerful. One set of laces was undone, trailing.
Here, the camera zoomed out, and the video exploded with laughter. A whole group of them out of view, an anonymous herd hidden where I couldn’t see.
They were taunting her. Calling her names. And now I could see her, all of her, better than I could before. She was cowering under her hair, then trying to run away down an urban sidewalk patched with ice and trash bags left on the curb and low, dirty drifts of snow.