“Why did you let me think you liked me?” It comes out a whine with bristles accrued to it.
“I didn’t do anything except be your friend,” she says quietly. “I’ve always been honest with you.”
“Yeah, now.”
“No, always,” she says firmly. “But, yeah, especially now. I could have lied to you. It would have been a lot easier. I could have told you I was gay. Or blamed my dad, or my religion. I could have said that I had a boyfriend back in Baltimore. Because guys will listen when you tell them you belong to someone else. Like, you’ll respect some made-up guy, but not me. I thought you were different. I trusted you. I told you the truth.”
“Get out,” I tell her, my voice dull. Lifeless.
“Look, we should—”
So now I scream it. I feel cords standing out in my neck, cords I’ve never felt before. I feel a sharp, almost painful tug deep in my throat.
Aneesa leaves.
She leaves.
She leaves me alone.
Which is right.
Which is how it should be.
I read every last comment. A part of me is amazed at how many different ways people can misspell murderer.
The roar of the ocean is back. The buzz in my ears intensifies. I close my bedroom door and turn out the light and crawl under the covers. The comment thread flickers and scrolls on the backs of my eyelids.
Murderer.
I don’t want to go to school in the morning, but Mom will ask questions, so I force myself out of bed and into clothes and onto the bus, where I sit in the front, away from Evan and Aneesa.
Evan approaches me when we get off. “Dude, are you still pissed about yesterday?”
“I’m fine. I just had to finish my algebra homework.”
Aneesa does not approach me.
I walk through school, certain that everyone knows, that everyone has seen the video and read the comments. They’ve all known, of course, forever. They’ve all known. It’s not like it’s a secret. But it’s always been unspoken. And now someone has spoken it. Someone here, in my school.
It could be anyone. Safely ensconced within the anonymity of a YouTube screen name, it could be anyone around me, even a teacher cloaked in the rhythms of online teenspeak.
At the end of ACAS, as everyone else gathers up their books, I approach Ms. Benitez at her desk. At least there’s one thing I can fix. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
“‘May I speak with you?’” She doesn’t allow herself a moment’s distraction or distance from the paper she’s reading.
Of course. Idiot. “May I speak with you?”
She looks up at me and smiles. “Of course you may, Sebastian.”
I’m not sure where to begin, so I just plunge in. “It’s about the essay assignment. The semester-long one. I know you want us to learn to do something like this for college applications, but I’m a sophomore. I’m wondering if there’s a substitute assignment I could do. Or maybe some kind of extra credit to compensate.”
She narrows her eyes.
“I’m not saying it’s too difficult,” I hasten to add. “It’s just that it… it’s difficult… in other ways.”
Her expression is flat, unreadable. Blank paper; blank screen. “Sebastian, you volunteered for this class. You requested it. No one made you take it.”
I regroup. I take a breath. Not a deep one, just a breath. Just a quick moment to gather myself.
“Look, you know who I am. You know about my past.”
Her expression flickers momentarily, a soft expression of grief and compassion before returning to stone. I’m used to this. It happens all the time around me, this unconscious projection of sorrow.
“You don’t have to write about that,” she says. And then dead stop. She thought it would be easier to say than it was. She thought if she said that and didn’t use specific words referring to specific events that she could do it and not feel awkward, but she’s realized that the awkward is a part of it, no matter what words you use.
“What else important has happened to me? What else can compare?”
The class is nearly empty now, a few stragglers lingering at the door. The room is quiet enough that I can hear the sharp, sudden increase in my own volume. I clamp down hard, tell myself to lower my voice, but my voice has become its own independent entity in my throat, and it wants to be loud.
“Sebastian—”
“I just want to try something else,” I say, too loudly. The stragglers have begun to mill. I can’t stop myself. “You can’t ask me to do this. You can’t tell me to write about this.”
“Well, look, the project—”
“And you make it for a grade?” I’m heating up, but it’s at a remove, as though it’s happening to someone else and is, therefore, only mildly interesting. “For a grade? What kind of a sadist are you?”
She exhales slowly and nods. “I understand your reaction. I really do. This is supposed to help you learn to think critically. Logically. This doesn’t have to be emotionally difficult for you, Sebastian. I’m sure there’s another area you could explore, but… if you insist that there’s only one thing for you to write on, we can discuss ways to handle the topic of your sister delicately—”
“Don’t—”
Don’t talk about my sister!
And then there’s static everywhere.
I know I said Don’t talk about my sister.
No. That’s not true. I didn’t say it.
I yelled it.
My hand throbs with leftover pain. I hit something.
Something. Not someone. The flat of my palm, smacking against Ms. Benitez’s desk. Now I remember. Her stapler jumped.
So did she.
Don’t talk about my sister.
I blacked out. Went into a fugue state. Sank deep into the static, where sound and light and memory could not find me.
As the static clears, as the world filters in, as the ache in my hand diminishes, I realize I’m in the assistant-principal’s office, and he’s hanging up the phone, saying, “…of course, thanks,” and he looks up at me with eyes like black olives sunk into raw dough. Roland Sperling, the corpulent mass of assistant principal known throughout the student body as the Spermling, regards me like an old hand grenade that has not been deactivated.
“Sebastian, how are you feeling?”
His voice buzzes. Static still clusters at my ears. Zzzebazztian, how arezzz you feelingzzz?
“I’m fine.” It takes a moment for my jaw to work properly. It, too, is sore, and I remember like a frame of film: Me, screaming until my voice cracked and then shattered like a wineglass hurled against concrete.
“Are you zzzure about that?” he buzzes.
I claw at my ear to knock away the filter, as though it’s a physical thing. The motion accomplishes something, though—the static in my ear goes away, and I can hear normally again.