Anyway, I dug out this notebook because I’m going through Some Shit, and I guess writing about it is a healthy outlet or whatever. I’m not dumb enough to do it on a blog or something—poor Alexa Ryan blogged about how she made herself throw up every day after dance team practice, only she forgot to make it private and the other girls found it. Someone forwarded it to Alexa’s parents and they sent her to a psychiatric hospital in Madison and for a while it was literally all anyone talked about.
Now literally everyone in Broken Falls is talking about me. Jade says I’m being dramatic, but the car accident and Cliff’s DWI are the very definition of drama, and if there’s one thing that keeps Broken Falls going, it’s drama. (And Packers Sundays.) I mean really, what else do we have?
I never thought that I would be the source of BFD (Broken Falls Drama, which also means “Big Fucking Deal,” which Jade cleverly realized). But put yourself in my shoes: the summer before junior year you make a vow to yourself to get noticed. You are tired of being Hammy Bailey Hammond, B+ student and all-around nice girl. The type of girl people call a “classic beauty,” which everyone knows is code for “you would have been considered hot fifty years ago, maybe.” So you have Jade cut four inches off the hair you’ve been growing since the third grade and spend every summer morning in front of your brother’s Tae Bo tapes until you magically have a butt.
And yet still, on the first day of junior year, no heads turn as you walk into homeroom. You feel stupid for expecting them to. And then right before lunch, you plunk down in your assigned seat during third-period local history, and then none other than Cliff Grosso sits down next to you in a cloud of Axe. He checks you out like he sees you for the first time, even though you’ve gone to the same school for twelve years. He looks at you with those ice-blue eyes and says, Hey, ’sup? and you flush from your stomach to your toes, because apparently you are that pathetic. You spend half the year making small talk before the bell, pretending you don’t give a shit how he smirks at you whenever Mr. Cannobbio embarrasses himself using the term historygasm. With feigned disgust you watch him cycle through girls, because a nice girl like Bailey Hammond would never even think about the feel of Cliff Grosso’s used-up lips on hers.
Maybe I was tired of being a nice girl. Maybe that’s why when I found myself alone with him at Tyrell’s party last weekend, I laughed when he made a joke about Mr. Cannobbio and didn’t turn away when he leaned in. I decided right then and there that I was okay with losing it to Cliff Grosso, even though everyone loses it to Cliff Grosso. I made out with him even though he tasted like Natty Ice and salsa. When he said he knew somewhere private in Tyrell’s house I said no, because I would not lose my virginity while half my graduating class played beer pong outside the door. So I said, Is anyone home at your house? even though everyone knows that Cliff’s dad doesn’t give a shit how many girls he has over.
It would be like ripping off a Band-Aid, this virginity business. That’s truly what I thought would happen. I didn’t realize how many beers he’d actually had until he failed to slow down at a yellow light, and bam, rear-ended some chick who just happened to be a Broken Falls deputy.
Anyway. Now Cliff has a DWI and people are saying that he might lose his scholarship to Ohio State. And guess who everyone blames. I thought maybe it wouldn’t be so bad when I got to homeroom and Meghan Constanzo rushed up to me and asked if I was okay, was I hurt? Gosh, I was so lucky the accident wasn’t serious. Meghan Constanzo and I have exchanged about a total of ten words since I’ve known her. I smiled very politely and watched her sit back down at the table with one of her tennis friends, a senior, who glanced back at me before turning to Meg and mouthing, Her?
Yes, her. Surprise! The painfully average girl whose first kiss was with a nose-picking trumpet player was the girl in Cliff Grosso’s car. And everyone knows what happens in Cliff Grosso’s car. When I was kissing Cliff I really thought that it would transform me, or at least how people saw me. Because it’s sexy when good girls do bad things. People still talk about how epic it was when Meghan Constanzo threw up in Sully’s pool after homecoming last year. Because that’s the type of stuff you can get away with when you’re Meg Constanzo and literally everyone adores you. I overestimated what I could get away with, I guess.
Because I’m nothing. There are girls like Meghan, who are adored, and there are girls like Bridget Gibson, who are feared, and then there are girls like me and Jade, who are nothing. People literally have no opinion on us. We’re not losers, we’re not nonexistent—people just aren’t aware of us.
I want to go back to being nothing.
Anyway, Meg and her friend sounded sympathetic enough that I thought the rest of today might be okay. Then I was waiting in line at the cafeteria and Axel Schulz, who still has his scholarship to UW, collided with me. His sloppy joe slid off his tray and onto my boots, and it hit me like a punch to the stomach. He did that on purpose.
Words were on the tip of my tongue—Fuck you, asshole—but he beat me to it. “Fuck you, Hammond.”
I paid for my sandwich and left my tray at the table with Jade. I told her I would be right back, nothing happened, I was fine—and marched over to the lunch monitor and asked for the bathroom pass. At the table by the door, Axel looked at me and laughed with his friends. “Too bad Cliff couldn’t find out if the carpet matches the drapes.” I caught someone else saying hammered and nailed, which is the term the football guys use for what is essentially date raping.
When I got to the bathroom I wet a paper towel and dabbed at the oily orange spot Axel’s lunch had left on my Ugg. And I thought, God, please let there be someone in this school who doesn’t think I’m a life-ruining whore.
And then I went to local history—I thought about skipping it, because I still had to sit next to Cliff—and it turned out he hadn’t even shown up for school at all. The bell rang, and then out of nowhere this girl walks in. Messy white braid with the ends dyed purple, wearing Vans with strange shit scribbled on the sides, and just sat in Cliff’s empty seat. She didn’t even ask where she should sit or say, Hey, I’m new or anything. I thought, Who the hell even is this girl?
And then something clicked—a snippet I’d caught earlier in the week, someone saying that Andrew Kang’s stepsister was coming from New York to stay with his family. I hadn’t even known that Andrew had a stepsister, and I thought I knew everything about Andrew Kang. Everyone knows everything about everyone around here. People had been talking about the stepsister for the past week once they heard she was coming. All anyone cared about was whether she was hot, because God forbid someone be interesting first.
Anyway, I watched her in the seat next to me—the one Cliff usually occupied—and studied her scrawling inside the cover of a notebook. I couldn’t catch what she was writing, but when she saw me watching, she stopped and sat staring straight ahead.
And I thought, Interesting.