“Do you think—?”
“Um. Yo. I’ve got a—” Ryan pulled his phone from his pocket and scanned the screen. “Yeah, sorry. We gotta go.” He nodded to Nick, who nodded back. “I hope you, you know, feel better, or whatever,” Ryan said. Then they turned and walked away.
This hurt, and yet she understood. They did not want to be associated with her suffering. They did not want to be reminded. Two weeks earlier, she might have done the same thing. It was something she might have done, for example, to Tristan Bloch, whose love note to Cally Broderick and the Facebook comments they’d all made about it had been so riotously funny up until the moment that they weren’t.
Tristan’s mother had walked away and Emma stood like an island in the middle of the store, shifting from foot to foot. Kids clustered up, cut lines, held hands, shared sips of soda, knocked into one another, play-fought, but around her they carved a wide circle.
From the cover of a magazine a pink headline blared: KIM KARDASHIAN SEX TAPE SHOCKER. Kim herself, airbrushed to a poreless sheen, gazed sadly out. It seemed to Emma that the star’s humiliation had been perfectly arranged: she was sexy and pretty and perfectly pitiable and you wanted to be her. You hated her and yet you wanted to be her. You thought her life was constricted and her sex tape degrading and yet you saw, behind her tragic eyes, a small, triumphant smile.
Emma’s humiliation had no glamour. No one wanted it. There was nothing desirable about standing there among her former peers, scraped of makeup, hobbled and hunched and wincing in pain, as eyes darted away from her or lingered too long. It was too painful to move, so she slumped against the magazine rack and waited for her dad to appear or her strength to revive.
In her body the knives awakened, fierce and fast, rhythmic stabbing at her pelvis and hips and legs, a musical fury that halted her breath. A black curtain dropped over her eyes and lifted. She blinked at the scuffed floor and forced herself to stand upright, to lift her head. Her stomach started churning; acid tickled at the bottom of her throat. She longed to collapse on the linoleum, to drop into oblivion. She did not. She stood on her crutches and breathed in and out. She knew how to control her breath, and she had always commanded her body; she would command it now. She would hold herself up. Who will do it if you will not do it yourself? Miss Celeste had always told her. She held herself up until the black curtain dangled at the edge of her eyes, threatening to fall and take her under, held herself until, at the very last second, mercifully, her dad appeared and scooped her up, his strong arms underneath her, and looped her arms around his neck and she crumpled against him, crying into his flannel with embarrassment and hurting and relief, and yes, she thought, as her world set once more to spinning, she would let her father hold her, for a little while more.
MISS NICOLL
As Molly stood outside the principal’s office in her Fresno State sweatshirt and skinny jeans, it was impossible not to feel like a teenager in trouble.
As a high school freshman, she’d been sent to the office of the humorless Principal Boyd for the sin of reading in class—worse still, reading books unapproved by the Fresno Unified School District. Her father had been called, and had seethed through the meeting, waiting till they were alone to unleash: Jesus, Moll, why can’t you just do what they tell you? Molly had apologized, though she didn’t believe she’d done anything wrong. Wasn’t reading the whole aim of school? Oh, how adults missed the point—how they seemed to do it on purpose, to delight in their obtuseness—over and over again!
She knew she’d been summoned now because of Elisabeth Avarine’s party. She was sick about it; since seeing the posts online Sunday morning, she’d hardly eaten or slept. She’d spent the day refreshing her browser, hoping for new information that would somehow make the previous night’s stories untrue, so that she would not have to believe that the funny, friendly, utterly human kids she talked to in class each day were the same as the heartless avatars she’d seen online. Nick hadn’t called back; the kids hadn’t answered her Facebook posts. She guessed they were embarrassed to face her. She was embarrassed to face them too. But this all felt like her own private horror. What did Katie Norton want?
Molly knocked on the office door. “Come in!” came the call in response, and she stepped inside.
The office was overstuffed, cluttered, and forcedly cheerful: among the too-large furniture and stacks of files were globes of pink and purple roses placed in what seemed like strategic disarray around the room. Katie Norton sat behind the desk smiling tightly. Across from her, straightening a sheaf of papers, was Beth Firestein.