Amber tenses as soon as the words pierce her skin; she arms herself against their laughter. They know she heard them, but they don’t care, or maybe they even wanted her to. Like she’s not even a person, not someone with feelings, not someone who can get hurt. Just an object. Just something they can use. And she does not try to prove them otherwise, does not speak or otherwise engage, neither denies nor confirms their statements. What she does is harden, her own special defense mechanism—fight or flight or turn to stone.
The bell rings. Students put away the art supplies none of them was using. The boys leave without acknowledging Amber’s existence, laughing all the way out the door. Even the guy who defended Lisa is in on it, because Amber and Lisa are very different kinds of girls.
Amber takes her time cleaning up. She is giving the guys a head start. The worst thing is to get stuck in the hall with a pack of them.
The classroom finally empties. Even the sub has disappeared. Amber zips up her bag and throws it over her shoulder. Only five more periods until the end of school, when she can sneak away to the computer lab and hide at her favorite desk in the corner while the tech club nerds congregate on the other side of the classroom pretending she’s not there. It’s her secret—this small joy, that tiny space behind the computer where she feels capable and creative, where she can leave her body and enter a world that makes sense, a world made of ones and zeros that she can manipulate, a world where she is in control.
“Hey,” a voice says behind her, making her jump. She turns around to find Grace, who somehow sneaked up on her without her noticing. “You’re Amber, right?”
Amber doesn’t say anything, just looks at Grace with an angry squint in her eyes, ready to deflect the inevitable abuse that’s coming, that always comes. She is ready to snarl back, ready to prove the other side of her reputation true: cruel, mean, nasty. There are reasons she doesn’t have any friends.
Grace lowers her voice even though there’s no one around to hear her besides Amber. “You’ve heard of the Nowhere Girls, right?”
Amber nods, and for a brief moment the squint in her eyes softens.
“Do you want to come to the next meeting?” Grace says. “I think you’d like it. The meetings are actually pretty fun.”
“What do you guys do exactly?” Amber says sharply, but the real question in her head is, When was the last time a girl invited me to anything?
“We talk mostly. You can talk about anything. We talk a lot about guys, I guess.”
“So you just sit around complaining about guys?”
“That’s part of it,” Grace says. “But other things, too.”
“Like what?” Amber’s body is angled toward the door, instinctively ready for a getaway.
“Like how to not let them bother us anymore.”
Amber’s bag is packed and over her shoulder, but she’s not walking away. She won’t look at Grace, but she wonders if Grace can feel her wanting to, can feel her full of questions, can sense Amber wanting to feel something besides anger and suspicion.
“You don’t have to decide right now,” Grace says. “If you give me your phone number, I can text you info about the next meeting.”
Just then Amber’s phone beeps with a new text message. She pulls it out of her bag. From a number she doesn’t recognize: Hey, want to hook up tonight? Amber sighs. She is too tired for her seventeen years. She opens her bag and rips out a piece of notebook paper, scribbles something on it, folds it, and hands it to Grace. “Okay,” Amber says, without looking Grace in the eye, then turns and walks out the door.
*
“Hey, boys!” calls a girl across the lunchroom. “Miss us yet?”
“There’s more where you came from,” calls a boy from the other side.
People laugh. It’s all they can do. Some laughs are giddy, triumphant. Some are the peculiar mix of cruelty and embarrassment—the laughter of bullies. Still, some burn with a rage and hate that was already there but hidden, before any of this began.
“Miss this?” says another boy, standing up and fake unbuttoning his pants.
“Miss what?” says a girl. “There’s nothing there.”
Clear lines are drawn. The lunchroom is tense. Allegiances are shifting; tables are emptying as members defect to the other side. A vague no-man’s-land exists between them, a neutral zone of people with their heads down, just trying to eat their lunches. The taunts fly over their heads like war fire, back and forth, a hit here, a ricochet there. Shrapnel flying and seasoning everyone’s food.
“Look at Ennis over there,” Rosina says. “He looks like he’s going to throw up. I almost feel sorry for him.” His head is down, his face covered by the bill of his baseball hat. His friends are silent, hunkered down and steely eyed. All except Jesse Camp, Grace’s almost-friend from church, whose doughy, bewildered face rises above the hunched figures of his lunch mates, looking around the lunchroom as if he’s been misplaced. “God, I wish we had the same lunch as Eric,” Rosina says. “I want to see the look on his face.”
“Sam said he hasn’t been at lunch the past few days,” Grace says. “He’s been going off campus.”
“Can I have your French fries?” Erin says.
“What happened to your raw, organic, vegan, gluten-free diet?” says Rosina.
“All this social upheaval is making me hungry.”
*
“It’s important,” a girl says to her boyfriend in her bedroom after school, removing his hands from her waist. “I have to do this.”
She’s having a hard enough time believing her own words without him touching her. Her body wants her to forget her promise. His mouth is on her neck and his breath is warming her skin, and he’s not the enemy, is he? He’s not a rapist. He’s a nice guy. She loves him. Why should he suffer?
She melts. She turns warm. She closes her eyes. She lets his hands sculpt her.
Then she thinks of Lucy, alone and scared, with nobody to help her. She remembers seeing her in the hall the day she came back, how the boys threw things at her—pencils, wadded-up paper, chewed gum—how the girls looked the other way. She thinks of her own body, her boyfriend’s. She thinks of this privilege of pleasure.
“No,” the girl says, and pushes her boyfriend away. “I need you to support me on this.”
He sighs. He squints his eyes tight. He breathes in and out. “I do support you,” he finally says. “But this is kind of painful.” He looks down at his lap, at the expectation bulging in his jeans. “Like physically painful.”
“So go to the bathroom and take care of it if you have to,” the girl says, her resolve back. She has lost all sympathy for decisions made by body parts.
He looks her in the eye. “I’ll survive,” he says, trying to smile. He puts a pillow on his lap.
“You will,” she says. She can see that he is trying. She softens. “Thank you.”
He looks out the window, at the relentless, pounding Oregon rain. God, what a perfect day to have sex. What a perfect day to be warm and close and under the blankets. “So what do we do now?” he says.
“I don’t know,” the girl says, sitting up on her bed, making sure none of her body parts touches any of his. “I guess we talk.”
The Real Men of Prescott