“Go back and tell your banker how you can’t afford to buy Ronni’s painting! How you can’t afford to pay for ruining Ronni’s life!”
“Mom, stop. . . .” The voice was soft and flat, but firm. It had to be Ronni. She was the real victim in this whole mess, but here she was, stepping in, taking control, rescuing Kim from her mother’s ire. . . . Kim turned back to thank the girl, to give her a grateful smile at least, but Ronni was obscured by Lisa’s toned form. Kim was having trouble focusing, but she smiled in the girl’s direction.
“What are you smiling at?” Lisa hissed. “Is this all a fucking joke to you?”
“Mom, Jesus!”
Ronni stepped into view then, and for the first time, Kim saw the damage. The girl’s hair attempted to camouflage the wounded eye, but it was not up to the task. The whiteness of the eyeball glared through the veil of her bangs, giving her a grotesque, horror-movie aspect. In this day and age, was that really the best the plastic surgeons could do for her? Kim and Jeff would pay for another surgery. A better surgeon! They would make Ronni look better, look normal again. She’d been such a pretty girl. . . .
And then, everything was going dark. Kim’s hands and feet were tingling and the weight on her chest was restricting her breathing. She heard a voice say, “Are you okay?” Not Lisa’s voice this time, but someone concerned and caring. But she wasn’t okay. She was having a heart attack. She was dying, right here, at the school art show, in front of students and parents and teachers. The kids would never forgive her for this. Kim felt an acute sense of embarrassment as she crumpled to the floor.
hannah
SIXTY-FIVE DAYS AFTER
Like school didn’t suck enough, now Hannah’s mom had gone and had some kind of conniption in front of half her classmates. . . . Of course, Hannah felt sorry for her mom; Hannah knew firsthand how menacing and scary Lisa Monroe could be. But when Lisa had come at Hannah, she hadn’t collapsed on the floor, a quivering, apoplectic mess. “Marcus saw the whole thing,” her brother had said in a rare moment of sibling commiseration. “He actually thought Mom was dying.” It was so fucking humiliating.
Someone, a concerned parent or a teacher, had called 9-1-1. Two paramedics had rushed into the school to attend to Hannah’s prostrate mother. As a crowd of Hannah’s peers looked on, the paramedics checked Kim’s blood pressure, her heart rate, asked her to lift both arms, had shone a little flashlight in her eyes. . . . After their thorough assessment, it was determined that Kim had had a panic attack. A fucking panic attack! If it was epilepsy or some kind of stroke, people would at least feel sorry for them.
Hannah desperately wanted to transfer schools, but changing this far into the term would have been “academically disastrous,” as Mrs. Pittwell put it. “You could end up having to repeat tenth grade.” The last thing Hannah wanted was to make this hellish experience even longer. But she knew that, at the right school, tenth grade could be salvaged. She’d heard of kids who were failing school—there was a girl with an eating disorder who’d missed three months, a boy with a daily pot habit who skipped the majority of his classes—who ended up passing with the right educational support. Their parents had shelled out for an elite private school to provide a delicate balance of structure and coddling that got them back on track and through the grade. It seemed you got what you paid for when it came to education. Hillcrest was fine if you were smart, had a traditional learning style, and no drama going on in your life . . . but as soon as the shit hit the fan, it was sink or swim.
Hannah had considered asking her parents about switching to a different school, but the timing was all wrong. With Lisa’s lawsuit, they were worried about money. She knew they weren’t going to flush the Hillcrest tuition down the toilet and shell out for another school, just to please their disobedient daughter. And there was already so much tension in the house; Hannah was afraid her request might cause another meltdown. She’d overheard her parents talking (yelling) in the kitchen.
“Lisa’s bullying us,” her mom had cried. “She’s so angry that she’s not rational.”
“I could say the same about you,” her father shot back.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’re willing to go to trial to hurt Lisa, even though you know what it would do to us all! I’d be dragged through the mud! The kids would be humiliated!”
“Maybe you should have thought about that before you gave liquor to children! Before you asked them to cover for you!”
“And they did cover for me!” her dad yelled. “We could pay Lisa off and this would all go away, but you’re so fucking vindictive!”
The admission stirred something uncomfortable in the pit of Hannah’s stomach. Why were her friends willing to lie, to perjure themselves, to cover for her dad? She thought of Lauren threatening Marta and Caitlin to keep quiet about the events of that night. Hannah had thought Lauren was protecting herself, protecting Noah and Adam, but was she covering for Hannah’s dad, too? If she was, why? She couldn’t ponder it—wouldn’t ponder it.
Hannah wouldn’t devote any more energy to her fucked-up parents; she had bigger problems to deal with, like surviving the gulag that was high school. A quick look at her phone confirmed that there were still seven minutes left in math class. Ironically, class time had become a refuge of sorts, where she could disappear into the lessons or into her thoughts, without stressing about social politics. Once, she’d waited anxiously for the bell signaling the end of classes; now, the trill filled her with trepidation. Lunchtime was the worst. Abject terror—that’s what Hannah felt when entering the cafeteria alone, knowing that no one wanted her to eat with them, no one wanted to talk to her. . . . Marta and Caitlin may have grudgingly let her sit at their table, but she had been a shitty friend to them. They had to resent her for thinking she’d outgrown them; they must be enjoying her comeuppance. And then there was Noah and his friends, who blatantly loathed her. And Lauren, who remained a wild card. Hannah was like a prisoner released from solitary into gen pop. She ate lunch alone near her locker, watching her back.