“Rachel, enough.” Mom plopped a slice of whole-grain toast in front of me, staring until I nibbled a corner. “I understand you’re worried about Flit, but skipping school isn’t going to make it go away. Going will be good for you. You can see firsthand how much of a molehill this really is.”
I knew Mom wouldn’t let me stay home—she never did. But I had only myself to blame. She always said monitoring my social media feeds would be “like reading my diary,” so there was no reason for her to know how ugly things had gotten.
I’d woken up to 23,208 more notifications (besides the luvs and reflits), mostly vicious. I was fat, I was ugly, I was pathetic and deluded. Not like I’d never thought those things, but seeing other people say them almost made me vomit. It made them feel true.
And even without those, almost a million people had reflitted the picture. That’s the population of a major city—or minor country—looking at my stupid picture of Kyle.
But if I told her that, there was no telling what she might do. How much worse she might make things.
“Fine,” I mumbled. I forced another bite of toast in. It felt too dry to even chew, a square of burny sawdust, so I gulped some coffee to help choke it down. “Bye then.”
I grabbed my backpack and coffee tumbler and headed for the front door.
“Rachel, what kind of reaction was that? RACH-el,” Mom called after me.
Usually I would have dashed back to give her a quick hug good-bye.
I slammed the door behind me and ran to the car before she could follow.
Staying home wasn’t worth having every one of my profiles shut down, and a dozen parents called, and whatever else Mom decided was the “appropriate” response to this. It was easier not to explain it at all.
So I was really, completely on my own.
I sat in my beat-up blue Toyota Corolla, hands gripping the plastic steering wheel, molded to look like stitched leather. I’d parked toward the far end of the junior lot, up against the spindly pine “woods” where kids went to smoke pot between classes. The spot had a good vantage point.
Though it’s not really hard to see a couple of news vans parked outside the main entrance to your high school.
If there had been a legitimate problem, like the time Sophie Laurentis’s brother had called in a bomb threat to get out of the PSAT, kids would have been flooding out of the parking lots like some retreating human tide before the teachers had gotten organized enough to stop them.
It had to be about football. We always played homecoming against Sunny Valley, and both towns acted like it really mattered which group of high schoolers had the longest streak of beating other high schoolers at a head-injury buffet.
Still, I couldn’t get too near. With my luck, they’d want to interview me about the team—which I had only seen play from under a marching band hat—and the internet would have one more thing to make fun of.
I’d have to go through the middle school.
Unlike East Apple Prairie, West Apple Prairie Middle School wasn’t freestanding; it huddled up along the short wall of the high school. One narrow hallway connected the two schools, lined with lockers that always got assigned to freshmen. Chances were good it would be less of a crapstravaganza than the main entrance.
I breathed in and out a few times, closing my eyes and trying to focus on something calming, like a smooth lake. That was supposed to help, right?
Probably someone on the internet was telling me to drown in one just like it.
Smiling bitterly, I got out of the car and headed for the door.
I slid inside and turned left down the mostly empty hallway, walking as quickly as I could without drawing attention, head down. The tube lights overhead buzzed; it sounded like I was being watched by a million insects.
“You’re her, aren’t you?” I heard from my right.
I stopped midstride, without really meaning to.
“Oh my god, you totally are. You’re Attack of the Rach Face.” Her voice was getting higher and faster, like someone had pressed fast-forward on her. “You must be mortified.”
I glanced at the girl, standing at one of the lockers that lined the hallway.
She was a couple of inches taller than me and weed-thin, with long, dark-brown hair with just a hint of waviness. She had to be a freshman, and she was arrestingly pretty. “Date seniors already” pretty. She had a hand over her mouth like she’d said too much, but her eyes were smiling wickedly.
I started walking again.
“Weren’t you worried people would think he was too hot for you?” she called after me, banging her locker closed. She sounded interested, but I’d seen the mean-girl trick in action before: sweet voice, eviscerating statement.
I sped up.
“If it makes you feel better, you’re a lot less fat than I expected.”
I tried to ignore her quiet laughter and the thickening in my throat. I didn’t care about baby mean girls, right? But no, apparently I did. The thought made me clench my fists in frustration.