I didn’t look up again until I made it to my locker.
Stuck on the front were dozens of copies of the picture, the largest cut into a heart and smacked dead center. Around the edge pictures of middle school me formed a border of ugly. Some were from sleepovers with Jessie, pictures no one would have but her. It was like joining the popular crowd made her want to out-mean them all. Across the whole array, scrawled in red Sharpie, someone had written “#loser.” Then other people—the handwriting was different—had added on. Smaller scribbles proclaimed “#notgonnahappen,” “#lose-someweight,” “#freak,” “#pathetic,” and a bunch more things.
I couldn’t read the others because I was tearing the pictures off one by one, slowly, so the people watching—cell phones out to capture the moment—wouldn’t think I was losing it, eyes squeezed extra tight to try to keep from crying.
chapter six
KYLE
WEDNESDAY, 7:54 A.M.
I was gonna be late for first-period Physics. And if you handed in homework more than five minutes after the bell, Ms. Casey docked you an entire letter grade.
I whipped into the first parking space I could find, grabbed my backpack off the front seat, pulled my phone out of my pocket, and typed out a quick flit.
Feels weird to be going back to school after everything that happened yesterday. Wish me luck!
It was kinda dumb, but apparently that didn’t matter. Last night, after spending maybe an hour in my room debating what to say, I’d finally just flitted:
Wow. Um, hi everybody (?)
It got 3,297 reflits in the first five minutes. Seriously. Already I could feel my phone rattling against my hip bone. I grinned. It was hard to wrap my head around the idea that people cared what I had to say. Maybe I was more interesting than I thought.
It was only when I was closing in on the main entrance that I registered the cars taking up all the visitor spaces. They were all news vans.
It was probably about homecoming. Local news ran that story every year. I could see the principal, Dr. Rheim (we just called her Ream), standing near the doors. She was craning her long, narrow neck back and forth like she was taking a head count. Maybe waiting for someone to throw on the mascot costume?
I walked up the lawn so I wouldn’t have to weave through the cameramen bunched on the sidewalk. There were at least two, plus a couple other people hovering around whose jobs I couldn’t figure out.
Ream sprang into action first.
“Kyle, come here, please.” She gestured me over with one of her claw hands. Her back was even stiffer than usual. Was I blocking her shot or something? I started toward her, but it was already too late.
“Kyle,” a woman in a navy dress with some sort of twisty thing happening at the waist yelled. She was smiling triumphantly, like she’d just found the prize in the cereal. “Kyle, the Now News Five team would like to speak to you!”
She started jogging toward me. Her narrow skirt and high heels made her steps jerky and straight-legged, like a Barbie. She didn’t get far before more people started yelling and pressing forward. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ream marching toward me, mouth pinched tight.
Then it clicked. The reporter knew my name. She’d picked me out by sight.
I was the news. They were here about me. Dude.
“I’m not entirely clear on why these reporters are here to see you, Mr. Bonham. They mentioned Flit?” Ream said in an insistent undertone.
I nodded, my throat tightening.
“You don’t have to speak to them. This is clearly outside the bounds of the school-use image release your parents signed. Until we reach them, the school can act in loco parentis and—”
“They won’t know what you’re talking about.” I hadn’t told my parents about the flit. What was there to tell? Hey, Mom, a lot of internet randos like a picture of me. She’d just nod, tell me to be careful about what colleges might see, then go back to whatever she was reading on her iPad. Dad would be locked up in his office, on some call, like he was most nights he was in town.
“They’re really here to talk to me?” She nodded. I tried not to grin. Ream was taking this so seriously.
It felt like nerves were weaving through my chest, expanding it until it was too big for breaths to fill. Talking to reporters would be like public speaking times a thousand. But on the other hand, it was flipping cool. Even Carter had never been his own news story before. And both years he was captain, lacrosse won state. I tried to imagine Mom and Dad seeing me on television. They’d be so surprised.
“Can I talk to them?”
Ream raised a drawn-on eyebrow at me.
“As I said, I haven’t been able to reach either of your parents, so legally I’m not—”
“I’m eighteen. And they’ll leave faster if I give them what they want, right?”