Unfriended, page 11
That’s silly, I know. Why would Mom cry about that?
It’s a nightmare I keep having, even when I’m not sleeping. Like when I used to dream about my dad coming back just to tell me he really left not because he loves the beach, or because of his age, but because I was a disappointment as a son. I’d run after him, trying to explain that I was just a little kid before he left! Little kids don’t realize how annoying they’re being. I would be way better as a son now! But I was shouting all those sorry excuses at his big broad back as he walked away, again and again. Or the other nightmare where Russell and everybody were standing on one side of the playground and they all pointed at me and laughed. Luckily I haven’t had either of those lousy dreams in a long time.
But today on the playground, I thought of that old playground dream. We were playing catch instead of Salugi because unfortunately the teachers were out there enjoying the weather after the rain of the past few days. I was looking around after Mike missed an easy throw, and I saw that unbalance thing: most of us were on one side of the playground all together and Truly was sitting on the steps by herself, with her bum leg out to the side.
Mike lobbed me the ball after he got it from the bushes. I tossed it deep to Clay, who caught it easy, but before he could decide whether to throw it back to me or over to someone else I ducked my head and took a slow jog over toward where Truly was sitting on the steps.
I was wishing even though Mom thought it wasn’t a great idea that I had that small white box in my sweatshirt jacket pocket again and I could give it to Truly and it would make her smile. She’d look a little confused, maybe, but then she would hold the box in her hands where it would look like a nice-size box, not a tiny thing like in my big paw. And she would open the ribbons slowly, untying them with expert delicate fingers, like a safecracker or a surgeon. And she’d be all flustered when she saw the bracelet and be all like, “Wow, Jack—thank you so much!” and maybe give me a hug or something for it. And then she’d put it on and wear it all the time from then on.
And I would always notice it there on her wrist.
But all I had in any of my pockets was a dollar seventy and my school ID. And probably some lint. Still, being the one kid not invited to Russell’s party left a mark on me in the way that I don’t like to see a kid sitting all alone. That’s true even if it’s not a person as smart and pretty and interesting as Truly Gonzales.
I sat down next to Truly. Because I didn’t have the gift with me to hand over, I had to think of something to say to her instead, which I probably should have been working on during my jog across the playground instead of hashing over old experiences from when I was ten and lived in Ohio instead of here.
“Hi, Jack,” Truly said, after I was sitting there beside her for a while, clasping and unclasping my fingers, resting my forearms on my quads and trying to think of a good thing to say.
“Hi, Truly.”
My mom is probably right though. A gift at that point would have been awkward.
“How’s your busted knee?” I asked her.
“Better,” she said. “I get the stitches out today.”
“That’s good,” I said.
“Really?” she asked.
“Well, that means it’s healing, right?”
“I never had stitches before. I’m kind of scared of getting them removed. Did you ever have stitches?”
“Yeah.” I showed her the scar on my forehead.
“Oh, no. What happened?” She was leaning close to my face to see the scar. It was the first time I ever felt proud of it, or happy I had it.
“I fell out of bed,” I told her. “When I was four. I don’t even remember it, but my mom says there was blood everywhere. I remember getting the stitches out, though.”
“Was it awful?”
“No,” I said. “My dad gave me a lollipop to suck on so I just focused on that and then it was done and I still got to keep sucking on the lollipop. I thought I’d have to give it back when they were done, but no.”
Truly smiled at me. “They let you keep the half-eaten lollipop?”
“Yup. Pretty awesome, huh?”
“Didn’t make you give it to the next kid who was getting stitches out?”
“Nope,” I said. “No presucked lollipop for that kid. All for me.”
“You’re a lucky guy.”
“True that.”
She giggled a little, a throaty laugh.
“I wish I had a lollipop to give you,” I said.
She blinked her eyes at me. A few times in a row, nice and slow. They have very long eyelashes.
“And I could keep it the whole time?” she asked.
“Uh, yeah,” I said. Man, those eyelashes are seriously like Mr. Snuffleupagus on Sesame Street’s eyelashes. “All for you.”
“I’ll imagine it,” Truly whispered. “The whole time they’re yanking out the stitches, I’ll close my eyes and imagine the—what flavor would it be, if you had a lollipop to give me?”
“Do you like watermelon?”
“My favorite.”
“Mine, too,” I said, looking down at my gripped fingers so I would stop staring at Truly’s eyelashes. “I would give you a watermelon lollipop, if I could.”
“Thanks, Jack,” she said.
“You’re welcome.”
Then she didn’t say anything else and I didn’t want to ruin the perfection of that minute by accidentally saying well, it’s funny you should mention a gift I might give you because I have one that I already bought and it is in my sock drawer right under a pile of tube socks. Don’t worry; they’re clean.
Toward the end of recess when my butt was really getting itchy from sitting so long on the brick steps, I stood up.
She got up, too, and said, “Well, see ya.”
I am the second fastest kid in eighth grade, and Truly was limping. She is not fast even on her best day so I completely could have caught up with her. But I didn’t try. I let her go. I watched her hobble toward the door and then push it open. Her narrow shoulders were slumped. I didn’t know what was going on with her but obviously it was a lot, maybe more even than just worry about getting stitches out. And no imaginary lollipop from me seemed likely to lift that heaviness off her.
Maybe not even a very delicate and special bracelet could.
It’s possible that I am a nicer person than I otherwise might have been because of some stuff I have gone through, as my mom says, and maybe everybody, even a person as sweet as Truly, has to go through some tough times in life. And bear them alone. My mom is really smart about stuff like life and hardships, so I am sure that is the truth. We have to appreciate our troubles, Mom says.
Maybe Truly just wanted to get away from me because she thinks I am a fat kid whose name should be Jumbo. I don’t think so. I don’t think that’s it. I think she was just coping with some stuff privately and needed me to respect her solitude. I don’t think she would think mean thoughts about me.
But how can I know? How can anybody ever really know what another person is thinking inside his or her own skull? I thought Russell was my best friend. I thought my dad was going to snuggle me up and say good night, sports fans to me every night until I was grown.
Obviously I had no idea.
NATASHA
“MAYBE TRY TO forget about it, Natasha,” Lulu whispered to me. “Let it go.”
“No, it’s not that,” I whispered back. Urgh. She can be so thick sometimes. But she was my best shot, the most gullible and agreeable, so I had to keep trying. We were at the back of the math room, trying to avoid the sub’s occasionally lifted eyes. Mrs. Gerstein. Lulu kept her normally cartoon-expressive face unmoving, tilted down toward her desk.
“I just . . . ” I tried sounding more sweet. “I wanted to warn you about Truly.”
“Warn me?”
Yeah, warn you, you jerk. Could you give me a frigging break? “She’s . . .”
Mrs. Gerstein looked up, so I bit my pencil and pretended to work on a stupid math problem until she sighed and went back to the novel she was reading.
“Truly felt terrible,” Lulu whispered out the side of her puffy-lipped little mouth. “She did.”
“She should! Not that I care,” I whispered. “But come on, what kind of weasel posts a nasty thing like—”
“Maybe she was trying to be funny and it backfired,” Lulu whispered.
“You don’t know her like I do,” I whispered back.
“Girls?” Mrs. Gerstein said. She’s completely the best sub ever, because she gives exactly zero craps about what the students do, as long as we stay in our seats and don’t bother her. Still, you want to keep it down so she doesn’t feel obligated to take an interest in us.
“Sorry,” I said, smiling at her. She nodded her fat head and went back to reading. We should make WE LOVE MRS. GERSTEIN T-shirts. That will be one of my projects if all goes according to plan and I fix the social mess in this stupid school. We could sell the T-shirts and raise money for an awesome middle-school graduation party, and everybody will be so into it. Or maybe for some charity. Everybody loves charity.
“Well, why did you want to bring her in, if she’s such a terror?” Lulu asked me. “You’re the one who said she was great, we’d love her.”
I shook my head. Jack was sitting right in front of me, unmoving as a boulder. I couldn’t tell if he was eavesdropping or not. He is clearly Team Truly, though, so I had to be careful. Luckily Brooke, Clay, Evangeline, and of course Truly are in advanced math, so they couldn’t butt in. Just us dummies, here. Still, I wanted to be focused and quick with Lulu. I had spent all night thinking this through but I still wasn’t sure it would work.
“I wanted to give her a fresh chance,” I whispered. “It’s been a long time and, I figure, everybody deserves a second shot, right?”
Lulu is a big believer in doing the right thing. Also generosity. If anything would win her over, it would be this, I thought. Or else Plan B, which I wasn’t launching until later.
Lulu nodded. “Sure.”
I nodded, imitating Lulu’s solemn nodding technique. Not to mock her, but just, it’s kind of contagious. Also kind of funny. So serious. Please. Like she’s a judge, passing judgment on me. Thank you, Your Honor.
“But I guess I was wrong.” My voice was full of sorrow.
“Girls?” Mrs. Gerstein said again.
“Sorry,” I said as sweet as I could. “We’re trying to work through this problem together.”
“Try independently, please,” Mrs. Gerstein said.
“Sure,” I answered. “Sorry, Mrs. Gerstein.”
She picked up her novel again, though I am pretty sure her eyes were closed in front of it.
Lulu wrote in her notebook, which she tipped toward me. What did she say when she called you yesterday?
??? I wrote back, in my own notebook. SHE NEVER CALLED. All caps. I never write in all caps. All caps means yelling. But too bad.
The bell rang so we got up and gathered our books.
“She did,” Lulu whispered. “After your mom called her mom. Truly was really upset and she said she felt terrible, and she wanted to call you and apologize. So she did.”
I shook my head. “Nope. I had my phone with me the whole afternoon.” That last part at least was true.
Lulu’s unwaxed eyebrows approached each other on her forehead. She wasn’t buying it. Damn, I was getting all muddled for no reason. Should always stay as close to the truth as possible to avoid exactly this. “Clay was texting with me,” I said. “You can ask him if you don’t believe me.”
We got to the corridor and turned left in the Bedlam of between-classes. “Are you sure?” Lulu asked.
“Completely.”
“She said she apologized.”
“Never happened.” Give me a break; she tried one damn time to call. Wow. Sainthood for her. Once and hanging up without leaving even a message is pretty frigging close to never calling. What if I didn’t have her number programmed into my phone so I didn’t know who was calling? Or maybe I was texting with somebody and didn’t notice? It’s practically the same as if she never made any effort at all.
“That’s intense,” Lulu whispered.
“I’m telling you,” I said. “Totally intense. This is exactly what I’m saying.”
“That’s just nuts,” Lulu said.
“It’s my fault,” I whispered, bending down toward Lulu’s shiny-haired head.
“No,” she said. “It’s so not.”
“I should have known better,” I said. “And I hate to say this, but I honestly fear she’s going to look for another victim, now that she succeeded in getting me kicked out of the Table.”
“You really think she’d—”
“Or maybe she’s not done hurting me yet. I don’t know.”
“Let me talk with Brooke,” Lulu said.
“You don’t have to,” I said humbly. “I probably deserve it, though not for whatever reason Truly cooked up to poison Brooke against me. But just, like, for inflicting her on you all. I only hope she’s still not done with me, and not turning her sights on you, or—”
Lulu put her heavy hand on my arm. “This isn’t right,” she said. “I’m gonna be late for Spanish but—don’t worry. Okay? I got this.”
“You’re the best,” I called after her. I was running late, too, obviously, but I took an extra few seconds to watch Lulu dash away, all full of righteous mission, with no idea what was ahead.
Because Plan B was only a few hours away.
HAZEL
AFTER MY PARENTS (holding hands; weird) and I got home from visiting my recovering grandmother in the hospital, where she is alive, conscious, and full of complaints about the incompetence of nurses she wants fired immediately, I checked all the sites and accounts I’ve been logging into. And there it was. The kind of thing I’d been expecting, waiting for, thinking if nobody got to it soon, I’d have to do it. Sometimes it feels like I have to do
everything.
Do I have to be everybody?
Not this time! Such a relief. Somebody took a bit of initiative, finally. And I had to admit, it was a good one. I was impressed. I wouldn’t have guessed Natasha was up to it, but maybe I’d been underestimating her.
It was Natasha’s page on tellmethetruth.com. She had asked: Does everybody hate me?
She’d posted it just half an hour before I logged in. Five minutes after she posted that pathetic question, somebody posted, anonymously of course: Yes
And then somebody else (or maybe the same person, pretending to be somebody else) added, one minute later, under it: Everybody hates you! You have no friends AT ALL.
And then, somebody else (or was it the same one person; impossible to know for sure but one could guess) added two minutes after that: Loser
I didn’t write anything. But I left the window open. Watching. Waiting. I had a feeling I knew who posted each of those things.
I had a feeling they were all posted by the same person, in fact.
A tricky move. High risk, but smart. Respect on that one, respect where respect was clearly due. Because I felt pretty strongly that person, the person who posted all three horrible, mean, bullying answers was the same person who posted the question:
Natasha.
It was kind of brilliant, I thought, in its demented horribleness. She set herself up and then punched herself, virtually, in the face. In public.
If I was right, and I knew I was right, Natasha was waiting in front of a screen across town. Waiting in her room, a room I’d never seen but could imagine was probably cluttered and had a mirror or three, maybe recently redecorated in beige in an attempt at sophistication that failed because of the collages made with her (ex)-friends and the mess of clothes she probably had scattered across her floor. So undisciplined. I sat staring at my laptop’s screen in my uncluttered pink mother-decorated-when-I-was-in-elementary-school-and-couldn’t-object room. Natasha, I was certain, was across town in basically the same position as me—staring at the same screen, looking at her question and the three hideous responses to it.
Waiting.
Waiting for other people, people other than herself (and me; of course she didn’t know I was logged on, or that I existed, particularly) to notice the post she’d put up, and the horrid responses she’d also put up, and spring into action.
How long could it take? In cyberspace, of course, each minute feels like forever. Refresh, refresh, somebody respond! Come on!
It took a full hour.
Finally, a response popped up, signed, from Lulu. Nice girl, Lulu. Not particularly interesting or creative, not an artistic type, but you never know. She’s endured hardships and might have an ethical core. So I wasn’t surprised to see her post first.
This is cyberbullying and whoever posted this: you know it can be traced rite? (Her misspelling, not mine.)
No response from Natasha or, well, Natasha. Other-Natasha. Bullying, imaginary-friend Natasha. I stopped pretending to do my homework and cupped my chin in my hands, to watch. A few seconds later, solid good Lulu added: Natasha—everybody loves you. Don’t listen to this troll.
I waited some more, listening to my parents down the hall chatting together for the first time in a while. I wasn’t sure what to make of that, but I was pretty sure the texting and screen capture and other connecty circuits were burning up between Lulu’s house and the other Popular Table kids. It felt like watching popcorn in an uncovered pot, waiting for the little kernels to start exploding.
