My Side (3 page)

And then there is the camera.

Someone was recording the whole thing.

I have no idea what time it is when I finally stop crying. By then I have completely dehydrated myself. I couldn't shed another tear even if I wanted to. But I stay where I am, even though it's getting dark. I squeeze my eyes shut, and I see Neely's face. The light flashed in my eyes, I heard laughing, and the next thing I knew, I was staring at Neely, holding that light so the whole thing could be recorded. She used to be my best friend, so she knows everything there is to know about me. She knows things my family doesn't even know. She knows things I would never tell anyone else.

Has
she
? Has she told people my secrets?

Was she behind what happened?

She's the only person who knows for a fact—because I told her—that I've had a crush on John for as long as I can remember. Now I wonder if John really wrote that note and stuck it in my locker or if Neely did. But if John didn't write the note, what was he doing out there, not with everyone else, but outside? Why did he look so puzzled when I ran by?

After a while, I hear a voice. It's my mother. She's calling me in a singsong voice that I haven't heard since I was a kid, when Neely and I used to play outside until dark and our mothers would open their doors and call us to come home. My mom hasn't done that since I got my first cell phone. She doesn't have to. She phones me or texts me and asks where I am and tells me to get home.

But my cell phone isn't on.

I listen to her calling me. I don't think I imagine the worry in her voice. I roll out from under the porch and brush myself off.

“Coming!” I call. I wipe my face as best I can, but as soon as I step into the kitchen, my mother stops what she's doing and stares at me.

“What happened to your face?” she asks. Her eyes drop down a few inches. “What happened to your jacket?”

I start to say, “Nothing.” But, like a baby, I start crying. Once I start, I can't stop.

She asks me again. “Addie, what's wrong?”

I still don't tell her. How can I?

How can I tell my mother I'm such a loser that my best friend and a bunch of her friends ganged up on me with this joke and that I wasn't a good sport, and I didn't find it funny? I didn't laugh along with everyone else. Instead I freaked out, which makes me an even bigger loser than I was when I got out of bed this morning.

I tell my mom that I tripped over something on the way home from school and that's how my jacket got so dirty. I get changed. I set the table like I do every night, as if nothing has happened. I poke at my peas and potatoes and meat, but by then it doesn't matter, because my dad has come home and he's talking excitedly about a big sale he's just landed that's going to make him top guy at the dealership again this year. My dad sells agricultural implements and, lately, recreational vehicles.
You go where the money is
, my dad says.
Then you make people
want what you're selling
. My dad can make anyone want anything.

That's the thing no one understands. My dad is the most talkative guy on the planet. Me, I'm tongue-tied and shy, always afraid that if anyone looks too closely at me, they'll find out what a loser I really am. I can't help it. I've been like this my whole life. When I started high school, it got worse.

My high school is huge compared to my elementary school. Kids from six different schools in six different towns go to my high school, including some kids from Lake Haven, which used to be a nothing town but is now one of the hottest places around for what they call “estate housing.” Rich people have built big houses on all the lakes up there. Their kids go to my high school. Some of them, especially the girls, think they're better than everyone else. Some of them get off on giving other people a hard time. For some reason, they decided to pick on me. And for some reason, Neely, who used to be my best friend, decided she wanted to get in with those girls. Kayla, Jen and Shayna are from Lake Haven.

Anyway, lucky for me, my dad's so excited about the sale that neither he nor my mom notices I haven't eaten a thing.

I go up to my room and try to do my homework. I give up when I realize that I don't care about algebra tonight. Instead, I log in to my computer and check my email. Don't ask me why— I hardly get any anymore.

But there's something in my inbox. I can't tell who it's from, but I check it anyway.

It's from Anonymous. There's a picture right there in the email screen.

A picture of me, wide-eyed and screaming. Underneath is a link. My hand shakes when I click on it.

When I watch the video the link takes me to, I almost stop breathing. When it's over, I watch it again. And again. I don't know how many times I watch it. A lot.

Sometime later that night, I start crying again, only this time I really can't stop.

Chapter Five

No one is home the next morning when I get dressed for school. My dad always leaves early, hours before the first customer is out of bed, and it's my mom's day to volunteer at the church. So there's just me.

I skip breakfast. I'm not hungry.

I walk to school and almost turn back half a dozen times.

I think about the video and wonder if everyone has seen it by now.

When the school comes into sight, my question is answered. A girl spots me. She nudges the girl next to her, who nudges the girl next to her. They all stare at me. One of them says something to the other two. I can't hear what they say, but I can see them. They're laughing.

Someone else hears them and turns to see what's so funny. There are maybe fifteen or twenty kids hanging around outside the school, and pretty soon they're all looking at me and laughing.

My stomach does acrobatics. I'm glad I didn't have breakfast, because if I had, it would be on the ground right now.

I slow to a stop. Part of me—okay, all of me—wants to run home and hide under my bed and never come out again. But I'm not stupid. I know hiding doesn't solve anything, ever. Sooner or later, you have to come out. So I keep walking. My legs are as shaky as a newborn deer's. My eyes are stinging. My throat is tight and dry. But I keep going. I tell myself I can get through this. I even believe it until I get inside and start what seems like the longest walk of my life— up the stairs to the second floor and down the east hallway, which is crowded with kids, all the way to the end where my locker is.

You'd think the queen was going by.

Or a death-row prisoner on the way to his execution.

With every step I take, another couple of kids fall silent, until finally the crowded hall is like a cemetery filled with mourners, that's how quiet it is.

I pretend not to notice. I don't dare look at any of the faces that are looking at me. I take hold of my lock and start to work the combination.

I open my locker.

There, on the inside of the locker door, where my mirror should be, is a poster-sized picture of my face, mouth wide open, eyes wide open, in a silent scream of terror.

Someone laughs. It's one of the kids near my locker.

More kids laugh, because what happened to me is the funniest thing that's ever happened here. Because it's hilarious to see someone who's convinced she's about to be strangled or hacked to death by some creepy stranger who hangs out in the bush.

I reach for the poster.

I rip it from the door.

I tear it into a thousand pieces.

I flee to the girls' bathroom and lock myself in a stall.

I stay there after the bell has rung.

I stay there even when I hear the click of heels on the tile floor outside.

“Addie? Addie, are you in there?” It's Ms. LaPointe. She knocks on the door of the stall. “Addie, I heard what happened. Come out, and we'll go down to the office and talk about it.”

By then my eyes are swollen to three times their normal size, and I can barely see out of them. My cheeks are wet with tears, my nose is red from blowing, and my head is aching, probably from dehydration.

“Addie?” She sounds tense, as if she's afraid what I might be doing in there. “Addie, if you don't come out, I'll have to get Mr. Sloane to open the door.”

Mr. Sloane is head of maintenance. I imagine
that
getting around— Mr. Sloane went into the girls' bathroom with his toolbox, and a crying you-know-who comes out with Ms. LaPointe. I open the stall door.

Ms. LaPointe looks as concerned as any vice-principal would under the circumstances. She also looks relieved as she checks out my wrists and scans me for any other signs of self-damage.

“I heard what happened,” she says again. “Let's go to the office and talk.”

I agree because I can't think of any other place in the school I want to go to or that you could get me to go to. But I don't want to talk.

The halls are quiet, and most of the classroom doors are closed. A couple of kids glance through the few that are open as we go by, but their faces are expressionless. Maybe they're the only ones in school who don't know what happened. Or maybe they don't care.

Ms. LaPointe ushers me into her tiny office and closes the door. She pulls down the blinds on the window that looks out into the main office.

“Now, then,” she says when we are both seated. “What do you want to do about this situation, Addie?”

What do I want to do?

“What do you mean?”

“I know about the video,” she says. “I also know that someone— I don't know who or how—got hold of the school email list and sent the link to everyone on it.”

Everyone in the whole school got the same link I did? I feel like throwing up.

“So even though the incident—”

Incident—that's school language for what happened to me. It's a nice, neutral word.

“—didn't take place on school property, we can still notify the police about our computer system being hacked. We can get them to investigate. When they find out who did it, we can lay charges against that person—or persons.”

“For hacking the school computer,” I say. It's not a question. I'm just trying to understand how the school computer system and what happened to it is more important than what happened to me.

“I think
you
should talk to the police about the incident, Addie. Maybe with your parents.”

My parents still have no idea what's going on.

“I'm not a lawyer. What I do know about the law is pretty much confined to what happens here at school. But there may be some charge that you can press, something that you can do. That is, if you want to.”

Maybe I read too much into her expression and the tone of her voice, but it seems to me Ms. LaPointe knows more than she's letting on. She knows there's no law against the kind of practical joke that was played on me. I wasn't physically hurt. I wasn't actually kidnapped. I wasn't forcibly confined—the door in the cellar turned out not to be locked. It was all just good fun—for the jokers.

I look at Ms. LaPointe's desk, not at Ms. LaPointe, and think about what to do. Some people would probably have laughed at the joke along with everyone else and then moved on. But a person like that would have to believe that he or she was the target of a truly funny practical joke—no harm, no foul. I don't believe that. I wish I did. I wish I could shrug the whole thing off. But I keep thinking that someone—more than one someone— planned and executed a so-called joke that was intended not only to scare me to death but also to create an online video to show to everyone in my school. Someone wanted everyone to laugh at me. And laughter isn't always funny. Sometimes it cuts like a knife.

I stand up. I say, “I'm going home.” I leave without stopping at my locker. When I get home, I crawl into bed. I'm still in bed when my mother gets back from the church, but she doesn't know I'm there. She doesn't find out until suppertime, when she's worried about me and comes into my room to look at my calendar to see if I have any after-school events. By then, so they tell me, I've cried myself out, I have no appetite, and all I see is darkness.

Chapter Six

It turns out Ms. LaPointe called my parents that night. It turns out my parents then watched the video and called the police. It turns out the police told them that no law had been broken, but that they were making every effort to ascertain (cop talk) whether the school computer system had been hacked. If so, they said they would pursue the perpetrator with the full force of the law.

“I can't believe they're going to let those kids get away with what they did,” my mother says, not to me, but to my father and at the top of her lungs. She's furious.

“Poor Addie,” my dad says. “I've been hoping she would break out of that shell. Then maybe this never would have happened.”

“You think this is
her
fault?” my mom asks.

“No, of course not. But, Leslie, you know things are a lot easier for kids who aren't so thin-skinned, who don't analyze every move they make or think that every decision is a matter of life and death.”

I hear my mother sigh.

I don't sleep that night. The next morning, I refuse to go to school. My mom doesn't argue with me.

I stay in bed, my eyes glued to my cell phone, waiting for John to call, waiting for Neely to call. I'm not sure which call I wish for more.

Neely is my best friend.

Correction. Neely was my best friend up until the beginning of this school year. But Neely was there, holding that light. She didn't just see what they did to me. She was involved.

She doesn't call.

John does. He swears he had nothing to do with what happened. He says Kayla asked to meet him. I don't know whether to believe him or not. He doesn't call again.

I don't know how many days pass after that. All I know is that one morning when there's no one in the house, I go to the bathroom, find a brand-new bottle of aspirin and swallow the whole thing. About an hour later, I panic. I call my mom and tell her what I did. I spend the next two days locked down in the regional hospital, where they monitor my blood levels and where a doctor says, “Maybe you think life sucks, but let me tell you, young lady, life on dialysis sucks a lot more.” It turns out I could have wiped out my kidneys without taking myself with them.