Sometimes Never, Sometimes Always (29 page)

Would it make
me
feel better if they did? If I took the blame, all of it? I could go right now and walk into Ms. Clark’s office, show her the blog, explain my intentions, admit my mistakes. Would she believe me?

She would tell my parents.
I mean, obviously this is a big deal. Okay, so I’m a coward. I’m the biggest coward on earth, and I can’t do that. My parents can’t find out about this. My mom …
no
. I turn away from the mob, away from their sick hunger, but Annika throws one more barb at my back.

“Everyone here
knows
, Cassie Randall.”

I look at her; she gestures to the crowd around us, which has grown—milling groups of interested eyes and ears straining to catch every word.

“What?” They know what? I try to catch Britney’s eye, but she looks away.

Annika draws the crowd’s attention with a precisely timed dramatic pause and then shakes her head like she’s so ashamed of me it’s rendered her speechless. She opens her mouth helplessly once or twice and then gasps out, “Oh come
on
, Cassie. The girl even said that she wrote those poems and gave them to you. Obviously she was in love with you, and you couldn’t handle that.” Once again she turns away from me slightly, speaking her soliloquy, “It’s so terribly sad the way pathetic people will post such cruel things on the Internet. So many awful things they would never say in person.”

My face burns. “She wasn’t in love with me! She only gave me the poetry because she wanted it to be in the school newspaper. You stole that poetry from me and passed it around to everyone and ridiculed it!” I gesture to the minions, and of course they all shake their heads. Nice little trained monkeys. People murmur to each other behind their hands. “And you’re the ones who posted those comments—you and Britney!”

I feel Kayla’s hand gripping my elbow. “Come on,” she says under her breath. “This is a bad scene.” Yeah, no shit, it’s a bad scene.

“That poor, poor girl,” says Annika loudly, dramatically, as Kayla tugs me into study hall. “I wonder if she’ll ever forgive you, Cassie. I mean, if she lives.”

I should say something. I should say something perfect and noble—something that will convince all these onlookers that I’m not the mean girl; I’m not the one to blame. But my throat is tight; my unshed tears have a stranglehold on my voice, and it’s all I can do to walk away with my head up.

“That poor
girl
,” says Kayla to the crowd, “is named Drew Godfrey. And she’s what we should be focusing on, not all this stupid drama.”

45. Something you
could never do …

It’s all anyone will talk about. The study hall monitor gives up trying to keep us quiet and instead settles in with a crossword puzzle or whatever study hall monitors do when they’ve thrown in the towel. Eric is the only one who will look at me, the only one who knows the whole score. “They don’t really believe you wrote those comments,” he says. “Anyone with half a brain can figure out you don’t have anything to gain by posting the poems or signing your own name. Mostly they’re just worried they’re going to get into trouble for going to the blog on their school account.”

“Maybe they should be more worried about whether Drew is going to be okay,” I say, but I know I’m as guilty as everyone else, losing my sadness and horror at Drew’s actions in my fear about facing the consequences of my own actions. Or inactions, when it comes right down to it.

About ten minutes into the period, I’m called down to Ms. Clark’s office. It’s my chance to spill all of this. Instead, I sit mute in the chair across from her, tightly wound and clutching my own arms to keep myself together while she shows me screenshots of the comment catastrophe and clears her throat in an awkward sort of disgust. Obviously I’m here because my name has come up, repeatedly, both in the comment stream and by others who’ve warmed this chair before me, whose hands have reached for the tissues Ms. Clark provides at the edge of her desk, whose blotted tears are crumpled up in the wastebasket beside me. But I don’t cry, and I don’t tell her anything. I fight the urge to pull my knees up to my chest and feel the heavy stone spinning faster and faster inside my body. I imagine it polishing all of my insides to some kind of ugly, shameful iridescence.

“Cassandra,” says Ms. Clark with a long sigh, “I understand this is a difficult situation. I’ve been studying the issue of bullying extensively for the last dozen years, and I know it’s not a simple matter. It’s no easy task to unravel the dynamics of an awful situation like this, and you have to understand that I’m trying to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. You understand that, right?”

I nod, but I don’t know if I understand any of it. They talk about this in school a lot—saying we’re a bully-free school and that we take bullying seriously—and it’s true in a lot of ways, but it’s always about these simple scenarios, like a big kid beating up a little kid for his lunch money. Even when they try to get more subtle in their examples, it’s always very clear who’s the bully and who’s the victim. So is Annika the bully, and Drew is the victim, and I should be the helpful bystander who tells an adult what Annika has done so that she can be stopped? Okay, so if I go with that interpretation, what is Annika guilty of? I can’t prove anything about the poetry or the comments on the blog, especially not while keeping my silence about the identity of Divinia Starr. Almost all of Annika’s comments to Drew in public have been shrouded in that wide-eyed insincere kindness—it’s not like she walks around spouting hate speech or pissing on cars or punching people in the face. It’s all under the surface, invisible. And that makes it really easy for it to appear like I’m the bully and
she’s
the bystander, doing her duty by reporting me.

And wasn’t I, really, more hurtful than Annika’s crowd and their snide comments when I took advantage of Drew’s desperation and made her lie for me, without even seriously considering asking her to go along?

“I want to reiterate how important we as a school feel it is for bystanders to come forward, Cassandra. One of the students I’ve spoken with, of course I won’t give names, has told me that you are no longer in possession of these poems, that you haven’t had them for some time. This student doesn’t believe that you are the one responsible for these comments.”

I keep my face neutral and think about this. One of the marionette girls, afraid of losing her college of choice or whatever?

“I don’t have the poems,” I say. I’m not willing to give any
more detail. “Why don’t you trace everyone’s computer acc-ounts, like you said in the assembly?”

Ms. Clark sighs softly, and I get this sense that maybe they can’t do it after all. Maybe because so much of what happened was after school, from students’ own homes … maybe there are laws against that kind of snooping around. Whatever the case, I think Kayla was right that most of what she said in the assembly about the accounts and IP addresses was more of a scare tactic than a reality of their investigation.

“I’d rather get a sense of this crisis on a human level first,” Ms. Clark says. “It’s not as much about punishment as it is about processing this event and ensuring that our school community can heal and move forward with the certainty that something like this could never happen again.”

“Is Drew … ” I can’t really finish the sentence because I’m not sure I want the answer.

“We don’t know yet,” says Ms. Clark, and she scoots the box of tissues a little bit closer to me. “We won’t know for sure for some time, it seems.”

I press my arms tighter around my middle, trying to slow down the spinning stone. “It doesn’t seem real,” I say. I don’t mean to speak, but then I can’t stop. “I saw her Tuesday morning and she seemed … she never seemed like she would do something like this, you know? I just can’t … wrap my head around it.”

“You two go to the same church,” says Ms. Clark, her voice gentle.

I nod. “We have youth group together. I—I wasn’t good to her.” I gesture toward the screen of her computer, toward Drew’s incriminating email.

“There are lots of reasons for people to attempt suicide, Cassandra. Loneliness, chemical imbalance, romantic problems, a feeling of hopelessness for the future. Bullying is one reason, and it could have been the only one, or it could have been the tipping point in a long list of reasons.”

It still doesn’t seem real. “But the blog … I didn’t leave those comments.” I almost reach for the tissue, but I can’t stand the thought of Annika reaching for the same box, the idea of her weeping in this same chair.

“Your church has been quite upset about the blog. Your parents too, I would imagine. Am I right, Cassandra?”

There’s something knowing in her tone, and I think again about those computer accounts, about what she says and doesn’t say. The stone in my belly spins and I have to leave—I’m going to be sick. I lurch to my feet and run. I’m half expecting Clark to stop me, maybe even clap a set of handcuffs on me or fold me into the back of a police car, but she only calls after me, “My door is always open, Cassandra, if you come up with anything to help us with this investigation.”

46. Something you
didn’t expect …

I cry in the bathroom stall like it’s going out of style, which of course it never is. As long as there are high schools, there will be girls crying in bathroom stalls. When my eyes finally clear enough to see the writing on the walls, I wish I could cry more, but I’m empty, spent.

“Cassie?” The voice is tentative, a mere whisper outside the stall.

I don’t answer. I don’t know which one of them it is, but I’m not going to give any of them the satisfaction of seeing my puffy face. I won’t have them thinking that I’m crying because of them.

“It’s Britney,” the voice continues, and I can tell by the sound that she’s been crying too. “I saw you come out of Clark’s office, and I … I want you to know that I told her the truth, when I was in her office.”

The truth. So she was the one who told Clark I didn’t have the poems.

“I guess you didn’t want to get in trouble when your account showed you’d posted the poems from the newspaper office,” I say, opening the door of the stall and stepping out to face her. “Did you throw Annika under the bus, then?”

“I didn’t ever have the poems, Cass.” Her face is pale, her makeup ruined. “I did go to the blog that night from the newspaper office, but I called her. Annika was the one who posted.”

“You told Clark it was Annika? Seriously?”

She reaches for my arm, like I’m going to rush out of the bathroom and tell on her. “Cassie—”

“Cass.” Might as well get one thing straight here.

“Cass.” She nods. “I … I didn’t tell her the other thing, though. I didn’t tell
anyone
.” Her perfectly manicured fingernails fly up to her mouth and she starts to gnaw away at them like a guinea pig with a fresh carrot.

“What other thing?”

“I promise, Cass, I won’t tell. Annika’s my best friend, but she’s like this sometimes, you know? She goes too far.” Britney bites a nail, spits, bites again. Gross. “It’s like, she’s under a lot of pressure at home, to be perfect, and sometimes … well, it makes her kind of mean. Not to me, usually, but when she finds someone with a kind of weakness … I think it’s hard for her too. She’s got this mother, see. Who, like, is always just so. Her house is just so. Her hair, her makeup, her family. And she’s … she’s
sharp
, like a weapon.” She takes a long, shuddery breath. “Annika’s never had anyone who wasn’t trying to overpower her. I think she forgets, sometimes, how to stop.”

“
What other thing?
” Why is she telling me this about Annika? Like I need things to get more complicated in my head.

Britney startles, spitting another fragment of fingernail onto the floor and fixing me with her wide eyes. “I mean the thing where you’re Divinia Starr.”

47. Something you
should get rid of …

I don’t suppose things can get much worse if I skip the rest of study hall today. I walk out of the bathroom in a kind of numb stupor. Britney told me how I forgot to clear the browser history on my computer in the newspaper office when I left to go help the boys with the snow sculpture. How I’d actually forgotten to log out of my Divinia Starr account.

“I logged you out right away because I didn’t want you to get in trouble,” she said, and I guess I believe her, especially now, knowing what she told Clark. “I was trying to be nice. But I guess in the end, I wasn’t nice enough.”

None of us were.

I stand at my locker for a second, uncertain. Should I go and tell Clark right now, get it over with? Again, I think about my mother finding out about the tarot. I spin the lock slowly, still wavering, and as soon as I open the metal door, two triangular pieces of folded paper fall to the floor, shoved through the slats at the top of the locker for me to find.

I pick them up and weigh them, flip them over in my hand. Neither one has any identifying markings on the outside, and both are folded in the same style. I slide the flap of the first triangle and open it, but as soon as I unfold the final crease, I can tell that this is not a pleasant note. The handwriting slants violently across the page in thick black marker. My hands shake as I read—the note is nothing but a string of hateful words and threats. The anonymous writer promises that I am actually
the most HATED person EVER to walk the halls of Gordon High!!!
The bulk of the message—the theme, so to speak—seems to be the words that are scrawled across the top, down both margins, and in block letters across the bottom:
U BETTER WATCH UR BACK!!!