Holding Up the Universe(22)

We finish the song, dancing in unison, and it’s awesome, but then the song is over, and Dusty drops onto his bed and gives me this look that lets me know we’re only in unison on the dance floor, nowhere else.

Just to drive the point home, he goes, “You’re not the man.”

“I guess not.” I sit next to him and we both stare at the floor.

“So which is it? Which reason made you do this shitty thing?”

I think through all the reasons I listed before—Sometimes they’re just shitty people. Sometimes people have been shitty to them. Sometimes they’re shitty because they’re afraid. Sometimes they choose to be shitty to others before others can be shitty to them. Sometimes someone doesn’t like who he is, but then here’s this other kid who knows exactly who he is, and that can make that first kid feel even worse about himself.

“Maybe all of them. But I meant what I said. I’ll never be shitty to you.”

Then he looks at me, and he might as well knock me in my split lip because he goes, “You need to make it right.”

“I know.”





My dad finds me in the kitchen, eating standing up, and this is something we don’t do anymore. It’s one of the food rules we follow, along with don’t eat in front of the TV, don’t eat too fast, and stop eating when you’re sixty percent full.

When I see him, I set the plate down. Wherever the ache is coming from—my heart, my stomach—the food isn’t reaching it.

When my mom went away, I went empty too. Like all of me just flooded out and disappeared. In the hospital, I held her hand until my grandmother came in, and my dad, and the rest of my family. All of them sweet and loving and brokenhearted, but none of them like my mom. Not even all together. They didn’t begin to add up to her.

My dad’s eyes go to the plate, but he doesn’t comment. Instead he says, “Bailey Bishop is here to see you.”

Bailey stands in the center of my bedroom, head turning, hair catching the light like it’s trying to grab all of it and keep it for itself.

“It’s been a long time.” She leans down to rub George under his chin, and surprisingly he lets her. Traitor, I think. Bailey says, “Didn’t you have him back then?”

“I got him when I was eight.” My mom and I picked him out, or rather he picked us. We went to a rescue event, and George got free of his cage and packed himself into my mom’s purse. “He was supposed to die four years ago, but he’s not ready.”

The last time Bailey was at my house, we were ten. I had invited her and Monique Benton and Jesselle Villegas for a sleepover. The four of us stayed up all night and talked about boys and told each other our deepest, darkest secrets. Bailey’s was that she tried to give her baby brother away when he was born. Mine was that I sometimes spied on the boys who lived across the street. This was before Dean, Sam, and Castiel became my only friends.

Bailey straightens and focuses all of her Bailey-ness on me and says, “I’m sorry I never came to see you. I should have come to see you. When you were in here. Well, not in here, but in your old house.”

This throws me completely, and I stand there like a lump. How does she get to be so nice and also have hair like that? Finally, I go, “That’s okay. I mean we weren’t best friends or anything.”

“But we were friends. I should have come.”

Should I hug her? Should I tell her it’s okay? Should I tell her she should have come to see me a long time ago, way before I was trapped in my house, when my dad first pulled me out of school and let me stay home?

She says, “I have to tell you something, and it’s horrible, but I don’t want you to have to hear about it at school.” All of a sudden, she looks like she’s going to cry, and at first I think she’s going to tell me she’s dying or maybe I’m dying.

And then she tells me about the game. How I was the grand prize in something called Fat Girl Rodeo, and how that news has spread across social media like a virus. Everyone is infected, and my two thousand classmates and many, many strangers are all weighing in (get it?) about whether they’re Team Libby or Team Jack.

Someone’s posted a picture of me, which they must have snapped just after it happened, because there I am in the cafeteria, looking mad as a hatter, fist still clenched, Jack Masselin sprawled at my feet. You can’t see his face, but you can see mine (dangerously red, slightly sweaty). Caption: Don’t mess with Mad Lbs. “Lbs” as in pounds, of course. There are seventy-six comments, and only a few of them are nice. The rest say the usual: If I was that big, I’d want to kill myself. And: She’s pretty for a fat girl. And: Just looking at her makes me want to never eat again. And simply: LOSE WEIGHT, YOU FAT WHORE.

This is exactly why I don’t do social media. So many mean comments and snarky comments and bullying disguised as I’m only expressing my opinion, as the Constitution of our great country requires me to do. If you don’t like it, don’t read it. Blah blah blah.

I have this overwhelming urge to throw Bailey’s phone away and my phone away, and then go up and down the street collecting phones so I can throw them away too.

Bailey says, “Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything.” She chews on a fingernail and squints up her eyes, and I can see the tears in them.

“I’m glad you did.” I mean I’m not happy, obviously, but I was going to find out somehow and being told by the world’s kindest person is probably the best way to do that.