The Nowhere Girls(40)
She turns her head very slowly until she is looking over her shoulder, straight into the principal’s office, straight at Slatterly seated behind her big desk with her head buried in her hands, her fan ruffling the thinning hair on the top of her head like soft feathers.
*
Amber Sullivan has Beginning Art for second period. It’s already a throwaway class, even without today’s substitute teacher. They’re supposed to be working on self-portraits, making a collage of the things they most care about, things that define them. Some students are texting or playing games on their phones; a few are asleep, heads cushioned by arms and jackets. But, mostly, people are talking.
Amber sits at her table in the corner and silently flips through old, wrinkled magazines, looking for pictures to add to her collage. She cuts out a picture of a tree. A mailbox. A cat. She glues them on her piece of red construction paper in no particular order. She cuts out no pictures of people, nothing resembling skin or body parts. The only intention she has for this project is that it should be impossible to read any meaning into it, that it should reflect nothing real of herself, that it should not give her away the way art always claims to do.
The only other person in class who appears to be working on their project is Grace, who is sitting on the other side of the room. School has been in session for three weeks already, but Amber only just started noticing the plain, chubby girl who always seems to be staring at her whenever she looks her way. It’s like she suddenly appeared out of nowhere, and now it’s impossible to ignore her. She doesn’t look at her the way other girls look at her, with a mix of ridicule and hostility in their eyes, the words “slut” and “white trash” on the tips of their tongues. Maybe this girl just doesn’t know any better.
“Fucking chicks, man,” says the asshole named Blake at the table next to Amber’s. It is impossible to ignore him, too. “I bought Lisa a quadruple grande caramel some kind of bullshit that cost like six dollars, and she wouldn’t even give me a fucking hand job.”
“Lisa?” says another guy. “She’s in on that Nowhere Girls bullshit now too?”
“Yeah, can you believe it? She was all, ‘I don’t have to hook up with you if I don’t feel like it,’ so I was like, ‘Then why are you wearing that skirt that’s so short I can practically see your ass?’ and she was all, ‘I can wear whatever I want,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, but if you wear something like that, you can’t expect me to behave myself,’ which is like totally reasonable, right?”
“Totally.”
“But then she started bitching about how blaming women for sexual assault because of what they’re wearing is, like, bad or something, and I was like, ‘Who said anything about sexual assault? I just wanted a hand job,’ and then she threw the fucking drink in my face!”
“She has a point, though,” says a third guy at the table. “It is kind of a dick move to just expect her to want to hook up with you whenever you feel like it.”
Blake and the other guy look at him, like they’re waiting for him to say, “Just kidding.”
“What the fuck, dude?” Blake finally says. “She, like, totally ruined my car seats.”
The guy just shrugs.
“But at least there’s still one girl left who won’t say no,” Blake’s friend says, not even bothering to lower his voice. “You should have called Amber.”
Amber tenses as soon as the words pierce her skin; she arms herself against their laughter. They know she heard them, but they don’t care, or maybe they even wanted her to. Like she’s not even a person, not someone with feelings, not someone who can get hurt. Just an object. Just something they can use. And she does not try to prove them otherwise, does not speak or otherwise engage, neither denies nor confirms their statements. What she does is harden, her own special defense mechanism—fight or flight or turn to stone.
The bell rings. Students put away the art supplies none of them was using. The boys leave without acknowledging Amber’s existence, laughing all the way out the door. Even the guy who defended Lisa is in on it, because Amber and Lisa are very different kinds of girls.
Amber takes her time cleaning up. She is giving the guys a head start. The worst thing is to get stuck in the hall with a pack of them.
The classroom finally empties. Even the sub has disappeared. Amber zips up her bag and throws it over her shoulder. Only five more periods until the end of school, when she can sneak away to the computer lab and hide at her favorite desk in the corner while the tech club nerds congregate on the other side of the classroom pretending she’s not there. It’s her secret—this small joy, that tiny space behind the computer where she feels capable and creative, where she can leave her body and enter a world that makes sense, a world made of ones and zeros that she can manipulate, a world where she is in control.
“Hey,” a voice says behind her, making her jump. She turns around to find Grace, who somehow sneaked up on her without her noticing. “You’re Amber, right?”
Amber doesn’t say anything, just looks at Grace with an angry squint in her eyes, ready to deflect the inevitable abuse that’s coming, that always comes. She is ready to snarl back, ready to prove the other side of her reputation true: cruel, mean, nasty. There are reasons she doesn’t have any friends.