Thousand Words (16 page)

“I just figured you’d want to know,” Cheyenne said quietly. “I think pretty much everybody has gotten the text by now.”

“I heard that some kid in the junior high is showing it around,” Annie said. “I don’t know if that’s true, though. Like, who would send it to a junior high kid? That’s gross.”

I dropped my spoon back into my cup, not hungry at all anymore. “Oh my God,” I said, resting my forehead in my hands. “Oh my God.”

Vonnie put her hand on my arm. “Don’t freak out. It’ll be okay.”

“That’s so easy for you to say,” I moaned into my palms. I felt hot, a trickle of sweat coursing down my back. “It’s not you who everyone has seen naked. I can’t believe Kaleb did this to me.”

“Even my brother didn’t send his slutty girlfriend’s picture around, and he was, like, so proud of that thing,” Rachel added. “He told everyone in the world about it, but he didn’t show it to anyone.”

I glared at her. It had never been clearer to me how much I couldn’t stand Rachel. Not to mention how much I didn’t see how Vonnie could like her. When Rachel talked about the texts, she almost seemed excited. Like on the inside she was thrilled this had happened to me so she had something to dish about. “Could we not talk about your brother’s slutty girlfriend right now? That’s what got me into this mess. Thanks to you, everyone is calling me slutty now.”

Rachel licked her lips. “Look, I know you’re having a
bad day, but just so you know, you’re not alone. Do you have any idea how many times I’ve been asked today if we do it, girl-on-girl? Do you know how many times I’ve been asked to send a picture of myself around? You’re the one who decided to go all full frontal, and I’m paying for it.”

“Oh, so I’m supposed to feel sorry for you now?” I said, incredulous. “It was your stupid idea in the first place, Rachel. Do you really think what you’re going through is anywhere near the humiliation I’m going through?”

Rachel was definitely the type of person who would think that. She would totally adopt my humiliation if that was what it took to get some sympathy from someone. But I wasn’t going to let her. So somebody had asked her a rude question. Poor baby. It was the broken acrylic all over again. Her whole life was one big snapped-fingernail meltdown.

“I didn’t think you’d actually do it,” she said, and again her lips curved upward, like she was enjoying this. “And besides, I thought you’d just flash your boobs or something. Not get totally naked. It’s really embarrassing.”

I got up and grabbed my pudding cup. “Well, I’ll make this easier on you, then, Rachel. I’ll leave. You don’t have to be associated with me anymore.”

“Buttercup…” Vonnie said, but I ignored her. I wheeled around and marched out of the lunchroom, tossing my trash into the garbage bin on my way out. It landed against the side of the bin and slopped pudding up onto the cafeteria wall. But I didn’t care. All I cared about was getting some alone time.

I stormed down the hall and out the front door. I sat on a bench in the sun until the bell rang for fifth period to begin, trying hard to let the stress melt off of me. But I was so tense I felt coiled, ready to spring. I was physically unable to calm down. On some level, I knew my embarrassment wasn’t Rachel’s fault for suggesting I take the picture, or Vonnie’s for pissing Kaleb off. But it felt easier at that moment to blame them, if for no other reason than to have someone in this mess with me, just so I wasn’t alone in my mistake.

I stood, turned to face the school. Listened to the hoots and calls of lunch-recharged students as they bounded up and down the stairs, wove in and out of crowds, slammed locker doors. They were all energized again. Plenty of oomph for a new round of Call Ashleigh Names.

I couldn’t do it.

I wasn’t blind.

Or deaf.

I could see and hear everything.

I turned around and walked home.

“Are you sick?” Mom had poked her head in my bedroom door. She was still wearing her sunglasses. “The school called to say you missed fifth, sixth, and seventh periods.”

I didn’t answer. Didn’t move. Just lay there, facedown, my cheek pressed into the folds of my pillow, staring out the window across my bedroom. Somewhere, hidden in the gloss of the window, there was a heart with Kaleb’s and my
initials written in it. I’d drawn it in some condensation on the glass one night last winter while talking to him on the phone. When it got cold again, the heart would reappear, a ghost of the past sent to taunt me.

I was no longer pretending to be blind or deaf. Instead, I was frozen. Laid out on a slab of ice, like in a morgue. I was stuck there. I couldn’t move.

Mom opened the door a little wider. “You need a chuck bucket?”

“Just a bad day,” I mumbled, my cheek scratching against the pillow. Getting frostbitten. Turning black and dying. “Sorry I left without asking.”

She sighed and I heard her purse hit the floor; a jangling of car keys. “Is this about Kaleb?”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t know how. Yes, it was about Kaleb, but not like she thought. I wasn’t simply heartsick over a boy. This was much, much worse than that.

“Okay,” she said, almost to herself. “Listen, we can talk while we fix dinner. Come down in fifteen minutes?”

“ ’Kay,” I said, though I knew that even if I’d wanted to, I’d never be able to get up and walk down the stairs to help her cook dinner. I thought I almost saw one edge of the heart shape on my window. If I squinted and stared really hard, it was there. I could maybe even see the “K” inside the heart. I glared at it.
Hate you. Hate me. Hate us.

The phone started ringing downstairs and I heard hurried footsteps and Mom’s voice as she rushed to pick it up.

I hated my phone. I never wanted to see it again. I wanted to crush it, to burn it, to run over it with a tank. I didn’t care if I never answered another phone as long as I lived.

I heard footsteps coming up the stairs, and then my door opened. Mom stepped through, holding the phone out for me. “It’s Vonnie,” she said. “Why do you have your cell turned off?”

I tried to shrug, but frozen shoulders don’t move, so I just lay there. “I don’t know,” I said.
I do know but I can’t tell you
would have been a much more honest answer.

Mom gave an impatient grunt and tossed the phone on my bed. I felt it thump against my leg when it landed. Damn. I had feeling. “Well, it’s off, and Vonnie’s trying to get hold of you.”

Mom left and I lay there for a moment longer, trying to decide if I could now see the pointy part of the little arrow I’d drawn piercing the heart. I didn’t want to.

Then, slowly, slowly, I reached down and picked up the phone, moving as little as I had to, and pressed it between my ear and the pillow.

“Hello?”

“Hey, what’s going on? I waited for you after volleyball but you never showed up. And your phone is going right to voice mail.”

“I needed some time alone,” I said. “And trust me, you wouldn’t want to see what happens when my phone is on. It’s totally blowing up. Or at least it was last time I checked. I had like a hundred texts.”

Vonnie made a sympathetic noise. “Have you talked to him about it yet?”

“Yeah. Sort of. Last night. He couldn’t care.”

“What a jerk. I can’t believe he did this to you. I mean, I always thought he was stuck-up and selfish, but I didn’t think he was this mean.”

I closed my eyes; a purple imprint of the window showed up behind my eyelids. I could still see pieces of the heart. I couldn’t get away from it. “You and me both,” I said. “He was always telling me how much he loved me. Guess we know what a crock of crap that was.”

“By the way, I found out who spread it around to everyone. Sarah’s little brother, Nate.”

Nate. Of course. The one who started the whole thing between me and Kaleb in the first place.
How poetic, Kaleb, you get points.
I would never know for sure if Nate had seen it on the day I sent it or if Kaleb had only told him about it. But Nate had definitely seen it now.

Not that it mattered anymore, anyway. Who cared who saw it and who only heard about it and when? Now everyone had seen it, everyone had heard about it, so why even bother to try to figure out when and how exactly the boy I loved had betrayed me? It only added insult to injury. It only made me feel stupid on top of everything else.

“He must have a lot of numbers in his address book, I don’t know,” she continued. “Anyway, Stephen and Cody are gonna kick his ass when they come home for fall break.”

“Stephen and Cody know?” I remembered the two of
them tossing me in the pool a few hours before I took the photo, and how I’d felt so weightless and carefree at the time. What I wouldn’t have given to go back to that night and do things over again. I would have stayed in the pool. I would’ve soaked up that weightlessness and I would have forgotten about Kaleb completely, let him play his stupid little ball game and enjoyed myself without him.

“Yeah. But don’t worry, Buttercup, they’re on your side.”

Great. Just what I needed. Allies, away at college. So now the photo was going around Chesterton High School, possibly the junior high, and at least two colleges. Very nice. I might as well have put my boobs on a billboard on I-70.

I heard Mom puttering around in the kitchen and slowly pulled myself to sitting. My cheek burned, I’d been smushing it against the pillow for so long. No doubt there was a red mark there. I rubbed it.

“I’ve got to go, Von. I’m supposed to help my mom make dinner.”

“Okay, pick you up in the morning?”

My limbs went cold at the thought of even going to school in the morning. But I had to. There was no way around it. Who knew how long it would take for this to run its course? I couldn’t wait it out, if for no other reason than at some point Mom and Dad would know something was up. “Yeah, okay.”

I hung up and trudged downstairs to the kitchen.

Mom was still in her work clothes—long denim skirt with an apple appliquéd to one hip, tan crocheted sweater
vest over a knit top, feet bare except for panty hose, glasses perched on top of her head like a bird in a nest. She was slamming things around as she worked.

“Hey, Mom,” I said tentatively. “Are you fine?”

She gave a single bark of a laugh. “Well, my dandy wants to get up and kick someone’s ass,” she said, which might have been funny on another day. She produced an onion out of nowhere and slapped it onto the cutting board, then began chopping it. “Some parents think their little angels poop nursery rhymes, I swear.”

I pulled a frying pan out of the cabinet and laid it on top of the stove, then dumped the hamburger she had thawing inside it, and crumbled it up with a spatula.

She pointed in my direction with her knife. “I’ve got a five-year-old who is going to be a delinquent someday, mark my words. But try to tell his mother that he’s anything other than perfect, and watch out. That woman is in serious denial.”

She poured a handful of chopped onion into the pan with the hamburger and then grabbed a jar of minced garlic out of the fridge and added a heaping spoonful.

“But enough about that,” she said, brushing her hands off over the sink while I continued to stir and crumble the meat. “What’s up with you?”

“My dandy fell down the toilet,” I said, trying to match her joke with one of my own, but I couldn’t quite get there. All I could feel was the embarrassment of the photo creeping up on me again. “But I don’t really want to talk about it.”

Mom came up behind me and rubbed my shoulder.
“Oh, honey, I know it feels like the worst thing in the world right now, but you’ll forget about Kaleb soon. Another boy will take your mind off of him.”

She was wrong. I’d never forget about Kaleb. Not now. He’d made sure of it. I would forever feel shame in the pit of my stomach every time I heard his name. It would never go away. Mortification this big couldn’t. But how could my mom ever understand? I couldn’t tell her what had really happened. I could only pretend that she was right—that breaking up with Kaleb was my only problem, and that it wasn’t a very big problem at that.

“It’s no big deal,” I said. “I had a bad day is all.”

“Well, I admire your attitude about it,” she said. “I remember when I broke up with my first boyfriend. I thought I’d die, and the pain lasted forever. It’s okay to have a few bad days. It’s expected. You two were close.”

You have no idea how close
, I wanted to say, and again felt heat creep up my ears. Everyone at Chesterton High had a pretty good idea, though.

“I’ll tell the office you were sick so you don’t end up with a detention. But next time let me know when you need a mental health day, okay? I was worried about you when the school called and I couldn’t get you on your cell.”

“Yeah, sorry about that. It was sort of a spur-of-the-moment decision.”

“I get that.” She leaned over me and peered into the meat mixture. “Stir.”

We worked alongside each other for a while. Mom
turned on the little TV that hung from the bottom of one of the cabinets and we watched the news. Every now and then she’d comment on a news story, but mostly we cooked away the stress of the day.

After a while, the front door opened and we heard Dad’s briefcase drop to the floor in the den.

“Hello,” Mom called out, and his footsteps approached the kitchen. Same routine as every night of my life. Something about that routine comforted me, like no matter what drama was going on at school, home was my oasis from it. I could escape to the kitchen, to fixing dinner with Mom while Dad sat at the table and read the paper. I could count on that, on Mom turning off the TV so they could talk while he read, on Dad griping about work. The routine felt like a hug. Maybe everything would be okay. After all, our routine hadn’t changed.

“There she is,” Dad said when he came into the kitchen. He leaned over Mom from behind and kissed the top of her head. She whirled around, her food-drippy hands held up in front of her, and smiled at him.

“Here I am,” she said. “How was your day?”

He came up behind me and reached over my shoulder to pluck a piece of meat from the pan and stuff it into his mouth. He leaned down and kissed my cheek.