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There are a lot of ways that bullies torment their victims. Kissing usually wasn’t one of them, unless you counted the slobbery way some guys try to Hoover your face as torture. That did sound awful.
Chris didn’t Hoover, neither did Jordan. Liam’s kiss from when we were twelve had been the standard I compared everyone else against and failed because the others didn’t make me feel it until I started kissing these bullies.
It must be a new technique. Kiss them until they shut up, or something.
As soon as school was over, I rushed into the girl’s change room at the pool, got into my swimsuit and plopped my dry butt on the bench with my phone to text the source of my anxiety and sisterly love. Jen had to have answers. I needed details. Who, what, when and how wasn’t enough anymore. I needed to understand why the boys had bullied her.
Waiting for a phone call is a lot like watching for water to boil. Yep, done that too. Kraft Dinner, and yes, if you put the macaroni in and then boil the water, it doesn’t taste the same. My sister was sneaking in this phone call. I couldn’t blow up her phone with impatient texts while I waited, in case I got her caught. I desperately needed to talk to her now.
Of course, she called, right when someone else walked up to me. I picked the phone up and told my sister to hold, then looked up at whoever had called my name.
“Jen, you going to warm up?” Rebecca asked, making a wet plop beside me. She had showered already. She flipped her long, strawberry blonde hair, getting me in the face with wet droplets.
“I ate a big pizza bagel after classes. Extra cheese, double pepperoni. Feeling kind of gassy,” I said. “I should wait for it to digest a bit before swimming. You know what they say about the 30-minute rule.”
“I thought you were on a diet,” Rebecca said. “No carbs. Remember, I taught you how it all turns to sugar inside you. Eat like a pig, look like a pig,” she added, making a little snorting sound.
I looked over at her in disbelief. Was this the kind of fat-girl bullshit she had been feeding my sister? Athletes needed carbs. Muscles needed glucose for the non-aerobic burst activity of diving, with split-second moves and your whole performance measured against the force of gravity that seemed damn fast when you were falling.
“I talked to a dietitian. As you can see, it paid off,” I said, standing up and putting my phone on the bench. I did a twirl with confidence in my tight one-piece suit. I had curves and they looked mighty fine. I hope Jen was on her way to re-acquiring them too.
I caught the look on Rebecca’s face. It was disgust that she barely managed to hide by the time I finished turning around. She honestly was repelled by my healthy body.
“Coach says girls should float like a butterfly,” she told me. “He doesn’t want any blubber on the team.”
Okay, now she was being straight up nasty. I felt my nice girl smile drop with the gloves. “Who cares what a guy that wears his trunks that tight is thinking? I say he’s outsourcing his inadequacies in the downstairs department by making you think he had something worthwhile upstairs with all his helpful advice. Next time he tells you to put down the chicken strip, tell him to shove them in his shorts and make a statement.”
Rebecca looked shocked. Her disgust was wiped off with a bewildered blubbering sound as I think she tried to respond at the same time as imagining our coach stuffing chicken in his swim trunks.
Somebody clapped and whistled, drawing my attention from Rebecca.
“Hey, this is a girl’s change room,” I said, taking a turn at shocked myself.
All three of my bullies were standing there. Chris was clapping.
“Get out,” Jordan said to Rebecca. “We need to talk to Jen.”
Rebecca stood up right away. “Should I lock the door?” she asked.
Liam shot her a look that was malevolent. I don’t think I ever saw him look like he wanted to hurt anyone before, even if he had to have turned to the dark side at some point if he had bullied Jen. Hearing another girl threaten to lock me in when there were three guys looking like they might harm me, though? It made him angry and I think it was on my behalf.
“Lock the door,” Jordan said. “We aren’t going to harm Jen. She has to dive in twenty minutes. She has her phone and there are cameras at the entrance of the door, so if we did harm her, there would be video evidence of us being here for her to use in prosecution.”
That actually was very reassuring. I didn’t fear them, figuring this was more a game to them than anything physical. The boys had only taunted my sister, words at their cruellest, but never anything dangerous.
An eating disorder was skating into harmful territory, but I felt that Rebecca and the coach were more to blame for that then the boys. They just reinforced my sister’s maladaptive eating with the stress they caused her.
The swimsuit. If they wanted to talk, we’d talk. I wanted Jordan to tell me why he had switched swimsuits on my sister. If he had known it said whale, that my sister was depressed and turning anorexic, if it had all been to please his ex-girlfriend, and hence, a total waste since they broke up soon afterwards.
Rebecca left, and the lock clicked.
I stood my ground, flip flops to their polished loafers. Didn’t matter. I was even wearing their pretty tracking ring, wondering if it was going to prove waterproof, or tragically, not.
“Genie, what you did last night was dangerous, coming to school so late on your own. What game are you playing?” Liam asked.
I glared at him before he took another step closer. Eyes don’t shoot out lasers, unfortunately. “Didn’t Jordan tell you I’m here to bring you all down?” I said, backing up a step and hitting the bench with my legs.
“Obviously, I kiss and tell,” Jordan said. “Your boyfriends deserve to know how you spend your nights.”
They were all getting much too close. “What crock of shit is this boyfriend stuff?” I said, waving my sparkly sapphires in the air to ward them off.
No lasers shot from the ring either. Useless.
“One boyfriend isn’t enough to keep eyes on you,” Jordan said, although that wasn’t really an explanation.
“Twin switch?” Chris said, changing the subject. “Smart, except your sister doesn’t have a tattoo on her ankle.”
Why was he looking at my sister’s ankles? “I could have gotten it over Christmas break,” I suggested.
“You ate an Oreo muffin for breakfast,” Liam said. Guess that window seat hadn’t been so hidden from sight after all.
“Your sister ate a very strict, healthy diet. I know because my mother had to cook specially for her. Too little enjoyment, I suspect, after hearing your conversation with Rebecca,” Jordan said.
“That’s your fault,” I shot back. “Who fucking writes whale on a girl’s swimsuit with body-heat sensitive ink, so it will only appear when she’s standing up on the board, ready to take one of the biggest dives of her career? There were college scouts in the audience!”
“I heard she got into the school of her choice on scholarship,” Chris said.
“Despite you assholes,” I shouted.
They closed ranks on me. Nobody touched me. Good thing because I was too angry, but they were cutting off all my exits.
“Are you saying we had something to do with the swimsuit?” Liam asked.
“Jordan lives at our house. He did it. Jen said he was the only one that could have broken into her room and made the switch,” I said. Let Jordan try to explain his way out of this one.
“That was why she was so upset,” Jordan said. “My mother was crying, begging on her knees for Jen not to say anything to your father. Jen kept going on about how I had broken into her room but wouldn’t say why or what I had taken.”
“He didn’t do it,” Liam said.
I felt guilty, thinking of Merry begging my sister. That must have been an awful scene for Jordan to walk in on and then to be accused. Was it really a false accusation? “Tell me who did it, then? You guys were all bullying my sister, right?”
“Not until after she lied about Jordan. We thought it was jealousy, trying to get Jordan and his mom kicked out because your father agreed to let Jordan ride Mr. Spot, so Jen could concentrate on her diving. She seemed like a spoiled bitch, not wanting Jordan to ride her horse even if she was too busy with diving,” Chris said. “We were standing up for our friend, trying to get her to back off.”
“It doesn’t make it right,” Liam said. “We were going to apologize after the break since Jen didn’t come back to school for exams when...”
“Chris lied about her cheating on her art history course? On her knees was the only way she could pass, right?” I said.
“Shit,” Chris said with a sigh. “We were assholes and we’re going to make up for it.”
Jordan touched me, a soft hand on one shoulder as if testing his welcome. I hadn’t fought his calloused fingers on me last night.
“I think Rebecca switched the swimsuits. She used me to get into your house, and I didn’t see it. She’s very competitive and I’m afraid her coach is driving that behaviour,” he said.
“The coach is a creep,” I muttered.
Chris made it out. “We think so too, which is why we don’t want you sneaking around campus at night.”
“Are you all ready to apologize to my sister?” I said, accepting this moment provided the perfect opportunity to scratch the boys' names off my vengeance list. Their behaviour wasn’t right, but I could see how they justified to themselves at the time.
All of them nodded. “Hear that Jen?” I said to my phone, looking at the dark screen where it sat on the bench.
Liam got a bit red in the cheeks. “Your sister has been listening?”
“Yeah, but I’m sure she would prefer to switch to video and see you all apologize on your knees,” I suggested.
Surprisingly, they did just that and I felt my chest squeeze as my sister cried a little. Sometimes standing wasn’t as powerful as kneeling.