In the two weeks since it had happened, Carly always called it the thing. She didn’t know what else to name it in her mind because it wasn’t just what the guy had tried to do. It was what had tightened and sharpened in her while watching the playback of it. In seeing what she’d done, seeing what it looked like to be better than she thought she was, all the good and the terrible of that day had become bound up into one electric, snapping thing.
On the second day after the thing, Carly’s gym teacher started calling her BK Liddell. BK stood for Butt-Kicker, and she liked it. She laughed along with everyone else. Carly figured that under his mostly gray buzz cut, Coach Marshall was really thinking Ass-Kicker, but he made a big deal about being a deacon in his church, so he wouldn’t say ass to a bunch of eighth graders.
The next day, her math teacher had hugged her on her way into the classroom. The principal knew her name all of a sudden, and the janitor high-fived her and called her Girlie when he’d never called her anything before.
It didn’t matter that the police had scrubbed her face out of the video. The neighbors saw the cops and the fire truck and the news vans on their street. Her friends recognized the rest of her—her hair and clothes and her backpack, and her house. Then those kids showed their parents. It didn’t matter that it was over so quickly. It wasn’t hard to put together. The next day it was all over the place.
The thing spilled over the borders of the school grounds. The desk clerk at the Y asked her if she was the one, and Carly had to try to not giggle because it sounded so high drama, like THE ONE, in her head when she heard it. The high schooler at the ice cream kiosk in the grocery store kept checking her recognition against Carly’s actual, not-blurred face by staring and trying hard to look as if she weren’t.
Every several hours that passed from the thing to whenever she noticed again, it seemed that the catalog of new reactions had grown by half. So many variations on a theme. It got to the point that she could feel the eyes on her, scuttling over her like butterfly feet, but soon she didn’t need to turn to find the source. It didn’t matter who it was. They needed to look, but she didn’t need to look at them looking.
Just looking was good enough for most people, but some kids, and even some of the grown-ups, insisted on more. They were positively itching to see what Carly was about in real life. And it wasn’t enough just to stare. It needed to be a circuit with Carly actively looped in while they checked what they could tell about her with their naked eyes. They measured her to see if she matched up to the video.
Some maneuvered into her peripheral vision and got so obvious about it that she had to peek over at them just so that she didn’t seem weird. There was on-purpose paper rattling and throat clearing to draw an involuntary glance from her, which some people would then make into an invitation to chat. Much of it was friendly. They wanted to say they’d seen the video, that they were glad she was all right. Sometimes they wanted to tell her about something that had happened to them, or to say they thought it was cool what she’d done. But sometimes they asked her to tell them the step-by-step details, to narrate their memory of what they’d seen on their screens. They wanted her fear and her pain and her almost-maybe-dying without thinking about how she might feel about the thing she’d actually lived through.
But whatever looks or words they wanted to trade with her, what Carly understood was that none of this was the real want, the real need. They wanted her to look at them, yes, and they wanted her to know what they were thinking about when their eyes met. But the demand of attention, even from across the room, was a type of touch. As much as if they’d put their hands on her, it was a reach and a catch that she saw with her eyes, but felt in her throat.
Her bad thing was any bad thing—accident, illness, attack, ruin in all its million forms—that everyone, not so deep down when they looked at Carly, knew was possibly close by. Maybe even standing invisible at their own shoulder in that very moment. Any bad thing could be on its way to them. Their lives could be on the to-do list for disruption, or even disaster. And so they forced Carly into contact, and it was a weird little bravery for them. They wanted to touch it before it touched them.
Strangely, she didn’t mind. She felt like a freak, but it wasn’t unpleasant. It made her feel real. Somehow, and with a pang, she knew this feeling, this certainty, wouldn’t last. It would end. She would forget. She was already forgetting.
The Carly of two weeks ago felt far away. The reality of Other Carly was fading. Normal life was blocking the view. Right at first, she’d been like the Venus flytrap on the windowsill in the science lab. Sticky and spiny, grabbing things that landed on her attention and then digesting the idea of them, breaking them down to know what they were made of. But now sometimes she was just what she was. She forgot to pay attention. Dumb as a regular plant.
She was still changed. She thought she was. What if she wasn’t? What if she didn’t get to keep it?
Whenever this thought nipped at her, she located that feeling she’d had since seeing herself on the security camera, the glue and the grip of it. It lived behind her eyes. She turned it up and pointed it at loved ones and strangers alike. Use it or lose it, BK Liddell! He made them scream back Yes, Coach Marshall! when he hollered out his encouragements like drill orders and laughed into his whistle as they ran or jumped or did sit-ups or shot baskets.
In line with Ada at the doughnut shop, Carly watched the cashier scramble through order after order, and the girl with the black headset and cool nose ring running the drive-through, and the couple bristling at each other at the only table she could see without being too obvious about it. She chewed over their gestures and postures, trying to glimpse everything more in their movements, everything she knew was there in every moment. The fishing was good today, and every day that she remembered to try. So many little things she could catch that were always happening everywhere.
The lady in front of her turned around and put her hand on Carly’s arm. In the past two weeks, there had been other people like that. Carly told her friends they were freaky, but in truth the touchy ones were usually nice.
“You don’t know me. My daughter goes to your school. She’s over there at the table. She’s in the seventh grade, so you probably don’t know her. Anyway, you’re wonderful.” And then to the cashier: “And I’ll pay for whatever she’s getting.”
The lady smiled back to Carly, and Carly looked at Ada, drop-jawed at her side.
“Oh, I’m sorry! I didn’t realize the two of you were here together. Of course, you, too,” the lady said to Ada. “Both of you get something. My treat.”
Carly paid more in thank-yous and blushing than she would have in money for the sweet coffees and sprinkled doughnuts. She and Ada walked back through the crush of people, their eyes on the goal of the last two swivel stools at the window. The line was from the counter to the door, packed with Friday-charged students and a few adults.
A boy from her class stepped clear of a knot of other kids in the middle of the line. His name was Dylan and Carly had hated him since the third grade. Dread pulled down on her stomach, even as her heart sped up to pounding. Dylan had his phone pointed toward her, tracking her, recording.
“Oh, look! It’s the famous Carly, gettin’ free eats. Maybe we can catch her doing something awe-some. C’mon, Carly, do something awe-some.”
Carly could handle the tickling curious looks from regular people, but the bully’s spotlight pressed hard. Dylan wasn’t the beat-you-up kind of scary. He was just mean. And he was on all the time. Ready constantly. A real asshole. She wanted to say it, to give him the finger and coolly walk out. She daydreamed the scene right where she stood, with Ada and everyone else looking at her, waiting for their cues. She imagined rolling right out the door and leaving Dylan to deal with the drag of half the crowd’s expectant attention and the air-sucking awkwardness of the other half who were averting their eyes.
But the load was all hers. She owned the hope of everyone pretending they weren’t leaning in for the payoff—either a sad story for them to tell in school next week about the poor picked-on girl, or a triumphant one about the whip-snap burn served up by the one who didn’t care at all about a reject like Dylan Davis.
She hated that she couldn’t do anything but crumple up inside and wish she’d never come in here.
“Let’s just go,” Ada said, close and low.
They hadn’t set down their snacks or even stopped long enough for it to be a real spectacle yet. They could just keep going, almost as if it weren’t happening. It would be the next best thing to being awesome. Awe-some.
Of course, the next best thing to awesome would feel like a total loss, but Carly let Ada pull her along anyway.
“Hey, Carly! Why’d you kick your boyfriend in the head? Might’ve been your only chance.”
She heard Dylan step out behind her, cutting loose from his circle and sliding into her empty lane. Ada was a length ahead, still carving a path for them to the door. Carly sensed the gap behind her and turned back. It didn’t matter. No one’s closeness would have made it anything other than just him against her. He’d steered it that way on purpose. It was his talent, making a show out of people who didn’t want it. He’d already won the first round.
The ones who laughed made Dylan bold. So did the ones who didn’t, holding in their exhales so as not to miss anything. They couldn’t help it. They were just like her, everyone breathless to know what came next. They were exactly as uninformed about what he would do as Carly was, and just as riveted, only not in the crosshairs.
Carly could almost feel the rise of his blood in him, so like her own, but in a different chamber of the heart altogether. He wanted to strike as badly as she wanted to turn to smoke and blow away.
He held up the phone, lining up his camera. His friends jostled and snickered in his wake. “You should’ve given him a chance,” Dylan said. “You might have liked it.”
More than anything, it was a concept. An idea made of giggles and rudeness and wonder and heat and a couple of partial diagrams from a rigorously straight-faced health class lecture on the biology of it. It was loaded into a slingshot of shame when the idea was pointed at her or the other girls, but she didn’t quite understand why the joke was funny for the boys, but definitely not for her. She was embarrassed by it, but even more embarrassed just for being embarrassable in the first place.
Nothing waiting in the queue of her thoughts would make any sense to say out loud. Fire bloomed into her cheeks and the maddening tingle of tears felt like a hand around her throat.
Dylan smiled, starting to collect his reward as the people in the room helplessly took score.
No one was on his side, but the balance tipped. She could feel their acknowledgment. He certainly could as well. The cruel, smooth, ancient part of the crowd brain tilted irresistibly toward not what was right, but to what was strong.
Carly saw the woman seated to her left watching with her folded hands pressed to her lips. She shifted in her chair and leaned forward, enthralled. But the woman didn’t settle back. Instead, she got up and walked toward Dylan and the other boys, smiling.
She was tall. White shirt. Jeans. Really good boots, with cool buckled straps wound around them. As she went by, Carly saw that the woman’s jaw was messed up. The right side of her face was tight at the far edge and puckered with scars.
The woman walked all the way up to Dylan, arms crossed, back bowed into a casual slouch. She looked amused.
“You know, you might be the bravest boy I’ve ever seen.”
Dylan tried to smirk, but the color went patchy on his face. A sudden rash of alarm crept up out of the neck of his T-shirt.
“No, really. That was unusual. Not a lot of people would be that . . . that . . . I don’t know. What would you call it?”
Dylan shrugged.
“What’s your name?”
He stiffened to keep from squirming. It was plain he wanted to shrug again so desperately that Carly felt her own shoulders rising in unwitting sympathy. He dropped his gaze to the level of everyone’s knees.
The woman ducked her head into his sight line. “Oh, come on. Don’t lose the fire now. What’s your name?”
One of the boys behind him cough-shouted into his fist, “Dylan!”
The woman dropped her smile and uncurled from her friendly slump to her full height. She rolled her hand over with a flick of her wrist, palm up. “Give me your phone, Dylan.”
Dylan struggled in the trap of his age. He didn’t have to give her the phone. But he wasn’t all the way out of the reach of authority. Not just yet. Everyone in the room knew it. He glanced out the window as if he were hoping to see a meteor on its way through the glass. No one said a thing, and now even the front of the line and the cashier and the girl with the headset and nose ring were all watching. The couple at the table had forgotten their argument.
Carly trembled with the thrill of it and also with some stupid measure of guilt at his agony.
The woman fluttered her fingers and snapped her palm flat again. Dylan rolled his eyes and scoffed in the back of his throat, but he gave up the phone.
She turned it over, lit it awake, and handed it back. “Unlock it.”
“C’mon. I’m sor—”
“No, no, no. Don’t do that. It’s not time to be sorry yet. Unlock it.”
Carly could see only half of Dylan’s expression and none of the woman’s, but whatever he read there made him clench his jaw and jab at the screen. He slapped the phone back into her hand and wheeled away as if he would walk back to his group, who had already pulled an extra step of distance from him.
“Wait,” she commanded.
He did.
She circled around so that they were facing each other again, never taking her eyes from the phone, slow steps, bootheels thocking on the tiles. She ticked a glance at his face to make sure he was watching her. He was. Carly could see her a little better, too. The woman launched the video he’d just taken and turned up the volume. C’mon, Carly, do something awe-some.
Carly’s mouth twitched in the fight against crying. Dylan rolled his eyes again.
The woman tapped the screen. “Okay, well, that’s gone.”
Dylan put his hand out for his phone.
She shook her head. “Not just yet.”
The woman scrolled through his pictures, all her reaction playing out in her rising left eyebrow.
Dylan shrank with every flick of her finger across the screen, going paler until his freckles and two panicked spills of red across his cheeks were all the color left in him.
“Oh. I see. Wow.” She looked up. Calm, Carly saw, and a little rage rippling under it. “Really, Dylan? Do you think we should show this to, I don’t know, your parents? Their parents, maybe?” She studied his photo gallery again. The last passes of her fingers were in a tight-lipped hurry. She looked up and sighed. “You have a real problem, Dylan. Do you know that?”
He quaked and nodded. The drive-through kept running in cars and order-box static, oblivious to the frozen crowd inside. The girl with the headset was going to give herself whiplash trying to both do her job and not miss out on the show.
“I’m going to do you a favor,” the woman said, her fingers flying across the screen of Dylan’s phone. “And delete all of this.”
She handed the phone back to Dylan, tears now running in shining tracks over his furious blushing. He put his fingers around it, but she didn’t release her hold on the phone or his gaze. She did, though, take a small-arc step to the left, Dylan in tow, turning the conversation and angling their bodies, Carly realized with a startle, for her benefit. She could see them both in full profile now—Dylan’s wrecked humiliation and the woman, at once scarred and beautiful, in complete control.
“Fresh start,” she said to him.
He made a little choked sound in his throat and nodded helplessly again.
She pulled the phone like his tether and reeled Dylan in toward her. “You’re going to get a lot of shit for this, Dylan. For what’s happening here, right now.”
Carly felt the antennae of all the young people in the doughnut shop buzz to life, remembering their world.
The woman continued, “But it won’t last long. It’ll pass. I want you to get over it. I want you to be fine. I really do. But I want you to remember it. Every time you go through your new, nice—regular—pictures, remind yourself.”
Dylan bobbed his head, agreeing to anything to make it end, quivering in place, pinned there in all his wrongness.
“Don’t be a terrible person, Dylan. In the end, you never really get away with it.”
She let go of his phone first, then of his eyes.
Dylan melted into his group and they went straight for the door like a single creature. The room broke out in chatter.
The woman said to Carly, “Take my table. Catch your breath.” She gathered up her bag and her book, and moved her coffee to the far side to make space for Carly and Ada’s things.
“Thanks,” Carly said. “I mean, not for the table. I mean, yes, for the table. But for . . . you know. Thanks for helping.”
The girls arranged their treats in front of them, but the doughnut now looked gross to Carly. She was lost-in-the-desert thirsty, but the clear condensation on the outside of the cup was more appealing than the thought of the syrup-sweet drink inside.
“You can repay me.” The woman smiled at them for checking each other’s worried glances for the right answer to that. “And by that, I mean you can show me your drawings.” She nodded toward Carly’s spiral-bound sketchbook. “I used to be an art expert. I can smell an artist a mile away. Either that or I saw you showing your friend here while you two were in line. Take your pick.”
Carly laughed and passed over the book. Shy and proud all at the same time, her face burned again, for what felt like the hundredth time since she and Ada had come in the door.
“I’m Emma, by the way. You’re Carly, or so my new best friend, Dylan, tells me.”
The girls giggled.
“And you . . . ?” Emma left it open for the answer.
“I’m Ada.”
“Do you also draw, Ada?”
“Nah. That’s her thing. I’m a musician. And a nerd. DC, not Marvel. Puh-lease.”
Emma flipped through Carly’s drawings, pausing, turning some of them into the light. She wasn’t kidding about the art thing. Carly had seen lots of people look at her drawings.
When she drew, it was a different kind of thinking. A pointed blankness in the front of her mind and whirring concentration in the back of it. But the moment when other people looked at what she’d done, when her ideas went into their heads in the first pass of their eyes, that was amazing. She felt both impossibly close and spacewalk-distanced from anyone who was looking at her work.
Everybody liked them. They liked them because they were good. Carly knew this, though smiles and shrugs were all anyone ever got out of her in reaction. It was the weirdest kind of thanks to give when someone had liked the work that was private and public all at the same time.
But this woman, Emma, could really see what the drawings were made of. Carly watched what she paid attention to on the page. Emma knew exactly how Carly’s pencil moved, where she’d started with the shadows and edging. Emma knew everything about what she was looking at.
“These are very good.”
Carly smiled and her shoulder moved toward her ear as if it couldn’t help it.
“No, really. These are excellent. Truly.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. So, I see Disney here. Some anime. Some original stuff, too.” Emma wound the pages back to the beginning. “But what else? Who do you like? Old Masters? Renaissance? Or more recent stuff?”
Carly didn’t know the answers to those questions. She had only the vaguest idea of categories and famous names.
Emma watched her with a steady patience, waiting for an answer.
“I . . . I don’t really know what I like.”
“Well, what do your parents like?”
“Oh, my mom doesn’t know anything about art. She can’t even play Pictionary. She’s a disaster with a pencil.” Carly hoped her smile was nice and that what she’d said hadn’t come out snotty. She hated getting stranded on the unknowing side of a knowing smile. When adults talked about Oh, teenagers as if they were all the same and all out-of-control obnoxious, it made her wish she’d never said anything at all—ever. “I don’t think John knows about art either.”
Emma closed her mouth and tilted her head. Carly saw her take a slow inhale that lasted forever. She hadn’t moved. That was it. That’s what was different. She’d gone statue still.
“John’s her stepdad,” said Ada, never to stay forgotten in a conversation for long. “I got to be in the wedding. Junior bridesmaid.” Ada nodded at her own commentary, wise with pride. “Me and Carly had matching dresses. They itched.”
“They were the worst,” said Carly. “But, yeah. I just draw on my own. I get comics and cartoon books from the library sometimes. Just to look at. Mom and John are really nice about my drawings. Really supportive. But they don’t know anything about art.”
“Is that right?” Emma said. “That’s interesting.”