Meg was rushing to third-period English class, excited because they were going to finish watching the movie version of Romeo and Juliet. Boston Jefferson, unlike Rose School, was low on resources and didn’t have little luxuries like AV equipment, new textbooks, or qualified teaching staff. Watching a movie in class was a huge treat, even if it was horrible quality, and dubbed in Russian.
Meg couldn’t help but notice Danny Vasquez and his friends as she sped down the hallway. The two of them didn’t exactly hang out in the same social circle. She was a freshman, with few friends, and he was an eighteen-year-old junior, held back multiple times for discipline problems. Most famously, he had been accused of statutory rape after a girl in his remedial English class became pregnant. Danny had refused a paternity test and was later acquitted when the girl admitted it was Mr. Frederick, the school guidance counselor, who had fathered her twin boys. Mr. Frederick was fired and, later, bussed off to Concord prison, and Danny Vasquez became somewhat of a hero at school. He liked to strut down the halls, bragging about how he had beaten The Man, and every girl at Jefferson swooned over his deep, gravelly voice, soulful brown eyes, and defiant attitude.
Meg swooned along with the rest of them, knowing that Danny would never even glance at a frizzy-haired chub. Still, it didn’t stop her from daydreaming. He was no James Dean or Marlon Brando. He wasn’t even a Justin Bieber, but he was the closest thing to bad boy hunkiness she’d ever seen in her fourteen years of existence.
As she sat in class watching Romeo seduce Juliet, she imagined Danny pulling her into the janitor’s closet and doing unspeakable things to her.
Her teacher was snoozing behind a newspaper. Gabby Jordan, Meg’s closest friend since second grade, tapped her on the shoulder.
“The most amazing thing has happened,” Gabby whispered, although she really didn’t need to. No one else was listening. The other students in the room who were awake and sober were riveted to the tiny television screen.
“Marcus Dougherty asked me out!”
Gabby had Meg’s full attention. “What? When?”
“In homeroom.” Gabby was a petite china doll with flawless skin, and plastic, purple glasses. She giggled. “I can’t believe it. I have a date. I might even have a boyfriend!”
Meg, who had neither of these things and hadn’t been blessed with beautiful eyes like Gabby, glowered. Marcus was short and acne-scarred, but he was still a real, live, breathing boy.
“So?” she countered. “I just made out with someone in the janitor’s closet.”
Gabby was stunned.
“Who?”
“Danny Vasquez,” Meg said and watched her friend’s eyes pop. Even the girl in front of her seemed to sit up straighter. Gossip about Danny was always worth the listen.
“Danny Vasquez?” Gabby asked, leaning closer.
“Danny Vasquez,” Meg said, looking smug. She was enjoying the shocked surprise, and envy, spreading across Gabby’s face. “And he felt me up.”
“No!”
The girl in front of them snorted and spun around. Her thick eyebrows seemed to join together as she scrunched up her face and stared at Meg, taking in her tight top, mop of unruly hair and bare, freckled face.
“You? Yeah, right.”
The disbelief in her face plummeted Meg back to Earth.
“It’s true,” Meg said, but her voice sounded small and shaky.
“Meg…” Gabby pulled away. She thought Meg was lying too and was embarrassed.
The girl rolled her eyes and turned back to the movie. Meg wanted to reach out, grab her long greasy ponytail and yank it. She probably should have. The girl would have stood up and punched Meg, and that would have been the end of it.
Instead, Meg sat and stewed in her seat, clutching a paperclip in her hand until the sharp edge pierced her skin and she couldn’t stop herself from speaking.
“It’s true,” Meg said. Her voice was loud and confident this time. The girl turned around and looked at her again. Meg wanted to wipe the smirk off her face.
She glared at her for a second before turning back to Gabby. “We talked for a while, and I think he really likes me.”
Gabby looked confused. This wasn’t part of Danny’s usual routine. He didn’t talk to his conquests.
“Really?”
“Um-hmm,” Meg said, leaning back in her chair. She was careful to keep her voice calm and casual. “He said I’m not his usual type, but he thinks I’m kind of cool.” She shrugged and smiled, trying to look like she too was amazed by this miraculous turn of events. “We might even hang out this weekend.”
“Nuh-uh,” the girl said, shaking her head. “You and Danny? No way.”
“Danny Vasquez?” The girl sitting across from her, a girl Meg had assumed was sleeping, spoke up. She stared at them with bloodshot eyes. “Are you talking about Danny Vasquez?”
“They’re going out this weekend,” Gabby said. Meg could hear the pride and awe in her voice and felt a bit ashamed. Gabby was a good friend.
Gabby grabbed her arm, pulled Meg closer to her and whispered. “What was it like?”
Meg nodded and ducked her head, pretending to be embarrassed.
“He’s such a good kisser,” she gushed, speaking softly but making sure she could still be heard above the music from the movie. Mimicking a gesture from the love-struck Juliet, Meg lightly ran her finger over her lip and sighed.
Gabby just shook her head. This too was very unlike Danny. He didn’t kiss girls. At least, he didn’t kiss girls on the mouth.
“We made out for a long time,” Meg said, perfecting her stage whisper. “But then I told him I had to get to class. He wasn’t going to class, obviously.”
She tossed her hair over her shoulder and for once, didn’t care that is was coarse and frizzy. The girl in front of her raised her eyebrows and turned around. Meg watched as she tore a piece of paper out of her notebook and began scribbling a note.
In a few short minutes, news of Danny’s latest hook-up was all over school.
Meg went through the rest of the day in a happy haze. She had never imagined that one little lie would cause so much attention. She wondered why she hadn’t thought to do it years ago. It would have made junior high much more interesting. People whispered when Meg walked by them in the hallway. Girls at her lunch table nudged each other when she sat down. Boys who had never noticed she existed made a point of saying hello to her in study hall.
She had never been so happy.
Of course, it didn’t last.
Danny had a regular set of groupies. They were a group of older, tougher girls who fought amongst themselves to carry his backpack, and took turns groping him at the bus stop, or in the hall and tried to entice him into the janitor’s broom closet.
Danny seemed to pay as much attention to them as a bored bull did when it swatted away a swarm of annoying flies, but they were his constant companions, flanking him as he walked down the halls. They were very protective of their hunk of man-meat.
One day after Meg told her spectacular lie, they cornered her in the first-floor bathroom.
She was coaxing a few stray hairs back into place when the girls entered. There were four of them, girls with dour faces, heavily lacquered hair and thick black eyeliner applied to their inner eyelids. The smallest of the four stood against the bathroom door, blocking the only exit.
Slowly, trying to buy some time, Meg turned off the faucet and wiped her wet hands on the legs of her jeans. The largest of the girls walked over to her and stood behind her, so close Meg could feel her hot breath on the nape of her neck. She smelt a bit like sour cream and onion potato chips. The smell made Meg’s traitorous stomach grumble, and the girl behind her snorted.
“Excuse me,” Meg squeaked, and turned around, making sure her head was appropriately bowed. She knew the best way to get out of these situations was to be as meek and apologetic as possible, so the brute, if they had any shred of humanity at all, would feel guilty about picking on such a worthless, weak target.
She turned and tried to scuttle away, but another girl shot forward and blocked her. The last girl moved into position on her other side. She was surrounded.
The largest girl smirked, raised her arm and pushed her backward. Meg slipped, and as she fell, the back of her head cracked against the tiled wall. The jagged ceramic sliced the back of her scalp. Her legs went wobbly, and she collapsed onto the floor in a graceless heap, biting her tongue as she hit the ground. Her mouth filled with the metallic taste of blood.
“Ugly little bitch,” Meg heard one of them say, hovering somewhere above her.
Meg could have started screaming. She considered crying and pleading and apologizing for the stupid lie. She could have jumped up, pushed through the three girls and run for the safety of the crowded hallway. But she knew that if she ran, or, worse, if she tried to get help, she would face much worse than the quick, yet thorough, beating she was about to receive. Instead, she curled into a tight ball, covered her face as best she could, and willed herself not to cry out as the three girls took turns kicking and punching.
When it was finally over, the largest of the three coughed up a wad of phlegm and spit it into her hair.
Laughing and congratulating themselves, they left the bathroom.
Meg slowly pulled herself up, leaned over the sink and spat out a mouthful of blood. With shaking hands, she rinsed out her mouth and splashed cold water on her face. She tried to avoid looking in the mirror, but she caught a glimpse of her battered face and shuddered. She dabbed some blood from her check with the corner of her pretty red sweater, not caring that she was staining the plush fabric.
She would never wear it again.
Before the lie, Meg was a member of the invisible horde. She showed up, went to class and went home. She did her homework. Occasionally, Meg even raised her hand in class. Her friends were also of the low-key sort. They were marking time, just trying to survive high school in a place where only 12% of the student body graduated. Meg kept her head down and stayed out trouble.
When the swelling had subsided, Meg went back to Jefferson. But being invisible wasn’t possible anymore.
When Meg approached her small group of friends, they walked away from her without a word. In home ec, her partner avoided her eye and asked the teacher if he could work alone. Meg would clear a lunch table instantly just by sitting down at it. Kids would gather up their lunches and books and scatter away like a pack of frightened squirrels.
Before Danny Vasquez, Meg had been nobody. Overnight, thanks to the lie, Meg had become both infamous and untouchable.
Even Gabby wouldn’t talk to her. Gabby, her best friend since second grade, turned her back on Meg and pretended that their eight years of slumber parties, secret confessions, and marathon phone calls had never existed.
Danny’s girls smirked and cracked their knuckles whenever they saw Meg and continued to terrorize her with the occasional ambush and in lots of other, subtler, ways.
Meg tried to hide, but nowhere was safe. Her hair would be pulled as she stood in the middle of the lunch line and she was tripped on her way to the soda machine. She stopped eating lunch in the cafeteria. Instead, she’d spend her lunch period hiding in the threadbare library stacks, cowering behind a faded copy of Highlights magazine. Eventually, they found her there and stole her book bag, jacket, and wallet before walloping her in the face with a yellowing dictionary. She was concussed and had to go to the free clinic, but the tired, overworked doctor didn’t question her when she told him she had fallen off her bicycle.
The bus was off limits too. The girls had found out her bus stop, and would wait for her there every morning, swinging a hockey stick, or worse, a backpack crammed with bricks.
Meg avoided the bathroom too, waiting to pee until she was safe at home. She would be ready to burst by last period and would have to sprint the five blocks home, crashing into tourists and businessmen, willing her bladder to hold out for just five more minutes.
It was agony to climb three flights of stairs with a full bladder. Meg had to unlock three padlocks before she even reached even the landing of her apartment. She rarely made it in time and would be whimpering and fiddling with her keychain when the hot urine began streaming down her legs.
Luckily, she was the only one in the family that did the laundry, and her busy mother never questioned the fervor with which Meg washed her clothes.
She stopped going to Jefferson in March and applied to Rose in April. She struggled with the application, and the essay, before paying Jonathan Wong two hundred dollars to write it.
She snuck into Jefferson, found Jonathan at his locker and made the transaction as stealthily as a hardened, expert drug-dealer would, handing him a roll of crisp bills, and receiving a ten-page document in return. She didn’t stop to read it, trusting Jonathan’s reputation as a perfectionist, and tried to make her escape as quickly as possible.
She was feet from the door when a big hand reached out and grabbed the back of her collar. She was dragged, thrashing and screaming, through the crowded hallway and into the girl’s bathroom. The other kids pretended not to notice as they hurried to get out of the way. No one stopped to intervene, not even the elderly biology teacher, who shuffled his feet and sped away with a grace contradictory to his years.
The knuckles were enormous. Repulsive. Covered with clusters of dense, dark hair.
Who has hairy knuckles in this, the golden age of electrolysis? Meg wondered, as her head thudded against the bathroom floor.
Meg wouldn’t be caught dead with a mustache, or hairy arms, or apish knuckles. It so easy to bleach, wax, or even tweeze unsightly body hair away! So what if every inch of her skin was covered with icky green and brown bruises? At least her body hair was baby-fine or non-existent.
She had that going for her, at least.
The knuckles smashed against Meg’s left cheekbone, and a burning pain erupted from the corner of her mouth to her hairline. She had been hoping Ape girl would forget her rings that day. They were heavy and silver, with sharp, jagged edges that could slice through the skin. Meg was used to the bruises. She’d become quite adept at concealing bruises, but cuts left scars, and scars were a bitch to cover.
The hairy girl straddled her chest, alternating fists. Her right hook was stronger, but her left wasn’t terrible. Meg’s brains bounced inside her skull after every blow.
Another girl held onto her feet, in case she tried to kick or thrash. Meg wasn’t stupid enough to kick or trash. Two more pairs of legs hovered above her, kicking when they could. One girl took pictures. No, it was video.
“Think you can take my property?”
She lifted her head off the ground, just a bit, and looked directly into the girl’s heavily lined, bloodshot eyes.
“You…believed me?”
They’d believed the lie. They thought she’d hooked up with Danny. It was all too ridiculous. She tried to laugh, but all she could manage was a small, choking sound as the blood bubbled out of her mouth in a great, red, river of drool.
They grabbed onto her ponytail. Using it as a handle, they yanked her up and off the floor. She’d managed to scramble onto her knees before she was pushed forward and her forehead connected with the dirty, cracked sink.
“Fat bitch.”
Ouch, Meg thought, as an entire constellation of stars crowded in front of her eyes. Now that hurt.
She closed her eyes and tried to think of her favorite movie heroines, and their acts of bravery. Scarlett O’Hara took on that union deserter. Marion Ravenwood was thrown into an underground cavern filled with snakes, in a backless dress to boot. If they could survive against such insurmountable odds, she could survive another beating.
Hopefully, it would be the last.
Hot, sticky blood dripped down her forehead, blurring her vision.
“Let’s carve Danny’s name into her gut.” She heard one of the girls chuckle. “It’s big enough.”
They were all laughing at this when the bathroom door squeaked open. They jumped up, and Meg felt a surge of pity for the poor unfortunate soul whose bladder had compelled them to interrupt.
Instead of pouncing on their new prey, the girls scurried away, leaving Meg lying in a pool of her own blood. She blinked hard but couldn’t focus her eyes. All she could see were a pair of grey sneakers inches away from her face. The sneakers looked new, and she wanted to tell the person to move away so they wouldn’t be ruined by all the blood, but she couldn’t talk. She couldn’t lift her head.
She felt strong arms underneath her, lifting her off the floor. Seconds later she was leaning against something warm and hard, and fingers were pressing into her sore face.
“Are you OK?” The voice sounded very far away, almost otherworldly.
“My bag,” she muttered, thinking of Jonathan’s paper, the two hundred dollars, and her only chance of escape.
The straps of her bag were placed in her shaking hands.
“Thank you,” she was able to mumble to her savior before she passed out.