No one is home the next morning when I get dressed for school. My dad always leaves early, hours before the first customer is out of bed, and it’s my mom’s day to volunteer at the church. So there’s just me.
I skip breakfast. I’m not hungry.
I walk to school and almost turn back half a dozen times.
I think about the video and wonder if everyone has seen it by now.
When the school comes into sight, my question is answered. A girl spots me. She nudges the girl next to her, who nudges the girl next to her. They all stare at me. One of them says something to the other two. I can’t hear what they say, but I can see them. They’re laughing.
Someone else hears them and turns to see what’s so funny. There are maybe fifteen or twenty kids hanging around outside the school, and pretty soon they’re all looking at me and laughing.
My stomach does acrobatics. I’m glad I didn’t have breakfast, because if I had, it would be on the ground right now.
I slow to a stop. Part of me—okay, all of me—wants to run home and hide under my bed and never come out again. But I’m not stupid. I know hiding doesn’t solve anything, ever. Sooner or later, you have to come out. So I keep walking. My legs are as shaky as a newborn deer’s. My eyes are stinging. My throat is tight and dry. But I keep going. I tell myself I can get through this. I even believe it until I get inside and start what seems like the longest walk of my life— up the stairs to the second floor and down the east hallway, which is crowded with kids, all the way to the end where my locker is.
You’d think the queen was going by.
Or a death-row prisoner on the way to his execution.
With every step I take, another couple of kids fall silent, until finally the crowded hall is like a cemetery filled with mourners, that’s how quiet it is.
I pretend not to notice. I don’t dare look at any of the faces that are looking at me. I take hold of my lock and start to work the combination.
I open my locker.
There, on the inside of the locker door, where my mirror should be, is a poster-sized picture of my face, mouth wide open, eyes wide open, in a silent scream of terror.
Someone laughs. It’s one of the kids near my locker.
More kids laugh, because what happened to me is the funniest thing that’s ever happened here. Because it’s hilarious to see someone who’s convinced she’s about to be strangled or hacked to death by some creepy stranger who hangs out in the bush.
I reach for the poster.
I rip it from the door.
I tear it into a thousand pieces.
I flee to the girls’ bathroom and lock myself in a stall.
I stay there after the bell has rung.
I stay there even when I hear the click of heels on the tile floor outside.
“Addie? Addie, are you in there?” It’s Ms. LaPointe. She knocks on the door of the stall. “Addie, I heard what happened. Come out, and we’ll go down to the office and talk about it.”
By then my eyes are swollen to three times their normal size, and I can barely see out of them. My cheeks are wet with tears, my nose is red from blowing, and my head is aching, probably from dehydration.
“Addie?” She sounds tense, as if she’s afraid what I might be doing in there. “Addie, if you don’t come out, I’ll have to get Mr. Sloane to open the door.”
Mr. Sloane is head of maintenance. I imagine that getting around— Mr. Sloane went into the girls’ bathroom with his toolbox, and a crying you-know-who comes out with Ms. LaPointe. I open the stall door.
Ms. LaPointe looks as concerned as any vice-principal would under the circumstances. She also looks relieved as she checks out my wrists and scans me for any other signs of self-damage.
“I heard what happened,” she says again. “Let’s go to the office and talk.”
I agree because I can’t think of any other place in the school I want to go to or that you could get me to go to. But I don’t want to talk.
The halls are quiet, and most of the classroom doors are closed. A couple of kids glance through the few that are open as we go by, but their faces are expressionless. Maybe they’re the only ones in school who don’t know what happened. Or maybe they don’t care.
Ms. LaPointe ushers me into her tiny office and closes the door. She pulls down the blinds on the window that looks out into the main office.
“Now, then,” she says when we are both seated. “What do you want to do about this situation, Addie?”
What do I want to do?
“What do you mean?”
“I know about the video,” she says. “I also know that someone— I don’t know who or how—got hold of the school email list and sent the link to everyone on it.”
Everyone in the whole school got the same link I did? I feel like throwing up.
“So even though the incident—”
Incident—that’s school language for what happened to me. It’s a nice, neutral word.
“—didn’t take place on school property, we can still notify the police about our computer system being hacked. We can get them to investigate. When they find out who did it, we can lay charges against that person—or persons.”
“For hacking the school computer,” I say. It’s not a question. I’m just trying to understand how the school computer system and what happened to it is more important than what happened to me.
“I think you should talk to the police about the incident, Addie. Maybe with your parents.”
My parents still have no idea what’s going on.
“I’m not a lawyer. What I do know about the law is pretty much confined to what happens here at school. But there may be some charge that you can press, something that you can do. That is, if you want to.”
Maybe I read too much into her expression and the tone of her voice, but it seems to me Ms. LaPointe knows more than she’s letting on. She knows there’s no law against the kind of practical joke that was played on me. I wasn’t physically hurt. I wasn’t actually kidnapped. I wasn’t forcibly confined—the door in the cellar turned out not to be locked. It was all just good fun—for the jokers.
I look at Ms. LaPointe’s desk, not at Ms. LaPointe, and think about what to do. Some people would probably have laughed at the joke along with everyone else and then moved on. But a person like that would have to believe that he or she was the target of a truly funny practical joke—no harm, no foul. I don’t believe that. I wish I did. I wish I could shrug the whole thing off. But I keep thinking that someone—more than one someone— planned and executed a so-called joke that was intended not only to scare me to death but also to create an online video to show to everyone in my school. Someone wanted everyone to laugh at me. And laughter isn’t always funny. Sometimes it cuts like a knife.
I stand up. I say, “I’m going home.” I leave without stopping at my locker. When I get home, I crawl into bed. I’m still in bed when my mother gets back from the church, but she doesn’t know I’m there. She doesn’t find out until suppertime, when she’s worried about me and comes into my room to look at my calendar to see if I have any after-school events. By then, so they tell me, I’ve cried myself out, I have no appetite, and all I see is darkness.