Chapter 17

Ruby in the Library

The school was still empty when Heather arrived in the library with her little sister. She was relieved that she could avoid study hall from now on—anything to escape the looks students threw at her everywhere she went. Even the librarian, as Heather signed in and explained the situation, could not help but stare at the deep red lines etched into Heather’s face.

“I’m so sorry, Child,” the librarian said.

But Heather only took Ruby’s hand and led her to a table next to a snake plant growing near the window.

Heather organized her backpack, checking that she had all her make-up work from the past week—just to keep her hands busy. As she flipped through her binder, she couldn’t help but shudder at the dark, rust-colored spot on her U.S. History timeline. It was the first page of her binder, one students were required to keep all year. It had been flung to the ground the day of the attack, but Heather had been hesitant to throw it away. It counted as ten percent of Ms. Cable’s notebook checks for the year. But now, seeing the dried blood only reminded Heather of the attack. Her hand trembled as she tore the page from her notebook, wrinkled it up, and walked it to the trash can.

Slowly, a handful of students trickled into the library. At first no one noticed Heather. She wore her most nondescript clothing, plain jeans and a brown sweater. It looked nothing like Heather’s usual outfits, and she practically blended into the background. Her hair, normally so shiny and flowing, now hung limply at her shoulders.

Ruby sat at the table and watched the other students as they stared at Heather’s hideous red scar. Heather felt the stares more prominently in the presence of her sister. Everyone stared. No one could help it. One girl watched from the other side of a book shelf. She pretended to be reading, but her eyes locked on what she saw through the shelves.

“Come on, Ruby,” Heather said finally after she had sorted her homework. “I’ll take you to the play area. It’s in an old conference room, and it’s where all the teachers’ children stay in the morning until the bus comes. You’ll have much more fun playing with them than sitting with me.”

Ruby considered this for a moment. To Heather’s horror, she climbed up onto the chair and stood on the table craning her neck so she could look into the playroom on the other side of the library. The teachers’ children were already there building a castle out of blocks. A library aide sat in the corner watching them.

Ruby’s face drew up into a snarl. “Heather, where are all the others?”

“That’s all there are. There’s only six of them. Do you know any of them?”

Ruby shook her head. “That’s not what I meant. I mean, where are all the others your age? All the little kids are playing together. And groups of high school kids are sitting and talking together. But where are the older kids that you hang out with? Why are you the only one sitting alone?”

Heather pretended to occupy herself with her homework. “I’m not alone,” she said without looking up. “I’m with you.”

Ruby hopped down from the table. “It’s best if I don’t leave you, then.” With that, she giggled and crawled under the table.

Her strange behavior only seemed to get worse, continuing even until the bus came to take her away. First, she insisted on sitting right near the glass wall of the library. She watched the masses of students pouring through the hallways to get to class. Each time a student in a football jersey walked by, Ruby pressed her nose to the glass. “Adam!” she shouted. She drew herself back in disappointment when time and again it was a false alarm.

Heather watched her sister until two sophomores approached. One of them spoke.

“You’re the girl they marked with a T. Serves you right, Traitor.” She picked up a stack of books and huffed off.

The other remained silent but simply stared and stared at the unnatural letter carved into Heather’s flesh. Heather met her gaze, and once again, it was as if the scarred letter would not allow Heather to be penetrated by any glare. Finally, as if defeated in a match of wills, the sophomore cried in pain and hurried out of the library.

“They were not true,” Ruby squealed, skipping over to Heather.

“What do you mean?” Heather asked.

Ruby didn’t answer. Instead, she dug through Heather’s backpack until she found a blank sheet of paper and an assortment of highlighters. Heather was happy for Ruby’s distraction and opened a notebook to review for her next class.

But when Heather saw what Ruby was drawing, her stomach churned. Ruby had drawn a group of high schoolers. Most of them were drawn in pink. They all had scowls on their faces, and they pointed to a figure in the corner. The figure was drawn with blue highlighter, and the T scratched across her face left no question as to her identity. Standing next to her was another figure, this one drawn half in blue and half in pink. He wore a football jersey and also had the letter T inscribed on his face, though his was pink rather than blue. Finally, in the very corner, Ruby had drawn a small child in yellow highlighter.

“I’m in yellow ’cause I don’t know which side I’m on yet,” Ruby explained.

Heather raised an eyebrow. “Which side you’re on? What are you talking about?”

“I don’t know if I will be true and have my own letter. I think I would prefer not to. I would prefer to stay pink. It’s not honest, but it seems like a lot less trouble.” Ruby looked around the library, motioning with her arm. “All the pink ones are happy.”

Heather studied the curious drawing for a few moments, but when she turned to ask Ruby some additional questions, she found the small child had already moved on to the next activity: Ruby had once again riffled through Heather’s backpack and found her spiral notebook in which she outlined or wrote upcoming stories for her blog. She hadn’t published anything since the big story broke even though she had still been writing.

Ruby, however, went through each page and scribbled a blue T across all the pages Heather had already posted. Ruby idolized her sister and knew her blog entries inside and out—even if she was too young to understand the full context of each entry. When she had finished drawing her T’s, Ruby looked up. She had reached the pages Heather had not yet posted. These were her reactions to all that had happened: the immediate backlash from the high school sports community, the negative—and positive—comments people had left on her blog, the assembly, her scar. Ruby flipped through these unposted pages and frowned at her sister.

“You think these pages don’t have a T on them, but they do. Everything you do has a T.” With that, Ruby drew a pink T on the rest of the pages. “They already do,” she repeated again, showing Heather the highlighter marks. “You might as well put them on your blog.”

Heather was speechless. Could this truly be her sister? This girl who spoke as if she knew much more than a first grader should? This girl who seemed to know Heather hadn’t gotten her scar from falling in the woods?

Heather looked around for a distraction. “I know! Let’s go play with the other kids.” Without waiting for Ruby to answer, Heather took her by the hand and led her into the old conference room where the other children were now sitting in a circle playing duck-duck-goose.

“This is Ruby,” Heather said to the children. “Everyone calls her Rue.”

Ruby scowled. “No. Everyone must now call me Ruby.”

“Why?” Heather asked.

“Because Adam was the one who called me Rue, and I won’t be called that again until Adam has a T. A blue one.”

“What?” Heather asked.

But Ruby had already taken a step to join the other children. Meanwhile, the rest of the children stared up at Heather, their game frozen by the strange intrusion.

“What happened to your face?” a child asked.

“Are you dressed up for Halloween?” asked another.

A third cocked his head. “My mom says drugs are bad. Do people who do drugs get a mark on their faces like you?”

“Are you the bad girl my mommy was talking about? She told my daddy she hoped you never came back.”

Heather didn’t answer but hurried out of the room, hoping that Ruby couldn’t read the look on her face.

The children quickly shifted their attention to the new girl. “You hafta be ’It,’ Ruby,” one of the other children said.

“Why? Because I’m new?” Ruby asked.

“No. Because you belong to the girl with the scar.”

Another scrunched her nose. “And because you dress funny. Didn’t your mama tell you not to wear pajamas to school?”

Ruby scowled and stared at the others, letting her eyes linger on theirs just a little too long. The other children seemed unable to break their gaze from Ruby’s entrancing eyes. Finally, after staring down each child, Ruby took her turn being “It,” and she played with such viciousness that the other children didn’t want to play with her anymore. Instead of tapping them on the head for “duck,” she swung at them, slapping the back of their skulls. And she tackled—rather than tagged—her victim “goose.” Before long the other children were chanting at her to leave, throwing bean bags and other small toys at her.

In the meantime, Heather had found a freshman struggling with her composition for English class. Priya was a shy freshman who usually sat, walked to class, and ate by herself. She had a lazy eye, and most of the other freshmen avoided her. Heather offered help, and Priya—more worried about her grade than about the stigma of sitting next to the girl with the scar—gladly accepted. Heather and her tutee had just made progress on the essay’s thesis when Heather looked down at her feet.

There, Ruby had crawled and sat. She had grabbed a handful of stalks from the snake plant growing in the corner. From the dirt encrusted on Ruby’s hands, it looked as if she had uprooted them. Heather gazed down to see that she was shredding the stalks of the snake plant into small, sticky green threads.

Heather gasped. “Rue! What did you do?”

“It’s ‘Ruby,’ remember? And I pretended these were the other kids,” she said, displaying the uprooted stalks of the plant. “They’re mean, so I did something about it.” Then, she proceeded to mash the rest of the stalks into a green, sticky pulp.

Priya, sensing she had gotten as much help as she needed, slipped away without thanking Heather. When Heather looked up to see where the freshman had gone, she saw instead a taller, more imposing figure standing over her… Principal Elders.

“Mr. Wallace told me about the arrangement he agreed to,” Principal Elders said.

Heather nodded. “This is my sister, Ruby.”

Principal Elders bent down to examine the girl underneath the table.

“I would expect nothing less than such behavior—and such attire—from a young girl influenced by one such as you.”

Heather tried to read the principal’s face to determine what he meant by that comment, but he kept his face as blank as stone.

“Thank you for allowing her here.”

Principal Elders simply grunted, looked down his nose at her, and walked away.

When Heather looked down under the table, she saw that Ruby had arranged the mashy pulp into a large letter T and plastered it on her forehead the same way she had arranged the grape jelly at breakfast.

“Rue,” Heather said, bending down. “I’ll make you an ice-cream sundae after school if you clean up that mess and promise never to do it again.”

Ruby did not stop, nor did she look up.

Heather waited a moment, but still there was no response.

“Fine, then! If you don’t clean that up right now, I’ll never let you use my laptop again. The Ruby Review will be finished!”

Ruby sat still.

“Did you hear me, Rue?”

To this threat, as to the promise of ice cream, Ruby made no change in behavior. Rather, she finished arranging the T at her leisure. When she was finished, she looked up at her sister matter-of-factly, blinking with the pulpy plant glistening between her eyes. Ruby said only one thing with a cold neutrality that made her sister shudder.

“My name isn’t Rue. It’s Ruby.”

Heather’s time in the library was just a taste of what she would endure that day. From the very first step of her return, Heather was shunned from high school society. By the time the bell rang for second period, Ruby was safely on the bus, and Heather was alone. As she made her way to class, the crowded hallways opened up to her, the students parting from her like the sea for Moses.

But though students would not go near her, neither would they take their eyes from her. Everywhere she went, stares threatened to penetrate her façade of strength. Even the teachers, though they pretended to be watching something else, couldn’t help but allow their eyes to linger on Heather and her scar. She felt at any moment, as she walked the halls, she felt she might lose control of her stoicism, running to the bathroom, letting the tears flow, and never emerging again.

In history and science, students were more active than usual. They got up to sharpen pencils that were already sharp, or to throw out tiny scraps of paper. And as they completed these menial chores, they allowed their eyes to gulp the refreshing elixir of Heather’s pained face. Heather could tell that behind their stares, they were glad the girl who had ruined Orchard Valley’s fame now suffered.

In English class, the desks were arranged in a circle for a Socratic seminar, allowing everyone an extended, uninterrupted view of Heather. Ms. Phillips, the only teacher who seemed sympathetic to Heather’s situation, tried to steer eyes away from the troubled girl by calling on those who stared. This exercise proved futile, however, as eyes stuck to Heather’s face like magnets, and Ms. Phillips labored against a Sisyphean task.

At lunch, the girls Heather usually ate with had spread themselves more liberally along the cafeteria bench, leaving no space where Heather usually sat. She thanked her luck that Adam, at least, ate on a different lunch shift and didn’t have to see her shame. Heather took her lunch to the table that everyone called “the freak show,” the one made fun of by all other social ranks. It was a table of students who had not quite found their niche, and they came together around such a commonality. Surely, Heather told herself, she could sit at such a table. But when she did so, she was met with stares not only from the denizens of the table, but from the surrounding tables as well. Their glares told her that she had crossed into a territory that was not hers.

With all eyes on her, she picked up her lunch and headed out the door. Not even the cafeteria monitor tried to stop her. And even over the din of lunchtime banter, she heard them chanting it as she left the cafeteria. That notorious word her scar had come to symbolize. The word that showed up on all the social networking sites and text messages and every bit of bathroom graffiti.

Traitor.