Thousand Words

by Jennifer Brown

  The phone started ringing downstairs and I heard hurried footsteps and Mom’s voice as she rushed to pick it up.

  I hated my phone. I never wanted to see it again. I wanted to crush it, to burn it, to run over it with a tank. I didn’t care if I never answered another phone as long as I lived.

  I heard footsteps coming up the stairs, and then my door opened. Mom stepped through, holding the phone out for me. “It’s Vonnie,” she said. “Why do you have your cell turned off?”

  I tried to shrug, but frozen shoulders don’t move, so I just lay there. “I don’t know,” I said. I do know but I can’t tell you would have been a much more honest answer.

  Mom gave an impatient grunt and tossed the phone on my bed. I felt it thump against my leg when it landed. Damn. I had feeling. “Well, it’s off, and Vonnie’s trying to get hold of you.”

  Mom left and I lay there for a moment longer, trying to decide if I could now see the pointy part of the little arrow I’d drawn piercing the heart. I didn’t want to.

  Then, slowly, slowly, I reached down and picked up the phone, moving as little as I had to, and pressed it between my ear and the pillow.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, what’s going on? I waited for you after volleyball but you never showed up. And your phone is going right to voice mail.”

  “I needed some time alone,” I said. “And trust me, you wouldn’t want to see what happens when my phone is on. It’s totally blowing up. Or at least it was last time I checked. I had like a hundred texts.”

  Vonnie made a sympathetic noise. “Have you talked to him about it yet?”

  “Yeah. Sort of. Last night. He couldn’t care.”

  “What a jerk. I can’t believe he did this to you. I mean, I always thought he was stuck-up and selfish, but I didn’t think he was this mean.”

  I closed my eyes; a purple imprint of the window showed up behind my eyelids. I could still see pieces of the heart. I couldn’t get away from it. “You and me both,” I said. “He was always telling me how much he loved me. Guess we know what a crock of crap that was.”

  “By the way, I found out who spread it around to everyone. Sarah’s little brother, Nate.”

  Nate. Of course. The one who started the whole thing between me and Kaleb in the first place. How poetic, Kaleb, you get points. I would never know for sure if Nate had seen it on the day I sent it or if Kaleb had only told him about it. But Nate had definitely seen it now.

  Not that it mattered anymore, anyway. Who cared who saw it and who only heard about it and when? Now everyone had seen it, everyone had heard about it, so why even bother to try to figure out when and how exactly the boy I loved had betrayed me? It only added insult to injury. It only made me feel stupid on top of everything else.

  “He must have a lot of numbers in his address book, I don’t know,” she continued. “Anyway, Stephen and Cody are gonna kick his ass when they come home for fall break.”

  “Stephen and Cody know?” I remembered the two of them tossing me in the pool a few hours before I took the photo, and how I’d felt so weightless and carefree at the time. What I wouldn’t have given to go back to that night and do things over again. I would have stayed in the pool. I would’ve soaked up that weightlessness and I would have forgotten about Kaleb completely, let him play his stupid little ball game and enjoyed myself without him.

  “Yeah. But don’t worry, Buttercup, they’re on your side.”

  Great. Just what I needed. Allies, away at college. So now the photo was going around Chesterton High School, possibly the junior high, and at least two colleges. Very nice. I might as well have put my boobs on a billboard on I-70.

  I heard Mom puttering around in the kitchen and slowly pulled myself to sitting. My cheek burned, I’d been smushing it against the pillow for so long. No doubt there was a red mark there. I rubbed it.

  “I’ve got to go, Von. I’m supposed to help my mom make dinner.”

  “Okay, pick you up in the morning?”

  My limbs went cold at the thought of even going to school in the morning. But I had to. There was no way around it. Who knew how long it would take for this to run its course? I couldn’t wait it out, if for no other reason than at some point Mom and Dad would know something was up. “Yeah, okay.”

  I hung up and trudged downstairs to the kitchen.

  Mom was still in her work clothes—long denim skirt with an apple appliquéd to one hip, tan crocheted sweater vest over a knit top, feet bare except for panty hose, glasses perched on top of her head like a bird in a nest. She was slamming things around as she worked.

  “Hey, Mom,” I said tentatively. “Are you fine?”

  She gave a single bark of a laugh. “Well, my dandy wants to get up and kick someone’s ass,” she said, which might have been funny on another day. She produced an onion out of nowhere and slapped it onto the cutting board, then began chopping it. “Some parents think their little angels poop nursery rhymes, I swear.”

  I pulled a frying pan out of the cabinet and laid it on top of the stove, then dumped the hamburger she had thawing inside it, and crumbled it up with a spatula.

  She pointed in my direction with her knife. “I’ve got a five-year-old who is going to be a delinquent someday, mark my words. But try to tell his mother that he’s anything other than perfect, and watch out. That woman is in serious denial.”

  She poured a handful of chopped onion into the pan with the hamburger and then grabbed a jar of minced garlic out of the fridge and added a heaping spoonful.

  “But enough about that,” she said, brushing her hands off over the sink while I continued to stir and crumble the meat. “What’s up with you?”

  “My dandy fell down the toilet,” I said, trying to match her joke with one of my own, but I couldn’t quite get there. All I could feel was the embarrassment of the photo creeping up on me again. “But I don’t really want to talk about it.”

  Mom came up behind me and rubbed my shoulder. “Oh, honey, I know it feels like the worst thing in the world right now, but you’ll forget about Kaleb soon. Another boy will take your mind off of him.”

  She was wrong. I’d never forget about Kaleb. Not now. He’d made sure of it. I would forever feel shame in the pit of my stomach every time I heard his name. It would never go away. Mortification this big couldn’t. But how could my mom ever understand? I couldn’t tell her what had really happened. I could only pretend that she was right—that breaking up with Kaleb was my only problem, and that it wasn’t a very big problem at that.

  “It’s no big deal,” I said. “I had a bad day is all.”

  “Well, I admire your attitude about it,” she said. “I remember when I broke up with my first boyfriend. I thought I’d die, and the pain lasted forever. It’s okay to have a few bad days. It’s expected. You two were close.”

  You have no idea how close, I wanted to say, and again felt heat creep up my ears. Everyone at Chesterton High had a pretty good idea, though.

  “I’ll tell the office you were sick so you don’t end up with a detention. But next time let me know when you need a mental health day, okay? I was worried about you when the school called and I couldn’t get you on your cell.”

  “Yeah, sorry about that. It was sort of a spur-of-the-moment decision.”

  “I get that.” She leaned over me and peered into the meat mixture. “Stir.”

  We worked alongside each other for a while. Mom turned on the little TV that hung from the bottom of one of the cabinets and we watched the news. Every now and then she’d comment on a news story, but mostly we cooked away the stress of the day.

  After a while, the front door opened and we heard Dad’s briefcase drop to the floor in the den.

  “Hello,” Mom called out, and his footsteps approached the kitchen. Same routine as every night of my life. Something about that routine comforted me, like no matter what drama was going on at school, home was my oasis from it. I could escape to the kitchen, to fixing dinner with Mom whi
le Dad sat at the table and read the paper. I could count on that, on Mom turning off the TV so they could talk while he read, on Dad griping about work. The routine felt like a hug. Maybe everything would be okay. After all, our routine hadn’t changed.

  “There she is,” Dad said when he came into the kitchen. He leaned over Mom from behind and kissed the top of her head. She whirled around, her food-drippy hands held up in front of her, and smiled at him.

  “Here I am,” she said. “How was your day?”

  He came up behind me and reached over my shoulder to pluck a piece of meat from the pan and stuff it into his mouth. He leaned down and kissed my cheek.

  “It was work,” he said, leaning against the counter, chewing. “Pretty normal until the end of the day.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Mom was stirring butter into some peas in a bowl.

  “Got a call from Principal Adams, up at the high school,” he said, and my arm froze. I tried to make it continue stirring the meat, but it wouldn’t move. I glanced at Dad, my throat going dry. “A big brouhaha over cell phones or some such.”

  The numb feeling drained down my wrist and into my hand. I dropped the spatula into the pan. It tipped backward and clattered to the floor. “Dang it,” I said, bending to pick it up.

  “Anyway, he got a phone call from a parent or something. I don’t know. I didn’t have a chance to really talk. I was trying to get out of there. I told him I’d call him first thing tomorrow. Exactly what I want to do—begin my day with a crisis. I wish we could just ban cell phones from those buildings. That would take care of a lot of problems. Those kids don’t need them, and they do nothing but cause trouble.”

  I rinsed the dropped spatula and bent to put it in the dishwasher, sure that I was going to be unable to stand up again. My dad’s words were tumbling around in my head like clothes in a dryer. Principal Adams… parent… phone call… cell phones…

  I hoped against hope that this was about something else. Maybe someone was failing a class because they were too busy texting or something. Maybe someone’s cell had been stolen from their locker in PE. Happened all the time.

  But, hope as I might, somewhere deep down I knew it wasn’t something so simple. Why would the principal call my dad if that was the case? You don’t call the superintendent unless you’ve got a really big, or really unusual, problem.

  And my problem was both.

  “You know anything about a cell phone issue at the high school, Ash?” my dad asked, and I swear my teeth were chattering like a dumb cartoon character’s. I took a deep breath and, stalling, acted really interested in something that was going on inside the dishwasher. Finally, I pasted on a smile and stood up.

  “Nope,” I said as convincingly as I could, though to my own ears it didn’t sound convincing at all. “I haven’t heard anything.”

  Liar, liar, liar.

  “Huh,” he said. “Well, I’m sure tomorrow I’ll get to the bottom of whatever it is.”

  Inside of me, something shriveled into a dead hunk.

  Tomorrow.

  This wasn’t going to blow over tomorrow.

  It was only going to get worse.

  Because tomorrow my dad would know.

  SEPTEMBER

  Message 198

  I always knew you were a slut

  Message 199

  Will you marry me? LOL

  I didn’t really sleep—just tossed and turned all night—but when five-thirty came, I jolted awake in a panic. My stomach clenched in on itself with worry, and I raced to the bathroom and hovered over the toilet. I could hear the shower in my parents’ bathroom. My dad was up and getting ready for work.

  I turned on my phone and texted Vonnie:

  ADAMS CALLED DAD. HE KNOWS.

  After a few minutes, during which I about gnawed my whole thumbnail off, she replied:

  EMAILED U A LINK. U NEED TO SEE IT.

  Not the response I was expecting to get. I opened my laptop, pulled up my email, and found the link Vonnie had sent me. It was for a website that posted naked pictures of random girls shot in ordinary places like parties and grocery stores and bedrooms. I clicked it and gasped.

  Right across the top was the photo of me, only it was blown up huge. The page had more than two hundred comments, and I scrolled through them, my mouth hanging open. A lot of people had written things about me.

  I thought she’d be a lot hotter.

  Dude, what are you talking about? I’d break that in half!

  Gross you’d probably get some disease.

  She’s got a lot of people fooled into thinking she’s some goody-goody athlete, but pictures don’t lie. She’s a whore and I’m so pissed that my boyfriend has this text on his phone.

  I’ve seen better on this website. You should check out Charlotte S. posted about three months ago. She’ll blow your mind. This chick can’t hold a candle.

  I can’t believe she did this. I would die before I’d do something like this.

  My mouth hung open as I read their words. I couldn’t count how many times I was called a slut, or worse. And everybody was talking about how ugly I was, how ugly my body was. And even worse were the comments from people who didn’t sound like they went to my school. The ones who were looking because they were enjoying it.

  A little moan leaked out of me, and for the first time since this whole thing began, I finally started to cry. It wasn’t going to go away. Not at all. This was way too big to fade away.

  I shut the laptop and pulled my legs to my chest. I rested my forehead on my knees and cried. People I didn’t know, looking at my naked body. People I did know—people in my classes, people I passed in the hallways—some of whom I actually liked, saying horrible things about me online. Oh my God, online. My naked body was online. Like a porn star.

  I ran back to the bathroom and hovered over the toilet again. Nothing would come up, and I sat on the floor for a long time, resting my head on the toilet seat and letting the tears drip down onto the knees of my pajama bottoms.

  I heard the thunk of pipes as Dad shut his shower off. He’d be coming out soon, smelling lemony like his aftershave and starchy from his freshly dry-cleaned shirt and heading off to work.

  I couldn’t face him this morning, knowing what he was about to find out.

  I went back to my room and changed into my running clothes. It wasn’t unheard of for me to take an early-morning run to beat the sun, especially when it was hot outside. Mom and Dad wouldn’t think anything of it.

  I tied my shoes and jogged down the stairs, hitting the front door as I heard Dad opening the bedroom door down the hall. I slipped out before he could see me.

  Back when I was in junior high and hoping to someday make the varsity cross-country team, running was my go-to stress reliever. I would breathe in, slowly and steadily, unplug from my phone and my iPod and my parents and everyone around me and just run. I liked the solitude, the way my breath beat in and out of my body without my even thinking about it. I liked the way it warmed me up, spent me, and left me with a floaty feeling after I was done.

  I had a trail that I liked to take that led from the back of our subdivision and through some woods. On the other side of those woods was a strip mall that had everything in it from an auto parts store to a karate dojo to a dance studio and even a thrift shop.

  I loved to go into the thrift shop for a halfway-point break and pick around at stuff, weaving in and out of the rooms, trying to imagine who’d first bought that old TV with the bent antenna, or the chipped coffee mug that said I DON’T DO MORNINGS or the beaded sweater or the picture of Jesus. I liked to paw through the clothes and shoes. I liked the musty smell and the flickering lighting and the fat, fuzzy gray cat that lurked around, usually in the tablecloth room.

  After ducking out of my house this morning, I hit the street and headed for the trail. It would be too early to go to the thrift shop, but I could look in the window. I could still transplant myself into someone else’s life, someone else’s story. I neede
d a new story right now. I needed that post-run floaty feeling.

  My feet hit the dew-moistened wood chips in perfect rhythm. Kaleb had shown me how to lengthen my stride so that it felt like walking rather than running. He’d improved my stamina by working with me to keep a cadence in my head. He’d challenged me, but he’d also helped me. And even though I’d been running long before I met him, I was unsure if I could do it without him now.

  I breathed in and out, trying to clear my thoughts. No Kaleb. It didn’t do any good to think about him, to dwell on how good he once was to me. Just breathe. Just step. Just run.

  There were two joggers up ahead of me, and I passed them on the left. Two moms pushing strollers, talking more than they were running. Seeing them on the trail made me feel safe, secure. They knew nothing about what was going on with me. There were far more people out there who didn’t know than people who did. I just had to remember that.

  And remember to breathe. To step. To run.

  The path turned and I turned with it, listening to the birds wake up and begin calling. It was one of my favorite parts of a morning run. If you paid attention to the calls of birds—really paid attention to them—you would be surprised by how many there were going on around you all the time. We don’t tend to hear them because we’re so wrapped up in our own stuff—in being loved, in being right, in being on time or first or loudest or funniest or coolest.

  I listened to the birdcalls. They were soothing.

  I breathed. I stepped. I ran.

  I saw the backs of two boys up ahead and slowed down. I couldn’t make out who they were from behind, but they were wearing Chesterton High School sweatshirts.

  Just like that my breathing got out of rhythm and I was winded. My step was off. I felt like I was flailing. Even in my woods, my stress reliever.

  One of them heard my steps and glanced back at me. He said something to the other and they both looked back. I slowed, slowed, stopped, and bent over, my hands on my knees, sucking in ragged gasps of breath, that vomity feeling in the back of my throat again.