by Leah Johnson
I’m supposed to be a master of love; it’s supposed to be the one thing I know better than anything else. But if love really means showing up, I couldn’t even do that.
I look at the notificationless screen on my phone—no one’s thinking about me enough to hit me up, not even the trolls on Confidential.
I’m really and truly alone.
Exactly as I deserve to be.
SUNDAY AFTERNOON
When I see Peter and Olivia pressed close together, practically kissing, all I can feel is the wreckage.
Me and Olivia are over. My only friend betrayed me. Farmland is gone.
I run away from camp faster than I think I’ve ever run before. I dodge Peter’s shouting and following after me by hiding behind an RV, and then keep going without the worry of him at my heels. There’s nothing he could say to me right now that I’d want to hear. Nothing he could say to me that would make this feeling go away.
It begins as a hollowness, some rattling emptiness that tells me maybe there was nothing there all along. Maybe I wasn’t pretending to be the ice queen, maybe the pretending only happened when I thought I could be the type of person capable of loving someone. Capable of letting someone in. But I walk. And I walk. And with every step, that emptiness evolves, changes and changes, fills and fills until I’m brimming with something else, something I’m afraid I can’t contain.
I’m angry. I’m suddenly so overwhelmingly, wildly angry that my vision blurs. My palms sweat. I stop where I’m standing—no regard for the Farmers who are walking behind me on the path to the Core—and try to collect myself. But I can’t.
How dare this girl smile at me, and stick around even after I tried to shake her, and talk and talk and talk and talk until she’d leapt over all my defenses? How dare she be funny and open and laugh like I was more than a cardboard cutout of a person, like she really cared about me? How dare she be everything I didn’t know I wanted, change the way I thought about myself, make me want to be more honest more open more bold more more more?
How dare I fall in love with her, knowing what I know about what love makes of us?
How dare I be so stupid?
I walk toward the security gates that lead into the Core, and as I go, the moments leading up to now flash through my head like Olivia’s Polaroids. Snapshots of memories, frozen in time. Olivia dancing in the grass during Odd One’s set. Peter with his tongue out near the Goldspur performance barn. Imani and Olivia with their arms around each other in line for the hydration station yesterday. Everything in those memories now has a stillness. An ignorance.
By the time I reach the line for security outside the Core, the festival is coming to life again. Folks are walking to and from the showers, people strumming their guitars aimlessly outside their tents. People don’t wave as easily as they used to. They don’t smile at each other as broadly. Everyone in line for security is jittery and quiet. A young guy in a Hawaiian shirt reaches for his shorts pocket to grab his phone and the woman beside him gasps, and then looks embarrassed by her reaction.
It takes about thirty minutes for me to get through security, but I don’t mind. The monotony of the process is a welcome distraction.
I don’t know what I’m heading to until I’m there, standing in front of it. The Granny Smith stage looms large in front of me, quiet and peaceful. Later tonight, Kittredge will perform here in front of tens of thousands of screaming fans and Farmers. Twenty years ago, my dad performed here with the Red Hot Chili Peppers after winning the Golden Apple.
I use the hem of my shirt to wipe my eyes. I’m not crying in earnest, just a few stray tears, but it’s already too much.
I wonder who won the Golden Apple, or whether or not they’re even going to do it anymore. Maybe that too has been snuffed out with the events of the past day. I don’t want to think about leaving, or being stuck in a car with Peter, the last person I thought I’d ever feel this betrayed by, for eight hours, but I can’t stand to stay here much longer. Once we leave this place, I’m leaving behind whatever memories it holds. I don’t want them anymore.
My phone buzzes in my pocket, and I can’t help myself from hoping it’s Olivia. And once I do, I hate myself for even having the thought. It’s an unknown number, but I answer it out of curiosity.
“Yeah?”
“Toni Jackson. How ya doing?” Davey Mack’s scratchy tenor rings through the line. My heart upticks at the sound.
I’ve never spoken to him before—never had reason to—but I know his voice well from interviews, from Kittredge’s songs on the radio. It’s been years since I even saw him in person. Probably since the band played Lollapalooza three years ago, and my mom took me up to Chicago to see my dad and I watched their show from the pit.
“Davey Mack,” I breathe out. I try to sound as cool as possible. Even though he’s not-so-distantly been a part of my universe thanks to my dad for years, we don’t know each other. And he’s still one of the biggest stars in the world. “What’s—What’s up?”
“Well, I wanted to personally say that you did a great job at the Golden Apple yesterday,” he says. “You and Olivia were something special. A power duo! Is she there? I have good news for you both.”
I cringe. “No, um, no. Yeah no, she’s not.”
“Oh damn! I wanted to get the two of you in the same place. Well, you’ll tell her, right? I’d like to have you perform with us tonight if you’re down.”
I’m pretty sure I stop speaking, or breathing even. He offers a few more pleasantries, kind words about my talent and where to show up later, but the call is over quickly. He speaks to me friendly, but there’s no indication that he knows who I am or, better yet, whose daughter I am. This is it. I did it. I won the Golden Apple. It feels even better to me knowing that I managed this with no link to my dad’s relationship to the band.
After hanging up, even though I’ll deny it if anyone ever asks, I scream. I scream, and it’s high-pitched and embarrassing. I can’t even begin to wrap my head around what this means. I get to perform, on stage, during Kittredge’s headline set tonight. I get to have my name on that ridiculously long plaque near the entrance, the same one my dad’s name was burned into twenty years prior. This is unbelievable. I have to call Ol—
My heart sinks. I want to call Olivia, to celebrate with her—thank her for getting me here. But of course I can’t. I don’t have it in me to revel in this victory with her, and I definitely can’t play alongside her tonight. We’re not even speaking. And now that she and Peter are whatever she and Peter are, I don’t know if she’d want to, even if I could bring myself to consider it.
What good is the music if you don’t get to share it with the person who makes you want to sing in the first place?
SUNDAY AFTERNOON
I walk back and flop down on the ground in what used to be our campsite.
The only thing that Imani hasn’t already packed into the car is my bag. It’s so targeted, her message so clear, that I can’t help myself; I start crying again.
I thought my pain and the way I loved and ached to be loved in return was unique, was something that deserved to take up space not only in my life, but in her life as well. And that’s not what it means to love someone. I ruined things with my best friend and shattered any chance of ever being on good terms with Toni again—I destroyed two relationships in one fell swoop. A new personal best.
There’s an ache in my chest that’s unlike anything I’ve felt after a breakup before. This is different, bone-deep, the kind of hurt that can’t be fixed with ice cream and a movie marathon. Those were Band-Aids for how to heal my surface-level hurt. But for something this intrinsic, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how you bounce back from something like this.
I unzip my fanny pack and grab my inhaler to take a quick puff, because crying always upsets my asthma. My hand brushes across the pointed edges of my Polaroids as I reach inside. I pull them out and spread them across the grass in front of me.
As I shuff
le through the photos, it occurs to me that the fifth apple is still out there somewhere. For something I spent my entire weekend racing toward, winning the car has managed to become so insignificant in the face of everything else that it’s almost nonexistent. I mean, winning would still be nice, but the urgency is gone.
Still, I check the page and the hashtag to see if anyone has found the last apple out of curiosity. It’s been a while since I looked at the @FoundAtFarmland page, and when I pull it up now, after the final clue, there are a number of black boxes with simple text: Fear Has No Place at Farmland.
The lightheartedness that the page used to contain—pictures of smiling Farmers at the Fiat booth in the Core nestled between clues—is gone. It seems as though while I was busy unraveling what good was left in my own life, someone was busy doing the same to this space of joy and community.
When I leave Instagram, I decide to do a full sweep of all my socials. I don’t know what possesses me to check Confidential. The rational part of my brain tells me to avoid it like the plague. But right now, I can’t help myself. It’s almost compulsive, an old habit that I thought I’d kicked, logging in and scanning my account.
I expect the usual trolls to be camped out in my notifications like usual, but instead, there’s only one: direct messages from @KMitch03. I nervously twist Imani’s ring around my pinky, like her anxious habit has somehow transferred to me.
It made sense when I saw that Troy had moved on to Kayla barely two weeks after our breakup. From her homecoming queen title to the state tennis championship she’d just led Park Meade to, Kayla’s face could’ve been plastered on the cover of the Good Girl Bible. She made good choices, always did the right thing. She would never do anything as stupid as what I did. And if she did, Troy would never betray her like that.
That kind of thing doesn’t happen to Good Girls. I close my eyes for a second before I open the message, trying to get my bearings. Whatever she has to say to me, about me, I can handle it. I won’t use it as fuel to spark my next bad decision. This time, I won’t burn my life down just to rise from the ashes as something different like Imani said. It’s not worth it. Not when it costs me the people I can’t imagine my life without.
From @KMitch03 to @OliviaTwist:
Hey so ik we’re not friends or whatever but you’re the only person I think would get it so I didn’t know what else to do
My breath quickens at the first message, this time for an entirely different reason than before. Besides Troy, Kayla and I don’t have anything else in common and never had.
What you said he did? I know he did it
I clutch my phone so tight I’m afraid the plastic of my case might crack in my hands. I can feel the early prickling of sweat dotting the back of my hairline.
He asked me to send him some pictures a few weeks ago and I didn’t really want to bc ik what can happen when you do that, which you do too obvi. But we’ve been together like 6 months now so I did it anyway. I cut my face out but still you know?
I found out he slept with Amelia Myers at the senior bonfire last week and tried to break up with him. And when I told him I was done he said that I didn’t get to break up with him first because then “everyone would know what I did”
I don’t wanna fuck up my shot at Stanford, so I don’t wanna do anything to piss him off more
There’s no way. I don’t have a reason to believe that Kayla would make any of this up—I mean what reason would she have to paint herself into the same corner I’m in unless it was the truth? But still, I struggle to wrap my head around it. How could something like this happen to someone like her? Someone flawless and smart and perfectly matched for Troy and his set?
From the moment the news came out, my mom had made it abundantly clear that she would rather sweep what happened under the rug than risk her job. Nia made no secret about the fact that if I wouldn’t have done something so irresponsible in the first place, I wouldn’t have embarrassed our family like I had.
So I compromised, something between dropping it completely and taking legal action. I thought it would keep things quieter, maybe make everything less messy. I put it in the hands of the school. I let them set a date for a judicial hearing, and then watched as they set another one when that date no longer worked, again and again for months. Until one day, it was the end of my junior year, Troy was already being tapped by Duke and UNC and Ohio State, and my mother had barely spoken to me since the day Troy posted the pictures. There was no resolution and would never be. Because no one cared about girls like me.
Even when they didn’t say it explicitly, I knew the truth: there’s nothing you can do with Black girls who aren’t “respectable” and easy to understand and the best at everything. We’re disposable.
All this time, I’ve been told I deserved what happened to me. That I was too much, too me to deserve the same type of love and respect as girls like Kayla. But since what she’s saying is true, then it wasn’t me at all.
Toni’s words from last night come rushing back to me with so much force it catches me off guard: That big love you give everyone else—you deserve to save some for yourself. You’re worth that much.
You’re worth that much.
Kayla is worth that much. I’m worth that much. Every woman is worth that much.
And until boys like Troy that grow into men with too much power and too much ego are made to face what they’ve done, this will keep happening. I don’t know what I’m going to say at the judicial hearing on Friday, but I know this: I’m worth more than Troy winning Park Meade another state championship.
My thumbs are hovering over the reply box when two more messages pop up back to back.
Idk if you’re still even going to Park Meade or whatever, someone said you were transferring to Ardsley? Which omg ew
Just. Whatever you do make sure you take him down. For good
I leave Confidential and open up the camera app instead. Maybe I can’t fix what happened between me and Imani, maybe me and Toni were never meant to be, but I can keep this from happening to another girl. I can make sure everyone knows exactly what type of creep Troy is—how he’s preyed on girls and used our bodies as bargaining chips in his game for power. Waiting for the school to do the right thing hasn’t worked, and me ignoring it hasn’t helped anything either. I can’t leave my life, my happiness, in the hands of other people. This is one thing I’m going to have to do on my own.
If people want to spread a story, my story, then they can spread the one I tell. The version I control.
I roll my shoulders back, fix my mascara, and press record.
“At the beginning of my junior year, I started dating Troy Murphy, the starting forward for the Park Meade High School varsity boys’ basketball team,” I start, attempting to make my voice sound more assured than I feel. “That fall, he violated my privacy in the worst way possible.”
I tell the entire story. I maintain eye contact with the camera and imagine that I’m looking right at him. I want him to see me and understand the depths of what he did. I want him to be afraid. I refuse to be ashamed.
Once I upload this, there will be no more secrets. My mom will know I haven’t been at a church retreat all weekend. Everyone at Park Meade will know what Troy did to me, and it’ll be up to them to decide whether or not to ignore it. Whether or not to decide to keep supporting someone like him. That will be their burden to bear, not mine. I can’t let my mom’s job, or my classmates’ outrage, or my sister’s pride keep me from the life I deserve. Even if the people who should have didn’t stand up for me when I needed them most, I can stand up for me right now.
I open Confidential.
And before I can second-guess myself, I press send.
SUNDAY AFTERNOON
My phone starts buzzing in my back pocket, and I consider just letting it go. When I check the screen I swipe unlock.
“Hey.” My voice comes out raspy, a little hoarse from the celebratory screaming.
“Toni, oh my G
od, I’m so glad you answered!” It’s Mack’s voice, loud and concerned. “You’re good, right? How’s Olivia? Where are you both? I wanted to check in after everything that happened yesterday, but no one had a signal last night and it was a whole thing. You can come to the bus and hang out with us until the show if you want. It’s kinda lonely around here right now because the whole team is out—”
“Everything is fine,” I say, interrupting.
My gut roils at the lie, but I want to stop the runaway train that is her concern. We haven’t seen or spoken to each other in years, so her alarm shocks me. Why does she care what happened to a girl she knew briefly when she was a kid?
I don’t understand it, but I consider the offer. I think it might be a good idea to be around someone else instead of retreating further into myself.
“Where are you?”
She runs off instructions on how to get to where their tour bus is located and says she’ll meet me at the gate so I can get through without the proper wristband, and we hang up.
It doesn’t take more than ten minutes before I reach the back lot where the tour buses are kept.
“Toni!” Mack runs past the security guards manning the entrance and pulls me in for a hug. I guess everything is different in the wake of the world feeling like it’s falling to pieces.
“It’s so good you’re here. I’m sure you heard that the band is going on tonight. It’s been super chaotic, but chaotic good, you know, not chaotic evil,” she rushes out as we walk through another set of security guards. More modest this time because they lead into a more exclusive area, but still. “The band is making all these plans for their set tonight. It’s going to be great.”
One of the security guards insists on patting me down, and I agree to it while gritting my teeth. I understand the need, but the touching unnerves me. The physical closeness feels unnatural, even though it’s entirely professional and perfunctory. A few days ago, I couldn’t even bring myself to hug people with my whole self thrown into it. Until …
