It didn’t really matter, because she forced me to turn around anyways, wrenching my arm until I did, then pulling my arms behind my back.
“Please, miss,” my dad said, “This isn’t necessary.”
Shadow Stalker bound my wrists with what I guessed was a plastic wrist-tie. Too tight. Then she turned to my dad, and her voice was hushed. “Look at this crowd. These people. They’re scared. A place like this, with this much suppressed panic, fear and worry, this many people close together? I don’t care if your daughter is an idiot or just ill. She’s proven to be volatile in a powder-keg situation. It’s both dangerous and stupid to have her here. You can cut off the plasti-cuffs when she’s separated from anyone she might harm.”
“I’m not dangerous,” I protested.
“Didn’t look like it to me.” Shadow Stalker shook her head and gave me a push towards the exit, “Go home and be grateful your dad isn’t having to post bail for you to sleep in your own room tonight.”
My dad held his bags with one hand so he could help usher me toward the door. He looked over his shoulder at Alan, “I’m very sorry. It’s the concussion.”
Alan nodded, sympathetic. His ruddy cheeks were redder at the attention our scene had drawn, “I know. It’s alright. Just… maybe she should stay home from school for a bit longer.”
My dad nodded, embarrassed. I felt bad at that. I felt worse at being led off like a criminal, while Shadow Stalker gave Emma a hand to help her up. Emma was beaming, smiling one of the widest smiles I’d seen her give, despite the red mark on the side of her face. Smiling as much at the way things had turned out, I imagined, as she was at getting the chance to talk with the concerned superheroine.
We headed out to the car, away from the crowd, the soldiers and Emma. I stood by the open passenger door for two minutes before my dad scrounged up some nail clippers to cut off the plasti-cuffs.
“I’m not mad,” he told me, quietly, after we’d settled in, as he started up the car and took us out of the parking garage.
“Okay.”
“It’s perfectly understandable. You’re emotionally sensitive, after getting knocked around by the explosion, and she reminds you of what’s going on at school.”
“More than you know,” I muttered.
“Hm?”
I looked down at my hands, rubbed my wrists where the plastic tie had cut into them.
If I didn’t tell him now, I don’t think I ever would.
“It’s her. Emma.”
“Oh? What?” He sounded confused.
I didn’t have it in me to clarify matters. I just let him think it over.
After a long pause, he just said, “Oh.”
“From the beginning. Her and her friends,” I added, needlessly.
Tears welled up, unexpected. I hadn’t even realized I felt like crying. I raised my glasses to rub them away, but more came streaming out.
“Stupid head injury,” I mumbled, “Stupid mood swings. I’m supposed to be better by now.”
My dad shook his head, “Taylor, kiddo, I don’t think it’s the only reason.”
He pulled over.
“What are you doing?” I asked, wiping ineffectually at my cheek, “We gotta be home before the curfew.”
He undid our seat belts and pulled me into a hug, my face against his shoulder. My breath hitched with a sob.
“It’s fine,” he assured me.
“But-”
“We’ve got time. Take as long as you need.”
5.04
A huge pet peeve of mine: being asked to arrive for a specific time, then being made to wait. Fifteen minutes was just about my limit of my patience.
My dad and I had been waiting for more than thirty minutes.
“This has to be intentional,” I complained. We’d been asked to wait in the principal’s office a few minutes after we arrived, but the principal hadn’t been around.
“Mmm. Trying to show they’re in a position of power, able to make us wait,” my dad agreed, “Maybe. Or we’re just waiting for the other girl.”
I was at an angle where if I slouched in my chair just a bit, I could see the front of the office through a gap between the bottom of the blinds and the window. Not long after we’d arrived, Emma and her dad had showed up, looking totally casual and unstressed, like it was a regular day. She isn’t even worried. Her dad was her physical opposite, beyond the red hair they shared – he was big in every sense of the word. Taller than average, big around the middle, and while he could speak softly when the situation called for it, he had a powerful voice that caught people’s attention. Emma just had a biggish chest.
Emma’s dad was talking to Madison’s mom and dad. Only Madison’s mom was really petite like she was, but both her mom and dad looked really young. Unlike Emma and her dad, Madison and her parents did look concerned, and I was guessing that some of what Emma’s dad was doing was reassuring them. Madison in particular was looking down at the ground and not really talking, except to respond to what Emma was saying.
Sophia was the last to arrive. She looked sullen, angry, an expression that reminded me of Bitch. The woman who accompanied her was most definitely not her mom. She was blond and blue eyed, had a heart shaped face and wore a navy blue blouse with khakis.
The secretary came to get us from the office not long after.
“Chin up, Taylor,” my dad murmured, as I slung my backpack over one shoulder, “Look confident, because this won’t be easy. We may be in the right, but Alan’s a partner in a law firm, he’s a master manipulator of the system.”
I nodded. I was getting that impression already. After getting a phone call from my dad, Alan had been the one to call this meeting.
We were directed down the hall to where the guidance counselor’s offices were, a room with an egg-shaped conference table. The trio and their guardians were seated at one end of the table, seven in total, and we were asked to sit at the other, the tip of the egg. The principal and my teachers all came into the room not long after, filling in the seats between us. Maybe I was reading too much into things after seeing an eerie echo of this situation just two days ago, with the meeting of villains, but I noted that Mr. Gladly sat next to Madison’s dad, and the chair next to my dad was left empty. We would have been completely isolated from the mass of people at the other side of the table if Mrs. Knott, my homeroom teacher, hadn’t sat at my left. I wondered if she would have, if there’d been another seat.
I was nervous. I had told my dad that I’d missed classes. I hadn’t told him how many, but I hadn’t wanted to repeat Bitch’s mistake and leave him totally in the dark. I was worried it would come up. Worried this wouldn’t go the way I hoped. Worried I’d find some way to fuck it up.
“Thank you all for coming,” the principal spoke, as she sat down, putting a thin folder down in front of her. She was a narrow woman, dirty blond, with that severe bowl-cut haircut I could never understand the appeal of. She was dressed like she was attending a funeral – black blouse, sweater and skirt, black shoes, “We’re here to discuss incidents where one of our students has been victimized.” She looked down at the folder she’d brought in, “Ms. Hebert?”
“That’s me.”
“And the individuals accused of misconduct are… Emma Barnes, Madison Clements and Sophia Hess. You’ve been in my office before, Sophia. I just wish it had more to do with the track and field team and less to do with detention.”
Sophia mumbled a reply that might have been agreement.
“Now, if I’m to understand matters, Emma was attacked outside of school premises by Ms. Hebert? And shortly after, she was accused of bullying?”
“Yes,” Alan spoke, “Her father called me, confronted me, and I thought it best to take this to official channels.”
“That’s probably best,” the principal agreed. “Let’s put this matter to rest.”
Then she turned to me and my dad, palms up.
“What?” I asked.
“Please. What cha
rges would you lay against these three?”
I laughed a little, in disbelief, “Nice. So we’re called here on short notice, without time to prepare, and I’m expected to be ready?”
“Maybe outline some of the major incidents, then?”
“What about the minor ones?” I challenged her, “All of the little things that made my day-to-day so miserable?”
“If you can’t remember-”
“I remember,” I cut her off. I bent down to the backpack I’d set at my feet and retrieved a pile of paper. I had to flip through it for a few seconds before I could divide it into two piles. “Six vicious emails, Sophia pushed me down the stairs when I was near the bottom, making me drop my books, tripped and shoved me no less than three times during gym, and threw my clothes at me while I was in the shower after gym class had ended, getting them wet. I had to wear my gym clothes for the rest of the morning. In biology, Madison used every excuse she could to use the pencil sharpener or talk to the teacher, and each time she passed my desk, she pushed everything I had on my desk to the floor. I was watching for it the third time, and covered my stuff when she approached, so on the fourth trip, she emptied the pencil sharpener into one of her hands and dumped the shavings onto my head and desk as she walked by. All three of them cornered me after school had ended and took my backpack from me, throwing it in the garbage.”
“I see,” the principal made a sympathetic face, “Not very pleasant, is it?”
“That’s September eighth,” I pointed out, “My first day back at school, last semester. September ninth-”
“Excuse me, sorry. How many entries do you have?”
“One for pretty much every school day starting last semester. Sorry, I only decided to keep track last summer. September ninth, other girls in my grade had been encouraged by those three to make fun of me. I was wearing the backpack they had been thrown in the trash, so every girl that was in on it was holding their nose or saying I smelled like garbage. It picked up steam, and by the end of the day, others had joined in on it. I had to change my email address after my inbox filled in just a day, with more of the same sorts of things. I have every hateful email that was sent to me here, by the way.” I put my hand on the second pile of papers.
“May I?” Mrs. Knott asked. I handed her the emails.
“Eat glass and choke. Looking at you depresses me. Die in a fire,” she recited as she turned pages.
“Let’s not get sidetracked,” my dad said, “We’ll get to everything in time. My daughter was speaking.”
“I wasn’t done with September ninth,” I said, “Um, let me find my place. Gym class, again-”
“Are you wanting to recount every single incident?” the principal asked.
“I thought you’d want me to. You can’t make a fair judgment until you hear everything that’s happened.”
“I’m afraid that looks like quite a bit, and some of us have jobs to get back to later this afternoon. Can you pare it down to the most relevant incidents?”
“They’re all‘ relevant,” I said. Maybe I’d raised my voice, because my dad put his hand on my shoulder. I took a breath, then said, as calmly as I could, “If it bothers you to have to listen to it all, imagine what it feels like to live through it. Maybe you’ll get just a fraction of a percent of an idea of what going to school with them felt like.”
I looked at the girls. Only Madison looked really upset. Sophia was glaring at me, and Emma managed to look bored, confident. I didn’t like that.
Alan spoke, “I think we all grasp that it’s been unpleasant. You’ve established that, and I thank you for the insight. But how many of those incidents can you prove? Were those emails sent from school computers?”
“Very few school email addresses, mostly throwaway accounts from hotmail and yahoo,” Mrs. Knott replied, as she flipped through the pages, “And for the few school email accounts that were used, we can’t discount the chance that someone left their account logged in when they left the computer lab.” She gave me an apologetic look.
“So the emails are off the table,” Alan spoke.
“It’s not your place to decide that,” my dad answered.
“A lot of those emails were sent during school hours,” I stressed. My heart was pounding. “I even marked them out with blue highlighter.”
“No,” the principal spoke, “I agree with Mr. Barnes. It’s probably for the best that we focus our attention on what we can verify. We can’t say who sent those emails and from where.”
All of my work, all of the hours I’d put in logging events when remembering the events of the day was the last thing I wanted to do, dashed to the winds. I clenched my fists in my lap.
“You okay?” my dad murmured in my ear.
There was precious little I could actually verify, though.
“Two weeks ago, Mr. Gladly approached me,” I addressed the room, “He verified that some things had occurred in his class. My desk had been vandalized with scribbles, juice, glue, trash and other stuff on different days. Do you remember, Mr. Gladly?”
Mr Gladly nodded, “I do.”
“And after class, do you remember seeing me in the hallway? Surrounded by girls? Being taunted?”
“I remember seeing you in the hallway with the other girls, yes. If I remember, that was not long after you told me you wanted to handle things on your own.”
“That is not what I said,” I had to control myself to keep from shouting, “I said I thought this situation here, with all the parents and teachers gathered, would be a farce. So far, you’re not proving me wrong.”
“Taylor,” my dad spoke. He put his hand on one of my clenched fists, then addressed the faculty, “Are you accusing my daughter of making up everything she’s noted here?”
“No,” the principal spoke, “But I think that when someone is being victimized, it’s possible to embellish events, or to see harassment when there is none. We want to ensure that these three girls get fair treatment.”
“Do I-” I started, but my dad squeezed my hand, and I shut up.
“My daughter deserves fair treatment too, and if even one in ten of these events did occur, it speaks to an ongoing campaign of severe abuse. Does anyone disagree?”
“Abuse is a strong word,” Alan spoke, “You still haven’t proven-”
“Alan,” my dad interrupted him, “Please shut up. This isn’t a courtroom. Everyone at this table knows what these girls did, and you can’t force us to ignore it. Taylor ate dinner at your dining room table a hundred times, and Emma did the same at ours. If you’re implying Taylor is a liar, say it outright.”
“I only think she’s sensitive, especially after the death of her mother, she-”
I shoved the pile of paper off the table. There were thirty or forty sheets, so it made a good size cloud of drifting papers.
“Don’t go there,” I spoke, quiet, I could barely hear myself over the buzzing in my ears, “Don’t do that. Prove you’re at least that human.”
I saw a smirk on Emma’s face, before she put her elbows on the table and hid it with her hands.
“In January, my daughter was subjected to one of the most malicious, disgusting pranks I have ever heard of,” my dad told the principal, ignoring the papers that were still making their way to the floor, “She wound up in the hospital. You looked me in the eye and promised me you would look after Taylor and keep an eye out. You obviously haven’t.”
Mr. Quinlan, my math teacher, spoke, “You have to understand, other things demand our attention. There’s a gang presence in this school, and we deal with serious events like students bringing knives to class, drug use, and students suffering life threatening injuries in fights on the campus. If we’re not aware of certain events, it’s hardly intentional.”
“So my daughter’s situation isn’t serious.”
“That’s not what we’re saying,” the principal answered him, exasperated.
Alan spoke, “Let’s cut to the chase. What would you two like to see ha
ppen, here, at this table, that would have you walk away satisfied?”
My dad turned to me. We’d talked briefly on this. He’d said that as a spokesperson for his Union, he always walked into a discussion with a goal in mind. We’d established ours. The ball was in my court.
“Transfer me to Arcadia High.”
There were a few looks of surprise.
“I expected you to suggest expulsion,” the principal answered, “Most would.”
“Fuck no,” I said. I pressed my fingers to my temples, “Sorry for swearing. I’m going to be a little impulsive until I’m over this concussion. But no, no expulsion. Because that just means they can apply to the next-closest school, Arcadia, and because they aren’t enrolled in school, it would mean accelerated entry past the waiting list. That’s just rewarding them.”
“Rewarding,” the principal spoke. I think she was insulted. Good.
“Yeah,” I said, not caring in the least about her pride, “Arcadia’s a good school. No gangs. No drugs. It has a budget. It has a reputation to maintain. If I were bullied there, I could go to the faculty and get help. None of that’s true here.”
“That’s all you would want?” Alan asked.
I shook my head, “No. If it were up to me, I’d want those three to have in-school suspension for the remaining two months of the semester. No privileges either. They wouldn’t be allowed dances, access to school events, computers, or a spot on teams or clubs.”
“Sophia’s one of our best runners in Track and Field,” the principal spoke.
“I really, really don’t care,” I replied. Sophia glared at me.
“Why in-school suspension?” Mr. Gladly asked, “It would mean someone would have to keep a constant eye on them.”
“Would I have to take summer classes?” Madison piped up.
“There would be remedial classes if we took that route, yes,” the principal spoke, “I think that’s a little severe. As Mr. Gladly mentioned, it would require resources we don’t have. Our staff is stretched thin as it is.”
“Suspension’s a vacation,” I retorted, “and it just means they could take a trip over to Arcadia and get revenge on me there. No. I’d rather they got no punishment at all than see them get suspended or expelled.”
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