“You gotta get over those bitches,” Cate says. I love her for it. For the words she chooses and the secret way she whispers them into my ear. But she’s looking at me like she gets me, and there’s nothing lonelier than the fact that she doesn’t.
“Thanks,” I say, and Cate closes my computer screen for me and heads back to the counter and I’m alone.
I reach into my bag and make sure The Secret Garden is still in there. That there is actual evidence of someone in the world totally getting me.
“I love you,” I hear Joe say behind me. If I closed my eyes, I could pretend he was saying it to me. But then there’s Sasha’s ridiculous giggle, and the whole fantasy vanishes so fast I lose my breath.
That night I hole up in Cate’s office as usual.
Elise and I chat about the meeting she had Friday with our impressively ignorant school counselor, Mrs. Drake, who passive-aggressively asked her about her dating life before launching into a speech about Elise’s chances at getting into an Ivy League school.
I ask Elise if she’d stand up to Mrs. Drake if she had a whole group behind her. If she thinks maybe people can do more if they act together.
There’s a long pause, a smiley face emoticon, and a vague uh sure? But I was hoping for more.
Elise logs off, and I stare at the screen waiting for Joe for another few, full, heavy minutes. He’s never missed this much time, and I feel an inside-itch at the thought of him not coming on at all.
I know what to do. I know because I want Elise to approve of me, and I want Cate and Paul to be right about their idea that I am special and good. I know what to do mostly because it hurts too much to sit here waiting for Joe.
I write Joe an email.
Hey. This is wrong. So we can’t. It’s not who I am.
It feels good, writing it out. It’s the Right Thing to Do. I’m relieved, thinking I can sit back and cry in the bathroom every time Joe and Sasha kiss or make googly eyes at each other in Tea Cozy. I can be sad and lonely and not have to worry about anyone being angry at me.
I won’t be a bad girl anymore. I won’t be a cheating immoral person. I’ll be regular, comfortable Tabby. The one Jemma and Alison and everyone else want me to be.
The inside-itch doesn’t go away after I send the email, though. I’m relieved that I have stopped something terrible and amazing from slowly destroying me, but now the mountains seem even larger, Cate’s office is even smaller, and I am even further away from liking my life.
It’s that itch that makes me type in the website from the book again. The site comes to life in blue and gold and silver. The freckled knees and Dorothy shoes make me smile even harder than they did the first time.
This is the first time I’ve seen the site on my computer and have had a moment to really look at it. I click on the “Members” link, and hold my breath. There’s a list of nicknames, and a picture of each one from the knees down. About a dozen members, apparently.
The spiral logo twists and turns, animated, and the whole site is practically breathing.
I make a profile. Call myself by the nickname my parents have been using since I was small: Bitty. Take a picture of myself from the knees down: worn jeans and gold ballet flats. No names, it says. No locations. We are from everywhere. We are everyone.
I vaguely remember a Morning Assembly we had about how Google can track all our searches and privacy doesn’t really exist online. But with a fake name and only, like, a dozen people belonging to the site, it doesn’t fit any of the “red flags” that lecturer talked about (credit cards, identifying pictures, meeting up with people you’ve never met in real life, webcams).
And then it tells me I have to share a secret. One secret, big or small, to join the group.
Secret:
I kissed someone else’s boyfriend.
—Bitty
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
Seven.
It’s past midnight. Joe hasn’t logged on all night, and Sasha’s poem is still streaming on an endless loop in my mind. But I’m blocking it out by sifting through random secrets posted on the site, while reading and rereading the list of rules that are firmly stated on every page.
RULE ONE: Post at least one secret a week to keep your membership active.
RULE TWO: Assignments will be given for every secret. Assignments must be completed within twenty-four hours to keep membership active.
RULE THREE: An active membership is the only way to protect your secrets.
The rules didn’t appear until after my secret was posted, which is sort of not the best. It’s also too late to ponder them, and besides, according to everything I’m skimming, these Assignments are intended to better people’s lives, and I’m nothing if not in need of some betterment. So I swallow down the little instant of worry, remember they don’t have any of my identifying information, and decide that it’s fine. And anonymous. So I can stay calm. All Zen-like. Paul and Cate would be so proud.
Also, Joe’s always talking about taking risks. He wants to go skydiving for his eighteenth birthday and likes snowboarding and meeting new people and really spicy foods. And, of course, weed. He typed fast, when he was telling me about all of these passions, and I just reread that conversation earlier today. I think Joe would like Life by Committee, and that makes me less scared of it.
Sort of.
Agnes is one of the more active members, so I zero in on her profile and her secrets. One of her knee-down pictures has her in black leggings that stop with a ribbon of lace just past her knees, no socks, and beat-up, possibly ironic penny loafers. Judging from her collection of always faceless photos, she’s from somewhere sunny and silly. Everything in the background is always too green or too blue or too yellow. Never snow. Never the shadows of mountains. I wonder what living in a mountainless world would be like.
Nice, I think.
I’m so happy to be transported out of my head, I actually smile, which is a ridiculous thing to do when you’re all by yourself. I can’t help it: Cate says it’s the mountains that make me feel trapped sometimes. Sometimes it’s cozy, like the perfect nook in the expanse of the world, but right now, when everyone hates me, it’s more like a crawl space I can’t properly stretch in.
Poking around LBC makes me feel like I found a trapdoor, Tabitha-sized, to let me out of here.
I click through a bunch of the secrets the Agnes girl shared, then Roxie and someone going by Elfboy, and the leader, Zed, who always give the official assignments. It’s like reading someone’s diary, except other members can comment on each secret.
Agnes has this strange, lonely, squirrely life that I pity so much it’s almost uncomfortable to keep reading.
Secret: I like my father more than my mother.
Secret: My mother keeps calling her doctor’s office and leaving messages. I listen in as often as I can.
Secret: I know my mother is snooping in my room and taking things, so I’m snooping in hers.
Secret: My mother told me to go on a diet.
Secret: I lie to my boyfriend. Often.
Secret: I picked up a pamphlet on depression and another on birth control and a third on anorexia when the school nurse stepped out of the room.
After every one of Agnes’s secrets, there’s a discussion with all the other members, a list of comments ranging from the brief (smiley face!) to the lengthy (an in-depth retelling of Roxie lying to her boyfriend about her age when she was fifteen and he was twenty). After the comments, there’s always a silver-fonted post from Zed titled ASSIGNMENT. It seems he takes the conversation of the members into consideration, and then constructs an Assignment that addresses the secret and the members’ feelings about the secret.
Zed posts secrets too, but he lets the community discuss his options and come up with an Assignment. If a majority of members agree, he’ll do what they’ve come up with.
I guess that’s what Life by Committee is. And with a mother like Agnes’s, who steals her books and her journals and anything she decides is “too troubling” or “informative about her emotional state” and brings them to Agnes’s doctor, it’s obvious LBC is a serious safe haven.
SECRET: I don’t want to go to college.
ASSIGNMENT: Apply to do a year of volunteering before college in Africa or Honduras or Romania. There’s more to life than the path everyone is told to take. Do it differently.
I wonder if Agnes will do it. If she’ll work in an orphanage in Romania and become a bigger, better person before college. I wonder how seriously they take these Assignments.
It must be pretty serious. She posts a link to a service program and says she’s filling it out immediately. I am watching someone change their life, just like that.
Sometimes there are only written descriptions of how Assignments went, but often Zed seems to require “proof.” Without faces and with so much anonymity, “proof” only really goes so far, but it looks like everyone takes it seriously.
This chick I am totally girl-crushing on, Star, posts pictures of her Assignments, filtered with some kind of vintage-y green look, and they all look vaguely magical and strange. There’s one of her feet, and each toe is wearing an expensive-looking ring. Diamond. Emerald. Sapphire. Ruby. I guess she’s sort of this major klepto. I like that she has her own style of picture taking. Agnes’s pictures are more straightforward. Roxie uses audio files. Elfboy obviously has some crappy old-school camera and an even crappier scanner, because his photos are all blurry and pixelated. @sshole draws pictures, which isn’t proof exactly, but he’s been a member for years, so no one is questioning it, I guess.
A girl named Brenda (seriously? Brenda is your magical nickname?) has amazing photos. Like every photograph on the site, they are faceless. Usually knees-down, sometimes neck-down, always expertly anonymous. Hers are black and white, classically beautiful, and obviously taken on a real camera, not an iPhone. One Assignment Zed gave her was to crash her estranged father’s wedding, and she did it in an actual wedding gown. Her mother’s old wedding gown. She managed a photograph of the cumbersome gown and its long train as she stepped off a horse-drawn carriage she hired for the event.
I’m dying to see her face. I’m dying to see all their faces. It’s strange, entering into their faceless universe. Unsettling. Cool.
In the best photo she’s lifting the gown, so we can see her sneakers underneath.
It’s in black and white, except for the purple sneakers. I mean, it’s basically the best photograph I’ve ever seen. Her description of completing the Assignment is great too. I can’t stop cringing, reading it. She says she could see every realization in her father’s face: the fact that his daughter was there, the fact that she was wearing a wedding gown, the fact that it was the wedding gown of the woman he last married.
It was bad for a while. Her dad was obviously pissed. Like, shaking-with-anger, wouldn’t-return-her-phone-calls-for-months pissed. But he ended up not marrying the obviously evil would-be stepmother, because she flipped out when Brenda made a scene. And from what I can gather, when the anger faded, he realized that he’d been ignoring Brenda and started making an effort to see more of her.
BRENDA: I did something. An unfixable problem got solved. My dad’s making steak tonight. For me and him. He’s making pancakes for dessert, since he knows those are my favorite foods. Steak and pancake dinner with my father. WTF life is crazy.
A few days later, Brenda posted a picture of steak and pancakes on a huge ceramic plate. I laugh out loud. My eyes go a little watery, the way they do at the end of a super-uplifting romantic comedy or sports underdog triumph movie.
BITTY: YES!
It’s like dipping a pinkie toe in the waters. The picture is from a week ago, and I’m not exactly adding to the conversation, but it’s something. It’s saying, I don’t know, maybe I’m ready. Maybe I’m one of you.
I click over to Star’s profile, to see if she’s as ridiculously cool as what little I’ve seen of her so far suggests. She’s in college, which about half the members seem to be. She uses a lot of caps locks and comments on other people’s posts pretty often. Her picture is barefoot and barelegged. Freckled knees and red toenails stretched out in the sand. Her most recent secret (posted just an hour ago) intrigues me:
Secret: I’m obsessed with someone who lives across the country and probably forgets my name.
When my eyes start to hurt, I turn away from the computer for just a moment and notice my hands are clenched and my toes are cramping from the way I am scrunching them up in my slippers. It feels like my whole body is one huge fist with nothing to punch.
My screen reloads, and I see that a few people commented on Star’s secret, and that Zed has already decided on an Assignment based on just an enthusiastic Go for it or two.
ASSIGNMENT, silvery bold font screams across the screen. Go get him. Book a flight. Find him. Tell him you can’t stop thinking about him.
I smile.
Not because I think it’s a great idea; I don’t. But it is something someone in a movie would do, and it’s scary and delightful and hopeful and sweet. And I guess everyone needs something hopeful. It may be a crazy-person thing to do, but at least it’s powerful and optimistic.
I tear up, the way I do watching the end of Pretty Woman, when Richard Gere climbs up the fire escape and Julia Roberts lets him meet her up there, and her smile is so big and toothy and absurd that life seems like it might actually be mostly good instead of mostly annoying.
STAR: Ticket bought.
I look around the room like maybe she’s hiding somewhere in here. The words popped up and the whole story is unfolding in front of me, but it’s not a movie, and Star is not Julia Roberts, although Zed is basically Cupid, apparently. A laugh rises from my belly straight to my mouth, but I hold it in and let it hum on my lips. Between the buzz of the unsurrendered giggle and the head-swirling tears, I’m temporarily just a snow globe of feelings and not a person at all. And that feels good. Because it’s hope, mostly, that’s coursing through me.
It’s weird that I care at all. For all I know, Star’s not even telling the truth. She can pretend to be on some romantic transcontinental journey and really be sitting in some sad bedroom in some sad city far away.
There’s a shiver inside me.
I’m surprised at how badly I want Star and her Assignment to be real. I need it to be happening. I need there to be a whole mess of craziness and loveliness and unexpected steak and pancakes and red Mary Janes and plane tickets and secrets beyond the snowy mountains.
My screen scrambles again. Life by Committee is telling me I have new comments on the secret I posted.
Underneath my confession about kissing someone’s boyfriend, a few people have asked how I feel about the guy, and a few others have expressed concern for the poor, wronged girlfriend.
And underneath all that, Zed has infiltrated with his thick, silvery font. ASSIGNMENT, it reads. I rev into heartbeat overdrive. Which is silly, it’s a game. If I don’t like what he has to say, I just won’t do it. I guess I’d pictured my secret dropping into the void, but something is happening and I’m too tired to stop it. I read what comes next: Kiss Him Again.
Secret:
I eat alone most nights. If I eat at all.
—Zed
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
Eight.
I’m not going to do it.
I’ve totally decided.
I can explain to the group that I’ve ended things with Joe, and that maybe losing me will bring him back to me eventually, and that I’m okay with that.
I can explain to them how I won’t get to really appreciate the kissing until Joe has left Sasha. I’m a new member, they’ll understand. They’ll come up with a way for me to get Joe and Sasha
to break up, and then I will happily, joyfully, ecstatically kiss him again.
I can explain that I can’t kiss him again now and still be Bitty.
I fall asleep dreaming of the post I’ll write to let them know I’ll need a new Assignment, and I wake up at four in the morning and open the computer, to see if Joe responded to my email.
He didn’t.
I log on to Life by Committee, but before I ask for a new Assignment I find myself back on Star’s page, and even though it’s only a few hours later, she’s updated.
STAR: I’m at the airport. It’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever done, so I tied a silver scarf around my neck for the occasion and probably drenched myself in too much perfume, but I wanted to smell and look exactly the way I feel. I have on red high heels even though it’s November, and I snuck my roommate’s fur coat out of her closet.
I’ve never seen Casablanca, but I’m pretty sure it’s just like this. I feel like Casablanca. I feel unstoppable. And in love.
So. Effing. In. Love.
There’s a picture attached, neck down this time. A delicate silver necklace hangs far past her collarbone. Some kind of butterfly. Pretty and innocuous. Maybe Tiffany’s. The airport in the background is a blur of bodies. There’s a plaid suitcase in the bottom left corner. It could belong to anyone. She could be anywhere. Airports all look the same. But she’s glamorous and messy and absurd, and I can tell, without seeing her face, with only really focusing on her stockinged knees, that she is happy. Reckless, but happy.
The other members post Xs and Os and smiley faces and quotes from old romantic movies, which I only recognize because Cate always has those movies on in the background when she’s ironing.
I realize I’m licking my lips over and over in anticipation. They’re dry now, and stinging a little. It’s not like Star can show up on the other side of the country instantaneously. As of now she’s just hours early for a morning flight, and reporting on every flutter of her heart as she waits for her life to change.
Life by Committee Page 6
