Love, Heather

by Laurie Petrou

  * * *

  I am everywhere online. I am a hero, a slut, a troll, a waste of space; people feel pity and anger and fascination with me. People hope I die. People wish I’d shot myself. People want whoever assaulted me to die, the privileged bros to die. People say it’s about time a girl did this, that they aren’t surprised a girl did this. People can’t believe a girl did this. People say of course a girl did this. I couldn’t even do it right. DIY gun guys mansplain the hell out of why my weapon blew up. People write think pieces on marginalized people seeking revenge. People talk about race and rape and shootings. People call me a terrorist and a feminist; people say they are the same word.

  People analyze the role of transphobia in the discussion. People say this is what happens when freaks teach our kids. They post pictures of Mrs. Sherman and Pete, side by side. People think Pete is a deviant. People think Pete is a hero.

  People don’t blame me for what I did. Others do. People think our generation is spoiled and entitled. People are all obsessed with online bullying and gangs and how little parents know these days. There are charts and screenshots of all of the online behavior leading up to the “attack.” There are pictures of all my revenge screen sirens with articles about violence in the media and its impact on young minds. Students at our school are shown tearfully holding each other in photos. They are interviewed as experts on me, on the school, on what happened. People have poured over my video channel looking for some secret evidence of mental illness, sadness, depression, aggression, plans for violence. They say I am crazy. They tell me in the comments that I should try again, but this time kill myself. They say I am the product of rape culture. They say rape culture is bullshit. They say I am ugly. They say I am beautiful.

  They say nothing about Dee. They never knew her. She never showed herself to anyone but me, and now she is gone. Disappeared like she never existed. She was a casualty. It’s hard for me to even call her face to memory. What did she look like again? What did she sound like? Gone. Fractals of color, 24mm per second, on the cutting room floor. Parts of me, edited out.

  * * *

  School is over. All the lockers have been scrubbed clean. Notices taken down. The graffiti power-washed off the bricks. The counselors, who came to school for the last few days, have left. The Makers’ Space is closed indefinitely.

  I know all this because Matthew has been here with me. Quiet, strong Matthew. I don’t ask why he comes. I don’t push it. I accept his presence. Visiting me. Visiting Pete. He reads silently beside me. He teaches me how to play Magic: The Gathering. Sometimes he shows me what people are saying online, until he decides I’ve seen enough. He says there is nothing good on there and he is right.

  When I’m alone, I lie in my bed and stare at the hospital ceiling. I count the little holes in the discolored squares and remember how it looked when the same ones blew apart at school. I lose count and start again. I look out the window. I feel so much, and then so little: shame, self-loathing, disgust, anger, frustration, then nothing: medicated boredom. The days pass, clouds flitting across the sky, and mostly my mind is empty. I think nothing. I am holding myself, floating above it, because if I look down, I’ll feel everything. It is too deep, too far.

  Mom, meanwhile, hasn’t tired of telling the media to fuck off her property, away from the hospital, off the phone, telling them it’s their fault this all happened, as though I’m Lady Diana and they’re the paparazzi. She wants to start a group for parents who want to learn about digital literacy, and I just can’t wait for her to tell me that I should really change my passwords regularly.

  “I broke up with Reg, honey,” she says one day, two weeks after, surprising me out of a nap.

  “Oh yeah?” I say, sleepily, finding my voice out of the fog of painkillers.

  “Yeah,” she says, rubbing the fingers on my good hand. “Who needs the hassle.” She waves a hand in forced carelessness.

  And then I say the thing I say all the time. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for making it hard for you.”

  “Oh, never mind. It’s not the right time for dating!” she says, overly cheerfully. Then she pauses. “I want to spend all my time with you, Stevie.” Her voice is breaking now, and her hand is squeezing mine. “I’m going to suffocate you with love until it drives you crazy. Well. Not crazy crazy, but, you know.”

  I laugh a little and nod.

  I am protected because I’m a juvenile, or what they call a young offender. The press won’t print my name because of this, but that doesn’t matter. Everyone knows my name. Everyone knows that I have a mole beside my belly button. Everyone has seen the photos. But I am protected from worse, I guess. Not charged as an adult. Saved from prison. I will spend a month of days at a juvie center once I’m recovered from my injuries, plus what works out to about a year of community service. There they will work with me on my mental health, on my regret, on pain, I’m told. There will be other girls there who have committed crimes, and we will do group therapy together. It feels so far away from where I am now that I don’t think about it.

  I’m still in that criminal no-man’s-land between childhood and adulthood, where kid games nod to sexual violence, where braided hair passes self-harm in the hallway. There won’t be a trial, because I pled guilty. Guilty of mischief, assault, but not attempted murder, which no one charged me with. It was a botched teenage suicide, a girl whose mind was bent by trauma in a moment of desperation. Bent and mangled. Like my bike. It was an accident, they say. I won’t be sent to jail but have been given a lifetime sentence of shame, or so it looks from here.

  It wasn’t quite how I’d imagined it going down. I didn’t think that I’d end up losing most of my right hand and getting burns all over my arms, one leg, and part of my face, as though Dee was quite literally blasted away.

  The homemade gun had only a couple of shots in it, if that, not that anyone really knows that. Who would I choose? Aidan was crying like a baby. Breanne was under her desk in a puddle of pee. Paige was praying. I see this all, over and over in my head, like a movie, my own, awful movie. And what was the plan? To choose one person, or to scare them all? I thought I’d decide in the moment, but the moment was too much for me. Too terrible and painful. I couldn’t make any choices.

  In those last seconds, before Pete grabbed me, I won out over Dee. I tipped the gun upward, toward my chin; I decided not to hurt anyone but myself and her. It wasn’t the plan either, but in the end, when I heard Lottie’s voice through the door, I saw no way out. The wick had already been lit; it was too late. I needed to end it, and Dee, end it all.

  But then Pete had me, and the gun exploded in a way it hadn’t the night before. The whole thing blew up. Pieces of shrapnel flew everywhere. There was blood on everything, mine and Pete’s, and more. There was a dull noise. There was a lot of movement. My eardrums were temporarily blown by the noise. My senses were foggy and blurred. People rushed around. There were sirens. It went black.

  I thought I would ride out of the school on a rocket fueled by my own outrage and pain, that justice would prevail and I would feel something different, something more, something less than pain and sadness. That it would go away. I thought that none of our acts of justice, none of the vengeance was big enough, and so I needed to go bigger, to blast it all away. To cleanse myself. Start fresh. But the pain didn’t go anywhere. I know now that it will always be a part of me. Part of who I am. Scar tissue.

  And now I have daily meetings with a psychologist and a physiotherapist, both of whom work in tiny increments on improving my worldview. I have nightmares. In them, there are a whole bunch of tiny kittens, and they are close to a busy road, and I keep running into it to save them, but they keep getting hit by cars, and so I have an armload of maimed kittens, I’m covered in blood, and there are people screaming all around me. I don’t mention this to the doctors but avoid looking at the motivational poster of a kitten in my room.

  “I don’t understand it all, but I get some of it,” Matthew says one day, in
to the silence of the room. He is not looking at me. He’s fiddling with the corner of a magazine on his lap.

  I say nothing for a bit, and then, “You don’t owe me anything.”

  “I know,” he says, looking at me. “But we’ve known each other since we were little, Stevie.”

  His eyes are so big and honest, and it’s all I can do not to start bawling, and then he says, “I’m your friend.” He looks away while I wipe my eyes, then opens the magazine and starts to read.

  Ava comes, too. She’s always gone against the current, so I guess it’s not that big a surprise. She said, the first time she came, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t know how bad it was.”

  “I thought I had it under control,” I said quietly.

  “They expect us to keep quiet,” she said, gripping my hand. “I get how you got there. God, I get so angry sometimes, too. I mean, I could never do that.” She meets my eyes, and I burn with shame.

  Me either, I think, not knowing how I got there.

  She continues. “But the pain. The anger. You are not alone in that. Half the world feels hurt and angry and we just normalize it. Girls are expected to just … keep going.”

  She is more political than I am. She articulates things, wants to talk in solidarity, wants to defend me, or at least explain me. I let her, just so relieved that I have a friend who made it through. The best is when we just share a laugh, or play a game, when we don’t dig deep. When we are just girls. Just friends; that is all, and that is enough.

  No one else visits me except Ava, Matthew, and my mom, and these days, that’s ok. Dad came at first, but I told him I wasn’t up for the visits, and he looked relieved. He calls every day, though, and we talk, and it is good.

  I’ve become friendly with one of the nurses who isn’t giving me the freeze the way the others are. I know they’ve all read the news; they know why I’m here. They all have their own opinions; nurses are not a timid bunch. They’re not sure if I was trying to kill myself or everyone else.

  I’ve gotten letters to the hospital from weirdos and perverts and feminists and people who love me and hate me, from all over the world, but none of them know me. Mom has been opening my mail and mainly throwing it all away. I expect my inbox has overflowed, that my presence on social has turned inside out with overuse. I can’t imagine what’s happened to my channel and then I don’t care. I will take it down, or at least make it private. I don’t want a presence anymore.

  32

  It is a day, but I don’t know which one.

  I lose track of the days. There have been many of them. The nurse who likes me has come in to change my dressing. She has her hair sensibly tied back in a long braid. Her name is Geeta. She has a nice smile and a singsongy voice.

  “Want to go for a stroll?” she asks me, and I shake my head. “Dr. Yang thinks it’s important for your mental health to get up and around.” Dr. Yang’s a really nice woman who specializes in cases like mine, whatever that means.

  Geeta pauses and looks out the door of my room. “Someone else could use a visit. He asks about you every day.”

  She’s talking about Pete. I start to weep, and she puts a steadying hand on my arm. I cry all the damn time these days. Mom says it must be all the painkillers they have me on because her hormone replacement therapy makes her cry.

  Geeta says, “It might be good for both of you.”

  “Okay,” I mutter through the tears. “Yes.”

  She helps me into a wheelchair, and even though she’s gentle, I wince as a jolt of pain runs up the length of my body. She squeezes my good shoulder kindly, in a way that’s supposed to mean come on, champ, you got this. I nod. She pushes me down the hall, where I know Pete is. I’ve been avoiding his end of the hallway, choosing always to head in the opposite direction whenever I can. I haven’t seen him yet. Geeta wheels me into his room, and it feels like I’m going to be sick. It’s a shock, seeing him in bandages.

  Lottie is there with her dad, Jacob. Her family. Jacob whispers a small hello, his face inscrutable. Lottie looks up, and she looks surprised, and concerned. There is love on her face, and it makes a small bridge between us. She checks with Pete quickly. His face is bandaged up, and much of his body. There is an IV taped to his hand, for pain, I expect. Same as me. When he speaks, he slurs a little.

  “Stevie,” he says, his voice soft, and I am crying harder now. And then he tries to say more, but then stops. His eyes are watering also. What a pair, we are. Jacob hands him a cup of ice water with a straw, and he drinks some. I look at Lottie, and she gives me a small ghost of a smile.

  “Give him a minute,” she says.

  My mouth is dry, and I swallow, over and over again. Geeta wheeled me close to his bed, then left. He reaches for my good hand with his. He squeezes it.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, my voice thick. They are the limpest words in the world. “I’m sorry, Pete. I’m sorry to all of you.” I look at them, my favorite family. “I wasn’t—”

  I wasn’t what? Thinking? Myself? Who I thought I was? I wasn’t okay? I wasn’t sure? I’m still not. There are tears running down Lottie’s cheeks. Jacob puts his arm around her.

  “I’m sorry, too, Stevie,” says Pete. This is the voice that has been comforting me my whole life. I am hanging on to his hand so tightly I’m afraid I’m hurting him. “You needed me, and I wasn’t there for you.”

  I am nodding. I would nod at anything; my head is pounding with the effort of not sobbing uncontrollably. “You were going through your own stuff,” I say.

  “I was,” he says. “I am. But I always have room for you, Stevie. Not to excuse what you did.”

  “I know.” I know. I will always know. I can never not know again.

  “We’re gonna be fine, Stevie. We’re gonna be just fine.”

  I hear a sob come from Lottie, and it is almost too much to bear, but I will bear anything from now on.

  “Okay,” I say, and hold his hand forever.

  EPILOGUE

  It is the fall.

  So much time passes during those weeks and months. There are surgeries and recoveries. I have lost the last three fingers of my right hand and now am adapting to what amounts to a kind of claw. I can’t flip anyone the bird on that hand anymore, which is a bit of a shame, and I am trying to relearn how to do so many things. I can still make a gun symbol using my thumb and forefinger, which no one will find funny. I will have scarring on my arms and face and legs for the rest of my life. I look like a proper survivor or criminal, a gangster or a freak, depending on your point of view.

  By the time I moved home again, the media circus had slowed down a bit. I mean, I’m not a headline anymore. Other people have done terrible, embarrassing, shameful things, and they have moved on to them. Most have, anyway. I know I’m still out there as a favorite topic and target, as a mascot and prop. I’m a celebrity to some, a disgusting villain to others. I looked a few times, and there are long, opinionated think-pieces about me. Well, not about me, but about what it means, what I did. How they can use it as a mirror, how it fits into a larger picture, you know. A zeitgeist. A paradigm shift. A tipping point. A moment. I look away.

  I went to the Youth Custody Centre every day for a month. Mom drove me, and I stared out the window while she chattered away nervously. It went by quickly. I met other “troubled youth” and noticed that we are all different, all the same: some were tough and mean looking, others quiet and broken. We were all some version of lonely, defensive, sad, regretful, but then, miraculously, hopeful that maybe we could change. Some of us were shy and reluctant to talk, and then, over time, we did. We talked about how we got there, what we did; we cried; we hugged each other. I didn’t tell anyone about Dee, but I was honest about the rest. It was exhausting, like something had been leeched out of me, and I usually slept on the way home. I don’t know if I’ll see any of them again, or if I want to, but my faith in restorative justice is actually the only political position I have anymore.

  I am taking
time off school. Mom and I hang out. She’s not a friend the way Lottie was, or Dee, but she’s my mom. And I have Ava and Matthew now, and they come over when they can, and maybe, one day, I can reach out and find Lottie there. Maybe. Meantime, Mom and I do quiet crafts and play board games. She makes lunch, dotes on me, and I feel young and safe again. We spent one afternoon playing the Game of Life that she got from the Woepine Benevolent Fund, and even though it was missing a lot of pieces, we had a good time. Pretending we were making life choices and stuff. Matthew comes over and we play cards, although it’s slow for me to master maneuvering them with my new hand. Ava and I listen to music and watch home improvement shows on TV, and it is relaxing and meaningless and exactly what I need.

  One day, Mom comes into the living room, where I am resting on a big La-Z-Boy chair she got me. She’s carrying a stack of DVDs, and she dumps them on the carpet.

  “What d’ya got there?” I ask.

  “The works. What do you feel like?”

  I think about it. “How about 9 to 5? I could go for a little Dolly.”

  She roots around the tapes, then holds one up triumphantly, singing the opening verse to the title song, shaking her hips in the worst Dolly Parton impersonation I’ve ever seen. I can’t help smiling. She pops it in the DVD player and tells me to move over. I scoot my bum so she can squeeze into the chair with me. We watch the credits roll as Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly all wake up to the same song my mom was singing. We smile and nod our heads. It’s the perfect fluff for me these days.

  “How are you feeling?” she asks, not taking her eyes off the screen.

  “Good,” I say. “Better.” She doesn’t ask better than when or in what way.

  * * *

  And somewhere during that day or another day, somewhere in that time we spend together, just the two of us again, we agree that it’s time to move. We pack up the movies and the curlers, shove everything into boxes and scrawl on the front of them. When we back out of the driveway, down our street and past Lottie’s house—the treehouse, and Martha the tree, and the screen door that I will hear bang shut in my dreams—I swallow hard but am okay. Some things you just can’t get back.