* * *
Mom found a townhouse in a nice neighborhood about forty-five minutes away. It’s actually not all that far from Dad, and he sent me a bunch of random emojis the day we moved in, mostly of food and balloons, but none to do with houses, which cracked me up. Mom set my equipment up for me, and she did a pretty good job. But she put all the movies in the family room because, she said, that’s where we’ll have our family movie nights. We started the night we moved in. I suggested Gremlins and dill pickle popcorn.
I know that Mom will meet someone else, and that it can’t always be the two of us forever, but for now it is, and it’s good. We go on walks together, and she sometimes reads the same books as I do, and we’ll talk about how much we liked them or didn’t. She doesn’t feel sorry for me or bring up what I did. We don’t talk about it. I know that she’s taken a break from social media, too; she said it was full of bitches, which I guess means she was getting some blowback. We are the same, but different. We try not to dig too deep; we just look ahead.
Our new neighborhood is all right. I know that everyone here knows who I am and why I’m here. We didn’t go far enough to escape that. But people mostly just avoid me, and that’s fine with me so far. And Ava and Matthew take the bus to visit, and that is good.
I am doing community service at the library. When I got the job, the librarian, Miss Dorothy, told me I’d be a page.
“A Paige?” I repeated, dumbfounded.
“Yes, a page.” She smiled and told me the duties required.
There is a lot of work using hands: shelving the books, typing, sorting, so I mainly use my good one for that. I like the job. It’s relaxing and quiet—two things I now want more than anything else. Since Dee left the picture, I feel like the girl from The Exorcist, post-exorcism, without the pea soup. Maybe it’s the antidepressants, but the fire isn’t in me anymore. Sometimes I’ll get a little spark, a jolt of anger or sadness, but then it just fizzles out and I return to this life. A quiet life. I put aside books on the cart while I’m shelving them in case I want to sign them out later.
Once, a group of girls who had been huddled at a table whispered to me as I pushed by with a cart of books that needed reshelving.
“Are you that shooter girl?” one said, as her friend elbowed her, shushing her.
I stopped and looked at them. They were smiling nervously at me. They looked familiar, like so many kids I knew. Like me, like Lottie and Paige, like Marta and Ava. Like Dee.
“I used to be,” I said, then pushed the cart past them and into the stacks.
People stare at me out in public. Once, when I was walking to the library, a bunch of kids threw a cold coffee at me out a car window and yelled a miserable stream of insults. They missed, and after they drove off, I watched the ice cubes and coffee snake into the cracks in the sidewalk.
School started, but I’m taking a year off to be homeschooled. Mom and Dad and the therapist had long conversations about my recovery, and they found a tutor who is in university and who seems perfectly normal. She is so nice to me that I think I’ll look forward to my lessons, or at least won’t dread them. Her name is Amanda. She wears glasses and is studying kinesiology.
I stopped making videos. I made my channel private. But it’s there, an archive. It’s hard to get away from your old self, I guess. Sometimes we just pile more on top, get new layers. I still like movies, but they don’t mean as much as they used to. I can’t remember feeling that passionate about them, about anything. I didn’t put all my posters up in my new room. I’ve left it clean and plain for now. I’ll see what fills it up as time goes on.
Pete called. He’s recovered really well from his burns, he said. Has scarring, but said it gives him character. He offered for me to join him at his new school, when I’m ready. He didn’t even make any conditions. He just said that I have to promise to keep going to my therapist. He even made a crack that he can take me, if I start getting ideas. I said that I’m happy to go to the high school closest to my new house, but it was really nice of him to call.
I wondered if Lottie was there when he did.
* * *
I know I did something terrible. Lots of terrible things, really. Felt terrible things. And terrible things were done to me, right? People argue about how bad: it wasn’t that bad, or it was really bad. Or that there were many things, death by a thousand cuts. How bad does it have to be for us to do something? How much bad? How bad can we be in return? Can anything be evened out? They talk about mental health, they talk about guns. I slip away from all of it. When I am alone and feeling scared, everything that happened leading up to what I did fills up my head again like water, and I worry that the thoughts will trap me and I can’t breathe or swim up to the top, where the fluorescent lights are shining down, like at the school pool. But I’m trying to find ways to get air. Ways to keep moving forward, if not moving on.
In the end, I didn’t try to find out who had done what they did to me at the party. The police talked about the dissemination of child pornography, but the people in the pics are blurry and difficult to distinguish. It was hard for me to tell, too. I didn’t press any charges. An investigation would be worse than the whole thing in the first place. The police weren’t surprised. They shook their heads and said this happens all the time, and I thought, I bet it does. People are afraid. No one knows what is going on in anyone’s home, in anyone’s school, in anyone’s heart. Everything okay? We pack our lunches and go to school and spend all our waking hours pretending that nothing is happening, to us or anyone else. And then, sometimes, we get a nice, cool afternoon, where we watch TV or hang out by the lake, and maybe it is all okay, just for then, just for that time.
The day I got home from the hospital, the first thing I saw was my bike, its frame and wheel bent at an odd angle. And then, a couple of weeks ago, Pete came by our new house, and he took the bike. He had it fixed for me, saying that it was his moving truck’s fault it was busted up in the first place. He had it delivered back to me, repainted and everything. It took a long time before I could ride it, but now, finally, I can, my finger and thumb gripping the handle, the air cooling the healing scars on my face. It looks different, but good, the bike. It feels almost perfect some days. And even thought I know it’s not, that it’s the same broken bike inside, I keep pushing those pedals just like it’s not.
Riding all over, around my new town, and home again.
Dear Reader,
There is pain in this book. It might be familiar to some and foreign to others. It is my hope that by shining a light on aspects of the world we share—on some of our pain—that we might see shades and variations rather than simply light and darkness.
My interest in writing this novel was to push back on the question often asked by individuals and the media when it comes to bullying and violence. Some of us have been asked the question ourselves: “Was it really that bad?”
We all have different bars set for how “bad” things need to be to justify the actions of others. I don’t have the answer, and neither do the characters in this book. They do, however, ask you to consider that to suffer alone, and without the empathy of others, is “that bad”. It is the worst of all.
To find people who will stand by us, come what may, they are worth everything.
As Stevie would say, they are all the heart emojis. And a couple of unicorns.
Yours,
Laurie Petrou
ALSO AVAILABLE BY LAURIE PETROU
Sister of Mine
Between
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Laurie Petrou is an award-winning author and professor. Her two previous books, Between and her debut novel Sister of Mine, were both Globe and Mail Top 100 books, and Sister of Mine was the inaugural winner of the Half the World Global Literati Award. She teaches at the RTA School of Media at Ryerson University in Toronto and lives in Grimsby with her family.
This is a work of fiction. All of the names, characters, organizations, places and events portraye
d in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real or actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2019 by Laurie Petrou.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crooked Lane Books, an imprint of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.
Crooked Lane Books and its logo are trademarks of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.
Library of Congress Catalog-in-Publication data available upon request.
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-64385-116-7
ISBN (ePub): 978-1-64385-117-4
Cover design by Melanie Sun
Book design by Jennifer Canzone
Printed in the United States.
www.crookedlanebooks.com
Crooked Lane Books
34 West 27th St., 10th Floor
New York, NY 10001
First Edition: October 2019
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Love, Heather Page 22
