By the end of the school day, I was furious on more levels than I could count. I think half the things I learned about being a woman in our world can be unpacked from my interactions that day.

First there were the boys who kept interrupting a response I was giving in history class—boys who didn’t interrupt one another, but who clearly thought that a girl’s thoughts weren’t as important as their own—and to make it worse, our teacher, who was a woman, didn’t call them out on it. As if their behavior had been so normalized, she didn’t even notice.

Then there was the flyer for the school’s college fair. It featured two pictures: a boy in a lab in front of test tubes and beakers . . . and a girl in a library reading Jane Austen. It infuriated me, because whoever designed that poster was probably clueless about the implications, never realizing they were the very definition of pride and prejudice.

But the worst was yet to come. I ran into Mr. Metts in the hallway right before lunch. The last thing I wanted was a conversation with the school counselor.

“I heard there was an incident on Friday night,” he said. “I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“I’m fine,” I told him. “A little sore, but I’ll be okay.”

“No,” he said, a little more quietly. “I mean that it must have been traumatic. How are you holding up?”

It felt like an odd question—but that was just the reaction of the various male observers in my peanut gallery of identities. Did he assume that, because I was a girl, I was more emotionally fragile?

“I’m fine,” I told him, a little more emphatically. The encounter was making me nervous, and I began to fiddle with a necklace that Layton had given me for my birthday. A little heart encrusted in tiny yellow citrines. My birthstone. As a guy, I hadn’t even known what my birthstone was, and hadn’t cared.

“Well, just as long as you’re okay,” Metts said, not quite making eye contact. “But if you start to experience anxiety over it, let me know.”

Right, I thought. I’m sure he had a pamphlet entitled “Post-Traumatic YOU!”

It was only after he left that I realized in those last moments of the conversation, his gaze had slipped down to my chest.

“No question, he was checking out your tits,” Nora said, when I brought it up at lunch. “It’s gross and way creepy, but it’s what guys do.”

“Or,” her band-reject boyfriend said, “he could have been glancing at your necklace. You did say you were fiddling with it, right? That could have drawn his attention.”