A movie is playing on my TV on mute. I’ve seen it a hundred times. Kids. It’s so disturbing and true and tough that tonight I’m watching it, while listening to something else or I may feel so much I’ll explode. Everything is so close to the surface now, every emotion and experience just under the ice.

Today, someone broke into a girl’s locker and put red paint all over the crotch of her gym shorts. Yesterday, someone wrote RAPIST in red on the lockers of every guy on the basketball team. The day before, someone shoved a boy’s head in the toilet between classes. I saw him, blotchy and wet, coming out of the bathroom. I don’t know now: was he the bully or the victim? But part of me doesn’t care. I think of Aidan grabbing me and my face reddens, even in the privacy of my room, in the quiet of my thoughts. So many people go unchecked. Do what they want to anyone, and they are getting a taste of it now—some of them, anyway. If there are some unintended consequences, I chock that up to collateral damage, but something creeps into my mind, knowing that the revenge game can go both ways.

I reach for my phone and text Dee. My life preserver, my buoy in the storm.

Hey girl what’s up? she says.

Nothing. Just hanging out

You ok?

Yeah, I’m good. Question

Shoot

Do you worry that someone will come for us? Like, do something big?

…

I wait, biting my lip.

No.

No?

No one’s coming for you. I gotchu.

And she does, I know. She eases the pain, whenever it comes. Lots of kiss and hug emojis coming my way, my phone buzzing with love. I lie back and close my eyes, letting the echo of those little cartoons of love float behind my eyes.

Chapter 23

23

On Monday and Tuesday, we sat awkwardly in Health class, because apparently this tiny school, in this itty-bitty old town, is going to be the place where progressive sex ed takes a wobbly first step. They decided to keep us all together, they said, for now. I think they were afraid of the students who are enlightened enough to claim that splitting us up is adhering to a gender binary, and that some people may not be comfortable being told or being pressured to choose a group. The Safe Spaces group was likely consulted, which probably made them feel extra important.