Thousand Words (25 page)

“What’s wrong?” he asked Mom.

“She wanted to come,” Mom said. “I couldn’t tell her no. This is about her.”

“It’s not,” he said, his attention flicking back and forth between the two of us. “It’s not about you, it’s about me. You shouldn’t be here. You need to let your mom take you home.”

“Dad, this wouldn’t even be happening if it wasn’t for me. Of course it’s about me. I’m fine.”

His fingers trembled around the papers he was holding, and I felt a stab of worry about him. “I’m fine,” I repeated, and he seemed to accept this.

We hung out in the back room until about a minute before the meeting was supposed to start. Then we headed out, Dad going to the long table where the board sat, taking his usual chair on the right-hand side of the president, and Mom taking a seat in the front row next to Dad’s secretary, her chin jutting up defiantly.

I stood awkwardly in the doorway, trying not to look around much, but I couldn’t help myself. People were everywhere. Every seat was full, the perimeter of the room lined with people standing, even more people spilling out into the
hallway. The TV camera rolled, and I blushed and held my breath when I saw it sweep over me. I pretended I didn’t know it was there, which was hard to do since it was so huge. Maybe the cameraman didn’t know who I was. Maybe to them I was just a part of the crowd.

I saw Vonnie’s mom and Rachel’s parents and my English teacher. I saw a reporter I recognized from TV and a bunch of people I’d seen around Central Office, including Mrs. Mosely. Principal Adams was there, and some students were milling around in the back, and a couple of really old people were sitting at attention, including the woman with the cane who Mrs. Mosely had helped up the stairs.

And there, in the last row, was Mack, sitting two rows behind Mrs. Mosely, his knees propped up on the seat back in front of him. He had one earbud out and dangling down the front of his shirt. He looked curious, amused.

I didn’t know him. I didn’t. But I knew enough about him. I knew that he’d lost far more in his life than I probably ever would in mine. I knew that he wasn’t whining about it, he wasn’t cowering or raging or blaming. He was moving on, doing his thing, keeping going.

And I also knew that he’d gotten the text, but he hadn’t looked, and somehow that was all I needed to know about him. He hadn’t looked.

I made my way to the last row and sat next to him. He acknowledged me by tipping a box of Tic Tacs into my palm.

The meeting started out pretty slow. The secretary read
the minutes; they went over some budget issues, talked about some textbook changes they wanted to make for next year. People shifted uncomfortably in their seats, crossing and uncrossing their legs while they waited for the board to get to the reason they were all there—the juicy stuff.

Finally the board president called for new business.

“Of course,” he said, gazing down at the sheet of paper in front of him, “there’s the matter of the, uh, call for the resignation of Superintendent Maynard for the, uh, mishandling of the, uh, texting issue at Chesterton High School. We’ll open the floor for comments.”

Mishandling? What did he mean by mishandling? Dad had confiscated phones, he’d contacted the police, and he—my own dad—had agreed to having me suspended from school. How else could he have handled it? This smelled like a setup to me. The president wanted Dad gone, and that was all there was to it.

A woman came up to the microphone and straightened her sweater. She leaned forward like she thought her mouth needed to be right on the microphone for her to be heard. The result was that all of her “P”s and “T”s and “S”s blew thunderously into our ears.

“My daughter goes to Chesterton High School,” she began, “and even though she didn’t receive the text, she was shown the photo by one of the boys in her class….”

My hands balled into fists as I listened to her talk about how damaged her daughter had been by the photo, and I could feel my shoulders begin to ache with tension. After
she was done speaking, another woman stood up, and then a man after her. Everyone somehow claimed to be a victim of what I’d done, and everyone was blaming Dad.

As the fourth person stood and ambled toward the microphone, Mack bumped my shoulder with his.

“Let’s get out of here,” he whispered.

I shook my head. “I need to be here.”

“I’ve got something we can do, though,” he said, and he leaned over to one side and picked up a rolled bunch of papers from the floor.

He unrolled one. It was a small poster. A poster made from the photo I’d taken for my pamphlet, with the shot of the pillow front and center:
A PICTURE’S WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS
.

Only he’d changed it. Off to the side of the pillow he’d added:
BUT THEY DON’T TELL THE WHOLE STORY.

I blinked and reread it a few times, a smile curving my lips upward. It was perfect.

He reached into his jean jacket pocket and pulled out two rolls of tape, then offered one to me. I took it.

Together, we stood up and, ignoring the crowd as they turned in their seats to look at us curiously, we began edging behind and around people and taping the posters to the walls.

“Young man,” the board president said, after it became clear that everyone was getting restless. “Young man, you may not disrupt this meeting….”

But we ignored him, too, hanging up one more, slapping
on pieces of tape as voices began to murmur around us, and then rushing out of the boardroom, laughing. My hands were shaking, but I felt great.

“Thank you for this,” I said, and we turned and taped two each on the meeting room’s doors before going outside to place folded copies under as many windshield wipers as we could in the parking lot. Then we sat on the bench and waited for the meeting to adjourn, Mack’s earbuds stretched between us, his fedora perched jauntily on top of his head.

Eventually, people began filing out of the building, some of them glaring at us, some looking amused. Mom and Dad were the last out of the building, their arms looped together as they walked. The board had taken a vote and decided, not unanimously, not to take further action at this time. Dad had never taken his resignation speech out of his sport coat pocket. He would not resign. At least not today. Not over this.

I bought my lunch. For the first time since the day I threw my pudding cup in the trash bin, I bought, and ate, lunch at my old table with my head up. A turkey sandwich, French fries, a brownie, chocolate milk. Like an elementary school kid.

A group of girls had called me a slut when they walked by my locker earlier in the day, and I didn’t know if it was the school board meeting the night before, or the posters, or the ice cream sundaes my dad had made to celebrate afterward, but suddenly I was just done. Done being everyone’s victim.

“Hey,” I called to their backs. They turned around. They were wearing snotty sneers on their faces, rolling their eyes as if it physically pained them to have to look at me. “You can call me whatever you want. It’s not going to
bother me anymore. But if calling me a slut makes you feel better about yourselves, then you should probably look into that, because you have a problem.”

They didn’t respond. Just shook their heads at me and marched off, whispering to each other. But I didn’t care. I felt triumphant anyway, and I had decided I was sick of being hungry because I was too afraid to eat lunch.

I took my tray to the cashier and punched in my ID number to pay, then stood in the doorway of the cafeteria looking in.

At first my brain saw it the way it had been for me for weeks now: frightening, cold, lonely. But I reminded myself that if I could hang posters at the board meeting last night, I could do anything. If I could call out those girls in the hallway, I could sit at a lunch table. I could take my life back. So I did.

I marched over to my old table, where Vonnie, Cheyenne, and Annie were all sitting. I pasted a smile on my face and sat down.

“Hey, Buttercup,” Vonnie said, pulling a bag of chips out of her Hello Kitty lunch bag.

“Hey,” I said, and I made sure I made eye contact with all three of them. I wanted Cheyenne and Annie to know that I was taking my space back, whether they liked it or not. I was done hiding, and if they couldn’t handle what that did to their precious reputations, that was their problem.

Cheyenne smiled. “Hi, Ash.” Annie followed with a smile of her own.

That was all it took.

I sat down and dug into my food, thinking it was the best meal I’d ever eaten in my whole life, and we chatted about school and homework and who was wearing what to the winter formal. Nobody brought up texts or naked photos or Kaleb or community service.

After a while, Rachel came to the table and stood over Cheyenne’s shoulder, a sour look on her face. She had to wait a few minutes before everyone noticed her.

“You’re not supposed to be sitting here,” she said.

I swallowed my bite of sandwich. “Actually,
you’re
not supposed to be here. I was here first, which means you have to stay away.”

She cocked her head to one side, like I was some kind of imbecile. “I sit here every day and you know it.”

I sipped my milk. “But today I got here first, which means you have to find somewhere else to sit. Which is what I’ve been doing. Only I’ve been doing it with a lot less drama.”

“Von? For real?” Rachel whined, putting one hand on her hip like she was challenging Vonnie to kick me out. I held my breath, waiting to see what Vonnie’s response was going to be. I kept my food in midchew, not daring to swallow. Vonnie had told me she was going to stop hanging around with Rachel. This would be the real test of our friendship. If Vonnie chose Rachel, I was done with her.

“I’m sitting with Ashleigh,” Vonnie said, and Cheyenne and Annie nodded in agreement. I swallowed, breathed.

Rachel squinted at Vonnie’s back, a look of total hatred,
and then huffed. “Whatever,” she mumbled, and turned her back on us as she scanned the cafeteria for somewhere else to sit.

A part of me felt victorious. I’d won a small battle. My friends had stood behind me in their own tentative way. And if they hadn’t, I’d been prepared to go find better friends. I was owning my existence. Maybe for the first time ever.

Vonnie and the girls went back to their lunch and chitchat, but I zoned most of it out, only adding to the conversation when someone asked me something specific. Mostly I thought about Rachel. About what had happened between us. It needed resolving.

When the bell rang, we all sprang up out of our chairs. I dumped the garbage and set my tray on the conveyor belt, and then turned and peered through the crowd for Rachel.

I finally found her, leaving the cafeteria with a couple of girls I didn’t know. She turned the corner and I followed her, catching up with her as she reached her locker.

“Rachel,” I said.

She turned, her face going from curious to disgusted instantly. “What is your deal?” she said. “You’re supposed to stay away from me.”

“For my protection, Rachel, not yours. Remember? I didn’t do anything to you. It was the other way around. But it doesn’t matter now. I think we need to talk.”

She leaned back against her closed locker. The girl at the locker next to her tried to look nonchalant, but it was
totally obvious that she was listening to us. “What do we need to talk about?” Rachel asked in a bored voice.

I took a deep breath. “I don’t ever want to be your friend again, but I think it’ll be impossible for us to always avoid each other. So I know it’s in the court order that you have to stay away from me, but I honestly don’t care if you don’t.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, so you’re all bigger than me now, is that it?”

“No, but… what you did really messed up my life. And I thought we were friends, which made it even worse. I still don’t know why you did it. But I’m sick of thinking about it. I’m sick of my life being about that picture. So if you come around, I won’t make a big deal out of it. I want life to get back to normal. I’ll just… ignore you.” I couldn’t offer her friendship, but this seemed like the closest I could come to it.

The girl next to us finally shut her locker and moved on. The crowd in the hallway was getting thinner; soon it would just be the two of us standing there. I noticed Mr. Green, the French teacher, standing in his doorway eyeing us warily, as if he expected a fight to break out.

“It was supposed to be a joke,” Rachel said. “I wasn’t trying to be mean.”

“Well, it wasn’t funny,” I said. “But I’m over it now. What you say or do doesn’t matter to me anymore.”

I turned and walked away from her, and it felt so good to leave her back there, leave her with the understanding that I didn’t need a court order to keep her out of my life. Leave her with the knowledge that no matter what “joke”
she played on me, I would come out on top. Fighting Rachel only spurred her on. Telling her that she didn’t matter—and really meaning it—was the best way to disarm her.

She wouldn’t give me any grief anymore.

I was a long way from peace, but I was at least one step closer.

After school, I told Mack all about what had happened, as we walked around the building taking down the posters, per Mosely’s orders. He laughed out loud when I told him about the look on Rachel’s face when she realized I wasn’t going to kiss her ass anymore.

When we were done, we went back to room 104 and straight to our computers. I only had a few hours left to finish my pamphlet. My community service was almost complete.

But before I got to work, I rolled up a few of the posters and slipped them into my backpack. I planned to hang them in my bedroom. My time in room 104 was about to end, but I didn’t want to forget it. Not all of it.

Mrs. Mosely brought in pizza for my graduation day.

I stood up in front of the semicircle of chairs, my stomach growling for some pepperoni.

Kenzie’s seat was empty because she’d gone into labor the night before. Nobody knew if she’d had her baby yet or not, even though Angel kept texting her to find out. Kenzie never answered the texts, which led us to all speculate on whether that meant she was in labor at that moment, and we all joked about how we felt sorry for the nurses who had to deal with Kenzie in pain.