CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
“If I know what love is, it is because of you.”
~Herman Hesse
PAST
Something awful had happened when we started going to high school. It wasn’t immediate, more of a gradual shift, but nonetheless detrimental to me.
Dante was physical and he always seemed to need an aggressive outlet for it so, much to my chagrin, he was often in some sport or other. Football was his favorite so every fall from the time we were in sixth grade, he had practice. Every year practice seemed to eat up more and more of his time.
I tried to take it well, but I was so jealous of his time and attention that I didn’t. But I did try.
I started taking drama after school myself, and it suited me. My stutter still plagued me at the worst of times, so I never got a speaking role in the school plays, but I was happy to fill extra spots and work on the set.
I thought for a while that it would work. We both had things to do, opposite interests that took up our time.
I’d finish drama and go watch him from the bleachers, sometimes I’d do my homework, sometimes I’d read, sometimes I’d just ogle him, and then we’d either drive or walk home together.
On paper it sounded great, but that’s not what happened.
In high school it became apparent that he was quite good at everyone’s favorite sport and for some reason it started to matter to people and seemingly overnight he was one of the popular kids.
It was awful for me. I was no more popular than ever. In fact when jealous girls got wind that I was his girlfriend and just how long we’d been an item, and how smitten he was with me, I was more hated than ever, which was saying a lot.
I started getting into fights again. Bad ones. And I was old enough now that I was getting in serious trouble for it. I almost got kicked out of school for one incident with a girl in the locker room (a girl who unfortunately also happened to be the daughter of one of the local sheriffs) that involved her dumping Gatorade on my head and me slamming her face into the locker.
It’d predictably started with the familiar mocking chant of, “Hey, trashcan girl.”
I was resigned to the fact that I would never live this down. It was a part of me. It was a thing I had to own that would always make me an outcast.
I was odd. I had been shaped by uncommon, un-relatable things. This I knew.
And since I couldn’t get into a fight every time I heard that, even with my temper, I ignored the first verbal jab.
We’d just finished gym class. Normally I liked gym. I didn’t talk to any of the girls in my period, but there weren’t many kids I talked to. I was good at being a loner. It suited me. The things I heard the girls talk about couldn’t have interested me less.
All they seemed to do was complain about things they could easily change or things that were so insignificant they sounded like petty brats for complaining about them.
One didn’t like her thighs. One hated her butt. One was too flat-chested, her best friend had huge boobs that she hated.
This one had fat fingers, that one had big feet. One complained for an entire mile that her mom had cut off her credit card when she’d overcharged it. Another couldn’t believe her daddy had bought her a used car.
Oh the humanity.
I had no patience for it. I didn’t feel like humoring them with their petty, wonderful lives with parents that loved them and normal problems.
Some of us had real problems. Ones that weren’t skin deep. A real problem was waking up every day to a world that had cast you aside, a world that had no place for you, with peers that hated you and cards stacked against you.
A real problem was being trash and having everyone around you know it and point it out regularly.
A real problem was being fundamentally unlovable. Struggling everyday not to hate yourself.
So I tried my best to tune them out and apply myself to whatever physical thing they had us doing. Today it had been tennis, which I liked just fine. The smaller the teams the better. I wasn’t the best team player.
I was actually in a good mood before she’d said that. I was a terrible student, so P.E. was naturally my favorite class, and it was last period. Now I was changing fast because I got to see Dante for a bit before he went to practice and I went to drama.
But then, “Hey, trashcan girl.” The words had me setting my jaw, a familiar feeling moving through me.
My mind flashed to that infamous trashcan, my baby self somewhere inside of it.
I had no real idea what it’d looked like, but I’d obsessed about every little detail of it. I imagined that dumpster, lid closed. I don’t know why, but I always imagined that it was only half-full. How else could my mother have fit a baby into it?
I imagined my baby self somewhere inside of it. Sometimes I was wrapped in dirty blankets and set neatly on top of the trash. Sometimes I wore only a diaper, was buried halfway down, and they’d had to dig for me when I’d been discovered. I liked to fantasize that some kindly paramedic had picked me up tenderly, maybe even cried for me.
Some of these imaginings came from nightmares, some merely my imagination, but the taunts always brought it all back.
Still, I was going to ignore her. I wouldn’t let her waste any of my precious Dante time.
“Did you hear me?” the girl said, her hand shoving lightly at my shoulder.
I shut my locker and turned to level an unpleasant look at her. “Leave me alone,” I said simply. It really was that simple. Why couldn’t they just leave me the hell alone?
She sneered at me. I tried to place who she even was. Brown hair, medium height, familiar weasel-like features.
Oh Lord, I was oblivious. I’d been going to school with her since third grade.
Mandy, I recalled. Her dad was a sheriff, I remembered too. Cops made me nervous, so of course I’d made a note of that.
She took a long swig of her red Gatorade, wiped her mouth, and asked snottily, “What’s your deal? Is Dante really dating you?”
“Yes,” I said tonelessly. Maybe if I was as boring as possible she’d leave me alone before I lost my temper.
“Since when?” she asked.
I didn’t know how to answer that even if I’d wanted to, which I didn’t. I’d been devoted to him since that first fateful meeting outside of the vice principal’s office.
“Answer me, trashcan girl!”
“No,” I snapped back. Hello, temper. If she’d wanted an actual answer, she had a lot to learn about me.
“What the hell does he see in you?” she sneered.
I eyed her, top to bottom, letting her see in my face what I thought of her. Not one attractive thing about her, inside or out. “As opposed to what, you? Keep dreaming.”
She gasped and dumped the contents of her Gatorade bottle over my head.
Loud giggles echoed in every corner of the locker room. Apparently a lot of the girls had enjoyed that. As I’ve said, I was far from popular.
I didn’t even think, my body just reacted. I grabbed a handful of the hair at her nape and bam, slammed her face against the locker.
On the tail of that, only one week later, I almost went to Juvie for an incident with the same girl. Again in the locker room, she (bruises still on her face) and three other girls snuck up behind me, slammed my face into the lockers, and dragged me to the toilet, then proceeded to try, with a stress on the word try, to dunk my head into the bowl.
I fought like a wildcat.
Here’s the kind of fighter I am: I don’t care if you’re bigger than me. I don’t care if you’re so massive you could take me out with one punch. Hell, I don’t even care if there are three of you to my one. I will take you on, and I will keep swinging until someone either knocks me out, drags me away, or kills me.
I fought them like a wildcat, and they were not fighters. They were little princesses who thought that they knew what revenge was.
When they realized I was going to struggle, that I wasn’t going to make it easy on them, they started slapping at me, smacking at my head and face like that was going to do anything but piss me off more.
I clenched my hands into fists and started punching.
It wasn’t my first fight or even my tenth, and as far as grappling went, I wrestled with Dante, a boy twice my bodyweight, for fun.
These girls were nothing.
I didn’t lash out indiscriminately. I’d learned a long time ago to go for the spots that debilitate.
The first girl I punched hard in the nose. I heard a crunch and blood started spurting everywhere.
One down.
The second girl, Mandy, the sheriff’s princess daughter who had freaking started it, I kneed hard in the stomach because she was almost on top of me, still trying to get me into the stall that I’d just escaped from.
She doubled over. The third girl was grabbing my hair, trying to pull me away from her friend, but I grabbed the side of Mandy’s head and viciously slammed it sideways, right smack into where the stall protruded sharply.
Third girl started backing away when she realized that both of her friends were crying huddles on the floor, but I wasn’t having it.
I stalked after her. When she turned to start running away, I grabbed the back of her long black hair and yanked.
She went flying like a rag doll and ended up on her back.
I was raising my foot up to stomp on her when the gym teacher walked in. She was a big, athletic woman, and she had to physically drag me away from the girl before I stopped fighting.
Of course I got blamed for all of it. I’d broken the first girl’s nose. Mandy they thought had a concussion, and I assumed she did. I’d smashed her head hard into the stall.
The cops were called, three besides the usual on-campus officer, and they took turns threatening me, chewing me out, and trying to scare me.
When I tried to argue that they had started it, I’d been defending myself, and there had been three of them, my stutter predictably came out to play.
I almost decked one of them, a large man that kept getting right in my face, close enough that I could feel his spittle and smell his breath, but I managed to control my temper at least that much.
After about an hour of them harassing me behind a closed door (they’d borrowed the principal’s office to interrogate me), I heard a commotion outside, someone getting loud. Someone losing their temper.
My chest warmed and I felt instantly safer. I even managed to get out a few sentences through my stutter. “Th-th-they attacked m-me! There were three of them. H-h-h-h-how can you not see that there were th-th-th-three of them?”
One of the cops (the second girl’s father!) took a menacing step toward me. “Are you calling my daughter a liar?”
Oh no. I was going to lose it. Nothing got my temper going hotter than injustice like that, the supposed mediator in the situation blood related to one of the culprits!
I nodded at him, glaring. “Y-y-y-yes. H-h-h-how can you deny it? Th-th-there were three of them!”
Dante crashed into the room, the principal, a small middle-aged man, right behind him, grabbing at his arm, clearly trying but failing miserably to hold him back.
“Are you fucking kidding me?!” he started shouting the second he cleared the door. “Four male officers harassing one teenage girl behind a closed door? You can’t detain her like this! You need to arrest her or let her go, but just so you know, my lawyer will be here in ten minutes and Vivian Durant will be here in five. You might want to start acting like real cops now.”
I ate up every rage-filled inch of him with complete adoration.
I don’t know how he made it across the room to me, it wasn’t easy, no one wanted to let him, but he made his way to my side, touching my cheek lightly, crouching down beside my chair.
“You okay, tiger?” he asked me softly.
Even with how angry I was that made me smile.
In short order Gram showed and barely kept them from taking me into custody.
It was the first time I’d gotten to see her in action. She was a glorious sight to behold. She had a way of declaring a thing and making it so. She was like Dante, the opposite of me, able to articulate exactly what she meant to with absolute, precise effect.
I made a promise to myself right then and there to grow up to be just like her.