Unfriended (14 page)

“Uh, yeah,” I said. Man, those eyelashes are seriously like Mr. Snuffleupagus on
Sesame Street
's eyelashes. “All for you.”

“I'll imagine it,” Truly whispered. “The whole time they're yanking out the stitches, I'll close my eyes and imagine the—what flavor would it be, if you had a lollipop to give me?”

“Do you like watermelon?”

“My favorite.”

“Mine, too,” I said, looking down at my gripped fingers so I would stop staring at Truly's eyelashes. “I would give you a watermelon lollipop, if I could.”

“Thanks, Jack,” she said.

“You're welcome.”

Then she didn't say anything else and I didn't want to ruin the perfection of that minute by accidentally saying well, it's funny you should mention a gift I might give you because I have one that I already bought and it is in my sock drawer right under a pile of tube socks. Don't worry; they're clean.

Toward the end of recess when my butt was really getting itchy from sitting so long on the brick steps, I stood up.

She got up, too, and said, “Well, see ya.”

I am the second fastest kid in eighth grade, and Truly was limping. She is not fast even on her best day so I completely could have caught up with her. But I didn't try. I let her go. I watched her hobble toward the door and then push it open. Her narrow shoulders were slumped. I didn't know what was going on with her but obviously it was a lot, maybe more even than just worry about getting stitches out. And no imaginary lollipop from me seemed likely to lift that heaviness off her.

Maybe not even a very delicate and special bracelet could.

It's possible that I am a nicer person than I otherwise might have been because of some stuff I have gone through, as my mom says, and maybe everybody, even a person as sweet as Truly, has to go through some tough times in life. And bear them alone. My mom is really smart about stuff like life and hardships, so I am sure that is the truth. We have to appreciate our troubles, Mom says.

Maybe Truly just wanted to get away from me because she thinks I am a fat kid whose name should be Jumbo. I don't think so. I don't think that's it. I think she was just coping with some stuff privately and needed me to respect her solitude. I don't think she would think mean thoughts about me.

But how can I know? How can anybody ever really know what another person is thinking inside his or her own skull? I thought Russell was my best friend. I thought my dad was going to snuggle me up and say
good night, sports fans
to me every night until I was grown.

Obviously I had no idea.

NATASHA

“MAYBE TRY TO
forget about it, Natasha,” Lulu whispered to me. “Let it go.”

“No, it's not that,” I whispered back. Urgh. She can be so thick sometimes. But she was my best shot, the most gullible and agreeable, so I had to keep trying. We were at the back of the math room, trying to avoid the sub's occasionally lifted eyes. Mrs. Gerstein. Lulu kept her normally cartoon-expressive face unmoving, tilted down toward her desk.

“I just . . . ” I tried sounding more sweet. “I wanted to warn you about Truly.”

“Warn me?”

Yeah, warn you, you jerk. Could you give me a frigging break? “She's . . .”

Mrs. Gerstein looked up, so I bit my pencil and pretended to work on a stupid math problem until she sighed and went back to the novel she was reading.

“Truly felt terrible,” Lulu whispered out the side of her puffy-lipped little mouth. “She did.”

“She should! Not that I care,” I whispered. “But come on, what kind of weasel posts a nasty thing like—”

“Maybe she was trying to be funny and it backfired,” Lulu whispered.

“You don't know her like I do,” I whispered back.

“Girls?” Mrs. Gerstein said. She's completely the best sub ever, because she gives exactly zero craps about what the students do, as long as we stay in our seats and don't bother her. Still, you want to keep it down so she doesn't feel obligated to take an interest in us.

“Sorry,” I said, smiling at her. She nodded her fat head and went back to reading. We should make
WE LOVE MRS. GERSTEIN
T-shirts. That will be one of my projects if all goes according to plan and I fix the social mess in this stupid school. We could sell the T-shirts and raise money for an awesome middle-school graduation party, and everybody will be so into it. Or maybe for some charity. Everybody loves charity.

“Well, why did you want to bring her in, if she's such a terror?” Lulu asked me. “You're the one who said she was great, we'd love her.”

I shook my head. Jack was sitting right in front of me, unmoving as a boulder. I couldn't tell if he was eavesdropping or not. He is clearly Team Truly, though, so I had to be careful. Luckily Brooke, Clay, Evangeline, and of course Truly are in advanced math, so they couldn't butt in. Just us dummies, here. Still, I wanted to be focused and quick with Lulu. I had spent all night thinking this through but I still wasn't sure it would work.

“I wanted to give her a fresh chance,” I whispered. “It's been a long time and, I figure, everybody deserves a second shot, right?”

Lulu is a big believer in doing the right thing. Also generosity. If anything would win her over, it would be this, I thought. Or else Plan B, which I wasn't launching until later.

Lulu nodded. “Sure.”

I nodded, imitating Lulu's solemn nodding technique. Not to mock her, but just, it's kind of contagious. Also kind of funny. So serious. Please. Like she's a judge, passing judgment on me. Thank you, Your Honor.

“But I guess I was wrong.” My voice was full of sorrow.

“Girls?” Mrs. Gerstein said again.

“Sorry,” I said as sweet as I could. “We're trying to work through this problem together.”

“Try independently, please,” Mrs. Gerstein said.

“Sure,” I answered. “Sorry, Mrs. Gerstein.”

She picked up her novel again, though I am pretty sure her eyes were closed in front of it.

Lulu wrote in her notebook, which she tipped toward me.
What did she say when she called you yesterday
?

???
I wrote back, in my own notebook.
SHE NEVER CALLED.
All caps. I never write in all caps. All caps means yelling. But too bad.

The bell rang so we got up and gathered our books.

“She did,” Lulu whispered. “After your mom called her mom. Truly was really upset and she said she felt terrible, and she wanted to call you and apologize. So she did.”

I shook my head. “Nope. I had my phone with me the whole afternoon.” That last part at least was true.

Lulu's unwaxed eyebrows approached each other on her forehead. She wasn't buying it. Damn, I was getting all muddled for no reason. Should always stay as close to the truth as possible to avoid exactly this. “Clay was texting with me,” I said. “You can ask him if you don't believe me.”

We got to the corridor and turned left in the Bedlam of between-classes. “Are you sure?” Lulu asked.

“Completely.”

“She said she apologized.”

“Never happened.” Give me a break; she tried one damn time to call. Wow. Sainthood for her. Once and hanging up without leaving even a message is pretty frigging close to never calling. What if I didn't have her number programmed into my phone so I didn't know who was calling? Or maybe I was texting with somebody and didn't notice? It's practically the same as if she never made any effort at all.

“That's intense,” Lulu whispered.

“I'm telling you,” I said. “Totally intense. This is exactly what I'm saying.”

“That's just nuts,” Lulu said.

“It's my fault,” I whispered, bending down toward Lulu's shiny-haired head.

“No,” she said. “It's so not.”

“I should have known better,” I said. “And I hate to say this, but I honestly fear she's going to look for another victim, now that she succeeded in getting me kicked out of the Table.”

“You really think she'd—”

“Or maybe she's not done hurting me yet. I don't know.”

“Let me talk with Brooke,” Lulu said.

“You don't have to,” I said humbly. “I probably deserve it, though not for whatever reason Truly cooked up to poison Brooke against me. But just, like, for inflicting her on you all. I only hope she's still not done with me, and not turning her sights on you, or—”

Lulu put her heavy hand on my arm. “This isn't right,” she said. “I'm gonna be late for Spanish but—don't worry. Okay? I got this.”

“You're the best,” I called after her. I was running late, too, obviously, but I took an extra few seconds to watch Lulu dash away, all full of righteous mission, with no idea what was ahead.

Because Plan B was only a few hours away.

HAZEL

AFTER MY PARENTS
(holding hands; weird) and I got home from visiting my recovering grandmother in the hospital, where she is alive, conscious, and full of complaints about the incompetence of nurses she wants fired immediately, I checked all the sites and accounts I've been logging into. And there it was. The kind of thing I'd been expecting, waiting for, thinking if nobody got to it soon, I'd have to do it. Sometimes it feels like I have to do
everything.

Do I have to be
everybody
?

Not this time! Such a relief. Somebody took a bit of initiative, finally. And I had to admit, it was a good one. I was impressed. I wouldn't have guessed Natasha was up to it, but maybe I'd been underestimating her.

It was Natasha's page on tellmethetruth.com. She had asked:
Does everybody hate me?

She'd posted it just half an hour before I logged in. Five minutes after she posted that pathetic question, somebody posted, anonymously of course
: Yes

And then somebody else (or maybe the same person, pretending to be somebody else) added, one minute later, under it:
Everybody hates you! You have no friends AT ALL.

And then, somebody else (or was it the same one person; impossible to know for sure but one could guess) added two minutes after that:
Loser

I didn't write anything. But I left the window open. Watching. Waiting. I had a feeling I knew who posted each of those things.

I had a feeling they were all posted by the same person, in fact.

A tricky move. High risk, but smart. Respect on that one, respect where respect was clearly due. Because I felt pretty strongly that person, the person who posted all three horrible, mean, bullying answers was the same person who posted the question:

Natasha.

It was kind of brilliant, I thought, in its demented horribleness. She set herself up and then punched herself, virtually, in the face. In public.

If I was right, and I knew I was right, Natasha was waiting in front of a screen across town. Waiting in her room, a room I'd never seen but could imagine was probably cluttered and had a mirror or three, maybe recently redecorated in beige in an attempt at sophistication that failed because of the collages made with her (ex)-friends and the mess of clothes she probably had scattered across her floor. So undisciplined. I sat staring at my laptop's screen in my uncluttered pink mother-decorated-when-I-was-in-elementary-school-and-couldn't-object room. Natasha, I was certain, was across town in basically the same position as me—staring at the same screen, looking at her question and the three hideous responses to it.

Waiting.

Waiting for other people, people other than herself (and me; of course she didn't know I was logged on, or that I existed, particularly) to notice the post she'd put up, and the horrid responses she'd also put up, and spring into action.

How long could it take? In cyberspace, of course, each minute feels like forever. Refresh, refresh, s
omebody respond! Come on!

It took a full hour.

Finally, a response popped up, signed, from Lulu. Nice girl, Lulu. Not particularly interesting or creative, not an artistic type, but you never know. She's endured hardships and might have an ethical core. So I wasn't surprised to see her post first.

This is cyberbullying and whoever posted this: you know it can be traced rite?
(Her misspelling, not mine.)

No response from Natasha or, well, Natasha. Other-Natasha. Bullying, imaginary-friend Natasha. I stopped pretending to do my homework and cupped my chin in my hands, to watch. A few seconds later, solid good Lulu added:
Natasha—everybody loves you. Don't listen to this troll.

I waited some more, listening to my parents down the hall chatting together for the first time in a while. I wasn't sure what to make of
that,
but I was pretty sure the texting and screen capture and other connecty circuits were burning up between Lulu's house and the other Popular Table kids. It felt like watching popcorn in an uncovered pot, waiting for the little kernels to start exploding.

And, go.