I recoiled and wrapped my arms around myself. Even from this distance, I could see Kellie start to shake. Though she didn’t move. She stared back at the woman and turned her chin upward, letting her hair fall back, out of her face. She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t run, either.
“You’re nothing but trash.” The woman’s voice was so loud that everyone in the store seemed to have heard, stopping and staring, but no one doing a thing to intervene. “A lying piece of trash.”
I should be clear: This was before I’d seen those flyers at the pharmacy. Before I’d learned about the Sarah rumors. I had no idea why this woman was screaming at an injured teenager in the middle of the grocery store. And it wasn’t just the one woman in the floral dress, either. There were others gathering around, most glaring, a few hurling curse words at her.
It wasn’t something I’d ever seen before—a group of grown adults surrounding a teenage girl, talking to her like she was a cockroach, a vile thing to be squished by whatever means necessary.
“Kellie.” A sharp voice came from the front of the store. A tall woman with strawberry-blond hair and thick-rimmed glasses was looking back at the scene from the checkout line. Even through her lenses, I could tell she had an expression of anger and shock on her face. “Kellie, honey, let’s go.”
The woman, I realized, was her mother.
Kellie took a few steps, breaking free from the small crowd, but as she moved toward the checkout counter, one of the bystanders spat at her.
“Go to hell,” the man, who must’ve been in his forties, hissed.
“Kellie,” her mother said again, her voice now tinged with a touch of fear.
Kellie kept her head down as she hurried over to her mother, who was grabbing the freshly bagged groceries as fast as she could. She shoved one of the bags into Kellie’s good arm and began steering her toward the exit.
But it’s the moment after that that sticks with me. The moment just before Mrs. Gaynor pushed open the glass door. In that split second, Kellie looked back, and our eyes met. I don’t think she knew I was there until that moment. And as she recognized me, her eyes narrowed and her lips twisted into a sneer.
No one had ever looked at me with the same sort of fury that Kellie Gaynor did in that moment. It was so powerful, so visceral, that I flinched. She could have slapped me and it would have been less startling.
When I think of Kellie, I will always remember that look on her face as she left the grocery store.
And I’ll remember that I stayed quiet, even when I had plenty of chances to speak up.
I hadn’t heard from Ashley since the text messages we’d exchanged during my visit with Eden. I’d thought about calling her, but I wasn’t sure what I would say. Especially once I knew that Brother Lloyd had talked about me to his congregation. And if her little sister was part of the crowd that had decided to hate me, I worried she had, too.
I found out soon enough.
Miles and I had driven to the next town over after school one day. If we were going to prom, we both needed something to wear. So we’d made our way to one of the strip malls that had, on one end, a place where Miles could rent a tux with the money his grandmother had excitedly given him when she found out he was taking “such a nice girl” to prom. On the other end, there was a consignment shop where I hoped I’d find an affordable dress that I could sell back in a couple of weeks.
Mom didn’t have the money to buy me a new dress, not even from one of the department stores, and I was trying to save every penny I could for my move to Los Angeles. But buying used clothing isn’t really the shameful thing in Virgil County that it is elsewhere. A lot of girls at VCHS would be getting their dresses secondhand. Being poor—or at least on the very bottom of lower middle class—was kind of the norm. In fact, you were more likely to be teased if it appeared as though you’d spenttoo muchmoney.
Anyway, I chose a spot in the middle of the parking lot so we could each go to our separate destinations and reconvene once we’d finished shopping.
“Meet at the pizza place in two hours?” I asked, pointing at the restaurant roughly in the middle of the strip.
He raised one thick eyebrow. “Twohours?”
“Listen,” I said. “You’re going to walk in, probably get measured, and try on a couple of tuxes that will all look the same and be done with it. I have way more options to deal with. And since I’m shopping secondhand, the sizing is a little less straightforward. You’ve got it easy. I need two hours. Which, really, all things considered, isn’t that much. Oh my God, if Sarah was here …” I trailed off as that old, familiar pain seized my chest.
Sarah would have loved shopping for prom. Not just for her dress but mine, too. She would have dragged me to every store within an hour’s drive. She would have taken pictures and notes on her phone so we could compare and make the perfect choice. It would’ve involved weeks of shopping.
But instead, it was just going to be me, shopping in one store, without her.
Miles covered my hand with his own and squeezed, anchoring me the way he always did. “Okay. Two hours.” He paused. “I have a question, though.”
“Yeah?”
“Should we … Are we going to coordinate?” he asked, his words slipping out in a quiet slur. “You know. Colors.”
“You mean, like … match? Your tie or whatever matching my dress?”
He shrugged. “I guess.”
“Do we have to?”
