“Gross,” Jasmine said, making a gagging sound before zipping her pink Abercrombie jacket up. “Leave it to her to be indecent in public like that.”
The pair finally broke their kiss, with Chad walking away in the opposite direction, leaving Courtney leaning against the lockers with a dreamy smile upon her face. Then she looked over and gave me an excited wave before bounding up.
“Hey, Aubs! Are we still going over our chem notes today at lunch? I am so not ready for the test on Monday,” Courtney said, either unaware or uncaring about the animosity from the other girls.
“I thought you already had plans,” Jasmine said with a coy tilt of her head. “In the boys’ change room.”
McKinley made a lewd blow-job gesture. The girls snickered as Courtney’s face turned pink.
Courtney looked over to me, eyes round and pleading, waiting for me to do something, say anything, to stick up for her. My stomach sank, very aware of how precarious my standing within the clique was. One wrong word and I was back to eating lunch in the hallway alone, or third-wheeling with Courtney and Chad.
Despite the sick feeling in my stomach, I tossed a braid over my shoulder, lifted my chin, then said, “You know he’s only with you because he thinks he’ll get laid after the school dance, right? Because of your reputation.”
Her totally false reputation. Courtney was a virgin; she’d never even seen a real penis before. But that didn’t matter—the truth never did, not in high school, when the rumour mill was far more interesting than facts.
Courtney looked at me as if she’d been slapped. Here I was—the girl who’d been her project partner every art class since grade three, who’d joined the Librarian Club with her in grade five and skipped every recess to shelve books, who’d journaled about our lives and futures late into the night at all those sleepless slumber parties—joining in with the others, bullying her, belittling her, calling her a slut.
Tears welled in her eyes and Courtney shoved past me and escaped down the hall. The other girls laughed, and I tried my best to smile through the pain of knowing what I’d just done.
“That was a good one!” McKinley had said, tugging on one of my braids.
“You are totally coming to the sleepover tonight,” Jasmine stated.
“Yes! You have to come,” Sakura added.
My soured stomach from throwing Courtney under the bus momentarily subsided at being invited to the coveted sleepover that I’d been excluded from my entire life. I managed to smile and nod. “I’ll be there!”
“Do you think you can sneak us some booze?” McKinley asked.
“Uh... yeah, I’m sure my mom won’t notice if I take some out of the pantry,” I said. If there was anything my mom was good for, it was having an abundance of liquor lying around.
“Perfect! We can go over our plan to break up Chad and Courtney.” McKinley smiled.
I tilted my head. “Break them up?”
“Yeah,” Jasmine tutted. “We can’t let a guy like him take a girl like her to the dance. She’s such a weirdo.”
“He needs to take one of us,” Sakura agreed.
“Which is why we need you to get one more thing,” McKinley added, looking over at me.
“Sure,” I said. “Anything.”
The girls looked at each other, then back to me with mischievous smiles. “You need to get a strand of her hair.”
And I did. It was easy enough, since she’d left a sweater at my house weeks ago. We used that hair to cast a spell on her to make her awkward and weird so Chad would break up with her, trying to ruin her life in the process.
I was a bad friend and a mean girl and a bully. No wonder the curse backfired. I got everything I deserved.
The bathroom door opens and Ebele walks in, startling me from my reverie. “Aubrey? You’re white as a ghost. Well, whiter than normal.”
Despite myself, I laugh, the contrast of her deep ebony and my pasty paleness especially stark in the bright light of the bathroom. “Sorry. I just needed a minute.”
Ebele places a hand on my back and meets my gaze through the mirror, her brown eyes full of understanding. “Events likethis can be deeply triggering, and I’m sorry I didn’t give enough of a warning.”
I try to shrug.
“I’m sure you have trauma in your past, as we all do, that makes things like this difficult. The fact that kids experience this at all reminds me how important our jobs are. We can help. The media is in a frenzy over this. People are looking for answers. The government will be more open to granting funding for school programs to reduce bullying for LGBTQIA youth. We need to move quickly and get our projects together. Do you understand?”
