Rise Page 5

  It feels like there are two of me, and they are very much at odds: there’s the me who keeps mentally going back to the bare mattress to search for answers, who tries to turn back time, to have stayed home that day, to erase those awful faces from my memory. This me searches in vain, clawing like a dog furiously digging in the earth for his bone, to figure out any clue I could’ve missed that would have predicted the events of that night. But there is also the me who comes to school each day, pretending none of it ever happened, hell-bent on getting good grades, and who uses classwork as the one buoy to cling to in an otherwise merciless and overpowering sea of pure, unadulterated shit.

  But being in school feels like living in purgatory. I try to keep a low profile in the corridor as I walk from class to class, but it doesn’t stop some senior girls from slamming me into the walls and saying mockingly, “Whoops!” as they run away in delight. And sometimes they don’t run at all and instead form a human fort around me, staring me down like wolves about to pounce, cornering me into submission. “You better watch your back, Slutton,” one of them snarls, her teeth gritting, her brows arched into wrath. Her face is so close to mine that I can see the hardened clusters of blackheads on the sides of her nose. The rest of the girls seem fueled by her antagonism, curling their upper lips at me.

  When they finally walk away, I feel like yelling out “Cowardly bitches!” but I don’t dare draw any more attention to myself, and instead hide in the bathroom. I close and lock the door and slide down to the cold floor, where I shut my eyes and pray for it to stop. I pray for these girls to leave me alone, to stop drawing attention to me, to stop attacking me. I pray for this crazy rumor to dissipate, that people will stop caring about it, that it will just fizzle like everything else does. I stay in the bathroom as long as I need to come back to myself, but panic is with me for the rest of the day.

  Every day I receive venomous texts from numbers I don’t recognize. In these messages, I am called a slut, a whore, a hoe, a hooker, a cunt, a stupid bitch, sometimes all at once. I am called ugly, retarded, crazy, and screwed up. I am told that I smell, that I’m an embarrassment, that I don’t deserve shit. I am told to shut the fuck up, to crawl into a hole, to crawl back into my mother’s womb even, and also to jump off a bridge. When I open my locker, sometimes I am met with crumpled pieces of paper that contain drawings of stick figures in sexual situations, the words “Paige Slutton” accompanying every illustration to make sure I know that the female figure is meant to be me. When I come home at the end of each day, there are often globs of saliva nested in my hair. One time I come home to streams of toilet paper all over our house and condoms hung from the trees like Christmas ornaments. My parents just think it’s the neighborhood kids being pranksters and don’t take it seriously—and I don’t have the heart to tell them otherwise.

  I could survive if the disdain simply held its course—but it deepens and worsens with every passing day until I feel like I want to die. It used to be that I just got the silent treatment from people, but now it feels like they literally want to see me go away. There’s something about my presence that inspires a unique kind of hate in some of these kids—like they can’t fathom me even being around.

  One afternoon, as I’m walking from AP bio to lunch, something smacks me in the back of the head. I turn around to see what’s happened, only to find that a plastic bag of stinking garbage has been hurled at me, and a gaggle of senior girls giggle and run down the hall, pleased with themselves. It feels like there is a game being played, in which whoever is most successful in assaulting me wins. If I try to fight back, it will only fuel their fire. If I tell on them, it will get worse. My only option is to ignore it all, but with each little attack, I shrivel into a darker and blurrier shadow of myself.

  And it’s one thing that the mean students are cruel beyond words—but even the ones who don’t do anything stare and whisper, like I’m a newly unveiled freak at a sideshow. I begin to wonder: What if there really is a video of me out there that people have already seen?

  I devise new routes in school to avoid assaults in the corridor. I show up to class as late as possible, and take the last desk all the way in the back, which also allows me to slip out before class ends, so I can walk freely—alone—down the halls. I use sunglasses and headphones to shield me, and I blare Eminem’s “When I’m Gone” on repeat so loudly that his flow fills me and drowns out my life. I think about death as the one thing that could rid me of this pain. And the only thing that stops me from moving on this idea is the understanding that if I die, the pain won’t actually end, it will transfer to my parents for life. I can’t do that to them. And even though I try to ignore the call of death and dying, it leers at me, like a crooked, bony finger summoning me close, to the point that I think not only of ending my own life, but also even fantasize about showing up to school with a shotgun and killing everyone in sight.

  In classes, I’m a ghost. I walk into English lit one day and sit at a desk, and right away the girl sitting next to me—clearly settled in already, with her notebook and textbooks open and pencil in hand—closes her books, gathers her things, stands up, and goes to sit at another desk, several rows behind me, as if the very state of proximity to me might render her inferior. I don’t enter the cafeteria anymore during lunch, because the stares and the pointing are far worse than the deafening silence that comes with sitting alone. I take my lunch to the bathroom, my one safe space, and lock the door behind me, both plagued by this and grateful for the solitude.

  I catch a sliver of hope one day when a sweet kid named Mike asks me out on a date. Finally. Someone nice. Something to do. A welcome distraction. But as we’re walking back to the parking lot after the movies, we see that someone has spray-painted the word “slut” all over his truck. “What the fuck!” he screams and never calls or speaks to me again.

  Even my very own brother seems to be buying into the hate. I try to be friends with him, to slip into his world, but I get the sense that he doesn’t want to be burdened with my issues. “You’re not gonna ruin high school for me, too,” he says, completely shutting me out. I have no old friends, no cheerleader friends, and certainly no guy friends. It’s worse than having enemies—it’s like not existing at all.

  I juggle the concentric layers of all this bullshit against the memories of Halloween night. These flickering images grow like a super ivy in and around all my thoughts, wrapping me with never-ending tentacles, holding me all twisted up in place. It’s like living in a straitjacket made of my own experience. The gauzed up, muffled, muted memory of whatever those stubble-faced monsters did to me tries to emerge in my consciousness like the dead rising from a nailed-up coffin, attacking any sense of peace, showing up even in my sleep. I am never safe, because these demons now live inside me—they have the controls. A girl who once believed in magic, miracles, dancing in fucking Disneyland, and had massive dreams, now doesn’t even want a happy ending for herself. She wants to disappear.

  My life becomes a series of hidings. I hide my grief at home, I hide my pain at school—and everywhere I go, I hide the truth. I cannot let the misery come home with me, because I don’t want my parents to worry, or worse, get involved. They work so hard—I don’t want to be a source of their stress. I also don’t want to be the girl who needs her mommy to rescue her. That will only make everyone hate me more. And I can’t afford even one more iota of hate in my life. But Mom knows me, and she must see that the light in me has dimmed. And as far as Dad goes, I don’t dare let him in that I’m in pain. He wouldn’t be able to process the fact that I am in emotional pain. It’s not a language he speaks. He glares at me if I cast my eyes downward, which is his way of saying “I didn’t raise suckers around me, so straighten up.”

  “Baby, you doin’ OK?” Mom asks when I come home one day, my eyes sunken, my spirit crushed. I am doing far from OK. I want to die. I want to stop living. I want to never have to see those kids in school again. I want life back to the way it was. I want this feeling
of panic and agony to go away already. And though I want to tell her everything, to rip open my hurt, to ask for her help, I swallow the lump in my throat, take a deep breath, and force a smile.

  “Yeah. Just tired, that’s all.”

  But I can’t keep the charade up for much longer, because every day I crumble more, little bits of myself disappearing into this new version of me that even I don’t recognize. The sadness takes a turn, and instead of just feeling the weight of the pain, I start to leak it out of me in streams of tears. I have to leave class and hide inside my trusted bathroom stall, where I can cry alone, where I can give voice to this misery. One day it hurts so bad that I call my mother from the bathroom, and she can barely hear the words between my sobs.

  “Please come pick me up,” I cry into the phone. “I can’t do this anymore.”

  “What’s the matter, honey? Talk to me. Are you hurt?” But she knows. She knows me, and she must know by now that something is terribly wrong. I’ve tried to camouflage it, I’ve tried to pretend, but she is my mother, she knows what I am made of, and she knows when I’m not whole. I don’t answer and instead cry even harder. “Baby, don’t move—I’ll be right there.”

  And through this crack in my spirit, I start to let my parents in, because at this point, hiding my pain is like trying to conceal a broken limb. The days have started to take on a new rhythm. I go to school, I try to remain invisible, but words of ridicule or worse are hurled at me. It has just become the new normal. I break, privately, in the confines of the bathroom, where I surrender to the linoleum floor beneath me and slump into an anguish that feels as infinite as it does dismal. I call Mom, she comes to my rescue. She picks me up and we go for coffee and talk. I start to tell her more about the girls who hate me, about the physical violence in the corridors, about the venomous insults, about being the person whom everyone despises, about the piercing loneliness of my every day. The words come tumbling out faster than I know how to string them together, a typhoon of information that at once confounds and hurts her. I don’t say a word about Halloween, because even an utterance of it might render it more real than I (and certainly she) am able to handle. I can see her mind working. She tries to hold strong for me, but her eyes go glossy and her chin starts to quiver.

  “It’s their loss,” she says, blinking away tears. “And they’re probably just jealous,” she goes on, this time holding me close. “Screw those people anyway. You got us.”

  But the torture persists. My fellow classmates get meaner. It feels like the let’s-hate-on-Paige thing has become a movement, something to join, a bandwagon to get on to somehow matter in the high school ecosystem. The cruelty is normalized. No one bats an eyelash and no one stops to care. The nastiness is pervasive, but even more upsetting is the lack of sensitivity from anyone. Even the teachers are blind to me. One day, in the bathroom stall, I cry, cry, and cry until there’s a knock on the door.

  “I’ll be right out,” I say, trying to compose myself, blowing my nose. I can’t let anyone see me like this.

  “Sweetie, are you all right?” It’s my Spanish teacher, Carla. I open the door and she puts an arm around me, her brow furrowed with concern.

  “Yeah, I’m OK,” I say, but I’m clearly not, and it’s obvious.

  “If there is anything I can do to help, please let me know,” she says seriously, which I appreciate. But this is bigger than her, and there’s really nothing in the world she could do to make this right. What can she do? Call the entire student body’s parents and tell on them? Make the cheerleaders like me? Go back in time and erase Halloween? I cry on her shoulder for a moment, grateful for the sliver of care, but when I leave the bathroom and walk back down the hall, the pain bubbles to the top, reclaiming every little piece of me.

  I hear Mom and Dad talking outside my bedroom door one Sunday morning, their voices muffled, the conversation laced with an undercurrent of distress. The volume goes up and down and soon I can tell the conversation is about me. She confesses to him all the layers of my struggles, how I have been challenged at school, the bullying, the lack of friends. He listens quietly and I can practically feel his disappointment through the drywall. He’s just not a touchy-feely guy, so this kind of business is simply not his ball of wax. If I had to guess, I would say he probably doesn’t even know what to do with the information. After a few moments, my door swings open again, and there’s Dad, equal parts melancholy and ready to pounce.

  “You’re telling me you don’t stand up for yourself?” he shouts, but it’s less a question than a declaration of disbelief.

  Throughout the morning, he paces around the living room trying to think up a way to help me through this, because he can’t fathom the thought of my weakness. This is a man who sees the world in the context of two types of people: those who handle shit and those who don’t. Even though he never explicitly says he’s proud, I know he has always seen me as someone strong. The thought of anything other than that crushes me.

  A few hours later, a police officer shows up at our house, at the behest of my father, who is not a time waster. “My kid’s getting aggressively bullied,” is what I hear him say. I know his heart is in the right place, but I also know there’s no way he can truly understand the path I’ve been on.

  “Here’s my advice to you, young lady,” the cop says, his thumbs hooked onto the front of his pants. “You get back to school tomorrow, and you figure out who’s the biggest, meanest one of those gals. Now, the next time you see her comin’ around your way, you take a big ol’ textbook and you hurl that thing right at her face,” he says, without a single word of hyperbole. My dad’s eyes light up at the sound of this counsel, and my mom shakes her head and lets out a whispered “Sweet Jesus Christ.”

  “Listen to the officer,” Dad chimes in. “And don’t even bother coming home until you’ve properly fucked up one of those good-for-nothings and taught ’em not to mess with you. I want to see blood.” That’s Dad, fierce, proud, a warrior to the core. I wish I could absorb that ferocity, really take it in, and do as I am told. But the fire in me is down to nothing, and the mere thought of creating any additional tension scares me. I can’t imagine being violent toward another person—I feel so battered with fear that I can barely make a fist.

  When I do go to school the next day, I clutch my books close to my chest. When I see Linda, I look down at my calculus book, which is the thickest one I have, and I grip it so hard that my knuckles go white. I replay the cop’s words in my mind—Hurl that thing right at her face—but I can’t muster the wherewithal to do it, and I sink back into my pain.

  And her eyes TELL A STORY,

  Of anger and pain,

  You think that she’s happy,

  But just LOOK AGAIN,

  And the scars of her past,

  HIDDEN under her clothes,

  Are a road map to places,

  THAT NOBODY KNOWS…

  —Unknown

  TO HEAL A WOUND, RIP IT OPEN

  Dad comes home earlier than usual one day. I hear a door slam and then the weight of his body slump like a sack into one of the dining chairs. I’m not used to seeing him in the house at this hour since he works nights, so I come downstairs to investigate and find him with elbows on the table, cradling his head in his hands, his eyes mournfully closed. Mom makes him a cup of coffee but doesn’t say a word when she sees me. He sighs a loud exhale. Something isn’t right.

  “I guess people just don’t read newspapers anymore,” he finally says, lifting his head. “It’s over.” He sighs again, taking off his hat and gently lays it on the table like a flower on a grave. It becomes evident to both Mom and me that my father has been laid off.

  “It’s like the grim reaper came in. They let a hundred of us go in one swoop,” he tells us, his eyes landing on the pile of bills where the mail usually sits. We moved into this new house less than three months ago, and our new mortgage is at least double what Dad used to pay. The air in the kitchen suddenly thickens with questions.
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  “We’ll figure something out,” is all Mom says. Her voice is warm with encouragement, but her face is another story.

  “I’m not sure what my next move should be,” Dad says, in a rare moment of vulnerability. “I guess I’ll start searching around town for another job like everybody else. Hell, I may even have to look around for something somewhere else.”

  I know the very last thing they want to do is move anywhere else—it’s why they bought this bigger house, so that we could plant our roots even deeper here. Our town is practically etched into their DNA. They were born in the same hospital, even delivered by the same nurse. They were married in the Newberg church, and they have never left their county, a voluntary confinement that fuels who they are. Leaving Newberg is like leaving themselves.

  Without Dad’s steady paycheck, our family starts to lose its worth, and the energy at home turns nervous and sullen. Dad sits at the kitchen table punching numbers into calculators and making phone calls with a put-on cheerful voice. He clears his throat before each one, takes a swig of coffee, his leg shaking like a motor under the table the whole time he talks. He starts to look for work at Portland General Electric, but they’re not hiring, so he needs a plan C, and quick. But despite not finishing college, my father is very intelligent, and he’s keen on getting our family back on track. He starts to read up on gas turbines, realizing that the energy sector has more of a future than anything in printing, which he knows is a slowly dying field. His days become a flurry of emails, endless research, and an incredible amount of pacing. Every now and again, he goes out on an interview, and he comes home even more distressed and disgruntled than he left. But one thing is for sure: the man does not stop.

  After desperately digging around for opportunities all over the West Coast, he learns of an opening in Reno, Nevada, at an energy plant. The pay won’t be much at first, but it’s a foot in the door of an industry that’s poised for a long game, and Dad is ready to shift gears and turn our luck around. Since the gig starts immediately, he must first relocate to Reno on his own. He drives there and stays for the whole workweek, then drives back to spend the weekends in Oregon with us. In the meantime, Mom is desperate to stay here. She picks up several different part-time jobs to make it happen. She works mornings as a crossing guard, then she takes on a few hours at a day care, then afternoons as a lunch lady, then back for the afternoon crossing guard shift, and after all that she still finds the energy to teach dance classes at the Sherwood Dance Academy.