Pretty Furious, page 6
The bell rang, and we headed for our lockers. They were less spread out than usual because this year we’d all been assigned to opposite sides of the same hall. Maddie and I went down to the cafeteria, and Jen peeled off to join the others at Reach for the Top practice, which Mads and I agreed was too stressful.
“So, next week,” Maddie said when we had settled in at the end of our table.
“Yeah,” I said. “Next week.”
We had a biology test on Friday, and that meant a new unit on Monday: independent study. None of us had changed our minds. If anything, watching Trevor Harrow walk through the halls trying to intimidate grade nines made us want to hurt him even more. He left us alone completely, like he didn’t even know we existed. So much the better, but it was very telling how he chose his targets. All of his friends had graduated, and he should have been alone, but instead he’d kept his seat at the table—literally—and the other boys on the hockey team raced to sit beside him.
“Do you think Mags is going to want to do this?” Maddie asked. She unwrapped her sandwich and traded half with me without conversation.
“Of course,” I said. I lined up my salami and cheese next to my salmon, and decided to save the salmon for last. “We all agreed.”
“No, I mean when it’s her birthday,” Maddie explained. She started with the salmon. “Like, when it’s November and it’s her turn.”
I hadn’t thought about it. I ate a few bites and wondered what sort of vengeance Mags would wreak if she had the chance to.
“Yeah,” I said. “I think she will.”
“It’s too bad we can’t put ‘organized overlapping events with a lot of details’ on our résumés,” Maddie said.
“I’m pretty sure Louise is going to anyway,” I said. “But she’ll hide it under her work with Students’ Council.”
It only took us about fifteen minutes to eat. We didn’t stay in the cafeteria when we were done. Mr. Harrow had spent two years trying to enact a “caf or library, only” policy at lunchtime, but it had failed spectacularly because none of the teachers would enforce it. Usually we all ended up sitting in a circle on the floor by Mags’s locker (because it was on an end), playing cards or talking. On Wednesdays we had jazz band. Jen did so many clubs that she almost never ate lunch in the cafeteria at all. In any case, it worked in our favour since the only people in the library at lunch were the ones who needed to be there. We would have no trouble getting a study carrel with a desktop computer, and we’d be able to frame Trevor without doing the research during class time, when we’d be more exposed because Mr. Rogman actually cared about what we were researching.
Maddie put her lunch bag away and got out her backpack again. Another one of Mr. Harrow’s failed policies was to stop us from bringing our backpacks to class. Last year’s grade twelves had solved that one in a week by malicious compliance. They went through about four hundred late slips running from the third floor to the first floor to the second floor to get books. I know for a fact that the girls were planning something gross and period-related if they had to escalate, but it never came to that.
(My absolute favourite of Mr. Harrow’s ridiculous policies was that he wanted us to sing the national anthem instead of just standing for it. He got rid of all our pretty instrumental versions and replaced them with an honest-to-God tape of sung versions. I don’t think he listened to it first, though, because one of them was the one the Nylons recorded in 1989. The first time it played, I was in math class, and we all thought we were having a stroke. It was the only version of the “O Canada” we ever actually sang along with, and we always sang it at the top of our lungs.)
Anyway, we did have a test on Friday, so Maddie and I studied until the bell rang, because we were nerds and also good girls. Mags came to her locker to get her stuff, and the three of us headed to biology together. This time, when I walked into the room, it wasn’t anxiety that I felt. It was expectation.
9.
Jenny Hoernig
While I spent the first month of school waiting for a unit in biology, Char was trying to settle into grade nine. It’s not the easiest thing to do under normal circumstances—most of the hazing and “orientation” practices have been outlawed, but there’s still spirit week, where all the hazing happens under teacher supervision. Char had come out of elementary school with a couple of really good friends, but since five elementary schools fed into ECSS, they had to explain themself over and over again.
There was nothing Adah or I could do about it. Nothing I could do would make Char’s introduction any smoother. For a while, I thought they were doing okay. Then I noticed that Adah had let them sit in the front seat every day for a week while I drove us all to school, and I knew that something was up.
“You want to talk about it?” I asked one afternoon in the parking lot while we waited for Adah to extract herself from her incredibly chatty friends and get in the car.
“No,” Char said.
“I thought you were going to try out for basketball, is all,” I said. “I was expecting to shuffle around the driving schedule with Mum.”
“I decided not to,” Char said. They looked down at their hands.
“Is it a change room thing?” I asked. “Because Mum will kill someone if it’s a change room thing.”
“No,” Char said. “I decided not to try out for the girls’ team, that’s all.”
God, they were so much braver than I was. I hated that they had to be, even while I was very proud of them.
“You’re going to play for the boys,” I said. “When did you decide that?”
Char laughed. They were only fourteen, and the sound was so much older than that. Another thing I hated.
“Mr. Rogman started grade nine science with genetics this year,” they said. “It’s fascinating how a grown man can talk about sex organs and sweet pea chromosomes in a room full of teenagers, but I’m the one he has to talk around.”
“Did he ask stupid questions?”
“No,” they said. “He ignored me completely. I was in the front row. He didn’t make eye contact even once.”
“Do you want me to talk to him?” I asked. It wasn’t Char’s job to educate every ignorant person in Eganston, even the ones who were well-meaning and genuinely curious.
“Nah, it’s fine,” Char said. “Having grown-ups be afraid of me is kinda novel. I’m going to see if I can take advantage of it somehow. And to be perfectly honest, I got the impression that he’s avoiding me because he’s terrified of making a mistake. Once he gets into the swing of it, he’ll be fine. And he’ll feel bad, which I can exploit.”
Adah came out the double doors, surrounded by her friends, and waved to us. It always took them a few minutes to say good-bye. Sometimes there was hugging involved, even though she’d see all of them again tomorrow.
“As long as nothing’s bad,” I said. “I . . . I know it hurt when I went back to youth group this summer, and if I can make it up to you, I will.”
“Mags needed you,” Char said. “We left, but she can’t, and I know it makes her uncomfortable. David and I talk about it sometimes.”
Before I could ask anything about their conversations with Mags’s brother, Adah finally opened the rear door and slid into her seat. She was talking a mile a minute, and I heard the word “steroids” twice before I registered what she was talking about. Then I had to swallow what I am sure was a smug, incriminating smile.
“I knew he wasn’t smart, but researching on school computers is extra stupid,” Adah said, fastening her seatbelt.
“I don’t like it when people have rumours spread about them,” Char said. “But at least Trevor is an asshole.”
I nodded, and navigated the car out of the lot. I wanted Char to feel safe at school, and knowing they might be prey to the rumour mill at any moment definitely sucked.
“Some people are just jerks,” Adah said.
I couldn’t agree more.
* * *
—
It had been pretty easy to get the rumours started. On the first day of the independent study unit, after the usual introduction to research methods and reminder of library etiquette, Mr. Rogman turned us loose in the library to start. We had to get our topics approved, which meant we had to do enough research to write a proposal first, and that was our window. We just needed to fake Trevor’s research and frame him before the proposals were turned in. A few lunches in the library, and we had laid down more than enough of a false trail. The best part was that Trevor was actually forced to spend his lunches in the library, because his dad wanted him to study. He spent most of his time goofing off, but that didn’t matter: he wouldn’t have an alibi.
On Friday morning, an anonymous tip was turned in to the Athletic Association, claiming that Trevor Harrow had been researching how to use steroids on school computers. Elyse Ritsma, current president of the association, was Isobel’s cousin, and she took the typed-out letter straight to our new principal, Mrs. Fiske. Mrs. Fiske promised to take action, beginning with an examination of Trevor’s search history, and by then, no one could have stopped what was coming. Elyse liked her cousin a lot, and was understandably pissed at what Trevor had done to her. That anger, coupled with the tip that Trevor was cheating the exact same way he’d accused Isobel of, meant that Elyse had no qualms about coming out swinging.
By the end of the day, it was everywhere, as I learned when Adah got into the car. Elyse was always efficient, and no one felt like she was being mean, because everyone knew why she was mad at Trevor. Nothing was sure, of course, because the internet searches were circumstantial. There was no way to confirm if Trevor was clean or not without a drug test, which was going to take time to do. A week later, and Trevor sat by himself in the cafeteria, shoulders hunched over to make himself look shorter. He was an instant pariah, and even when the test eventually cleared him, everyone still thought he’d just got caught before he could execute his plan. No one believed that he would research two things at the same time. His reputation was used against him. He quit the volleyball team, which he’d been using to fill time until hockey season, and a second set of rumours sprung up about how he was going to drop out altogether. No one mentioned Isobel, but no one had to. I knew what we’d done, and that was enough.
Mrs. Fiske made us sit through an hour-long assembly about the school’s zero-tolerance bullying policy, which had literally never been used to protect a kid from bullies. We sat on the floor of the gym and pretended to pay attention, but all I really cared about was the number of heads I saw turn for a furtive look at Trevor Harrow, the fallen hero. It was very satisfying.
* * *
—
“Whose turn is it to make dinner?” Adah asked as I turned onto the street where the elementary school was.
“Dottie,” I said. Adah grimaced. “Hey, we all went through phases.”
“Yeah, but you and I didn’t have TikTok,” Adah said. Technically Dottie didn’t, either, because she was only twelve, but that hadn’t stopped her from subjecting us to several recipes she found there, watching over Char’s shoulder.
“I’m glad one of us is experimental,” Char said. “When I was twelve, my dinner was usually grilled cheese and tomato soup.”
“I like grilled cheese and tomato soup,” Adah said. We pulled into the looped driveway of the elementary school. Dottie was sitting by herself, since most kids who didn’t take a bus had to walk home. Being driven was something of a status symbol, and Dottie was extremely proud of it. Also, she beat the bus home by half an hour, because we didn’t make any stops.
“Do you need anything from the grocery store?” I asked as Dottie settled herself in the back seat with Adah.
“No, I’m good,” Dottie said. “I wanted to make my own gnocchi, but we wouldn’t eat until like midnight if I did that, so Mum just got me the premade stuff.”
We left town and I sped up to eighty. Four cars passed me immediately, because no one drove slower than one hundred on this road, but I couldn’t afford any surprise expenditures. I listened to my siblings bicker about dinner and cooking and how long it took. Char leaned up against the window, and I took my eyes off the road a couple of times to look at them.
“I really am fine,” they said. “Elementary school was small and no one cared. Now there are more people, so there’s more noise. It’ll keep getting noisier, so at least this is good practice.”
“This is not what you should be practicing.” I gripped the steering wheel tightly, furious and with no place for it to go.
“I know.” They sighed. “But it’s better than the alternative.”
I thought about all the hand-me-downs Char had had to wear ever since they came out, because those were the clothes we had. I thought of all the people who still misgendered them because they were lazy or just didn’t care enough to pay attention. I wanted to fight all their battles for them, because they shouldn’t have had battles to begin with, but at the same time, I knew that wasn’t what they wanted from me.
Maybe that’s why I’d decided to get revenge for Isobel, even though she would never know about it. She might find out it happened—Facebook was the great leveler—but she wouldn’t know who. Char didn’t need me, and Isobel didn’t need me, either, but I needed to do something, and Trevor Harrow had pissed me off. Was it nice? No. Was it ethical? Absolutely not. Was it good? Not even in the same ballpark.
But it was justice, and suddenly it didn’t seem so bad that Char was facing down ignorant science teachers and too many questions from new kids who hadn’t seen them grow up. It wasn’t a big difference, but it was a difference all the same. And, just like Maddie said, no one suspected a thing. No one even thought to suspect a thing. It seemed like it had just happened, an organic result of the awfulness of teenagers.
The good girls were going to get away with it.
Again.
10.
Jenny Hoernig
Trevor Harrow stopped coming to school the week before Thanksgiving. I doubt he did it on purpose, but his timing was excellent. It was Commencement weekend in addition to the holiday, and Isobel was supposedly coming home for it. Poor grades notwithstanding, Trevor had technically graduated as well, and was expected to show up, along with his father. It didn’t take all the heat off of Isobel, but it did give the gossips more targets.
I had been to Commencement every year since grade nine, because the band always played at it. Usually it was pretty boring, and Mrs. Heskie made us all get off the stage so we didn’t cause a distraction by chatting. This year, I was not the only person hoping that she’d forget and let us stay through the whole thing.
“Oh my God, you will not believe the program,” Louise announced, gracefully sinking down to sit cross-legged on the floor by Mags’s locker. There were only fifteen minutes of lunch time left, so she was eating carrots while she spoke, which was always risky.
“Ugh, is it going to be long?” Jen asked. “These uniform bow ties have not gotten more comfortable.”
“I have no idea,” Louise said. She held a carrot in her mouth and brandished a salmon-pink paper. “Check out the awards list.”
Every grade twelve advanced class had an award for the highest mark, a carryover from back when Ontario still had OACs. There were other awards for things like tech and non-sport extracurriculars, but the real money, literally, was in the subject awards.
“Holy shit,” Maddie said.
I pulled the paper out of her hands and Mags read over my shoulder. Isobel Johnson had taken seven classes last year, and she’d won the subject award in six of them. She wasn’t just getting a diploma tonight. This would cover almost her entire first year’s tuition.
“She’s going to have to go up onstage seven times,” Mags said. “Well, maybe fewer, since some of the subjects are clumped together.”
“I wouldn’t want to do that under normal circumstances,” Jen said. “I hate being in front of people.” She paused. “They still have to give her the money if she doesn’t come, right? Even if she changes her mind about coming at the last minute?”
“Yeah,” I said. “They’ll just mail her the cheques or something.”
“I hope the Harrows sit where we can see them,” Maddie said. “I want to see their faces every time Mrs. Kelly reads her name out.”
The warning bell rang, and we went to our lockers for our afternoon books. None of us were really thinking about classes, though. Apparently, tonight was going to be quite the night.
* * *
—
For reasons lost to time, the setup for Commencement was not the same as a regular assembly. Instead of all the chairs facing the stage, they were arranged into angled wedges that faced the long side of the gym. The rarely used choir risers were hauled out from storage, and that’s where the guests of honour sat, along with whatever teachers were in charge of running the show that year. Behind them, hanging almost floor to ceiling, was a giant flag that was only brought out on special occasions. It had once flown on Parliament Hill, and Mr. Harrow had been ridiculously proud of it, even though literally anyone could apply to get one. I remember being alarmed to learn that the giant and presumably expensive Peace Tower flag was replaced every day, but usually I forgot it existed at all. Graduates would slide out of their rows, walk to the back via the middle aisle, and then come up one of the angled ones to receive their diplomas while we all found out if the administration had learned to pronounce everyone’s names.
