“I was twelve and it was my birthday. My parents helped throw a big tea party with fancy dresses and hats for all the girls from my class because I was friendly with everyone and didn’t want anyone to feel left out, even though a couple of the girls weren’t my favorite. And then as everyone was putting on their coats and leaving. . . ”
* * *
I was handingout special bags I made for everyone. The ribbon adorned gifts had special fancy sugar cubes, a teacup I selected for each girl, and different kinds of tea.
My schoolmate Chloe didn’t notice me as as she shucked on her bulky purple coat because it was starting to snow. “Madison, I forgot my sleeping bag at home, so my mom is picking me up first and then I’ll be over.”
“Over where?” I asked Madison, walking up to the two girls. She was going to have a sleepover, and I wasn’t invited?
Madison and I had been best friends since first grade, but she’d grown distant lately. She no longer chatted my ear off about Connor, the boy she’d been crushing on for two years. I even tried to engage her in conversation about him because I knew he was her favorite topic, but she repeatedly shut it down before claiming she had to get somewhere.
Chloe’s eyes reared up to mine, wild and wide. She didn’t realize I was there. Madison’s face remained impassive. I never before noticed the calculated, measured coolness about her.
“I’m just having a couple girls over for a sleepover tonight,” Madison explained with false modesty. I could tell it was false by the flash of satisfaction in her eyes when I deflated.
“Oh,” was all I could say.
Chloe got out of there so fast, but Madison’s mom hadn’t shown up yet, leaving the two of us waiting by the front door.
“So who’s going to your sleepover?” I asked, trying to be polite and show I didn’t mind.
Madison leveled a gaze at me that made me feel like she was preparing a death blow of some sorts. I didn’t realize how true it was until she said, “Everyone. All the girls.”
“Oh right. . . ” I tried to recover. “I mean you probably thought I was busy tonight, but I can come over too.” Hope filled me up. Ending my birthday with an all-girls sleepover sounded pretty magical.
“No one wanted you to come.” My stomach dropped out through my feet.
My voice almost failed me. “What?”
Madison tucked her hair behind one ear as she stepped closer. “Oh, you didn’t know?” A sympathetic look crossed her face. “No one likes you. When you're not around, they talk about how fat you are, and how you dress like a slut.”
It was like a bucket of ice water had been dumped over my head. The shock of her words pierced my lungs so I couldn’t breathe.
A nastiness slipped into her tone, and was directed right at me. “When I found out Connor liked you, I knew there had to be a reason. Because he definitely liked me first and would have asked me out if you didn’t grow boobs.”
I instantly covered my chest, not understanding yet somehow taking in the horrible things my supposed best friend was saying. As a bigger girl, I had to get a training bra by the time I was ten. It wasn’t something I was exactly proud of.
“Oh yeah,” she crossed her arms and looked down at me with disgusted superiority. “That’s all the boys talk about. Goldie’s boobs. And then you dress to show them off and wear makeup at twelve. My mom says only girls who wear makeup before their twenties are sluts.”
Madison was my friend. I would have done anything for her, but she stood in front of me, yanking my insides out gut by gut until there was nothing but a bloody mess of me left on the floor.
I spent the rest of the weekend sobbing my eyes out. My parents couldn’t find a way to console me other than putting on my favorite movies, covering me in a blanket and letting me silently cry the rest of that day.
When we went to school on Monday, I found out Madison did in fact throw a sleepover and invited every girl in our class except me. Knowing what Madison told me in confidence, I watched everyone so much more carefully. I tried to find the signs of the disdain they felt for me. It was then I noticed the boys watching me, whispering as they ogled my chest. Then the girls started to laugh behind my back. After Connor asked me out to a school dance, which I said no because I knew how much Madison was into him, I thought she’d forgive me and we could be friends again. I told her how I said no because I cared about her.
Bad idea.
* * *
I let out a big breath.Disgusting black tar toxic emotions bubble inside me. I remember exactly how it all felt as if it were yesterday.
“She didn’t care about you as a person anymore,” Ted growls.
“Yeah, I see that now. She was livid. Claimed the only reason he asked me is because I slept with him, which was absurd. I hadn’t even had my first kiss. But the rumors she started caught like wildfire until no one cared what they did or said to my face. Messages were always left in my locker calling me a whore, and they started an online hate group in my honor. Then they invited me to it so I could read all the comments about how I was the worst, and an explicit account of all the sexual favors I'd done for the boys in our school.”
Ted’s face twists in dark disgust on my behalf. But I don’t need saving, not anymore. I roll my shoulders back and tell him the rest, no matter how ugly it was.
“So I started to dress in only baggy clothes and stopped playing with makeup. It didn’t stop the bullying though. A year and a half of this made me pull into myself entirely. I became withdrawn, started eating very little, starving myself until I ended up binging late at night. I stopped talking as much. There were a couple times I remember being in front of a mirror, holding my mom’s pill bottle of sleeping meds, thinking I could make it all go away.” My voice caught. That little girl was in so much pain and still trying so hard to be small, invisible. She believed no one could ever love her.
