Over the course of the next couple of weeks, Alana and I would invite Haven to come sit with us at the cafeteria, or sit next to us in science lab, but it quickly became apparent to me that while Haven liked Alana enough, she had not taken a shining toward me. It hurt, of course, realizing that she had found me lacking in one way or another. But my disappointment then was nothing compared to the despair I felt when I noticed Haven starting to exclude me. By the end of the term, Haven and Alana were regularly spending time together without me. I was predictably upset, but I was twelve and there were plenty of other kids I was friendly with. And so I moved on.
Or so I thought.
The problem was, for Haven, stealing my best friend was not enough. She had identified me as a good target to have, and in this respect, she was absolutely correct, because as mentioned above, I am not one to retaliate. Over the next few months, I watched as one by one, the friends that I had made slowly froze me out. A couple of them told me it was because of what Haven had toldthem about me. I dared not imagine the things that Haven might have been telling people. And soon enough, I had no one left. This continued on throughout the rest of middle school, and then throughout high school.
You might be wondering why Haven did this, and honestly? I would love to know myself. She was and has always been at the top of her game, and I was a nobody. By rights, I should have been invisible to someone like her. Maybe she just liked an easy target. At the end of the day, the why doesn’t matter. The mouse does not ask why the cat is after it; all that matters is that it is.
You know the story in which the scrawny, bullied kid gets a makeover and turns up at the prom looking more beautiful than the bully? This isn’t one of those stories. In reality, by the time we graduated high school, I was a mess. After years of torment from Haven and the rest of my schoolmates, my self-esteem was nonexistent, replaced by a sense of self-hatred so strong that I believed I was deserving of nothing good in life. I had internalized all of their taunts, and the person I saw when I looked in the mirror was as worthless as they had told me. My grades had suffered, and the only place that I was accepted to as a result was a community college, where I spent the next two years of my life before transferring to a local college. I was aimless and, unlike most of my peers, I had no aspirations.
After college, I decided to leave my painful past behind and move to the East Coast, as far away as I could get from Haven. I went through therapy during this time, and slowly, painstakingly, my therapist helped me rebuild my core. In New York City, I carved out a quiet life for myself as a photographer’s assistant. It was a small life, but it was peaceful, and exactly what I needed to continue healing.I began to hope for a better life.
Back at school, the one thing that saved me from the endless vitriol was books. I kept numerous journals where I vented all of my sadness, and in doing so, I began to develop a love for writing.
[Pictured: One of Fern’s journals from high school, open to a page on which is written: today, I opened my locker and four hissing cockroaches flew out at me. Oh God, I don’t have the words to describe how disgusting, scary, and humiliating it was. One of the cockroaches landed on my chest, and another one landed on my neck. I can still feel their scratchy legs scrabbling across my skin as I write this. I did that dance that people do in these situations, jumping, slapping at my own body frantically, screaming the whole time. Teachers rushed out of nearby classrooms, and eventually one of them calmed me down enough to assure me that there were no more cockroaches. I guess they had all run away by then. I was in tears, and not like quiet tears, but like really ugly crying. And of course, the hallway was filled with curious students. I looked around me and all I saw were grinning faces. One of them was Haven’s. But she wasn’t just grinning, she was making a quiet noise under her breath. She was hissing, just like the cockroaches had been. And that was when I knew that she had been behind this.]
I started writing stories. I joined online forums for writers, and I integrated into the writing community. In this way, I slowly forged friendships. After a while, I had a little community of people who shared my love of writing. I wrote four manuscripts before one finally sold to a publishing house. It wasn’t a huge deal, but it was my book deal, and I was so damn proud of it. It was the first and only time that I had done something worthwhile,and with this achievement under my belt, I found my self-confidence slowly returning. My book deal wasn’t just a dream come true, it was the evidence I needed to prove to myself that I was worthy of a good life. I joined what is called a debut group, which is an online community of authors who are debuting in the same year. There, I made two friends, and we quickly became a close-knit trio, chatting with each other throughout the day, every day.
Imagine the horror and shock I felt upon finding out that Haven also had a book deal. I confided in my friends about my past with Haven, believing that it was a safe space for me to do so. Same as before, my natural instinct was to retreat to a corner and let Haven have the spotlight that she has always clearly loved. I had my own little book deal, and I was content.
Over time, though, I noticed Haven getting up to her old tricks. Undermining my chat messages, going out of her way to make me look bad in front of the others. I tried my best to ignore it, even as my anxiety grew and grew, threatening to overwhelm me. It was at this time that the pandemic became bad enough for the city to go into lockdown. I was laid off, and without my salary, I was forced to move back to my parents’ house in LA. Without access to my usual healthy coping mechanisms, Haven’s assault on my character bypassed whatever little defenses I had left and struck me in the soft underbelly. My fears grew unchecked. I knew that if I didn’t do something, Haven would soon take me right back to high school. Because she is a predator, and all predators need prey.
After all of the work I had done in therapy, and all the effort I had put into restoring self-confidence, thethought of Haven tearing me down again for fun was unbearable. I wasn’t sleeping, nor was I eating much. I was breaking down both mentally and physically. I’m not sharing this in the hopes that anyone might excuse what I did next, because there is no justification for my actions.
I drove to Haven’s house with the intention of confronting her and begging her to let me be. I should have known that this was a futile endeavor, because what kind of mouse would stop and turn around to face the cat and ask it nicely not to eat it? As soon as I arrived at Haven‘s house, what little courage I had disappeared, leaving me standing there bubbling with the familiar self-hatred and sense of despair. Only one thought remained: Stop her.
And stupidly, I thought that maybe if I could cut off Haven’s access to the internet, just for a while, it would distract her enough to leave me alone. In hindsight, I realize never has a plan been more foolish. But that’s the thing about prey: We are not used to fighting back, and when forced to do so, we will make the absolute worst choices possible. Like pulling out what I thought was an internet cable.
The whole world knows the story by now. The cable turned out to be an electricity cable, and when I pulled it out, it plunged Haven‘s house into complete darkness. When I realized what I had done, I let my fear overtake me and I ran. Later, I came to find out that what should have been a small prank had turned into an actual emergency. Because, as you might have heard by now, Haven’s father has diabetes, and keeping his insulin refrigerated is a literal matter of life or death.
Trust me when I say there is no insult you can hurl at me that I haven’t already stabbed myself with. You can hate me if you want, but I assure you that your hatred towardme pales to the hatred I have for myself for what I have put the Lees through. I felt such revulsion toward myself. To say that I was overwhelmed with guilt would be an understatement. I wished desperately to do something that might make up, just a little bit, for what I had done.
And so I turned to the debut group, suggesting that we might put together a gift box for Haven. Unfortunately, though everyone loved the idea, many of us could not afford to pitch in due to financial constraints brought about by the pandemic. We decided on a card in which I would put together well-wishes from everyone, which is a heartfelt and wonderful gift but felt to me like it was nowhere near enough. I understand now that my guilt was so great that no gift would have been sufficient, but at the time, I felt that I had to try.
I bought a secondhand espresso machine, something that I had heard that Haven wanted, and given I had financial constraints of my own, I decided to fill the gift box with something else that was more affordable—homemade bread. I have always loved to bake. Anyone you talk to can attest to my baking prowess.
[Pictured: Fern posing with a sourdough starter, which she affectionately calls Doughlores.]
I hand delivered the gifts to Haven personally, wanting to make sure that nothing was damaged in transit. It was extremely strange to stand on Haven‘s doorstep, with all of this history behind us and the knowledge of what I had done a mere week ago. I handed the box to Haven and left the house in somewhat of a daze. I hadn’t foreseen the maelstrom of emotions that seeing her in person would bring me. I wasn’t in a state to drive, so I sat in my car for a while, trying to calm myself down enough to go back home. It was at this time that Haven’s side dooropened, and she came out carrying the bread that I had just given to her. I stared in confusion as she dumped all of it—the rustic sourdough loaves, the bagels, and the cinnamon rolls—into the trash.
Did I feel angry, seeing my hard work literally go to waste? Not really. What I felt above all else was fear. Because this was proof that Haven still hated me. It was hard evidence, something I had to document to assure myself that yes, this really happened, that I didn’t just make it up. Because after all of those years of bullying and gaslighting, I no longer knew how to trust my own instincts. So I went up to Haven’s trash can, lifted the lid, and took photos of the bread inside the bin.
Then I told my two close friends what had happened. They were understandably shocked, as was I, and they shared it with the rest of the debut group. And before I knew it, Haven was hated by everyone. It was never my intention for Haven to be excluded from the group, but when confronted about what she had done, Haven chose to leave the debut group. Once again, I found myself struggling with all of the contradicting emotions I was feeling. I knew that I wasn’t innocent in all of this, but neither was Haven. And a not-so-small part of me was relieved now that everybody knew what Haven was really like. And, I consoled myself, after all, she still had a massive book deal and a career in publishing that was off to the most incredible start.
I should have foreseen Haven’s retaliation. Shortly after I exposed her, she left the group. Haven then released a statement about me along with security camera footage of me coming to her house the night of the blackout. I deny nothing in the video. I was the one who pulled out the Lees’ cables and created an emergency. I fullytake responsibility for that. I was quickly fired by my literary agent, and my book deal has been canceled by my publisher, both of which are consequences that are appropriate for what I have done. But what broke me was reading Haven’s statement where she painted me as the villain all those years throughout middle and high school. Seeing my history get rewritten under her pen.
And that is why I have written this op-ed. I may be a villain now, but I need to have my truth heard. I have nothing left, and I fully understand that I deserve this. It was no one else’s fault but mine that landed me here, at age thirty, with no job, no book deal, and no friends. But I do not deserve to have my past be rewritten into something it was not. If you walk away from this hating me, don’t hate me for what I haven’t done, because what I have done is atrocious enough on its own.
Chapter 25
The op-ed I wrote goes viral. It is all over social media. On Twitter it gets over eighty thousand likes and over thirty thousand retweets, and the comments are at almost ten thousand and still going strong. And surprisingly, everyone is on my side. Well, not everyone. There are always exceptions to every rule. I still get some hate, but the comments are overwhelmingly, undeniably #TeamFern. Because the thing is, while some people may judge me for pulling out those electric cables, everyone has at some point in their life been the target of a bully. Everyone knows the way being bullied eats away at you from the inside, festering like an infected wound. It infects every part of you, including your sanity. Many people even support me losing my mind and ripping out those cables, because they get it. They understand and empathize with the primal fear that Haven had pushed me into feeling.
The days following the publication of my op-ed, I go to sleep clutching my phone and wake up with it still in my hand. I refresh Twitter over and over again, watching the numbers tick up, up, up. It is all over TikTok as well, where tons of people have posted videos of themselves summarizing everything that’s happened between me and Haven.
I laugh when I watch one particularly animated user gesturing wildly at her camera and saying: “Y’all are not gonna believe the crazy shit that authors get up to behind the scenes! We all think of authors as nerdy little gremlins, hiding away in their dark caves typing away on their little keyboards, but these two bitches be crazy! I don’t knowwhich is the crazier of the two, but I know who is the more evil and calculating. It’s Haaaven!”
The comments range from “Both of them are insane” to “I am totally on Fern’s side. If I were her, I would’ve done the same, or worse. Haven had it coming.” Even the ones that call me crazy or insane or unhinged generally agree that Haven is worse.
Reading all these comments from impartial strangers is a salve to my soul. I no longer feel as isolated. The bottomless hopelessness starts to abate, and I see a light at the end of the tunnel. I still don’t have a job or a book deal, but it doesn’t quite feel like the end of the world. I have shared my truth, and in doing so I have freed myself. I’m no longer hiding in a dark corner, waiting for Haven to pounce on me. Everyone knows now, and there is something so exhilarating about that.
