“Oh,” Jenny said sweetly. “Sorryyyyy.”
A hot ball formed in my throat, and I was microseconds from crying when Jenny did something she shouldn’t have. She smiled wide enough to reveal the huge gaps in her front teeth.
I saw a fork in the road before me. The second path was twisted and dark, but itwasa second path. And fifteen-year-old me dove onto it like it was a free ticket to Paris.
“Why don’t you have braces?” I asked, scrunching my brow in concern. “Do they not have dentists in Pukekohe?”
Saying it felt like landing a knockout blow. My timing, the acid in my delivery, the fake sympathy, everything about it was perfect. So was the way Jenny’s friends, no doubt trained from years of petty callouts, burst into shocked giggles.
Jenny’s face crumpled, and hot triumph exploded in my chest.
“Bray-cessss,” I said, dragging each letter until it screamed. “You put them on fucked up teeth? So they don’t look like Stonehenge?”
Jenny’s friends let out more shocked laughter, and she started crying. Big fat tears welled in her big, blue eyes like she wasn’t the one who started all of this.
“Sorry,” I snapped. “But I didn’t hook up with Rhys, and it’s fucked up you said that right in front of me.”
She didn’t respond. I watched her push back her chair and run from the room, sobbing. Within a week, she had braces, and I had my own personal Stalin. She spent therest of my high school life calling for my head, and as much as I hated her, part of me always felt like I deserved it. Making fun of her teeth was a low blow, and I knew it even back then. But I paid for that low blow a thousand times over. I bounced from abusive encounter to abusive encounter like a pinball and the only thing that kept me alive was knowing it wouldn’t last forever. I’d get into the furthest university I could find and leave it all behind.
Bullying can be quite motivational. At least it was for me. I played the flute every minute I wasn’t at work or school. My fingers wore down the steel pads so quickly that my parents had to shell out for two replacement flutes. But as long as I was first chair in youth orchestra and not actively crying, they put up with me. I was accepted into Juilliard the winter of my final year in high school. I took two correspondence courses and managed to graduate without sitting exams. I still have no idea how my dad swung the academic exception, but I didn’t care then, and I don’t care now. As soon as I handed in my last paper, I started packing for New York. Cece and Rhys were the only people I said goodbye to. I was at school on a Wednesday and in Manhattan by Thursday, vanishing the way I’d wanted the second I stepped into Pukekohe High.
Only now I’m going back.
I look at the glittery, spiral-bound notepad lying innocuously beside my tequila. The first few pages are full of plans for Cece’s makeover, but the back twenty hold my plans for everyone else. A shadow scheme.
The seeds of that scheme are many and yet to blossom; I’ve got a month to bring my retribution to bloom. It might be petty, seeking revenge after all these years, but fuck it. The moral high ground is an illusion that people give victims. The meek don’t inherit the earth, they get shit-kicked until they disappear.
I spent my twenties trying to bury the girl I used to be, but she’s still here, hunched in the leather booth across from me, her fringe so long it covers half her face. And she isn’t alone. A stocky redhead sits beside her, sucking an Alpine Ultralight despite the ‘No Smoking’ signs. Rhys Muldoon, the only person who was openly nice to me atschool, committed suicide a year after graduation. I don’t know if the daily torment he took from the likes of Jenny and her future husband was a contributing factor, but Idoknow it can’t have helped.
Rhys is gone, but I’m still here. And so are Jenny and Will. And all the rest of them. I will hunt down every last person who made our lives hell fifteen years ago and slice a pound of flesh from each of them. I’m gonna make what I did to the stag party look like a fucking baby shower.
The only foreseeable roadblock is one I resent even having to acknowledge: Jake Graves-Holland. The ghost I can’t bring myself to Google. The best sex I’ve ever had, despite what I told Cece and Aggie. He must have been there, blurred into the background of my high school memories. Had I known I was going to the reunion, I’d have laid my tracks more carefully. But I can’t take screwing him back now. And regardless, aside from some sloppy ‘you up?’ DMs, I’m not going to hear from him again.
I grab my phone and look at the selfie I took in his bedroom. Just seeing his stupid tattooed bicep makes my clit tingle. It feels like a slight to Teen Ada that I fucked some guy who must have witnessed her humiliation. Jake remembered my pencil case. He must have been there, watching me get tortured, and I slept with him just for a chance to fuck with a fridge...
“Hey!” Cece says, materialising to my left. “Is that the picture I sent you?”
I exit out of Jake’s photo like it’s cursed. “What is it, Cecelia-ella? More happy snaps of Prince Charming?”
“You’ll see!”
Sure enough, the image she texted is of Will Sharpe. He’s wearing a canary-yellow polo shirt and wayfarers and somehow looks douchier than ever. “Fuck, he’s a five.”
“He is not!”
“He threw more than one apple at me, you know? He got me in the ass at swimming sports.”
“That was during the food fight!”
I bite my tongue. As much asCece’s naivete sometimes makes me want to scream, it comes from a good place. She’s not foolish or victim-blamey, she just genuinely believes most people are nice.
Ibelieve most people are mean, narrow-minded assholes who will be treated as such until they prove otherwise. But that’s not Cece’s MO. She’s forever ‘trying to see things from other people’s perspectives’ and ‘empathise.’
It’s as endearing as it is infuriating. There’s no one irritating enough for her to write off; not aggressive drivers, not people who whine about housing prices, not even her peabrain brother, who deserves the ‘No Angel’ label more than anyone who usually gets slapped with it. But nowhere does Cece’s blinding optimism incinerate my corneas more than her eternal soft spot for the blockhead rugby lads who ignored the shit out of her in high school.
When I was fifteen, I had crushes on Aragorn. The Count of Monte Cristo. Rick fromCasablanca. Men of honour with kind hearts who fundamentally don’t exist. Cece, on the other hand, was always a sucker for the Big Man on Campus. And they, in turn, had a vague fondness for her and nothing else.
It wasn’t her looks—she’s always been gorgeous. It’s that she’s earnest, open-hearted, and wholesome. The kind of girl you want running your group history project, not splitting a six-pack of Woodstock in your back shed before an enthusiastic dry-humping.
