Home > What Kind of Girl

What Kind of Girl
Author: Alyssa Sheinmel

Part One


   The Girls

 

 

Monday, April 10

 

 

One


   The Popular Girl

   It’s hard not to want to defend him. He’s one of my best friends. I’ve known him since we were little kids. The whole school knows how sweet he is. It’s hard to believe he would ever do what he’s accused of doing. And if he did, maybe he didn’t mean it. Maybe it was an accident.

   Or maybe it was justified, somehow.

   Okay, okay, I know—no girl deserves to get hit by her boyfriend, no matter the circumstances, it’s never okay, et cetera, et cetera. I’m as much of a feminist as the next girl. I’m all for the sisterhood. I’ll wear my pink knit you-know-what hat with pride to march for women’s rights, and when I turn eighteen next year, I’m going to vote for female candidates, or at least male candidates who support us. Rah-rah, feminism. Women’s rights are human rights and human rights are women’s rights.

   But I’m not sure what that has to do with what’s happening now. What’s happening here, at my school.

   What had been happening for months, according to the rumor mill. Though I don’t know how that particular detail got out.

   Which kind of makes you wonder why someone would wait so long to say anything.

   Which kind of makes you wonder how long a person can live with something like that. If maybe it doesn’t really hurt that much. If maybe a person can get used to being hurt.

   Which kind of makes you wonder if maybe—on some level, deep down or right at the surface, I don’t know—someone might actually like it.

 

 

Two


   The Girlfriend

   It was my eye that did it. It wasn’t quite a black eye, not at first, but there was an undeniable bruise. More of a pink eye, though not in the way that kindergarteners get pink eye. I guess I could’ve tried to cover it with makeup, cut school until it faded—I’d have had to pretend I had some viciously contagious strain of the flu to keep anyone from visiting—but honestly at this point, that seemed like more trouble than telling the truth.

   Or maybe I just didn’t feel like covering it up. Covering for him.

   So I went to the principal’s office this morning.

   It happened on Saturday night. All day Sunday, the skin around my eye stayed light pink, barely noticeable. Not that my mother—the only person who saw me on Sunday, since I spent the day at home studying—ever looked that closely. Sometimes I think we live more like roommates than mother and daughter, each keeping to her room and doing her work and reading her books and watching her shows.

   But this morning, the skin around my eye had turned dark pink, almost but not quite purple. I got dressed in the clothes I’d laid out the night before: jeans and a North Bay Academy T-shirt in red and white—our school colors—because Mike has track practice after school today and I always cheer him on. I pulled my wavy brown hair back into a tight ponytail. I grabbed a sweater because even though it’s April there’s still a chill in the air, and I left the house early without saying goodbye (or even good morning) to Mom. She might have noticed the eye now that it’s darker.

   And, I wanted to be gone before Mike arrived to drive me to school like he usually does.

   I walked to school through the morning fog. At some point I realized that the cardigan I was wearing over my T-shirt used to belong to Mike. He lent it to me once when I was at his house late, and I never gave it back.

   I walked straight to Principal Scott’s office. (Never trust a man with two first names; where had I read that? What about a woman with a regular woman’s first name and a man’s last name—could you trust her? And if she were a married woman who’d taken her husband’s last name—and Principal Scott had definitely taken her husband’s name—then you knew that her husband had two first names. Did she trust him?)

   Anyway, I arrived in the office before Principal Scott, so I sat on the uncomfortable bench outside the office and waited. At eight fifteen on the nose—Principal Scott is a very on-the-nose sort of principal—Principal Scott breezed in. She didn’t seem to notice the girl sitting on the bench at first.

   But when she unlocked the door to her office, I followed her inside.

   * * *

   “That’s a very serious accusation,” Principal Scott said carefully. She’d offered to get me an ice pack from the nurse’s office, but I said no, it didn’t hurt anymore, though I could still feel a tiny thrum of pain beneath my eye.

   It’s not that she didn’t believe me—or anyway, it’s not exactly that. I had a bruised eye, after all, and our school is the sort of place that prides itself on empowering its students to speak up for themselves; it’s literally in the brochure. She knew I’d been hit, it’s just that she couldn’t believe Mike—her Mike, the student who worked in her office during his free periods for extra cash (he isn’t on scholarship like I am, but his parents aren’t rich like some of our classmates’), the humble track star, the guy who blushed when his best friends made naughty jokes (not that Principal Scott knew that about him)—was the one who did it.

   I almost felt sorry for her, trying to square that circle. I tried to imagine her thoughts:

   There is a student in my office who claims her boyfriend is hitting her.

   Always give the victim the benefit of the doubt.

   And yet: Not Mike, right? It was some other kid, some other boyfriend, who did this.

   What’s a neutral response—something that will let her know I don’t disbelieve her, but I’m not 100 percent all-in either?

   Until finally, out loud: That’s a very serious accusation.

   I nodded. On the walk to school this morning, I decided that no matter what Principal Scott said or did, I would do my best to stay calm, appear reasonable. Because maybe she wouldn’t believe me if I seemed hysterical, unhinged. Sitting in her office, I hoped she couldn’t hear the way my heart was pounding, couldn’t see the sweat pooling at the base of my neck, just beneath my ponytail.

   “Was this the first time Mike—” She stopped herself then, looked off to the side for a moment, and finally said, “Has this happened before?”

   I nodded again.

   “Have you discussed this with your parents?” she asked. I shook my head. “With any of your friends here?” I shook my head again. “Why not?”

   It was about then that I began to wonder whether I’d gone to the wrong person. I probably should’ve gone to my mother first. Maybe even to his mother. It was weird, wasn’t it, that I’d told the principal before anyone else? I tried to remember why I’d chosen her. I thought—I guess I thought—that she’d be able to make it stop. Isn’t that what teachers and school administrators are supposed to do, step in if a student misbehaves?

Hot Books
» House of Earth and Blood (Crescent City #1)
» A Kingdom of Flesh and Fire
» From Blood and Ash (Blood And Ash #1)
» A Million Kisses in Your Lifetime
» Deviant King (Royal Elite #1)
» Den of Vipers
» House of Sky and Breath (Crescent City #2)
» Sweet Temptation
» The Sweetest Oblivion (Made #1)
» Chasing Cassandra (The Ravenels #6)
» Wreck & Ruin
» Steel Princess (Royal Elite #2)
» Twisted Hate (Twisted #3)
» The Play (Briar U Book 3)
» The War of Two Queens (Blood and Ash #4)