Madison gathered more of my hair into her hand, tangling her fingers in it, and a heavy dread settled in the pit of my stomach. Her fingers scraped my scalp, and she yanked, making me wince.
The others shifted—predators scenting blood.
Madison laughed. It started out as a light chuckle and quickly turned manic, her wild eyes inches from mine as she laughed literally in my face.
“Thanks?” she mimicked. “Fucking pathetic.” She punctuated her words with another yank. I cried out and instinctively reached up to wrap my hands around her wrist.
The others moved, pulling my hands behind my back.
Tears stung my eyes.
“You’re not a man, Phil.” Madison shook her head, her eyes narrowed. “But you’re not a woman either. You’re fucking nothing. And we can’t have you walking around, lying, pretending to be something. You think covering up that hideous thing on your face makes you better? You’re a fucking joke. And we can’t have anyone forgetting that, can we?”
No one said anything. My labored breathing echoed off the old, chipped tiles. The side of my head where Madison was still pulling on my hair stung like a bitch, and my neck was starting to hurt from the odd angle. A tear slid down my cheek.
“Can we?!” Madison shouted into my face.
“No.” I closed my eyes—the next best thing when I couldn’t move my head to lower them.
“Good.” She released my hair and patted my head as if I were a dog.
My eyes flew open as the bitches holding me pushed me against the sinks.
Madison walked to the back of the bathroom slowly, calmly. She gripped the handle of a mop that had been left in a bucket in the corner and turned back to face us. What idiot of a janitor had left that out? Bonnie giggled again, as if someone had handed her a puppy. Kelsey took a break from her scrolling to snap a picture as Madison raised the mop out of the bucket.
It splatted on the tiles. She dragged the sodden thing across the bathroom.
“No. Please.” I started to struggle, but I had no chance. There were four of them, two of them holding me down. The edge of the sink dug into my lower back as my shoulders pushed against the mirror. “I’ll take it off. Just let me go, and I’ll take it off right now. Please, Madison, please, don’t do this.”
She stopped in front of me and flipped the mop so the shaggy, dripping head was level with my face. The abrasive smell of bleach hit the back of my throat.
I sobbed, pleading with them to stop, to let me go, but it was pointless.
They held me down as Madison shoved the mop into my face. I coughed and spluttered, the bleach making it hard to breathe, making my eyes water and sting. She roughly wiped at my face with the scratchy, disgusting strings until she was satisfied the makeup had been removed.
The mop clattered to the ground moments before they released me, and I collapsed next to it, sobbing, pushing away from them. But I had nowhere to go; the sinks were already at my back.
On their way out, someone dumped the rest of the filthy gray water over my head.
I gasped and spluttered again, the smell making me gag.
The door closed behind them, and I was alone once again.
I refused to look at myself in the mirror when I finally gathered the strength to pick myself up off the floor. I just wrung out my ruined hair and washed up with clean water, splashing it onto my face over and over.
As I turned the tap off, the door opened again. I flinched and turned to face it, chastising myself for stupidly not getting the fuck out of there before they came back.
But it wasn’t them. Jessica Miller stopped in her tracks, her eyes widening as they took in my appearance, the mop and bucket, the water all over the ground.
She’d smiled back that morning, but now the status quo had been reestablished. She lowered her head, turned around, and walked back out of the bathroom without saying anything.
In some ways, that hurt even more than what those bitches had done to me.
I knew in that moment that nothing would ever change. Not until I left.
Last year, I’d had hope that if I tried hard enough, I could fit in, make people forget why they hated me.
This year, I’d given up.
With a heavy heart, I rounded the corner, and Devilbend North High School came into view—patchy dry grass and cracked pavement framing the low brown building with bars over the windows.
I arrived with just enough time to go to my locker and get to my first class. Keeping my head down, my hair draped over the birthmarked side of my face, I sat off to the side about halfway back—not in the back with the assholes who thought they were cool and rebellious, and not in the front with the kids who were constantly called on to answer questions. I didn’t speak to anyone or look at anyone who wasn’t a teacher. I did my best to remain invisible, and I managed to get to lunch unnoticed and unscathed.
“Hi, Phil.” Madison’s voice was so close I almost flinched, but I somehow managed to calmly put my books away and close my locker, revealing her pretty, made-up face as she leaned on the lockers next to mine. Kelsey was behind her, on her phone; the others milled about nearby, mostly ignoring me.
I turned to leave, but Steph and Bonnie blocked my path. Clearly they were paying more attention than I thought. I sighed and waited. The corridor was packed. They weren’t above doing something mean to me in front of other people, but even they weren’t stupid enough to pull a stunt as bad as the bathroom incident when teachers were close by.
“Where are you going? I’m just trying to say hi.” Madison stepped around her friends to stand in front of me.
I kept my gaze on her purple kicks and said nothing.
After an extended silence, she leaned in and spoke low, close to my ear. “How was your summer?”
I kept my mouth shut. There was no right answer. If I replied, it would be thrown back in my face. If I tried to defend myself and was as much of a bitch to her as she was to literally everyone else . . . I shuddered to think.
“Nothing to say?” Madison tapped her foot as I remained still. “Good. We don’t want a repeat of last year, do we? That bleach really fucked with my nails.”
With a snicker, she led her sheep away, and I walked off in the opposite direction. At least we agreed on one thing—I didn’t want a repeat of last year either.
I spent lunch in a back corner of the library. Food wasn’t technically allowed in there, but if I was quiet enough between the bookshelves, no one noticed. I ate my sandwich as I scrolled through my Instagram feed, which was mostly filled with makeup pics and baby animals. I followed every person doing makeup I could find, but I never posted anything, and I had no followers. I was a lurker, too scared to post any of the hundreds of pics of my own makeup I had hidden on my phone.
Despite the horrible thing Madison and her friends had done to me, I hadn’t abandoned my makeup hobby. There was something cathartic about focusing on a single task and being able to see the finished product—about pretending to be someone else for the few minutes before I wiped it all off again.
On my way out of the library, I heard that confident tone, the ocean-deep quality that wrapped around the smooth timbre of his words. For the first time that day, I lifted my head and looked for the guy I’d spent hours talking to on my balcony. The hallway was packed with students making their way to class, and I couldn’t see him anywhere.