Текст книги "Naked"

Автор книги: Stacey Trombley

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Just a few months ago, I was a prostitute. I feel like I should be in one of those support groups.

Hi, my name is Anna, and I’m a recovering whore.

Do they have recovery groups for hookers? They should. We’re just as jacked up as anyone else, drugs or not.

Mom tells me I can take all the time I need before I go back to school, but after a few days hiding out in my bedroom, I realize I’d rather go back now than keep putting it off.

I’m not sure what I expected to happen when I go back to school. Once inside, I head for the bathroom, just for a splash of water to wake me up, but I stop when a rather large body blocks my path. When it doesn’t move, I look up.

It’s Eric, Brandon’s old friend, the guy who asked me if he could buy my services.

Well, this should be good.

“Can I ask you a question?” he asks me.

I say nothing.

“How much money do you make sucking cock?”

I guess there’s a reason Brandon got along so well with this guy.

A sly grin spreads across Eric’s face. I guess he’s going to milk this for all he has.

“So what’s the going rate?”

I don’t know how to respond. Honestly, the only thing going on in my mind is how much I’d like to kick him in the balls. But talk about making things worse. Instead, I twist away from him and disappear into the crowd.

I hide in the bathroom and wonder what’s going to happen now as I work on a random sketch of a bush of honeysuckle. Will the whispers and stares ever calm down? Will Jackson forgive me for real? Will I ever escape my past?

I pause when I hear a set of slow footsteps enter the bathroom. They’re too slow to just be someone coming in to use the restroom or “freshen up” or whatever girls do when they look at themselves in the mirror for thirty seconds.

I see a set of pink-and-white striped flats stop in front of my stall.

“Anna?”

It’s Marissa. Even if I didn’t recognize the voice, the flats are a dead giveaway.

“Yeah?” I say, making sure I don’t show any weakness in my voice. I’m just tired of being looked at.

“You okay?”

“Maybe. Are you?”

“Kind of.” She’s quiet for a moment, then she sighs. “Winning one big battle doesn’t fix all your problems. Guess that’s a lesson we’re both learning.”

“Guess so.”

“I don’t know how to stand up to all of them, how to move on from here.”

I open the bathroom door to face her. “You need to get your power back, remember?”

“Yeah,” she smiles. “But maybe you do, too.” She takes a few steps back and then retreats out the bathroom. I’m not sure if we’re friends now. I’m not sure where she’s at, but I do know things are better than before. Maybe we’re both still learning.

I take a deep breath and run her words through my mind. Didn’t I already face my monsters? Wasn’t that getting my power back? I faced Luis and his friends, the ones who pushed me to have sex with them and then paid me. Wasn’t that enough?

Then again, if it were enough, would I still be hiding in the bathroom? Maybe I do have a few more battles to fight before this is completely over.

Class is…interesting. Even the teachers seem awkward around me now. I guess maybe they thought the rumors were, well, rumors before. Now it’s pretty public knowledge. Shit, there was even an article about me in the newspaper.

Mr. Shelf can’t even look at me now. Mrs. Robert’s eyes just glaze over me.

Only Mr. Harkins seems unchanged. He keeps pushing me to get better and better at art, and it’s kind of working. He posts my self-portrait in the hallway, and every time I walk by it, I feel a little bit better.

It’s watercolor, mostly blues and blacks, like a bruise. But on the white background, it doesn’t seem too somber. It’s just a face, no connecting neck or whatever, like I’m floating. The girl is looking down with a hood up over her head.

It’s me, I guess, though it doesn’t look much like me anymore. The girl in that picture is hiding. But for better or worse, everyone sees me now. I’m exposed. Naked.

Then someone sits at my table. I didn’t realize how much I needed to see him until he was here.

Jackson.

He smiles at me, and my heart stops. He sits beside me without saying much as we work on finishing our third-quarter projects. It’s nice just to be near him, to know he doesn’t hate me. But I still wonder where exactly we’re at now.

I try to ignore my unresolved feelings with him and focus on my artwork. I’m drawing a black bird taking flight, except this section is on “pointillism,” so it has to be drawn with hundreds of little dots. You get shading by putting more dots in one spot than another.

“Any idea what you’ll do for your last project? It’s a big one,” Jackson eventually says.

I groan and press my head to the table. “No. No clue.” I look up. “You?”

Mr. Harkins wants us to do something that “makes a difference.” He tells us a few examples, like how last year one of his students brought in an old fuzzy picture she had of her birth mother whom she’d never met. All she had was the picture and a name. She painted the picture and posted it all over the internet with the first name, hoping to find her.

It took a few months, but eventually a friend of a friend pointed her in the right direction, and she found her.

Another year, a girl painted a picture of her father in his army fatigues hugging her little sister and sold them to raise money for a charity that supported veterans after their service.

Now she wants us to do something amazing.

I look to Jackson, sure he’ll know something fantastic to do for this kind of project.

“I don’t know,” he says. “You should have something good, right? I mean, you’ve got a killer story.”

I shake my head. “But I already told it and no one cares. I’m back where I started. Besides, who would that help but me?”

“I think people care more than you think. But if you don’t want to do something about yourself, pick something else you care about. Something that bothers you.”

I’m looking at him, thinking about what to say, when I realize something is different between us after all. Something’s missing. And then I realize what it is. That cold, heavy fear I’ve lived with for so long. It’s gone.

I take in a deep breath. “What about you? What ‘issue’ are you going for?”

His face turns a little red, and now I see the old Jackson. The one who blushed when he first saw me. I wonder if he could ever be that boy again. I wonder if I could ever be the girl he thought I was.

“I was thinking maybe drugs, you know, since my mom… Or I was thinking maybe something to support people who come forward as witnesses. You know, like you did. It was brave.”

“Oh,” I say, totally taken off guard. He thought I was brave? “I just told the truth.”

He shakes his head. “Maybe you don’t see it, but it was brave. You could have kept it inside yourself until…”

He doesn’t have to say it. Until it was too late. He knows better than anyone.

“I think you should do the one about your mom,” I say. “That’s part of who you are, you know?”

I think about the Jackson I first met, seemingly confident and at ease but hiding his own fear inside…and then I think about the Jackson who came between me and the janitor. Defending me because of who I am, because I was too weak to tell the truth before it blew up in my face—again. Because I was too scared to trust someone to help me.

The bell rings a few seconds later, and I’m not any closer to coming up with an idea for this project. I don’t even know what I want my project to be about. Do I really want to go the obvious route and make my life even more about my past than it already is? Seal my identity with the horrors of my past? I’ve faced them. Now I want to move on.

Does it make me selfish to want that?

I don’t want to be a former hooker forever.

I enter the crowded halls, too distracted to even pay attention to the strange looks. They’re just background noise at this point. A part of life.

But then I look up into the faces that surround me and I realize how many of them I don’t know. I don’t have any names to go with their faces, any memories of them. I don’t know their secrets the way they know mine.

But they have secrets, too. Secrets they’re terrified will destroy them if they let them out.

Jackson’s mother overdosed on drugs years ago.

Marissa’s boyfriend used a sex tape to blackmail her.

Jen was raped and called a slut for it.

I slept with men for money.

Most of those are secrets no one knows about, with the exception of mine.

I look into the sea of faces and wonder: what are all their secrets?

Are we really all that different, after all?

I smile when I think about Jackson, before he knew the truth about me, before he knew I was lying to him, before one of my ex-johns threatened him in front of me, he told me something.

“Everyone’s been through something… I mean, what’s normal, anyway?”

How can I prove that Jackson was right all along? My story might be a bit more intense than theirs, but so what? I’m not normal, but neither are they.

I think I know what my final project will be.

I spend the next three weeks planning my project. Truthfully, it’s not really that hard. Not now that I know what to do.

I don’t know if this will turn out the way I hope, because it’s not just about me. This is about everyone in the school and if I can give them the courage to admit who they really are. They don’t have to tell me. They don’t have to tell anyone they don’t want to tell. But if I can use my past for something good, if I can use it to inspire people, maybe I can do more than make peace with what happened. Maybe it can become something I’m proud of.

I may end up looking like a fool—again. I guess I can’t get much worse than the town whore who got attacked by the janitor after homecoming.

The point of this project is that I’m a freak, just like everyone else. If I’m not brave enough to risk more social embarrassment, how can I expect anyone else to be?

Mr. Harkins lets me use the theater stage again, partially because my project wouldn’t fit on those art tables, and partially because I want to keep it a secret. Even from Jackson.

He watches me every day as I leave art class to work without him, but a quick smile from me lets him know I’m not avoiding him. He showed me a new life. He gave me hope. Without that hope, I don’t think I’d ever have had the strength to let go of Luis, not for real, not for good.

Right now, I’m still stuck inside the looks and these concrete halls, but I’m not trapped anymore. I’m not chained. I can walk away from this school, these people, and live an actual life. I don’t know what I’d do, but I could do it. I believe in my future. I believe in the people who love me.

Most of all, I believe in myself.

And I only know that because of the boy who danced in the park with me, who believed in me when he didn’t even know me.

I finish the final touches of my poster…and decide that I’m not done yet. This isn’t enough. I’m not so good at telling people how I feel, but maybe I can show them.

Maybe Mr. Harkins is onto something. Using art, any kind, can help me change the things I want to change.

I curl up my poster, ready to unveil it on Monday morning, and run back to the art room to ask for one more thing from Mr. Harkins. I’m going to write three notes, but I want more than just notebook paper. I want them to mean something.

He gladly gives me three pieces of thick parchment paper and a calligraphy pen. I put the pen into my purse and press the paper inside my history textbook. I’ll write my notes at home this weekend. For now, I sit by Jackson and write a list of the objects I’ll need.

1. A chain

2. A jar

3. A picture frame

Jackson looks over my shoulder. “What are you planning?”

I wink. “It’s a secret. But I promise this is a good one.”

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Monday morning comes too soon. I’m nervous as hell, and not just about the poster. I’m nervous about all of it.

I drink a cup of coffee with my mom and pretend to be leaving for school. She sends me a quick farewell, and then she turns back to the magazine she was reading at the table.

My heart thuds in my chest, but I know I have to do this.

I place a picture frame, the glass jar—now filled with lightning bugs, lighting up and fading out—and a note on the kitchen counter, and then I walk out the door.

Inside the frame is a picture of her and me before I ran away. I was eleven, my unruly curls flying into my face, but in the picture my mother doesn’t seem bothered by that. Our cheeks are pressed up against each other, and we’re both smiling cheesily.

The picture doesn’t take up the whole frame though, and below it is a piece of pink paper I cut out from my old journal. It has my sloppy bubble letters I used to think were cool in middle school, and in the entry, I talk about the trip my mom and I took to the fireworks over Inner Harbor in Baltimore one year. I talk about how much I loved spending time with her and how I wished we could do more things like that.

On the parchment paper, I wrote:

Mommy,

It might not seem like it, but I’m still your little girl. I want to start over and have the life we should have had together, catching fireflies and shopping and talking about boys. I did love you then, and I still love you now.

I’m sorry for hurting you. I hope you’ll forgive me, too.

Love

Anna

I stop at our mailbox and hold a gift for my father in my hand.

His gift was harder to come up with. It’s hard to forget about everything he did to my mom and me. It’s even harder to accept. I don’t know if he’ll ever change. But I know now that people can. If he ever decides to, I want him to know I believe in him.

So in the end, I decided the simplest gift would be the best. I wrote a letter.

Daddy,

I’m sorry I went away. I’m sorry I changed. I’m sorry I grew up.

Sometimes you have to let the things you love be free or they’ll suffocate.

I hope one day you can accept me for who I am.

Love

Anna

I put the letter into the mailbox and then practically run to the bus stop. My heart pounds while I wait for the bus, and it hasn’t seemed to slow by the time the bus arrives.

On the bus, Jackson flops down next to me, and I jump.

“Whoa. You okay?”

I laugh awkwardly. “Just nervous about today.”

His eyebrows shoot up. “Do I finally get to see what you’ve been working on?”

“Yup. And this is going to be a looong day.”

He laughs. “I’ll be ready and waiting.”

I hold back a groan. I am so not ready for this.

We pull up to the school, and when we walk inside, I feel like my skin is on fire. Do these kids know how much of an effect they have on people? On each other? Do they know they have the power to destroy me today?

I shake the feelings and head to my locker. Today, I refuse to hide.

I finally take Mr. Harkins up on his offer of an escape inside the school. All my projects are done now, so I sit down at a table and just sketch a random face. It’s not very good, but it gets my mind off of what I’m doing today.

Because of Jackson, I’m going to wait until lunch to unveil my project, because I have one last thing to do during art class. I get permission to leave science a few minutes early, and I run into Mr. Harkins’s room to drop off Jackson’s gift and a note at his desk, and then book it down the hall to the theater room.

I hide out there for the rest of art period, where all I can imagine is Jackson as he sees my gift and reads my note.

Jackson,

I don’t think you’ll ever realize how much I needed you this year. You were the only light in the darkest time of my life. I have no idea how to thank you for that or how to make up for the horrible things I’ve let into your life. But I knew I had to tell you, somehow, how much you changed me.

You, Jackson Griffin, helped me break my chains, so I gave you some to remind you of how amazing you are and how much power you have to help people.

You believed in me. Now I believe in you.

Love

Anna

Next to the note, I left a tiny little bottle topped with a cork and filled with a silver chain connected to a key chain hook. The key chain is brittle, cheap. But it’s supposed to be. I want him to always be able to touch it and feel how weak the chains we wear can be. All it takes is the courage to break them.

I end up lying back on the stage and staring up at the lights like I did that first day with Jackson. I was so different back then. So jaded. So lost.

Maybe I’m still lost, still pushing my way through a life I have no idea how to live, but I have my feet planted, and I’m moving toward something. One day, I’ll figure out what that is.

After one more excruciatingly long class, it’s finally lunch and time for me to sink or swim.

I leave my English class early—with the teacher’s permission—to hang my poster (teachers seem happy to let me break rules if it’s for another teacher). I want my poster ready before anyone arrives at lunch. Alex and Jen help me place it right next to the entrance of the cafeteria, where everyone will see it.

Mr. Harkins comes down to check it out himself before all the kids comes crashing down the hall. I’m very glad he did this, because I’m not positive it won’t be destroyed within a few minutes.

Three big words are written across the poster.

What’s Normal Anyway?

And to the side is a painting of a person with half her face covered with a mask. I thought about writing more words to explain what I mean, that secrets chain us and that we’re all the same underneath those masks we wear. But I decided I wanted everyone to come to their own conclusions.

While Alex, Jen, and Mr. Harkins watch, I walk up to the poster with a permanent marker and write, I slept with men for money, and then I hand two more markers to Alex and Jen, hoping they’ll take my lead.

Jen walks up to the poster and writes, I didn’t want to have sex with him. He made me do it.

Tears fill my eyes at her honesty. Anyone could have written that note, so not everyone will know it was her, but it doesn’t matter. When she turns around with a light in her eyes I haven’t seen before, I know she’s free of it.

The bell rings, and right away bodies fill the lobby. Alex looks around for a second and then steps forward, in front of the kids now, stopping to watch before they enter the cafeteria. She writes, My father used to hit me. Now he’s in prison and I’m glad.

Everyone stops. More kids fill the lobby and stop to look.

Alex shrugs and hands the marker to someone else. “What’s your secret?” she asks the freshman boy. I want to hug her, for more than one reason.

Jen hands her marker to someone else, and I do the same.

“What’s your secret?” I ask.

Soon the lobby is packed. A few kids move past the crowd and head into the cafeteria, but most of them don’t. Maybe partially because the spectators are blocking the path for the rest. No one else steps forward to expose themselves.

Then I see Elizabeth, Eric, and the rest of their not-so-nice friends. Brandon smirks at us, our three secrets sitting there alone, exposed, in front of everyone.

Then Marissa steps forward. She practically rips a marker from the freshman I gave mine to and walks up to the poster.

She writes, I had a sex tape and Anna helped me destroy it.

I almost laugh out loud. Alex actually does.

Already the whispers are spreading, but Marissa is free of it. She walks right up to me and throws her arms around me.

“Whore!” someone coughs.

Marissa looks up. “Dick!” she coughs back, then winks at me and steps beside Alex to watch as more kids write their secrets on the walls.

Now more kids are walking up to the poster, hesitantly at first, but soon people are fighting for their chance to write something.

My parents hate me, one kid writes.

My dad is gay, a senior girl writes.

I make myself throw up.

I gave my virginity to a boy whose name I don’t know.

I’m still a virgin.

Secrets cover the board quickly, but just as quickly people head back into the cafeteria and back to their normal lives.

Alex picks up one of the fallen markers and walks back over to the poster. I thought she was done telling secrets. She writes, I wish I were more like Anna.

I blink. Me? Why would she want to be like me?

Alex smirks and hands the marker back to me. “You’re stronger than you think,” she says, and I want to say the same back to her, but she’s already walking back into the cafeteria with everyone else.

There are only a handful of people left. They’re reading the poster full of so many secrets, so many I doubt anyone will remember whose was whose.

Jackson walks over, and I watch him pick up a marker off the floor.

He finds a place in the corner of the poster and writes, Heroin killed my mom, but then he scoots a few feet over and finds another place right in the middle, underneath the word “normal,” and writes, My heart belongs to Anna.

I don’t know what to say. He smiles and crosses the room with big steps and wraps his arms around me. And then, in front of everyone, he gives me a kiss that feels like everything I’ve ever wanted and everything I’ll ever need.

I decide that this is my new favorite moment. No matter what happens between us, this will be the moment I remember forever.