Copyright 2019 by J.H. Khan. All rights reserved.
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Before she got fucked over by the GamerGate mob, before she declared that “men are scum,” before she became an esports superstar, before her high school’s sexting scandal, before the incessant bullying, Jane was a relatively normal child. But her voice was abnormal, and over time, that made her abnormal. All the kids at her day care made fun of it, except one. His name was Matt. He was cool. But he suddenly disappeared after a few years, which sucked. He had been her best friend, her only friend, really. He had been like family, since there was an absence of one at home. Jane’s parents were once photographed in the front seats of their car, passed out from drugs. There was no denying her connection to the incident because there she was in the backseat, the face unmistakably hers.
Another school year, another tribulation. Each year began the same way. The students would all be outside running about, chattering with excitement. A few, like Jane, would be more reserved, standing in one place and saying nothing. When the bell rang, they would line up by grade and teacher and then go to their classrooms. The teacher would drone on and on with introductory fluff, boring everyone. But Jane did not mind that part. She wished it would go on forever, because she dreaded what would happen next.
Almost inevitably, the teacher would ask the students to stand up, one by one, and introduce themselves to the class. When Jane was called, she would slowly lift herself from her seat, heart palpitating, palms sweaty and cold, eyes cast downward, always downward. She would murmur her name, then her favorite color, animal, food, or whichever other favorite was requested that year. Before she finished speaking, the giggling would start. She would be surrounded by it on all sides. Following the giggles would be the unsolicited commentary. Why does she sound like that? She sounds so weird! What's wrong with her voice?
The teacher would shush everyone sternly. Then thank her for introducing herself, always with a gentle smile. Then move on to the next student. She would shrink into her seat, wishing for the day to pass quickly so she could see Matt at day care. Just the thought of him was comforting to her. It gave her something to look forward to each day. It made her want to get out of bed in the morning.
When she was in third grade, a beautiful woman entered the classroom. Jane recognized the woman because she had seen her around the school, always with the same small group of funny looking kids.
“Hello, everyone. I’m Ms. Dee,” the woman said. Her bright eyes drew attention, along with her crisp red turtleneck. “I’m here to talk with you today about the students I teach. You have probably seen me with them. My students have special needs. Now, does anyone know what that means?”
Not a single hand went up. Ms. Dee smiled and explained. Her students had various disabilities, and she described a few of them in detail, all of which went over Jane’s head. It was very important, Ms. Dee cautioned, that her students felt welcome at school, because they faced greater challenges than most. They should always be referred to as special needs or disabled, not retarded or handicapped. Ms. Dee’s students understood words, and words could hurt.
In the days and weeks ahead, Ms. Dee’s message faded from Jane’s memory, but would come back sporadically, triggered each time by a comment she overheard. Several of her classmates did not listen to Ms. Dee. They privately called Ms. Dee’s kids retards or messed up, with contempt in their voices. She did not understand why they acted that way. She did not remember them saying those things before Ms. Dee’s talk. It seemed like the talk had made things worse.
One day, while the class was standing in line waiting to go back to the classroom, someone called out, “Look at the bathroom!”
All heads swiveled to the bathroom doors down the hall. One of Ms. Dee’s students had wandered out of the boy’s room, and had forgotten to pull his pants up. He stood outside the door, deer in the headlights, blinking and confused, while Jane’s classmates laughed and jeered. The girl behind Jane in line cupped her hands over her mouth to suppress her giggles.
“Ms. Dee?” the boy said, in a quavering voice. He seemed on the verge of tears. “Ms. Dee!” he cried out, as if calling for his mother.
Another one of Ms. Dee’s students wandered out of the boy’s room. This one had remembered to pull up his pants. He stood next to the exposed boy, side by side, studying the sea of chortling bodies across the hall, wondering what all the fuss was about.
Suddenly, the door to the girl’s room opened and Ms. Dee hurried out. There was a lull in the laughter as Ms. Dee took in the situation.
“Oh dear, let’s get you inside,” Ms. Dee said. She grabbed the boy’s hand and pulled him toward the girl’s room. He stumbled toward it with lots of little shuffling steps because his downed pants were stretched taut between his ankles, preventing a normal stride. As he got closer to the door, the front of his body swiveled toward it and the class got a full view of his bare bottom. That, along with the rare occurrence of a boy entering the girl’s bathroom, sent the third graders into even more hysterics as the exposed child finally disappeared from their sight.
Jane started to laugh loudly as well, to join in on the fun. She was still laughing when she noticed that her classmates had stopped. All of them were staring at her. She stopped too, and looked anxiously from one unfriendly face to the next. What had she done wrong?
“You sound terrible when you laugh,” a boy said. Others chimed in with unabashed agreement. Jane’s cheeks burned. She turned away, stuffed her hands in her pockets, studied the ground.
“Hey Jane, why are you with us?” a girl asked. “How come you’re not with Ms. Dee? You should be. They should put the weird sounding kids with the weird looking kids. Weirdos, weirdos.”
More laughter, this time without Jane joining in. She was too busy trying not to break down. She hated that girl, and she hated Ms. Dee, and she even hated the naked retarded boy. If he had simply remembered to keep his pants on, this would not have happened to her. But she also hated herself. She had allowed the pack of cackling hyenas to turn on her. She had gone from hunter to hunted because she was foolish enough to open her mouth and laugh. The full enjoyment of life was not available to flawed children like her. It was better to stay quiet, to blend in to the scenery.
At that moment, the other boy, who was still out in the hall, decided that whatever it was, if it was funny enough for them, then it was funny enough for him too. Suddenly, the attention was diverted away from Jane and onto his spasmodic laugh. This time, however, Jane’s classmates did not join in. They were silent, and avoided looking at him. Just then, the teacher shushed everyone and led them into the classroom. As they entered, the boy’s laugh continued to echo in Jane’s ears. It was ignorant and innocent, and it was a privilege she did not have.
After that day, things became more noticeable to Jane. When her teacher talked to her at a slower pace than with other students, or when she got away with things that others would be chastised for. Before, it made her feel special. Now, she realized that special was a nice way to say messed up, inferior, deficient. They treated her better because she was worse.
When Jane started middle school, it took time to adjust to six different classes, each with a different teacher. From the beginning, she decided that she hated P.E. the most. It was an easy decision because of what happened the first time they played a sport.
Flag football. The teacher chose two team captains, who then each took turns picking team members from the rest of the class, one by one. Jane’s anxiety heightened as student after student was chosen, and the group of less preferable options dwindled. Six of them remained. Then three. Then two.
Jane looked to her left and her heart sank. She recognized the other girl, though she did not yet know her name. They all recognized her because of her droopy eye, the one that did not keep up with her normal one. The girl looked at Jane with her good eye, while the other eye sagged down. Jane saw fear. She felt fear herself, bottled up, increasing exponentially from the pressure until –
“Her,” one of the team captains said, pointing directly at Jane. Her fear dissolved into a mist of sweet relief, and she sprung up to join her tribe. She glanced back at the remaining girl, who did not look happy. The girl slowly got up and joined the other team. Jane’s pity for her was surpassed only by the consolation that she herself was not chosen last.
Something about the methodical method of triage seemed to bother the teacher, because he never allowed team selection to occur that way again. For the rest of the school year, members of each team were selected ahead of time at random. No more picking and choosing. But the damage had been done. Everyone knew their caste.
For Jane, that became an opportunity. When you know that someone has been handed a verdict by a jury of peers that they are on a lower tier than you, it becomes easier to reach out to them. Jane soon learned from the girl with the droopy eye that her name was Kara, and she did not fear speaking to her, like she did with everyone else. That excruciating moment when she and Kara sat together as the class rejects and made eye contact, eye to eyes, ended up being a godsend because it allowed Jane to make her first school friend.
They soon became inseparable. There was not a break or lunch when they were not seen together, unless one was absent. The following year, when they chose their electives, they made sure their preferences were identical. That year was especially fortuitous because they also landed two required classes together. They now shared over half the school day. In math, the teacher threatened to separate them because they kept whispering to each other. The whispers continued, and so did the rebukes, but never the promised separation.
When they were in eighth grade, Jane went to Kara’s house for a sleepover. They ate lots of junk food and danced to music blasting from Kara’s phone and watched a scary movie. At night, they snuggled under the warm covers and talked about a dystopian TV show and inner beauty and the inconvenience of bras. And, of course, boys. Neither had a boyfriend but it was fun to speculate about what that might be like. It was one of the happiest moments of Jane’s life.
That summer, Jane noticed a message pop up on social media. A boy who had been in several of her classes. He asked her which high school she was going to. Turned out that it was different from the one he would attend. Even though he lived a few streets down, her high school was bigger and encompassed a larger area, including where she lived, while falling just short of him. Oddly, their divergent paths seemed to make him more interested in messaging her.
His name was Jeremy. Toward the end of the summer, he asked her if he could visit her. She did not want anyone to know where she lived, especially him. He kept talking about having nice things and buying pricey things and doing cool things, like traveling. Jane and her parents never traveled. They would visit the city sometimes, but nothing that required a plane. There was no way Jeremy was going to know what her house looked like. In the meantime, Jeremy was causing friction between her and Kara, who warned her to stay away from him.
“He’s up to no good, I’m telling you. I know him,” Kara said. She swore and pleaded.
Jane dismissed it as stemming from jealousy, which caused an argument, their first serious one. Serious enough that when high school started, they were still not speaking to each other. Jane found herself isolated again. Matt was long gone, Jeremy was at a different school, and Kara was being selfish.
At lunch, Jane noticed some of the prettier girls looking at her, sizing her up. She did not recognize them. They must have come from a different middle school. Some of them asked her to join them, and she felt the same way as before, when she was not chosen last in P.E. These girls seemed so elegant and sophisticated, swapping makeup tips and passing knowing comments on everyone’s shoes. The ringleader, Stacey, was old enough to drive. Becca, her lieutenant, had a boyfriend who was in college.
She went with them to the movies. She went with them to the city. She went shopping with them, but soon learned to avoid that, because she had to keep pretending that she was too snobbish to buy anything, to cover up the fact that she was of modest means. Sometimes, Jeremy would come by after school to hang out. She preferred having the other girls there during those times, because she did not like the tone of the most recent messages he had sent her.
He asked her for a picture of herself, and she obliged. Posing, ribbon in hair, embroidered skirt. She wanted to look nice for him. After a while, he asked for another one. Again, she obliged. Then, one evening, he sent her a link to another girl’s picture and asked her to send one like that. It was a girl they had known in middle school, and the picture was on her main profile page. The girl was wearing something low-cut, and her shoulders were hunched forward and inward, which accentuated what was in between. Jane spent a moment taking it in, then scrolled down to another picture on the girl’s page, where her pose was normal. Clearly, the effect in the first picture was deliberate. She put her phone down, got up from her bed, and walked over to the mirror. She attempted to strike the same pose. Ewww…
She stopped responding to Jeremy’s messages. It was not that hard, because other things were happening at the same time.
After school that same week, she was hanging out with Stacey and the other girls when Kara approached them. She had a hopeful look on her face. Jane had not spoken to Kara in weeks. She missed her. But instead of feeling happy, she felt her stomach clench. Rage began to build inside her. Why was she feeling like this?
Stacey eyed Kara coolly, then glanced at Jane.
“Friend of yours?” she asked.
Jane turned away from Kara. “No.”
Five seconds passed, then ten. She felt the urge to turn back, to embrace her best friend. But then she heard Kara shuffle away, and it was too late. Jane quickly babbled to the group about the first topic that popped into her head. To erase the memory of Kara in their minds, and in her own.
That weekend, she went to the movie theater with the girls. It was a sappy romance, which she was not especially into, but she always went more for the company than for the film. Stacey’s boyfriend, Doug, was there too. He was handsome, with a solid build and a disarming smile. They were a cute couple. Before the film started, Stacey went out with the other girls to the bathroom for primping and makeup adjustment.
Jane was staring at the screen absent-mindedly when she noticed someone sitting down in the seat next to her, where Stacey had been sitting. But Stacey just left. Jane turned her head and saw Doug. He gave her a winning smile, asked her how she was doing. She stammered a bit, said she was fine. She had seen him a couple of times before, but something about him was off.
“You look lovely tonight,” he said, his dark eyes flashing.
She blushed, looked down. “Thank you,” she whispered. She even giggled a little, until she felt the hand on her thigh. The giggling stopped, her body went rigid. She looked at Doug, who continued smiling at her reassuringly. She shrank back, unable to believe or accept what was happening. But the hand stayed where it was on her thigh. Then it started to creep upward, toward her –
“I have a boyfriend,” she whispered. The smile gave way to disappointment, the hand moved away. He turned his head forward, stared at the screen for some time. Then turned back to her.
“If that changes, let me know,” Doug said, then winked. He moved back to his seat. A little later, Stacey and the others came back. Stacey sat where Doug had been, and Jane could breathe again. The rest of that evening passed without incident.
A few days later, Jane told Becca what happened. Becca told the others. Then someone told Stacey. The change was abrupt and irreversible. She was no longer welcome to hang out with them at lunch. Or after school. Or any other time. She was cast out completely.
“Don’t you understand?” Becca told her over the phone a few days later. It had to be over the phone, because Becca could not afford to be seen with Jane in public. “Stacey sees you as a threat, so you had to be eliminated.”
“But I’m not a threat! He made a move on me! I didn’t do anything!” Jane said.
“Don’t you understand?” Becca said, exasperated. “That just makes it worse. Listen to yourself. You’re saying that you seduced him without even trying. It’s like you’re openly bragging about how much hotter you are than Stacey. You’re done.”
The next day after school, Jane took a bus to Jeremy’s school. Her tribe had deserted her, and she could not bring herself to face Kara. She anxiously scanned faces until she saw Jeremy. He was with a group of friends, and they seemed to be hanging out. She walked toward the group. Jeremy turned his head, saw her, and looked confused. She had never visited him at his school before. He always insisted on visiting her. She smiled at him. He did not smile back. As she got closer, he moved away from the group toward her, almost like he was trying to intercept her.
“What do you want?” he asked when they were face to face.
“To talk,” she said.
Jeremy glanced furtively behind him, at his friends, then back at her, glaring. “Okay,” he said. “But not here. Call me tonight, and we’ll talk all you want.”
She wanted to protest, but he gave her a menacing look, like he wanted to hurt her, and she drew back in fear. Why was he acting like this? Jane realized that she did not know any of his friends. He kept them sealed off from her. Just then, a couple of them broke off from the group, headed for them. He noticed and turned toward them, broadening his shoulders in an unsuccessful attempt to conceal her. Looked like it was the other way around: he was sealing her off from them.
“Hey, that’s the girl in those pictures, right?” one of them said jovially.
Jane looked at Jeremy in disbelief. He had shown them the pictures? Those were only supposed to be between her and him.
“He showed them to you?” she asked the boy, who stopped and stared when he heard her voice. Jeremy turned back to her, his face contorted with rage.
“Leave! Now!” Jeremy shouted.
She fled, ran to the bus stop, arrived home a half hour later. Went to her room, closed the door. Flopped down on her bed face first, cried into her pillow. Got out her phone and called Kara. For some reason, Kara was not answering. Jane then called Becca.
“This is the last time you’re calling me,” Becca said. “Next time, I’m blocking your number.”
The details tumbled out of Jane. Jeremy reaching out to her the summer before high school, the requests for pictures, his strange behavior earlier that day. Jane asked Becca what she thought happened. Heard her sigh.
“Oh God, it’s so obvious,” Becca said. “Why do you think Jeremy only showed serious interest in you after middle school was over, and after it was clear you were going to a different high school? He liked you, but he didn’t want to be seen with you in front of other people. You’re a trophy girlfriend, but only if they don’t hear your voice, which sounds so freakish. So he shared your pictures with his friends, who were impressed that he landed you. But when you showed up and they heard your voice, that screwed up the social status he could gain off you. But don’t worry. At least you were smart enough not to send him the slutty picture he asked for. He would have shared it with his friends, no question, and they would have spread it over his entire school. Then it might have spread to our school. You dodged a bullet.”
Jane thanked her for her insight, then got off the phone.
The memory from just a few weeks ago was vivid in Jane’s mind. She was hanging out after school with the girls. Jeremy was there too, expertly steering the conversation toward sports and fitness. That gave him an excuse to show off his sculpted biceps, which Jane privately had to admit were nice to look at. Then he went down and did thirty pushups while the girls watched, sporadically giggling.
Then Jeremy abruptly turned the spotlight on her. “Jane, how flexible are you? I’m probably more flexible than you are. I bet you can’t touch your two elbows together behind your back.”
She smiled, threw her hands up in a gesture that said, Seriously? Then she went ahead and made an attempt. She strained as her elbows inched closer and closer to each other, without quite making contact. She did not realize she had been set up until it was too late, when the group had already broken out into laughter.
“Oh god, she still doesn’t get it,” someone said.
Her concentration interrupted, Jane glanced at them, then down to her chest, where their eyes were trained. Immediately, she dropped the pose, her palms and forearms slapping against her hips and thighs. Her cheeks reddened with rage. She walked over to Jeremy and socked him on the arm. He was on the ground laughing, and it was not clear that he even felt it.
“It’s okay, Jane. Not like that made much of a difference, anyway,” Stacey said.
“Yeah, Jane has such itty bitty titties,” Becca chimed in.
That comment elicited another wave of laughter. The only person who did not laugh was Stacey’s boyfriend, Doug. At the time, Jane thought him chivalrous. Now, she knew better.
She was feeling sick of it all. The girls who chatted amongst each other excitedly only to fall silent as she walked by, the boys who checked her out but never asked her out, the teachers who carefully enunciated everything they said to her.
She got up, went to the mirror. Something was bothering her. The expression on Jeremy’s face…
She closed her eyes, thought back. When Kara had come up to her after school last week, and she was still a member of the girl group, and…
Jane breathed slower, tried to calm her mind, empty it out. Then she mentally placed herself back there, went deep into the memory. The rising anger when Kara had come up to her. At that time, she had no idea why she felt it. But now, with the rage coursing through her again…
Jane opened her eyes, and saw the exact same expression on her face that she had seen on Jeremy’s less than two hours ago. She did not want her friends to see her with the droopy-eyed girl, just as he did not want his friends to hear the broken voice of the pretty girl. He was no guiltier than she was.
In church, they talked about not being sinful. They talked about right and wrong. They talked about morality. She understood it a little deeper now. When you were guilty of a sin, you deprived yourself of the feeling of righteous superiority when you saw someone else pleading guilty for the same sin. When you committed a wrong, you deprived yourself of the ability to feel similarly wronged when it happened to you. You could not hate the perpetrator without also hating yourself. You could not exact revenge upon them without admitting that you yourself also deserved someone’s revenge. Instead of anger, you felt depressed. By treating others the way you would not want to be treated yourself, you removed the tools and weapons that could have otherwise protected you, leaving you naked and exposed.
But despite these complicated feelings, Jane felt a glimmer of hope. Something else had happened earlier today, something that made her momentarily forget all about Jeremy. It happened while she was scanning the faces in an unfamiliar high school. A boy walked by her, and her stomach clenched when she saw him. Could it be…
Something about his hair, his frame, made her rush toward him. She grabbed his shoulder, and as he turned around she looked eagerly at his face, a face that ended up being as unfamiliar as the others, to her crushing disappointment.
“Sorry,” she whispered. “Thought you were someone else.” Then she resumed her search for Jeremy, a search that would succeed, though not the way she wanted it to.
But that was okay, she thought. She smiled at her reflection. Not all boys were like Jeremy or Doug. Not all girls were like Stacey. She knew that because of Matt. She did not find him today, and she might never find him, but she would never forget him.
A sound snapped Jane out of her reverie. Her phone had beeped. Then it beeped again, then again and again, without stopping. She picked it up, looked at what was happening. She had been tagged in a picture on social media. That explained the first beep. Comments were coming in, each one causing an additional beep. She tapped the screen to see the post.
Two images, juxtaposed against each other. On the left was a picture she had never seen before but recognized instantly. A vehicle, pulled over on the side of a freeway. Two adults, a man and a woman, sitting in the front seats, deep in slumber. Her parents. In the backseat was a little girl, face turned toward the camera. Jet black hair, porcelain skin, wide eyes. She was five years old, and her name was Jane Merrick. This was the picture Jane’s parents had mentioned that night, when Ms. Appleby had come over. How Jeremy had managed to find the original, unblurred, was anyone’s guess.
Jane knew it was Jeremy even before she saw the name of the poster because the picture on the right had been sent only to him, by her. It was the second picture he had asked for, before his requests had turned unmistakably creepy. She looked closely at the picture, a picture she herself had taken. A selfie, face shot. Her lips were pursed forward, as if she were inviting a kiss. At the time, she thought it was all in good fun. Plenty of other girls posted pictures like that on social media, and openly, not just to a significant other. But the three words in the caption below the post were anything but fun. They burned in her mind as she sat there in stunned disbelief, her eyes beginning to tear up.
Crack baby whore.
Part 2: https://medium.com/@phenomgamer/game-on-part-2-e5555f658d0
