[Wk8] Freedom of Speech
Isa sat at her desk, legs tucked and crossed beneath her chair. She doodled careless loops across her notebook while her teacher ranted about the evils of a sloppy proof. She’d decided to start that night’s homework when Bryan, a boy who’d never looked at her twice, much less spoken to her, leaned across his desk till his nose was touching her hair. He whispered behind her, his breath falling sticky against her neck,
“You look hot.”
Isa replied, “Fuck off.”
“Time and place!” Bryan cackled, to the delight of his buddies on either side of him.
Isa flinched, his remark clenching the back of her neck like a threat she shouldn’t have ignored. Bryan outright hooted. Bryan got a lecture and detention, and Isa left with the rest of the class for lunch break.
Isa sat at a cafeteria table with Pearl and Justine, the incident already a distant jumble. She was telling Justine about the three-week camping trip her dad had planned for her when Pearl grabbed her shoulder and said,
“Holy shit, Isa! What the fuck happened to your neck??”
Isa put her hand against her neck and felt a large, angry, welt rising from the skin where her neck met her shoulders. Isa turned shocked eyes to Pearl.
“I don’t even know. I…I don’t know.”
Except she did know. Or she was reasonably sure. The lunch conversation drifted to reasons their English teacher Mr. Parker always quoted bits of The Great Gatsby at them before class started. Pearl was chortling something about “he thinks if we’re never illusioned in the first place then maybe we won’t have to suffer reading that book at all” and Justine was laughing over ‘illusioned’.
Isa was trying to remember what Bryan had said, what his actual words had been, but every time her memory veered close to the whispered slime of his intent, she felt the clench on the back of her neck and she shuddered it away.
The rest of the school day passed quietly. Isa walked down the main steps of the building and headed towards the bus pick-up lane. Bryan’s crowd, including his girlfriend, Tish, was standing near the bus, swathed in surly glowers and foreboding shoulders. Isa had no sooner gotten in line than Tish approached her, saying,
“Bryan has to miss practice all week because of that detention!”
Isa shrugged. “Why are you mad about him missing practice and not about him hitting on me?”
Tish laughed, arms folded in a jeer that matched her face. “Ugh like he was even hitting on you. Exaggerate much?” Isa gasped as she felt her left cheek sting and tingle. Tish and Bryan’s friends sauntered off without looking at her. Isa put her hand to her throbbing cheek and boarded the bus.
The marks tallied, after that. Catcalls lined up along her arms and legs, blue and black bruises of varying widths and shades. A pointed laugh and a muttered jab cost Isa her smooth, un-scraped, kneecaps and a chunk of her hair. A teacher merely smirking when she didn’t know an answer drew a bloody gash across her palm. Isa stopped making eye contact, avoided crowded hallways, and limited her role in conversations to nodding or walking away. The injuries still tallied. Isa ran out of ways to hide the wounds, fell short on explanations for them, and lost sleep from all the hiding she had to do to stay clear of a beating.
When Bryan spotted her, alone, coming out of a restroom just after third bell, Isa was empty. She stood and waited. Bryan ambled towards her. His first comment about how shit her hair looked ricocheted off her temple, slamming her head into the wall of lockers on her other side. Bryan howled.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” He circled her as she leaned against the cold metal doors, the stale lemon scent of the floors swirling under her nose with the acrid tang of her sweat and fatigue. Bryan sneered into her face. “You used to be at least kinda hot, but now you’re gross and weird. You know that, right?”
Isa’s gut seared and went numb, and she crumpled to the floor. Bryan snorted something about pathetic loser and stalked off. Isa lay still in the quiet of the resting hallway, trying to decide if her ribs were broken.
She finally willed herself to move with a plan. She dragged her torso to sitting, thinking about the hundreds of acres of forest just a few miles from her house. She wobbled to her feet and lurched towards the exit of the school, picturing the bag she’d pack and the trail she’d take to get there. She wouldn’t leave a note. She would go quiet, like the release she couldn’t find.
Isa squatted near her shelter and let the rain hit her face. She’d lasted three weeks in the woods, and missed her previous life not at all. The coarseness of the detritus had quickly faded to an almost velvet embrace, and she traipsed light and even through the soft whistling of the trees, unburdened but for her fixed blade knife tucked into her belt loop. With every passing day, her body healed along with her soul, and she stood taller than she’d felt in months. She’d avoided the search parties and the gnawing guilt at leaving her friends and family, held steady to her self-imposed isolation by the grace and warmth in being able to meet her wooded world without flinching.
The rustle of leaves on the first afternoon of her fourth week was markedly different in the deliberate, spine-arching, way that had chased her through her school and into the forest. She froze in a crouch, listening to the rustles become crunches, louder and heavier with every crack. She waited.
A man appeared; combat boots and cargo pants and a fancy multi-pocketed vest. He was clean and fresh and tall and borderline horrified when she rose slowly in front of him.
She waited.
Then his brow raised and his lip curled around the beginning of a word. Isa’s arm moved like silk in water, fluid against the gentle chuckle of the trees. His body slid off her blade, the word dead before it started.
Isa breathed easy, and waited for the world to come.
