She was like putty in his skilled fingers.
She needed to keep her two massaged feet planted into reality instead of falling into some fantasy involving the man sitting there working her sore muscles.
Feeling too relaxed, her confession easily slipped from her. “Truth is, I had to force myself to talk to people tonight. People I didn’t dare talk to back then. It was one of my goals for coming back for this reunion, to interact with people I haven’t seen in twenty years. I wanted to push myself, prove I could do it, to remind myself that I’ve changed and will no longer allow them any control over my life. That I would no longer allow them to bully me. Or look through me like I didn’t exist.”
She looked at tonight like an eviction. It was time to kick these people out of her head.
His fingers paused, almost causing her to complain. “They act like dicks tonight?”
It was hard to escape dicks, they seemed to be everywhere. But no one acted like a bully or dick to her tonight. At least not to her face. Whether they gossiped or talked about her behind her back, she didn’t notice and didn’t care. She no longer cared what any of them thought about her. She reminded herself several times tonight that their opinions didn’t matter.
“No. At first, they didn’t remember me since I was easy to forget, apparently.”
“Ain’t easy to forget now,” he mumbled.
“I was also an easy target. It was either one extreme or the other, depending how the wind blew.”
“Why were you invisible?”
“I was gawky and really, really thin. I was also a nerd who loved her books, especially fiction because it was so much better than reality. Also, back then I wore really thick glasses and metal braces. I was in the honor and AP classes and I did really well in school without a lot of effort.” She was called all kinds of awful names. Metal mouth, brace face and worse. They called her glasses coke-bottle bottoms, jam jars, and whatever original insults they could come up with.
“Jealous,” he muttered.
“Maybe about academics but not about the rest.” No one wanted to look like her. No one wanted to be her no matter how smart she was. Most of the girls preferred to be popular and pretty, instead. “When seventh grade started, every time a teacher would ask a question, I would raise my hand because I knew the answer. Eventually my classmates would call me names behind my back and throw things at me every time I volunteered to answer. Someone even put gum in my hair one day in class and no one told me so I had it stuck in my hair the rest of the day and my mother had to cut it out when I got home.”
Her mother had actually cried over that incident. Shay lied and told her it must have been an accident. When it clearly wasn’t.
“A few times my locker was filled with shaving cream or stuffed with dirty diapers. Or even trash. One day I even found some bloody tampons in the pockets of my jacket. I got nasty notes left inside my books. My textbooks were actually stolen one year, too. By ninth grade, I stopped raising my hand. I stopped answering questions unless a teacher asked me one directly. So, I guess I did prefer being invisible. But it still hurt. What child doesn’t want to be accepted? I was never mean to anyone and at the time didn’t understand why I was being treated that way.”
After getting her braces she’d also began to hide her smile or when she laughed because whenever she did, it spurred the taunts. Other students had braces but, for some reason, they didn’t get picked on.
The worst part was she had always been nice to everyone. She treated everyone how she wanted to be treated, no one else did the same in return.
“Your parents didn’t do shit about any of that?”
“In the beginning, when I told them about it, they went to the school several times. My father actually threatened the principal once. He ended up charged for that.”
“But none of that did shit to stop it.”
“No. My parents considered changing my school but that wasn’t an option because they couldn’t afford to move or send me anywhere else. But I know it upset them. It even sent my dad into a rage several times and I didn’t want him to be arrested again, so I stopped telling them what was going on and pretended everything had gotten better when it hadn’t.”
“Damn,” he whispered. “That’s fucked up.”
“I felt guilty telling them and also guilty not telling them.” She had been torn. She ended up hiding her tears by locking herself in her room after school and burying her nose in a book.