The Worm in Every Heart

God, please, please, God.

Not, of course, that she really put too much faith in that particular fable, any more than she truly “believed” any of the other mildly comforting stories she’d told herself over the years. Or maybe she did—but only at moments like these. Only when the stakes were high, and all other avenues of escape closed.

Make Wang not tell. Make Janice not be home when the school calls.

A bird sang suddenly, somewhere in the gathering dark.

Make Doug not come home. Not yet. Not ever.

It was cold.

Yeah, and why not ask for a smaller rack while you’re at it, reality sneered back at her, from every visible angle.

Rustling in the bushes, now, on either side. Snide whispers. Giggling.

“Hey, Hea-ther . . . ”

Just two weeks before, Mrs. Diamond (Jenny’s mother, the school nurse and that most contradictory of things, a nice adult), had maintained cheerily that all these girls would be jealous of her in a year—even, improbably enough, Jenny herself. In a year, they’d be desperate to have what she had, to be what they thought she was. The same Jenny who’d already decided it was real good fun to make sure an open box of Tampax somehow snuck onto her desk during Recess, or rifle through her bag at lunch and then leave one of her pads—oh so artistically arranged—where everybody could see it, snicker, make comments. A white-winged hunk of cotton squatting in the homeroom doorway like some flattened mouse: Ooh, hey, guys. What’cha think THIS is, huh?

(Well, we know who it prob’ly BELONGS to, at least . . . )

Snicker, snicker, snicker.

Dropping squashed packages of McDonald’s ketchup in her binder, knowing they’ll smear and dry like brown Crazy Glue all across her journal, her poems. Just looked like the kinda thing you like, Heyyy-ther. Soh-REE.

Didn’t matter how many words she strung together, or how well—how many plants she could raise, catalogue, research or harvest, to what mysterious and potentially fatal purposes. In the world outside her own freakishly pubescent body, it was the Jenny Diamonds who had the real power—always had. Always.

But: Poor Mrs Diamond, bound and determined to put the best possible face on everything, however bleak. While she just sat there, thinking: Yeah, well. In a year, a thousand different things could happen. I could be DEAD in a year.

Or rather: Christ, I HOPE so.

“Yo, Heyyyy-ther . . . ”

She levered up, made the stream’s far side in one long-legged jump. Heard yelps rise behind her at the flicker of movement (there she is, there she IS!), and ducked headlong into the underbrush without a backwards glance, heading directly up: Up through the poison oak, up under the shifting grey-green shadows of trees, up where the hiking trail’s woodchip-lined trail turned to mud and mush. Remembered the last time the clique had chased her down here, running her through the blackberry bushes ‘till she was breathless with stinging scratches. Like she’d accidentally grabbed the Black Spot and just not known it; like she was marked with fluorescent paint, invisible to everyone but them. Like she was some kind of, what was that word—

—scapegoat?

Chosen ahead of time, like around kindergarten, to sink and drown under a steady tide of bullying, or picked on simply because she’d been unlucky enough to have grown boobs a year earlier than everybody else—to have them when they were still age-inappropriate enough to be weird instead of jealousy-bait, before they were prized collateral on instant cool. On top of every other unlucky Goddamn thing.

And then that older guy Paul—fifteen at least, a kept-back retard hanging with the Fives and playing Master Of The Universe ‘cause everybody else didn’t know any better—had caught up to her at last, shot out in front of everybody else to grab her by the sleeve and wrench, so the two of them went down in a heap together with her hair in the mud, and him on top. Grinning a wet, dumb smile as he stuck his hand down her shirt, like he was fishing for some kind of surprise gift-bag through a carny peep-hole.

“Heather, baby—man, that set feels nice. Just like a couple a’ water-balloons.”

“Get off—”

“Aw, you know you want it. Just be cool and go ‘long, baby, everybody knows you’re fifty pounds of slut in a five-pound bag . . . ”

(They can, y’know—just smell it on you.)

She felt poison well in her heart, a cold black spurt; rolled and got on top of him all in one crazy lurch, using both fists to hammer his head down hard against the nearest hard thing: A root, a rock.

“Crazy mother b—”

He jumped back, bleeding, and the fear on his face was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.

But the rush of it drained away so fast.

* * *