She was fat and unattractive. That wasn’t up for debate, and she couldn’t change a few thousand years of developing standards for beauty. On the other hand, neither of those facts made it okay for anyone to mess with her.
That’s what people didn’t seem to get.
Maybe someone sent a mass text that it was okay to say things about her weight. Or stick pictures of pork products on her locker. Or make oink-oink noises when she was puffing her way around the track in gym. If so, she didn’t get that text and she did not approve of the message.
Screw that.
It’s not that she was one of the mean girls. Dahlia suspected the mean girls were the ones who hated themselves the most. And Dahlia didn’t even hate herself. She liked herself. She liked her mind. She liked her taste in music and books and boys and things that mattered. She didn’t laugh when people tripped. She didn’t take it as a personal win when someone else—someone thinner or prettier—hit an emotional wall. Dahlia knew she had her faults, but being a heartless or vindictive jerk wasn’t part of that.
Revenge was a different thing. That wasn’t being vindictive. It was—as she once read in an old novel—a thirst for justice. Dahlia wanted to be either a lawyer or a cop, so that whole justice thing was cool with her.
Justice—or, let’s call it by the right name, revenge—had to be managed, though. You had to understand your own limits and be real with your own level of cool. Dahlia spent enough time in her head to know who she was. And wasn’t.
So, when someone did something to her, she didn’t try to swap cool insults, or posture with attitude, or any of that. Instead she got even.
When Marcy Van Der Meer—and, side note, Dahlia didn’t think anyone in an urban high school should have a last name with three separate words—sent her those pictures last month? Yeah, she took action. The pictures had apparently been taken in the hall that time Dahlia dropped her books. The worst of them was taken from directly behind her as she bent over to pick them up. Can we say butt crack?
The picture went out to a whole lot of kids. To pretty much everyone who thought they mattered. Or everyone Marcy thought mattered. Everyone who would laugh.
Dahlia had spent half an hour crying in the bathroom. Big, noisy, blubbering sobs. Nose-runny sobs, the kind that blow snot bubbles. The kind that hurt your chest. The kind that she knew, with absolute clarity, were going to leave a mark on her forever. Even if she never saw Marcy again after school, even if Dahlia somehow became thin and gorgeous, she was never going to lose the memory of how it felt to cry like that. Knowing that while she cried made it all a lot worse.
Then she washed her face and brushed her mouse-colored hair and plotted her revenge.
Dahlia swiped Marcy’s car keys during second period. She slipped them back into her bag before last bell. Marcy could never prove that it was Dahlia who smeared dog poop all over her leather seats and packed it like cement into the air-conditioning vents. Who could prove that the bundle of it she left duct-taped to the engine had been her doing? No one could be put under oath to say they saw Dahlia anywhere near the car. And besides, the keys were in Marcy’s purse when she went to look for them, right?
Okay, sure, it was petty. And childish. And maybe criminal. All of that.
Did it feel good afterward?
Dahlia wasn’t sure how she felt about it. She thought it was just, but she didn’t spend a lot of time actually gloating. Except maybe a couple of days later when somebody wrote “Marcy Van Der Poop” on her locker with a Sharpie. That hadn’t been Dahlia, and she had no idea who’d done it. That? Yeah, she spent a lot of happy hours chuckling over that. It didn’t take away the memory of that time crying in the bathroom, but it made it easier to carry it around.
It was that kind of war.
Like when Chuck Bellamy talked his brain-deprived minion, Dault, into running up behind her and pulling down the top of her sundress. Or, tried to, anyway. Dahlia was a big girl, but she had small boobs. She could risk wearing a sundress on a hot day with no bra. Chuck and Dault saw that as a challenge. They thought she was an easy target.
They underestimated Dahlia.
Dahlia heard Dault’s big feet slapping on the ground and turned just as he reached for the top hem of her dress.
Funny thing about those jujutsu lessons. She’d only taken them for one summer, but there was some useful stuff. And fingers are like breadsticks if you twist them the right way.
Dault had to go to the nurse and then the hospital for splints, and he dimed Chuck pretty thoroughly. Both of them got suspended. There was some talk about filing sexual harassment charges, but Dahlia said she’d pass if it was only this one time. She was making eye contact with Chuck when she said that. Although Chuck was a mouth-breathing Neanderthal, he understood the implications of being on a sexual predator watch list.
Dahlia never wore a sundress to school again. It was a defeat even though she’d won the round. The thought of how it would feel to be exposed like that . . . Everyone had a cell phone, every cell phone had a camera. One photo would kill her, and she knew it. So she took her small victory and let them win that war.
So, it was like that.
But over time, had anyone actually been paying attention and keeping score, they’d have realized that there were very few repeat offenders.
Sadly, a lot of kids seem to have “insult the fat girl” on their bucket list. It’s right there, just above “insult the ugly girl.” So they kept at it.
And she kept getting her revenge.
Today it was going to be Tucker Anderson’s car. Dahlia had filched one of her dad’s knives. Dad had a lot of knives. It probably wasn’t because he was surrounded by so many large, fierce women, but Dahlia couldn’t rule it out. Dad liked to hunt. Every once in a while he’d take off so he could kill something. Over the last five years he’d killed five deer, all of them females. Dahlia tried not to read anything into that.
She did wish her dad would have tried to be a little cooler about it. When they watched The Walking Dead together, Dahlia asked him if he ever considered using a crossbow, like that cute redneck, Daryl. Dad said no. He’d never even touched a crossbow. He said guns were easier. Ah well.