The Weight They Used Against Me

The lunch bell at Bellcrest Prep always rang like a warning shot. I had learned to time my entrance into the dining hall so that I could eat without too many people watching, which meant arriving ten minutes after the rush and sitting at the far end of the long oak table near the windows. The light was better there, and the light never lied to me about the size of my own arms. That day I had my phone propped against my water bottle, watching the screen while I picked at a turkey wrap. On the other end was a message from him, the boy I had been talking to for four months. He called himself Cole, and he wrote the way I wished people spoke, slow and careful and never once in a hurry to make me feel small. Cole: So you are still refusing to send me a picture. Me: I am still refusing. Cole: I have been very patient. I think I deserve at least one. Me: You deserve a lot of things. A picture is not one of them. Cole: Then I will keep guessing. Let me think. You have brown hair. Me: Everyone has brown hair. Cole: Not everyone. You have brown hair that you tuck behind your ear when you are embarrassed. You told me that. I had told him that. I had told him a lot of things I had never told anyone at Bellcrest, because he was three hundred miles away and because he never asked me what I looked like. He asked me what I was reading and whether I had slept and what I thought about the world. He asked me things that required me to have a self worth describing. "Who are you smiling at?" I looked up. Cassidy Vance was standing at the end of the table with her tray balanced on one hand, wearing the kind of lip gloss that cost more than my shoes. Two of her friends were behind her, and the rest of the table had gone quiet in the particular way a room goes quiet when something is about to happen. "Nobody," I said, and I turned my phone face down. "Nobody." Cassidy sat across from me without asking. That was her way. She sat where she wanted and the table rearranged itself around her. "So you are still talking to your internet boyfriend." "His name is Cole." "I know his name is Cole. You have told everyone his name is Cole." She reached for my water bottle and took a sip without asking that either. "What you have not told anyone is what he looks like. Or what you look like to him." The girl beside her, Marissa, laughed. That laugh was the reason I had stopped eating in the dining hall for two months last year. "We are just friends," I said, which was true enough that it did not feel like a lie. "Right. Friends." Cassidy set the bottle down and looked at me with the flat, cheerful cruelty she used on everyone she considered beneath the story she was telling about herself. "So if he is just a friend, then you would not mind sending him a picture. Of yourself. Today." The table had gone very still. "I do not have a picture of myself on my phone," I said. Which was also true. I had taken photos of the sky and of my dog and of the English hallway when I was the only one in it, but I had not taken a photo of my own face in so long that I honestly could not remember what I looked like on a screen. Cassidy smiled, and the smile made my stomach drop before I even understood why. "Then let me help you," she said, and she reached across the table and picked up my phone. I grabbed for it. She was faster. She had always been faster, the way people who have never had to carry their own weight are always faster. She turned the phone toward the table, and there it was, our messages, and there was the way he had written my name, the way he called me by my full name like it was something worth saying. Cassidy read it out loud. "I have been very patient. I think I deserve at least one." She looked up. "Oh, this is sweet. This is actually sweet. He does not know what you look like at all, does he." "Give it back." "The boy thinks he is talking to a person." Cassidy scrolled with her thumb, and I watched her face change as she read further, and I understood that she was not going to stop, that she was going to find the worst thing I had ever written and hold it up to the light. "Cassidy," I said. "Vera, sweetheart." She said my name the way a doctor says a diagnosis. She was already opening the camera, already turning it on herself, and I knew what was about to happen and there was nothing I could do. "You weigh what, one hundred and eighty pounds? You are shaped like a bus. I am doing this boy a favor." "He is my friend." "He is a stranger on the internet who has been talking to you for four months because he thinks you are someone else." She tilted her head, adjusted her hair, and took the photo. She took three. She picked the best one. And then she sent it to him with a message typed in my own phone. This is me. Finally. The table erupted. "Finally got a look at her," Marissa said. "She is doing him a favor," someone else said. "He is going to block her," another girl said, and the whole table agreed. Cassidy handed me back the phone with the air of a person returning a charity coat. "You are welcome," she said. "Now he knows what he is getting. Better he finds out now than when he shows up here expecting a girlfriend." I looked at the screen. The message was sent. The photo was sent. And below it, the gray text that said delivered. "Is that why you did it?" I asked. My voice came out level, which surprised me. "Because he might show up here?" Cassidy laughed and stood up, tray in hand. "Everyone knows he lives three hundred miles away. He is never going to show up here. That is the whole point of a boy like that. He is safe because he is gone." She looked down at me, and for one second her expression was almost kind, which was somehow worse than the cruelty. "This is actually good for you, Vera. Now you do not have to spend the next year pretending." She walked away, and the table folded itself back around her, and I sat with my phone in both hands and watched the screen. The photo of Cassidy was there. My name was next to it. And he was going to believe it. I did not cry. I had spent years learning not to cry in that dining hall, and that day the habit held. Instead I picked up my tray and walked out the side door into the courtyard, where the October air was cold enough to hurt my face, and I stood by the fountain and read our last four months of messages from the top, all the way down to the photograph, looking for some line where I had lied to him. There was not one. Not a single lie. The only person who had lied to him was the girl with the lip gloss, using my hands to do it. I sat on the edge of the fountain and wrote him a message, and then deleted it, and wrote another one, and deleted that too. What was I supposed to say. Cole, the photo was not me. Cole, the photo was the girl who has tormented me since ninth grade. Cole, I am sorry, I am not what you imagined, I am not what anyone has ever wanted to look at. The screen stayed gray and silent, and after twenty minutes I put the phone in my bag and went to chemistry, where I got a C on a quiz I had studied for all week, because I could not stop thinking about the three words under Cassidy's smiling face. This is me.