Journey to Psitharis

Chapter 8

Eight

Thanksgiving break was pretty uneventful. The good folks at Facebook took the fake profile down quite quickly, but the Instagram took a little longer. Those pictures lingered there like a long forgotten corpse, stinking up the place. A couple more attempts were made to get the profile back up, always with derogatory language that got it taken down after a couple of hours. Some anonymous people managed to leave vicious messages on the profile before it got taken down. One of them even had the audacity to write "are you highway roadkill yet? LOL!" before it disappeared completely. It gave people a whole new reason to visit their long-forgotten Facebook accounts. After the third or fourth attempt the profile stopped showing up altogether. There were probably other places where they could find nasty images of me, but I didn't have the strength to go searching for them. The whole thing was wearing me down, and I didn't dare show any of it to my mother. She already thought I was a colossal foul-up, this problem just might prove her right.

The Sunday before we headed back to school there was a knock on my bedroom door. I thought I had avoided any interrogations involving the pictures or the posts; I was wrong. "Mer, can we talk?" My mom's voice was softer than usual. Uh oh, I thought. The last time my mom came into my room for a heart to heart was when I was twelve, and she thought I might need to be told about sex. What followed was an hour of embarrassing stammers and unanswered questions. All I learned that night is boys have penises and girls have vaginas, and I already knew that. The rest of it I learned through the daily gossip at school, stupid girls like Jennifer Langston and Sasha Daniels who thought sex in a stranger's bedroom was the only way to climb the social ladder in high school.

I braced myself. "Sure Mom. Shoot." I made room for her as she sat on the side of my bed. She had a bag from the pharmacy with her.

"Mer, I found out about the Facebook thing."

My heart dropped. Oh man, I wanted to handle that one on my own. I didn't want to have to deal with her anger...or her disappointment. "Mom, look..." I began, but she interrupted me.

"You should have told me." She seemed truly upset that I hadn't turned to her for help. "I could have helped you. I could have gone down to that principal's house and put my foot up his ass."

I smiled a little. "Mom, I don't have proof it was that girl or her friend. I couldn't go accusing them if I didn't have anything to back it up. Anyway, I handled it. They took down the profile. By tomorrow everyone will get tired of it."

"Regardless." She wouldn't be deterred. "If it does happen again you have to promise me you will come to me to help you. That's what I'm here for, right?"

Truthfully I didn't know why my mother was there, except to buy clothes for my sister and remind me of what a failure I was. But considering this was one of her rare moments when she actually decided to be a parent to me, I figured I'd hear her out. "Yeah, I guess. So, if they do anything else I'll come straight to you."

She grabbed for the bag beside her. "I think I know why they're picking on you. You don't look like the other girls, honey. You don't fix your hair in the mornings, you don't wear make-up and you wear those horrible black t-shirts all the time. I think I can fix that." She dumped all of her purchases out on my bed. It was enough to make my heart sink. There was a bright green blouse, a foundation compact, some mascara, blush, eyeliner and eye shadow in the pile. And what appeared to be a small box covered by the blouse was on the bottom. "We can show you how to do your make-up. Your sister has volunteered to do your hair a couple of times in the mornings, until you figure out how to do it yourself. And this little splash of color will make your outfits look so much better. You'll get addicted to trying new clothes, I guarantee it."