At eight, she was accepted into the circle of Ashlee, Tabatha, and Danielle, and even though they said to her, You’re not as pretty as us, but we’ll let you play with us anyway, Charlotte conceded to their haughty governance with fawning displays of appreciation and unmitigated devotion and loyalty.
In sixth grade, Charlotte fell in love with Scotty Marlowe. She sat behind him in geography class and mapped the spattering of copper freckles on the back of his neck instead of the primary-colored countries on the blackboard.
Yesterday, Danielle helped her narrow down her dress choice for the eighth-grade dance to a silver number with a conservative neckline and a sexier, asymmetrical piece in “oasis blue.” Charlotte was leaning toward the blue dress.
II
The four girls are the last to finish getting dressed after second-period phys ed class. They are always the last to get dressed because they take their time reapplying fragranced lotion to their ivory limbs, glinting baubles to their discriminating wrists and ears, and expensive, shimmering makeup to their delicate eyelids and lips. Ms. McCreary knows this, so she leaves them to finish preening while she prepares the gym for the next class. Mr. Pickert, their pervy third-period algebra teacher, knows this, but what Ms. McCreary calls “tardy,” the girls call “fashionably late” and Mr. Pickert calls “reasonably delayed,” as long as they sit in the front row with their long legs emerging from short skirts. Rosalee Carrasco knows this, which is why she chooses this specific time to step into the girls’ locker room at Oak View Middle School and reach into the pink, rhinestoned messenger bag at her side. What do you want, skank? Ashlee says, looking up, holding a comb with its teeth paused in her straightened, tawny hair. Rosalee pulls out a semiautomatic Smith & Wesson 40 VE. It is heavier in her hand than when she fingered it this morning in her father’s desk drawer. She points the cold black barrel at Ashlee.
III
Tomorrow, Charlotte will stay home from school, where she will lock herself in her bathroom and scrape under her fingernails with a toothpick, and then a metal nail file, and then a little Swiss Army knife. She will struggle to get the blood out from under her nails until the blood that is there is her own.
She will stay home for the remainder of the school year, and she won’t answer calls from her friends. Her older sisters will bring her homework from school, and they’ll help her complete it on the floor of her bedroom. One of them will show her how to equalize a basic equation while the other kneels behind her, brushing her hair.
When the new school year begins, Charlotte will attend high school in a new district, where nobody asks her questions.
In fifteen years, she will marry a quiet young professor from UC Berkeley, and they will have two daughters.
When they are old enough, she will tell them that they are both the prettiest princess, even though they never ask, and even though she doesn’t believe it.
I
At just five years old, Ashlee’s parents bought her a Shetland pony.
Her mother went to college with James Dewitt, Danielle’s father, and this is how Ashlee and Danielle became inseparable.
Ashlee was always second in command because her parents were not as rich as Danielle’s (her father moved around real estate, while Danielle’s father moved around stocks) and because her mother was half black, though they never spoke of it.
When other little girls asked to play with them, Ashlee laughed.
She played tennis — but only indoors because she’d learned that too much sun was costly.
It was Ashlee who noticed, last week, that the Mexican girl had begun her period and didn’t know it. She had a blossom of dark red on the back of her khaki pants. Ashlee pointed it out to the others. Someone (not her, certainly) took a picture with his or her camera phone and posted the picture on Facebook, tagging everyone in the school.
II
Rosalee is nervous and angry and she doesn’t know what she’s doing. She planned this, and she planned what she wanted to say and how she would say it, but she hasn’t thought past that. She just wants them to listen to her, to be scared, to feel what it feels like to be powerless. She wants a lot of things. Tabatha takes a step toward a locker, and there’s no exit but the one Rosalee is standing in, but Rosalee says Sit the fuck down anyway. Danielle stands up and repeats what Ashlee said, without the epithet, and much more calmly: What do you want? She stands in a little rectangle of morning sunlight thrown into the room by the small, high windows above the lockers. It puts her perfect face half in shadow. Her hair is perfect and her clothes are perfect, and she was in the middle of doing her makeup, so only her bottom lip is shiny with gloss. She seems in control, even when she’s not. Rosalee hates her for this. Rosalee’s hand is trembling, the heavy black-and-silver Smith & Wesson is trembling, and when she speaks, her voice is trembling. She releases the safety, the way the YouTube video showed her. I want you to pay, she says.
III
Tomorrow, Ashlee will go to school. Reporters will sneak onto campus, and one will pop out of a bush like a gangly bird of prey and surprise her. He’ll poke a mic in her face and ask if she knew Rosalee was crazy. She’ll say, I didn’t think she was crazy. I didn’t think about her at all.
She will stay friends with what remains of her clique through high school, but there will be something off-kilter, as if the shifting of elements within the group has thrown off their center of gravity. She will feel the subtle prick of exclusion when her father loses his real estate job in yet another recession, and after high school, they’ll lose touch completely.
In college, Ashlee will stop lightening her hair, and she will experiment with a new drug called Chastity. Things will unravel rapidly. She will drop out of school, and huge chunks of her life will later appear as empty spheres, or as bleary shapes viewed through a glass of water. It will take twenty years for her to clean herself up, and she will, in therapy, retrace it all back to that day in the locker room at Oak View Middle School. She won’t go any further than that.
I
Tabatha was born in October. She was a Libra.
At two years old, Tabatha would not stop eating her crayons, and her mother had to remove all crayons and crayonlike objects from the house.
Her little brother was born when she was five, and when he was two months old, she pinched his nose closed while he slept to see him open his little pink, translucent lips like a fish. Then she kissed him.
When she was six, she gained an appreciation for the proper use of crayons, and turned out to be a capable artist.
In fourth grade, she and her three new friends helped her dad paint a mural with an ocean theme on the wall in her little brother’s room.
When she was twelve, she was her brother’s hero.
Tabatha Roth was also in love with Scotty Marlowe.
Yesterday, like every Tuesday for the past fifteen years, Tabatha allowed herself to chew gently on a crayon when nobody was looking, before she went to sleep. She liked the feel of wax between her teeth. This crayon color was called “blush.”