Where I Stand

It had not, at first, been about anything.

Liv's friend group — Hanna, Bo, Mara, Liv herself — had picked up, in early September, a low-grade running joke about a girl in their year called Esin. The joke was that Esin walked funny. The joke was that Esin's bag was always too big for her. The joke was that Esin sat alone at lunch.

Liv could not, looking back, remember who had started it. Maybe Bo. Bo was the funniest of them; Bo's jokes were sharp; the group orbited Bo. The joke had not been a sentence, exactly. It had been a series of small things — a snicker when Esin walked past, a particular way of saying her name, an imitation of her hand-raising in class. The kind of low-level mockery that does not feel, while you are participating in it, like anything serious.

Liv had laughed. She had laughed because her friends had laughed. She had laughed because not laughing would have been weird. She had laughed because Esin was, in fact, a little awkward, and the joke was — she had told herself — affectionate-ish. Just a thing. Just a thing the group did.

The joke had got worse over October.

It had moved from in-person snickers to a private group chat that Liv was in. The group chat had a name that was, technically, Esin's name, modified in a way that was specifically meant to mock her. There were screenshots. There were photos. Some of the photos had been taken without Esinknowing. There were paragraphs of mockery dressed up as analysis. Liv had not, herself, posted any of the photos. But she was in the chat. She had not left. She had reacted with the laughing emoji to several messages. She was — there was no other way to describe it — part of it.

In early November, two things happened.

The first: Esin's mother phoned the school. She had found, on Esin's laptop, that Esin had been writing in a journal entries about wanting to disappear. She had been writing them since September.

The second: the school called an assembly about bullying. They did not name names. They named patterns. They named, in particular, the pattern of group chats targeting a single student. Liv, sitting in the assembly between Hanna and Bo, felt the floor start to slide sideways under her chair.

After the assembly, Bo leaned over and whispered: "Awkward."

Hanna giggled.

Liv did not laugh.

She walked out of the assembly with the very specific awareness that she had, since September, been part of pushing a girl in her own year to write about wanting to disappear.

That afternoon, Liv could not eat her lunch. She sat with the group at their normal table. They were laughing, normal-style. They were, she now noticed, also nervous, a little. Bo made a joke about how the assembly had probably been about somebody else. Mara laughed.

Liv did not laugh.

She got up from the table and walked outside.

She sat on the wall by the bike rack for the rest of lunch.

She had a decision to make. She had, she thought clearly, two days at most before the decision made itself for her.