The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  One day, as Peter was doing his best not to fall asleep to Madame’s recitation of the verb avoir, he noticed that Dolores was sitting in the middle of an ink stain. He thought that was pretty funny, given that she was wearing white pants, and then he realized that it wasn’t ink at all.

  “Dolores has her period!” he cried out loud, out of sheer shock. In a house full of males—with the exception of his mother, of course—menstruation was one of those great mysteries about women, like how do they put on mascara without poking out their eyes and how can they hook a bra behind themselves, without seeing what they’re doing?

  Everyone in the class turned, and Dolores’s face went as scarlet as her pants. Madame ushered her into the hall, suggesting she go to the nurse. On the seat in front of Peter was a small red puddle of blood. Madame called the custodian, but by then, the class was out of control—whispers raging like a brush fire about how much blood there was, how Dolores was now one of the girls that everyone knew had her period.

  “Keating’s bleeding,” Peter said to the kid sitting next to him, whose eyes lit up.

  “Keating’s bleeding,” the boy repeated, and the chant went around the room. Keating’s bleeding. Keating’s bleeding. Across the room, Peter caught Josie’s eye—Josie, who’d started to wear makeup lately. She was singing along with the rest of them.

  Belonging felt like helium; Peter felt himself swell inside. He’d been the one to start this; by drawing a line around Dolores, he’d become part of the inner circle.

  At lunch that day, he was sitting with Josie when Drew Girard and Matt Royston came over with their trays. “We heard that you saw it happen,” Drew said, and they sat down so that Peter could tell them the details. He began embellishing—a teaspoon of blood became a cup; the stain on her white pants grew from a modest spot to a Rorschach blot of enormous proportion. They called over their friends—some who were kids on Peter’s soccer team, yet hadn’t spoken to him all year. “Tell them, too, it’s hilarious,” Matt said, and he smiled at Peter as if Peter were one of them.

  Dolores stayed out of school. Peter knew that it wouldn’t have made any difference if she was gone for a month or more—the memories of sixth graders were steel traps, and for the rest of her high school career, Dolores would always be remembered as the girl who got her period in French class and bled all over the seat.

  The morning that she came back, she stepped off the bus and was immediately flanked by Drew and Matt. “For a woman,” they said, drawing out the words, “you sure don’t have any boobs.” She pushed away from them, and Peter didn’t see her again until French class.

  Someone—he really didn’t know who—had come up with a plan. Madame was always late to class; she had to come from the other end of the school. So before the bell rang, everyone would walk up to Dolores’s desk and hand her a tampon they’d been given by Courtney Ignatio, who’d pilfered a box from her mother.

  Drew was first. As he set the tampon on her desk he said, “I think you might have dropped this.” Six tampons later, the bell still hadn’t rung, and Madame wasn’t in the room yet. Peter walked up, holding the wrapped tube in his fist, ready to drop it—and noticed Dolores was crying.

  It wasn’t loud, and it was barely even visible. But as Peter reached out with the tampon, he suddenly realized that this was what it looked like from the other side, when he was being put through hell.

  Peter crushed the tampon in his fist. “Stop,” he said softly, and then he turned around to the next three students waiting in line to humiliate Dolores. “Just stop already.”

  “What’s your problem, homo?” Drew asked.

  “It’s not funny anymore.”

  Maybe it was never funny. It was just that it hadn’t been him, and that was good enough.

  The boy behind him shoved Peter out of the way and flicked his tampon so that it bounced off Dolores’s head, rolled underneath Peter’s seat. And then it was Josie’s turn.

  She looked at Dolores, and then she looked at Peter. “Don’t,” he murmured.

  Josie pressed her lips together and let the tampon roll from her outstretched fingers onto Dolores’s desk. “Oops,” she said, and when Matt Royston laughed, she went to stand beside him.

  * * *

  Peter was lying in wait. Although Josie hadn’t been walking with him for a few weeks now, he knew what she was doing after school—usually strolling into town to get an iced tea with Courtney & Co. and then window-shopping. Sometimes he stood back at a distance and watched her the way you’d stare at a butterfly that you’d only known as a caterpillar, wondering how the hell change could be that dramatic.

  He waited until she’d left the other girls, and then he followed her down the street that led to her house. When he caught up to her and grabbed her arm, she shrieked.

  “God!” she said. “Peter, why don’t you just scare me to death!”

  He had worked out what he was going to ask her in his mind, because words didn’t come easily to him, and he knew that he had to practice them more than others would; but when he had Josie this close, after everything that had happened, every question felt like a slap. Instead, he sank onto the curb, spearing his hands through his hair. “Why?” he asked.

  She sat down next to him, folding her arms over her knees. “I’m not doing it to hurt you.”

  “You’re such a fake with them.”

  “I’m just not the way I am with you,” Josie said.

  “Like I said: fake.”

  “There’s different kinds of real.”

  Peter scoffed. “If that’s what those jerks are teaching you, it’s bullshit.”

  “They’re not teaching me anything,” Josie argued. “I’m there because I like them. They’re fun and funny and when I’m with them—” She broke off abruptly.

  “What?” Peter prompted.

  Josie looked him in the eye. “When I’m with them,” she said, “people like me.”

  Peter guessed change could be that dramatic: in an instant, you could go from wanting to kill someone to wanting to kill yourself.

  “I won’t let them make fun of you anymore,” Josie promised. “That’s a silver lining, right?”

  Peter didn’t respond. This wasn’t about him.

  “I just . . . I just can’t really hang out with you right now,” Josie explained.

  He lifted his face. “Can’t?”

  Josie stood up, backing away from him. “I’ll see you around, Peter,” she said, and she walked out of his life.

  You can feel people staring; it’s like heat that rises from the pavement during summer, like a poker in the small of your back. You don’t have to hear a whisper, either, to know that it’s about you.

  I used to stand in front of the mirror in the bathroom to see what they were staring at. I wanted to know what made their heads turn, what it was about me that was so incredibly different. At first I couldn’t tell. I mean, I was just me.

  Then one day, when I looked in the mirror, I understood. I looked into my own eyes and I hated myself, maybe as much as all of them did.

  That was the day I started to believe they might be right.

  Ten Days After

  Josie waited until she could no longer hear the television in her mother’s bedroom—Leno, not Letterman—and then rolled onto her side to watch the LED acrobatics of the digital clock. When it was 2:00 a.m., she decided it was safe, and she pulled back her covers and got out of bed.

  She knew how to sneak downstairs. She’d done it a couple of times before, meeting Matt outside in the backyard. One night, he’d texted her on her cell—1/2 2 C U now. She had gone out to him in her pajamas, and for a moment when he touched her she actually thought she would slip through his fingers.

  There was only one landing where the floorboards creaked, and Josie knew enough to step over it. Downstairs, she rummaged through the stack of DVDs for the one she wanted—the one she didn’t want to be caught viewing. Then she turned on the television, muting the sound so low she ha