What's a Girl Gotta Do? (25 page)

forty-three

I eventually fell into bed in a confused stupor, trying to make sense of the good and bad things.

GOOD THING
– you've had over ONE MILLION views!

BAD THING
– at least ten people have promised to rape and/or murder you.

GOOD THING
– Will! You had mindblowing sex with Will.

GOOD THING
– and he's already sent you a message saying he had an amazing night and that he's proud of you…

BAD THING
– amongst all the death-threat business, you've missed yet another day of college before your Cambridge interview.

GOOD THING
– your friends will always be there for you.

BAD THING
– you gave up. You're too weak, you messed up.

I scrabbled around in the covers, opening my window, shutting my window, staring out of my window to check a potential murderer wasn't hiding in the bushes.

I cried. I remembered things with Will… I smiled…

I cried…I smiled…I cried…I smiled… One million views…

When I finally found sleep, I was smiling.

forty-four

I slept heavily and, when I woke, I felt lighter. Just knowing no one could send me anything else did help…

Hang on, why was it still dark?

Hang on, why was my phone ringing?

I reached for it in the darkness, grabbing at where it was charging at the wall.

6.30 a.m. What? It was the middle of the night!

And it was Will's number?

My tummy melted, replaced straight away by nerves.

People don't ring in the middle of the night (well, before 7 a.m.) unless something bad has happened. I slid the screen up to answer.

“Are you dead?” I joked, my voice husky from not being used yet.

Will's voice was not jokey in reply. “Have you been online yet today?”

All my hairs stood up instinctively. Something was wrong. Something else had happened.

“It's not even today yet,” I joked again, lamely. “Why are you up so early?”

“Lottie…” He took a deep breath and I knew my instincts were right. It was the sort of breath you take before delivering bad news.

“What is it?”

A pause. A pause so pregnant it was going to give birth already.

“It's Teddy, he's done something… Lottie? Lottie?”

I didn't need him to tell me anything else. He'd given me the only word I needed. Will gabbled at the end of the phone, all flustered, anger lacing every word. I couldn't tell if it was at me yet, or Teddy.

“There were journalists hanging around at college yesterday. I didn't want to tell you, as you were already so upset…I…I…I didn't think anyone would talk to them anyway. We told people not to.”

I slowly rolled onto my stomach, pulling the laptop down in front of me, starting it up as he carried on ranting. I typed Teddy's name into Google then clicked on
News
.

My hand went to my mouth.

It was a trashy tabloid site, but still a national newspaper. There, there was his sorrowful-looking face. Next to a huge headline that read,
FEMINIST TEEN'S BLACK WIDOW PAST.

I gasped in actual horror.

“Lottie?” Will's voice was frantic on the phone. “Lottie, are you there?”

I was reading the story under my breath.

“
Teen feminazi, Charlotte Thomas, has become a viral sensation this past week with her month-long video project to call out sexism. But, according to her devastated ex-boyfriend, gender equality isn't something she takes into the bedroom…
”

This. This was awful.

“Lottie? Lottie?”

I dropped my phone, ran to the bathroom, stubbing my toe in the dark and vomited into the toilet. I stayed there for a while, clenching the sides of the toilet bowl.

Teddy…

How could he? How could he? How could he…

I hadn't even read most of the story yet.

Mum and Dad were making waking-up noises in their bedroom and I stumbled past them, croaking, “Good morning,” so they wouldn't suspect anything, back into my room, shutting the door behind me. My phone was glowing. My call with Will had rung off, but he'd tried ringing back four times.

I couldn't talk to him.

Not yet.

Maybe not ever.

I brushed a tear from my face and forced myself to sit upright at my desk with the laptop, thinking maybe if I tried to view this professionally, I wouldn't get so upset. I wiggled the mouse to activate the screen, and there was my face again. Teddy had obviously given them one of the photos he'd taken last year. There weren't many, we had hardly dated. But there was that one day when we'd gone to Brighton and shivered by the sea all day in the non-existent winter sun. He'd taken a few selfies of us on his phone… Here they were. The sea and Brighton pier in the background. They'd picked a bad one of me, my eyes squinting from the wind, my hair all over my face. Teddy looked nice though. My insides froze with hatred.

I dragged my attention away from the photo and started reading the story again.

Edward Burrington, eighteen, says he dated the notorious Charlotte last year before he heard about her man-eating reputation.

“Once we got together, everyone told me what a slut she was,” he said. “I didn't believe them at first. I was in love. I wish I had listened to them now.”

I was shaking my head.

Slut. I was being called a slut in a national newspaper.

A fresh wave of nausea hit me, tears pouring down my cheeks. My phone kept buzzing but I ignored it. I knew I should stop reading, but I couldn't. It was like I was in full-on self-flagellation mode.

So I scrolled down.

But soon after saucy Charlotte had taken Edward's virginity, she lost interest and cruelly dumped him.

“I was heartbroken,” Teddy told us. “I honestly thought we were soulmates.”

No you didn't, Teddy
, I thought.
Nobody would treat someone the way you've treated me this year if they thought that.

“When people came to comfort me, they told me this is what she does. She has sex with boys and then dumps them afterwards. It's a feminism thing. She says the only way to beat men is to behave like one.”

Where was he getting this from??? How? How was this thing printed? They hadn't even rung me to listen to my side of the story!

They were still giving Teddy column space.

“This stupid project of hers, she says it's all about equality, but really she's one of those man-haters. This is all about revenge for her. She's a black widow spider. She's dangerous.”

I didn't read any more.

I was too stunned to cry properly. I just stared at the screen, shaking my head.

Mum called through the door. “Lottie? You've not gone back to sleep, have you? You've got college soon.”

“I'm up,” I called back, my voice cracking.

There was no way I was going to college. Not with this, not with lies about my sex life splashed all over the papers and everyone reading it. The way Teddy would look at me all triumphantly – revenge for something wrong I did to him that he'd totally imagined.

And I'd only just got through yesterday…

Oh God – Will would read this! Of course he had already – he was the one who'd phoned me about it. What must he think?

What must anyone think?

I'd always tried not to care before. That's how you give away your power, by caring what other people think. As long as nobody thought I was a nasty person, I didn't worry about the rest. I mean, why bother? You couldn't control it anyway.

But this had broken that.

I knew I wasn't a slut… Was I?

And it's a totally horrid word anyway, that I'm totally against. I'm against the whole concept. A slut isn't even a real thing – it's just a thing society has made up, an imaginary noun used to shame and control women. If I'd read this story and it wasn't about me, I would've been publicly declaring how awful it was.

It
was
about me though.

And now, now…everyone thinks I'm a slut…

I lay my head on my hands, collapsed forward and really started to cry then. The sobs heaving up out of my back – my phone still ringing like crazy.

Was it Will? Probably. Pretending this hadn't altered how he thought of me. Probably thinking how quick I'd been to have sex with him, multiple times, the day before.

Probably thinking that's a pretty slutty thing to do.

Or it would be Amber and Evie. Caring, always caring. But whatever they said or did, it couldn't take any of this away. Not even with a lifetime supply of cheesy snacks.

Mum called through my door again and I started. College. I was supposed to be going to college.

No way in hell. But they couldn't know that. They'd been clucking a lot about this Cambridge interview, saying how important it was I knew the syllabus inside and out. In amongst all my public glory (and shaming that they didn't know about) they were still making sure I kept my eyes on the prize.

I wondered if Cambridge would read this.

Then I laughed through my tears. No chance. At least their intellectual snobbery would stop them ever reading this paper.

I began getting dressed, wiping the tears from my eyes the moment they fell, hoping my face would clear up enough before I went downstairs so my parents couldn't see I'd been crying.

There was another thing to think about.

What had just happened. This. Teddy. That whole mess.

It was sexism.

A tiny sliver of my brain that wasn't in total free fall could identify that.

And, if it was sexism, that meant I needed to call it out.

Which was exactly what they wanted me to do.

Enough…

I didn't have the strength.

I was broken. I was willing to admit that I, Lottie the unbreakable, was totally and completely annihilated.

I wasn't going to call this out.

I was going to hide.

I'd been silenced.

And you know what? I was relieved.

forty-five

My parents didn't suspect anything through breakfast, and I was out the door before them anyway.

I wasn't going to college. Nope. I didn't have whatever insane mental strength you would need to go into college the day you're publicly shamed for being a girl and having sex with more than one person. I'd turned my phone off too and left it in my bedroom.

Yes, I was sure Evie and Amber would be worried, but I was so humiliated I couldn't even face having that conversation with them now.

Will might be worried. Or he might worry I'm a black widow slut…

It annoyed me how much I cared what he must think.

It was a cold and damp morning, the wind swirling my hair around my face. I walked without much clue where I was going, just as long as it wasn't in the direction of college. I passed a new sexist poster at the bus stop.

I didn't do anything.

I was done. I was spent. I'd given it everything and all it had done was bite me so much in the arse, I was surprised I had any arse left – just a hole that poo fell out of.

That's really gross, Lottie.

I found myself climbing Dovelands Hill, the spot where me and my other spinsters had first made friends. It took up most of my energy, my breath frosting as it left my mouth in rapid sobby heaves. I collapsed on the bench at the top and surveyed the landscape below me, my teeth chattering from the chill.

I was lost.

I wasn't usually able to admit that, but then, there, alone, I could.

I'd tried to do something good and now I was being publicly shamed. The sheer unfairness of it hit me in waves of fury and I screamed out over the view – scattering some birds from the trees.

Why wasn't Teddy being publicly shamed for doing this to me?

I was innocent. The only thing I was guilty of was not liking him as much as he wanted me to. Of maybe taking too long to figure that out. I'd broken up with him with respect and care.

Now he was calling me a nasty slut in the national press, ruining my reputation, and I couldn't do anything. Well, I could do something. I could fight back… I was supposed to fight back. But I had no fight left in me.

I thought of how it had all started – with those two men in the van. How strong I'd felt when I'd taken them on.

But it wasn't worth this. The fight wasn't worth how I felt right now. Damaged, ashamed.

Humiliated…

Maybe this is why people don't bother changing anything. It's not just having your hope crushed in the palm of society's hand, but having your spirit crushed too. Your sanity questioned.

Am I crazy?

Is this really a problem?

Is it really worth all this to try and fix it?

Especially when it's likely this won't fix it?

I started to cry again – tears jumping off my face like paratroopers. Really depressed ones.

I thought I was strong but I'm not.

I thought I could change things but I can't.

I thought I didn't care what anyone thought, but I do.

Maybe I should just roll over. Shut up. Calm down. Zip it. Stop whinging. Cease and desist.

Maybe I should just look out for me, put me at the top of the pyramid. Focus on revision, focus on Cambridge. Get in, get a brilliant job, earn loads of money, drop some pound coins into a collection tin when I passed to ease the guilt that I was letting the universe eat itself but it's okay because look at this lovely new lipstick I've bought.

It would be easy.

It would be nice.

I wasn't going to change anything anyway.

I stayed up there until I couldn't feel my limbs from the cold – I'd gone past the point of numb. I was just going to stop the project. Not announce it or anything. Just stop posting videos, stay offline…go back to college maybe in a few days' time…with a hammer to smash in Teddy's skull…no…not murder. Murder bad.

It was so cold my brain was broken.

The house was empty when I let myself in. Dad off teaching people stuff they'd never need to know, not really. Mum rubbing the physical knots out of people that life had given them.

I turned on the TV. I hadn't watched any really since I'd started this thing. It was impossible. Like, every single panel show was just always men men men men, and one token woman who always gave themselves a hernia trying to be heard over all their verbal dick-measuring.

I didn't have to worry about that now.

I stayed away from news channels, just in case I was on them, and settled into some show where they make over your house while you're out swimming or whatever.

“That's shit wallpaper,” I told the television.

“That's a shit chair.”

“That's a shit painting.”

I didn't stop watching it though. In fact, the only break I had was to go into the kitchen and open a bag of grated cheese – shoving fistfuls of it into my face.

“That's a shit pair of curtains.”

It worked to some degree. My brain was only replaying back Teddy's words every 2.5 seconds, instead of every 0.5 seconds.

I must've slumped into some kind of daytime TV coma, because when the doorbell went, I jumped, my heart pounding like a gunshot had been fired.

Doorbell. People.

I stayed where I was.

The doorbell rang again.

I stayed where I was.

Knocking.

I stayed where I was…

Then. “Lottie? Are you in? It's Megan.”

Megan?

I found myself standing up.

I couldn't face the girls, or Will. But somehow Megan, I could answer my door to her. She stood on my step sheepishly, hopping from one foot to the other. She wore a sad smile that instantly confirmed she'd heard or seen the newspaper story.

“Can I come in?”

I didn't say anything. I hadn't spoken all day, other than to tell the interior designers on the TV they were shit.

“I have a present for you,” she said, in a bargaining voice. She reached into her nice leather satchel I'd always lusted after and pulled out a T-shirt. “I made it today.” She held it out so I could read it. It was crumpled, but it had a unicorn on it, with a speech bubble that said in big neon letters:

SLUTS AREN'T REAL.

A small smile played on my lips.

“Am I allowed in?”

I took the T-shirt, holding it up. She'd made it herself, I could tell her style anywhere, but it looked so professional. You could sell it in a shop. I let her in and followed her through to the living room.

“Do you want a drink?”

“A cup of tea would be nice. It's freezing outside.”

She sat on the sofa, all bird-like. I left her there and went to make the drinks quickly, then brought them back.

Megan's presence didn't fill much of a room. She was small and dainty and unassuming and always covered her hands with the sleeves of her jumper. Her fragile energy somehow calmed me. She wasn't going to give me fighting talk, or lie about it all being okay. I needed that right now.

“I almost didn't recognize you without your eyeliner,” she commented, thanking me as she took the mug of tea.

“I don't even recognize me without eyeliner.”

She smiled. “Are you okay?”

I shook my head.

“I'm sorry for what Teddy did. If it helps any, I heard he's been suspended. He may even get expelled.”

It didn't help any. It didn't help at all.

I took a sip of my tea, saying nothing. Looking everywhere but at her, in case I saw more sympathy on her face.

“Evie and Lottie said they tried to come round earlier but no one answered.”

“I went out.”

“They're trying again soon. They've sent me first.”

She'd been sent? That wasn't a surprise really.

“Will was looking rather desperate today at college too. He said you've turned your phone off.”

Will… My heart did little confused leaps.

I didn't know what to say. So I took another sip of tea and said, “I'm stopping the project.”

“Lottie, no!” Megan's energy shifted right away. She was on the sofa, then she was next to me, grabbing my arm urgently. “You can't.”

I shook my head. “I'm sorry. You've been great, and so helpful… But I can't do this any more. I…I'm…I'm not brave enough.”

I started to cry again, with the shame of admitting it out loud.

Megan didn't comfort me though.

She made an annoyed tut and went, “Oh really, Lottie? For fuck's sake. What's bravery got to do with it?”

I looked up. Surprised at her sudden lack of sympathy.

“I don't have the strength!” I tried to explain. “Everyone's saying how strong I am all the time, but I'm not. I thought I was, but I'm not.”

Megan shook her head. “Jeez, what are you even saying? What sort of sociopath would you be if this didn't upset you, Lottie? You're not GOD…even if you act like it sometimes.”

“I was under the false impression you were here to be nice,” I said, still stunned. Though her harshness had kicked me out of my stupor.

“I was. Until you said you were quitting this project. Lottie” – her voice did soften then – “I've found these past few weeks really…helpful.” A long pause. She was going to tell me, oh God, I hoped I handled it right. “Look, I know you and Amber and Evie know something happened with me and Max, that you've probably guessed the truth.”

I stayed still, to keep her talking. She wasn't getting upset or emotional or anything though; it wasn't how I'd pictured it. Though it was weird I'd pictured this moment at all.

“And…well…I've found it useful to have something to focus on – to feel like I'm doing something about it… Don't stop, Lottie. I know what it feels like to think you're not brave or strong enough, believe me. But you are helping people. And surely that gives you some strength?”

I picked my words carefully. This wasn't about me any more, this was about her.

“Megan. Do you think you need to tell someone what happened?”

She looked up at me, still no emotion. Still no crying. Whereas I was still crying. Because actually, what Megan was surely going through required more strength and more courage than what I was doing. And if she could even get out of bed most days, that was quite something.

“I've told my mum.” My mouth dropped open. “We're dealing with it.”

Dealing with it by telling the police? Dealing with it by getting Max prosecuted? Dealing with it by going to counselling?

But Megan didn't say anything else. She just met my eyes, and hers were fiery. Daring me to ask her more questions. Daring me to judge how she was dealing with this. And I realized that I shouldn't judge her. That I
had
been judging her. For not fighting the fight that I would've fought. When I have no idea what sort of fight I'd be capable of fighting if that happened to me anyway.

So I just said, “I'm so sorry something bad happened to you. If I can do anything…”

A small smile. “You can not quit this project.”

I gave her a small tearful smile back. “I'm not sure I can do that.”

“Why not? What's the worst that can happen? Hasn't it happened already? Look, Lottie” – her eyes watered a little – “horrid things happen, but you
can
get through them. Believe me.”

“I'll always believe you.”

She smiled, wiped away a tear before it began, ignored my interruption. “So why stop? You've taught me to fight, Lottie. Maybe not in the way you want me to. But I still feel I'm fighting. You've pulled me into it. Now it's my turn to pull you back into it.”

I was crying harder. We were both crying harder. My heart ached for her. I wanted to take it all away – take her pain away.

“Why did you start this whole thing anyway?” she asked, wiping her nose on her hand. “Can you remember? I know you say it was those men in the van. But what was the feeling? Remembering may help…”

I bit my lip, trying to sift through my memories. It had been the men who harassed me, but it had also been Mike stealing my line and the first FemSoc meeting and…and… my philosophy homework. I'd totally forgotten about that homework. Which wasn't great, as it was my Cambridge interview in two weeks' time. I remembered that train careering down the tracks – two horrible consequences. Me deciding that avoiding one horrible consequence is never worth allowing another to happen.

I didn't want to be the person who flicked the switch.

But that was different, that was about saving other people, not saving me.

“Do you think it's harder,” I asked her, sipping my tea, “to stick up for other people, or to stick up for yourself?”

“Is that why you did it? To stick up for other people?”

I nodded. “I think so… Like what happened with you.” She stiffened but didn't stop me. “Maybe, I dunno…I can find my strength when I'm battling for someone else, when I'm not, like, the victim…” I wished I hadn't just used the word victim, I hated it so much, but Megan didn't seem to mind. How was she so calm? If I was her, I would be screaming from the rooftops, I'd be yelling from the wings of aeroplanes I'd hired out.

Actually…would I?

I wasn't sticking up for myself today. Not now it was me hurting, me burning, me turning into ash.

“I know I've already said it, but I'm so sorry about what happened to you,” I blurted out, almost wanting to cover my mouth afterwards.

But Megan, calm, calm Megan just said, “I'm so sorry about what's happened to you, too.”

“But what's happening to me is so silly…compared with…”

She shook her head. “It's not silly. It's serious. That's why we're all worried. Anyway, you shouldn't compare these things. You can't put different measurements on pain. Isn't that what your whole project is about?”

I nodded – wondering how she was so wise this afternoon. She was right. All of it was bad. What had happened to Megan, what Teddy had done to me, girls walking down the street and being told they have nice tits, pills costing that bit more money just because they're pink, boys knowing it's more socially acceptable to punch someone in the face than to cry silently in their bedrooms, toddler girls being told they're pretty, toddler boys being told they're brave. Pink and blue. Trousers and skirts. Rape culture and glass ceilings. A skeletal model sauntering down a catwalk, a lonely girl being called fat on the internet.