The post had come from Cassidy Vale. Tess knew Cassidy the way everyone at Greyhaven High knew Cassidy: a senior with a loud laugh and a following that seemed to gather wherever she stood, flanked most days by Harper and Sloane, who laughed a half-beat after she did. Cassidy had never been cruel to Tess's face in a way Tess could have answered. The cruelty, when it came, was of a different kind: a photograph, a caption, a joke that pretended to be about the picture and was really about the person who had made it. The page Cassidy had posted was a tide pool study, one Tess had drawn at the marine centre on a Saturday, with a starfish and a hermit crab and careful notes in the margin about the way the water moved. The caption called the drawing babyish. Another post, posted a few minutes later, showed a second page, and then a third. The captions grew bolder as the likes grew. By the time Tess saw the fourth, someone had written the words that would follow her down the corridor for the rest of the day: "Fish Girl."
She did not remember walking to the art room. She remembered the hallway sound, though, and she would remember it later when she tried to explain the day to herself. It was not one laugh but many, overlapping, and underneath them a bubbling sound, like water coming up through a drain, or like someone trying not to laugh and failing. It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. It rose when she passed a group by the lockers and fell when she turned a corner, and then rose again near the stairwell, where Harper was holding a phone out so Sloane could see. Tess did not stop. She did not look at them directly. She kept her eyes on the floor tiles and counted them, one, two, three, until the art room door was in front of her and she could push it open and be, for a moment, out of the corridor's weather.
The art room was empty. That was the strangest part. It was the place where she was usually most herself, with its smell of paint and paper and the long sinks along the wall, and the windows that let in the harbour light. Ms. Alvarez was not there; she was teaching another class. The tables were bare except for jars of brushes and a stack of paper waiting to be used. Tess stood for a moment in the middle of the room, holding her bag against her chest like a shield, and then her legs gave out in the quiet, unremarkable way that legs do when a person has been holding herself upright for too long. She sat down on the art-room floor, with her back against the side of a table, and put her head on her knees.
Mara found her there during the lunch break, or rather, Mara found her because Mara had been looking. She had heard the nickname in the corridor outside the gym, said lightly, as if it were nothing, and she had felt something in her chest go very still. Mara was used to anger. On the pitch, anger was useful: it made her run faster, push harder, call louder. Off the pitch, anger was less tidy. It wanted a target, and a raised voice, and a satisfying, immediate answer. For a moment, standing in the doorway of the art room and seeing Tess on the floor, Mara felt all of that rise in her at once: the urge to go straight back into the corridor, to find Cassidy, to say the sharp thing that would make the laughing stop. She could feel the words lining up in her mouth, hot and ready.
She did not say them. Not there, not then. She closed the door quietly behind her, crossed the room, and sat down on the floor beside Tess, not opposite her, not standing over her, but beside her, shoulder to shoulder, the way they had sat as small children when one of them had fallen over. She did not ask what had happened in a rush. She did not say, "Who did this?" in the voice she used for opponents. She just sat, and waited, and let the art room be quiet around them.
"Tess," she said, after a while, softly.
Tess lifted her head. Her face was pale, and her eyes were bright in the way that meant tears were close but not yet arrived. "They posted my sketchbook," she said. "Cassidy did. Harper and Sloane were with her. They took photographs in here, I think. I don't know when. I left it on the table once, maybe. I don't remember."