I didn’t notice Gemma until she started speaking in an English accent, there, in second period, at her desk under the tangerine tendril of light the first morning after Christmas break. She’d left for the holiday speaking just the rest of us— if she’d spoken at all—languid, mumbly, buffering herself from her comments with a “maybe” or “I guess” or “other people are saying—” and then there she was, surprising our Lit teacher by waving her small peach hand for attention and announcing to the class, apropos of nothing, that she’d been to London and Canterbury, in a strange new lilt. 

It was a joke— it had to be. She was making fun of the Brits, their propriety and their tea-and-crumpets manner of singing their sentences, their formal choice of words: lift, tube, knackered. But she made similar announcements in Physics and U.S. History. You could see the teachers’ heads jolt backwards at the strange new affect, taking a half- measure of recalibration. And the next day and the next and into the second week, her hand constantly waving for attention. I sat there hoping— praying— that she’d be drop the act or be sick for a day or go hoarse, just to save herself that embarrassment I felt on my arm hair, as if it were my voice and not hers. 

I was a shit-heel back then, it has to be said— a squirmy little twerp. How I dressed, even— I can barely look at those pictures: the practiced carelessness of my poses, my frat boy polos, my shark’s tooth necklace— the necklace I wore every day, like it lent me substance, like just by wearing it I could become who I wanted to be: smoldering and edgy and dangerous.

I did just about the worst shit you can do without winding building a record, all of it out of suburban boredom. I egged the houses of a girl who refused my uncharming, clumsy teenage flirtations; my hoard of patchy-bearded friends provided supplementary fire from right behind me, at three in the morning, the crisp-shattering of eggshells on the shingled roof. I stole a whistle from our fat gym teacher. I broke candy bars in the nearby drugstore just so little kids would be disappointed. So they’d, momentarily, feel hopeless as I did. If my parents had been aware of what I was doing, they would have smacked me across the head. And I would’ve deserved it. Wish I could do it to myself in hindsight.

Gemma was short. She was easily missed. Before that Christmas, if memory serves, her hair had obstructed her face in thick, sandy sheaths. She’d favored form- swallowing sweatshirts with logos that no one ever cared enough to read. And suddenly she sounded like a Spice girl and wore collared button-downs in the pastel spectrum of springtime, her hair gathered up under a news-boy cap (the kind my great uncle used to wear), revealing thicker eyebrows than I’d seen on a girl. I began to notice her outside of class, in the farthest corner of the library, reading books I didn’t recognize, nodding to herself as if the author was sitting across from her— as if they were having a private conversation. Sometimes she’d have lunch with Katie Chong and Lauren Manini, sitting on the brick half-wall next to the vegetable garden. I saw her pontificating, gracing the two with a theory, the pinched fingers of one hand slicing the air in front of her with quick strokes as she lectured. You could see the way Katie and Lauren’s eyes type- writered across the passing faces of the rest of our class; they hadn’t asked for that kind of scrutiny.

We talked about her a lot, down in Martin Grasper’s mildewy basement, between wolfing down microwaved mac-and-cheese and games of foosball or darts. We were the deciders. Us seven. The council of what should and shouldn’t be. 

Thom said she was having a nervous breakdown; he seemed like an authority; his dad was a psychologist. Martin said he’d been in classes with her since kindergarten, that she’d always been a freak. “She’s not even good at the accent,” he fumed, outrage prompting him to stand, his face turning that strawberry color it sometimes did. “If you’re going to speak like that twenty-four-seven, you have to at least be good at the accent.”

She was the easiest punchline, the lowest fruit. “Gemma would say it was smashing, gov’na.” We reported to one another: what we’d seen her wearing, reading. How we’d seen her walking the halls with an undeserved confidence, had wanted to smack the books out of her arms. Everything was breaking news. It sustained us. I wish I could say I didn’t laugh— that I felt bad about it— that while my immoral friends ridiculed, I cast my eyes shamefully towards a blur of ground. But that’s not true. In my own little way, in the way high schoolers lacking courage do, I swam with the current. Accelerated it. Piled on. 

Into February it went. Her name was a verb. Anytime you tried to sound smart you were “pulling a Gemma.” People would yell at her in the middle of class— the teachers did nothing: “Gemma! You’ve lived here your whole freaking life! Enough!” And Gemma absorbed it, chin raised, blinking into the middle-distance, as if not willing
to dignify her abuser with eye contact though you could see her quivering if you paid attention, with Mrs. Markler shuffling her papers like the attack hadn’t taken place, waiting out the laughter, unwilling to risk her own hard-fought cache. 

Katie and Lauren no longer sat by the vegetable garden— they’d fled her company. I no longer saw her reading in the library; I don’t know what she did for lunch. Good, I thought. Let her be alone, the fucking bitch.

One of the popular girls toe-tripped her outside the lockers along the science wing (“oops, sorry, didn’t see you there!”) and her chin thwacked the pavement. The blood matched the painted ground. You would’ve thought it ended there— that she
would take the abuse as a clear sign of her unnatural sin, her injustice against the unspoken rules of the school, the social order and self-consciousness which kept us magnetized— that invisible push and pull— locking us at the exact status we were predestined to hold. But then the day after, there she was raising her hand with a black zipper of stitches along the underside of her jaw; unblinking, clueless. “I thought last evening’s chapter was a re-fresh-ing de-pahr-ture.”

We rolled our heads around our necks. Our eyes narrowed. 

Her house got TP’d. Jeff Produnsky and the rest of those future drug-addicts poured a gallon of piss inside her locker. I watched her stand there over the shoulder of our janitor, the Korean man with the cracking knees whose name I never bothered to learn, as he swore and swabbed the metal, blaming her for his own humiliation. 

I felt it the week after. Violence was in the air. Something worse than urine waited around the corner. In each of us, in the whole student body, stretched a potential: we could scar, we could break. We wanted to do it. It was a matter of when. 

And then she was gone. One day became two days became a whole week, then another. She left in mid-March. I remember looking at her desk and wondering where she was as our Lit teacher gave a forgotten lecture about some book I never read. Rumors whipped the halls. Gemma’d been hospitalized; she had an STD; she’d stolen a car and went on a shoplifting spree; Gemma was never her real name; she’d been in witness protection; she’d been arrested after an orgy with local politicians.

Gemma missed almost three full weeks of school before Clarissa Weiss raised her hand and asked our teacher, directly, “Mrs. Markler, where’s Gemma?”

Mrs. Markler drew a hand to her brow, as if the topic of Gemma had merely slipped her mind. “Right. Gemma, I’m sorry to say, has moved. It sounds like she’s started attending a boarding school. In England. Somewhere that accepts new students in the middle of March.” Her eyes panned across our faces and settled on mine. She shrugged at me— a moment of communion, like I wasn’t a student but a peer— a shrug as if to say, What can you do? Some people are just beyond understanding.

I told the others as soon as possible— Martin and Thom and Keith and Roberto— at the table under the overhang where we met for first break. They said nothing. I remember the moment: every face aimed a different direction: one chin high, one chin low— a set of eyes towards a wall, another glazed towards the chain-link fence. Nicholas picked at the metal grating of the table-top; I remember the scratch of his fingernails. No one had given her permission. Yet she had left. 

We weren’t the council. We weren’t deciders. My friends looked small in that moment. Like toddlers in adult clothes.

Gemma’s name stopped being said. There were no more jokes. It was an unspoken rule, unanimously absorbed: she wasn’t brought up. I stopped wearing that shark tooth necklace soon after she disappeared. Sometimes I’d see one of my friends folded over, staring at their shoelaces, and I wondered if she’d just crossed their mind. I can’t speak for my friends, but I thought of her often her as the year went on. I still think about her. I imagine her over there, my age now, surrounded by all those old buildings, fancy shoes clicking down the narrow cobble-stone streets of London, driving on the wrong-side on the rolling road of the hyper-green English country, stopping for fish-and-chips along a foggy coastline, her voice— whatever it was— sounding natural and calm and easy.

Elan Maier grew up on the mean streets of Silicon Valley. He graduated with a Creative Writing master’s from Oxford University and his writing has been published in the Appalachian Review, Assignment Literary Magazine, and Darling Records. He was a recent finalist in the Screencraft Cinematic Prose competition. He resides in New York City.