Pariah (The Magic Unveiling Book 1) by Sullivan Gray

Pariah (The Magic Unveiling Book 1) by Sullivan Gray

Author:Sullivan Gray [Gray, Sullivan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-09-17T05:00:00+00:00


17

Solitary Confinement

Solitary confinement is supposed to be the worst punishment for people. At least according to prison movies. They’re always throwing people in solitary while they beg and scream not to go. People lose their minds when they don’t have human interaction. That’s why Tom Hanks talked to the volleyball in that movie Castaway that Mom made me watch with her last year. I hated the movie, but couldn’t help getting teary when Wilson got lost in the ocean. Was it weird that I was more upset by that part than him losing the woman he loved? Probably.

Anyway, all the movies are wrong. Being totally isolated and cut off from people isn’t the worst thing. Being completely alone while you’re surrounded by people is the worst thing.

Not that I’ve been in solitary confinement to compare the two, but I know how I felt after spending a few days walking through halls crowded with people who don’t see you. It felt like I didn’t exist at all. Not to them.

I could see them and hear them and touch them and even sometimes smell them in the clouds of cologne or perfume as I walked the halls. But by Thursday, no one would even make eye contact with me. The guys had stopped their campaign of lewd comments and threatening looks and had followed Cassie and Kendall’s lead: I didn’t exist.

Finally, I started to hear pieces of the rumors they spread about me. Usually in snatches of conversations in the hallways as I passed groups of people and saw their heads swivel away from me.

“She’s the one who …”

“I can’t believe she …”

“At that party last weekend, everyone said …”

Mostly the rumors were predictable. The one I heard most was that I slept with half the football team—even the ones with girlfriends. Which made me not just a slut, but a boyfriend-stealing slut. There were variations, but most went around that idea. In one version I seduced one girl’s boyfriend and then bragged about it right after. In another I paid guys to have sex with me. That was the only one that made me want to laugh. The rest left me feeling varying degrees of nauseated and angry.

I struggled to even understand how these kinds of rumors made me an outcast, while all the guys in question had zero consequences. I took all the blame. I was a slut. The guys who supposedly all slept with me—even the ones with girlfriends—walked around school like nothing could touch them. Talk about a double standard. I’d heard people talk about slut-shaming, but didn’t understand it until I was (allegedly) the slut.

While I knew the rumors obviously weren’t true, I was shocked at how the whispers and the lies made me feel guilty. I already felt a sense of misplaced shame, like their unwanted touches and lustful gazes made me dirty. It wasn’t my fault. I knew that, logically. Yet as the days wore on with everything piling on, the lies started to get to me.



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