Bad Apple by Laura Ruby

Author:Laura Ruby
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-10-24T04:00:00+00:00

I’m excused for the day. The ride home with Mom is quiet, but the kind of quiet that’s filled with all the things you really want to say but can’t. I wonder if that’s something I can paint. Every once in a while my mom swipes at her eyes and sniffs. When I ask if she’s okay, she laughs and says, “Peachy.”

Later that night, she asks me, “What are you trying to do to me, Tola? What are you trying to do?”

Madge has a new hobby. In addition to watching war movies, reading the latest research on psychiatric medication, screaming at Pib, and ignoring my mom’s pleas for better communication, she’s now a faithful reader of TheTruthAboutTolaRiley blog. (Mom had it shut down, but it popped up again and again in different forms and on different sites.) Madge reads the news articles quoting me and Mom at the school-board meeting. She reads about how Mr. Mymer and I were “observed” by another student “acting in an intimate manner,” which makes me picture a middle-aged couple crammed in a grimy bathroom, cleaning out each other’s ears with Q-tips.

The comments describe something you’d see on late-night TV or YouTube, complete with bad behavior in broom closets and lots of inappropriate language. In one of them, Mr. Mymer isn’t a Mr., he’s a Mrs., and we’re hot lesbians in luv. In another, I’m a twelve-year-old immigrant boy from the Philippines and Mr. Mymer is a twice-married, fifty-three-year-old father of seven. I stole a fetal pig, the post said, because it reminded me of the baby pigs I ate back home.

“Things were bad enough for you,” Madge says, “and then you go and mess with Mr. Anderson. What is up with that? You’re such an idiot.”

Rather than making an artistic statement, or even a rebellious one, the pignapping has confirmed everyone’s worst opinions of me. Do-anything, say-anything Tola Riley. I’m not allowed to be online anymore, so I can only imagine what’s happening in other places on the Web, how the collective has examined and reexamined the evidence, the articles and the blogs and the texts that have been passed around; how they have all decided together what must have happened to me. I think about how nice that must be, to feel so sure of your own judgments, basically because no one is allowed to have different ones.

“But then most people at school are idiots, too. Nobody can decide anything for themselves anymore,” Madge is saying. “It’s all about groupthink.”

I can’t even remember where this started, when I became this outcast. Did it begin when people discovered I could eat more than a football player? When I outran Josh Beck? When I told Chelsea Patrick that I wouldn’t go to the mall to meet some dealer named Spit?

“I dumped my Facebook,” Madge says. “I couldn’t stand it anymore.”

“Couldn’t stand what?”

“Do you ever listen when someone is talking to you? You’re so annoying. It’s like you’re trapped in your own head all the time. The world doesn’t revolve around you, you know.

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