What Cool Girls Believe

Somewhere in time a girl is walking down a school hallway on the first day of seventh grade in a swirling river of hormone-awakening bodies, books held tightly against her chest. The girl is happy to be back in school, to be away from the red clay hill in the back country where she spent a lonely summer. She’s surprised when a gaggle of cool girls approach her in the hallway, when she hears them sing-songing her name like cool girls do. Their voices echo like sneaky distant thunder. She’s almost lulled into thinking they want her to join them but her stomach says no. The blonde with the ice chip eyes gets to the point. “Hey, we heard what you and Alex did this summer.” Giggles. “Did it feel good?” Heat rises from her heart, that’s in her mouth, to her scalp.  Alex has lied and the cool girls believe him because he’s cool, too. They prance away giggling, flipping their daisy-fresh tresses. A buzzing in her head drowns the voices of all the kids around her as the blood drains from her face. She feels like an old, crumbly cicada shell stuck to a tree, like she felt after Alex walked away with a smirk. 

 
Even after she is a grown woman the girl never forgets this incident. The girl-now-woman thinks about those cool girls, how they believed that lie and laughed. About how someone can tell a lie about anyone and the lied-about can never prove it’s a lie. How the lie lives forever and is almost as bad as the truth.