Under the Dome

“I started crying. That’s usually the signal—among kids, at least—that things have gone far enough. Not that day. When I started screaming, Lila said, ‘Shut up or you get worse.’ There was nobody to stop them, either. It was a cold, drizzly afternoon, and the Common was deserted except for us.

“Lila slapped me across the face hard enough to make my nose bleed and said, ‘Tattle-tale tit! All the dogs in town come to have a little bit!’ And the other girls laughed. They said it was because I told on Andy, and at the time I thought it was, but now I see it was everything, right down to the way my skirts and blouses and even my hair ribbons matched. They wore clothes, I had outfits. Andy was just the last straw.”

“How bad was it?”

“There was slapping. Some hair-pulling. And… they spit on me. All of them. That was after my legs gave out and I fell down on the bandstand. I was crying harder than ever, and I had my hands over my face, but I felt it. Spit’s warm, you know?”

“Yeah.”

“They were saying stuff like teacher’s pet and goody-goody-gumdrops and little miss shit-don’t-stink. And then, just when I thought they were done, Corrie Macintosh said, ‘Let’s pants her!’ Because I was wearing slacks that day, nice ones my mom got from a catalogue. I loved them. They were the kind of slacks you might see a coed wearing as she crossed the Quad at Princeton. At least that’s what I thought then.

“I fought them harder that time, but they won, of course. Four of them held me down while Lila and Corrie pulled off my slacks. Then Cindy Collins started laughing and pointing and saying, ‘She’s got frickin Poohbear on her underpants!’ Which I did, along with Eeyore and Roo. They all started laughing, and… Barbie… I got smaller… and smaller… and smaller. Until the bandstand floor was like a great flat desert and I was an insect stuck in the middle of it. Dying in the middle of it.”

“Like an ant under a magnifying glass, in other words.”

“Oh, no! No, Barbie! It was cold, not hot. I was freezing. I had goosebumps on my legs. Corrie said, ‘Let’s take her pannies, too!’ but that was a little farther than they were prepared to go. As the next best thing, maybe, Lila took my nice slacks and threw them onto the roof of the bandstand. After that, they left. Lila was the last one to go. She said, ‘If you tattle this time, I’ll get my brother’s knife and cut off your bitch nose.’ ”

“What happened?” Barbie asked. And yes, his hand was definitely resting against the side of her breast.

“What happened at first was just a scared little girl crouching there on the bandstand, wondering how she was going to get home without half the town seeing her in her silly baby underwear. I felt like the smallest, dumbest Chiclet who ever lived. I finally decided I’d wait until dark. My mother and father would be worried, they might even call the cops, but I didn’t care. I was going to wait until dark and then sneak home by the sidestreets. Hide behind trees if anyone came along.

“I must have dozed a little bit, because all at once Kayla Bevins was standing over me. She’d been right in there with the rest, slapping and pulling my hair and spitting on me. She didn’t say as much as the rest, but she was part of it. She helped hold me while Lila and Corrie pantsed me, and when they saw one of the legs of my slacks was hanging off the edge of the roof, Kayla got up on the railing and flipped it all the way up, so I wouldn’t be able to reach it.

“I begged her not to hurt me anymore. I was beyond things like pride and dignity. I begged her not to pull my underwear down. Then I begged her to help me. She just stood there and listened, like I was nothing to her. I was nothing to her. I knew that then. I guess I forgot it over the years, but I’ve sort of reconnected with that particular home truth as a result of the Dome experience.

“Finally I ran down and just lay there sniffling. She looked at me a little longer, then pulled off the sweater she was wearing. It was an old baggy brown thing that hung almost to her knees. She was a big girl and it was a big sweater. She threw it down on top of me and said, ‘Wear it home, it’ll look like a dress.’

“That was all she said. And although I went to school with her for eight more years—all the way to graduation at Mills High—we never spoke again. But sometimes in my dreams I still hear her saying that one thing: Wear it home, it’ll look like a dress. And I see her face. No hate or anger in it, but no pity, either. She didn’t do it out of pity, and she didn’t do it to shut me up. I don’t know why she did it. I don’t know why she even came back. Do you?”

“No,” he said, and kissed her mouth. It was brief, but warm and moist and quite terrific.

“Why did you do that?”

“Because you looked like you needed it, and I know I did. What happened next, Julia?”

“I put on the sweater and walked home—what else? And my parents were waiting.”