A Song for Julia

screamed at her, and she slapped me, and I ran to my room. I wanted to die. I … I really wanted to die.”
    She inhaled through her nose, making a great sniffling sound, and wiped at her eyes furiously. Then she glared at me, her eyes deadly. “I’ve never told anyone all of this. No one.”
    I just nodded and quietly whispered, “You can trust me, Julia.”
    “I got sick. Really sick. I don’t think there was much blood loss, but it lasted almost a week. And being out in the cold, wet, all those hours. So I spent a whole week out of school with the flu. I barely saw my mother. Carrie came and sat with me a little after school, but Mom made her stay on the other side of the room, in case I was contagious.”
    She gave a bitter laugh. “It wasn’t much different later on. Because she decided that me being a slut would be contagious.”
    I winced at the anger of her words.
    “When I got back to school, I saw Harry in the hallway. He met my eye and just turned away. He never spoke with me again. I guess it was a relief when he saw me back at school, that I hadn’t died or caused some big diplomatic incident that would have gotten him in trouble. But I did finally break down and tell Lana, later that year. For a while, she wasn’t speaking with me either, because I’d been so distant when I was with Harry. But by spring, we were friends again, and stayed that way for most of the rest of the time I was in Beijing.”
    “The thing is,” she said, “When you trust people, they can hurt you. And my last week there, we got in a fight. A bad fight. And Lana emailed everyone in our class a story about how I supposedly seduced Harry Easton and got pregnant. She said in her email that we’d had sex in the school building. And she told them how I’d gotten the abortion, and that was why I missed that week of school right before Christmas. And … she included a picture someone had taken. A … horrible picture. The thing is, I don’t even remember it. Harry had taken me to a party, and I’d told my parents I was staying with Lana. He kept telling me I had to drink. I blacked out … I don’t remember that night. But someone took a picture of me, and it was … horrible. Someone forwarded the email to my parents.”
    Mother of God, I thought.
    “The thing is … I’d put my life back together. I had a couple of friends … and I’d promised myself, I’d never let that happen to me again. I didn’t date. I didn’t … I didn’t even go out much with the other kids at school. I stuck to myself, and to Lana, and that was pretty much it. I worked hard. I learned Mandarin, fluently, so I’d never feel lost in the city again. I was never going to be a weak, scared little girl again. But when Lana betrayed me … it … it ruined everything. And the story followed me back to the United States. So my whole senior year in high school, it was … slut … whore. The guys would proposition me in the hallway, or grab my breasts or butt, and the school did nothing about it. They’ve got bullying refined down to a science at BCC. Then I’d get home, and it was worse, because my father was supposed to be on his way to Moscow by then. But Maria Clawson had somehow gotten hold of the email. She took my name out, because I wasn’t eighteen yet. But she published the rest, and Senator Rainsley put a hold on Dad’s nomination, and it sat there. And so every day I’d come home, and my mother was crazier and crazier. Because she thought my dad’s career was ending with a scandal. Clawson had implied in the blog that my father knew about the abortion … that he’d made arrangements for it. And my mother … she didn’t use the same words they did at school. But she meant the same thing. That I was a worthless whore.”
    Holy Christ on Mars, why in God’s name hadn’t her parents helped her? I swallowed. “You got through it somehow.”
    She nodded, slowly. “New Year’s of 2000.”
    She held up her right wrist in front of her face, and she slid the bracelets she always wore up her arm, baring her wrist, then turned it toward me. “If you look closely,” she whispered, “you’ll see the scars.”
    I sucked in a quick breath. I could barely see it—three long, vertical scars that went three inches up her wrists. Bad scars. Tentatively, I touched them, ran my fingers down them. When I did … when I made that contact, tears started to flow from her eyes, too many to staunch or swallow back.
    “I slit my