“And then he asked you to shave your arms?”
She nodded.
“He said if I changed that one thing, they’d stop talking about us.”
“Did he apologize?”
“He said he didn’t mean to hurt me. He said he just wanted the jokes to stop.”
I took her hand.
“Emma, you were not responsible for making those boys behave.”
“I know.”
But she didn’t sound convinced.
Then she said something that made me stop.
“He told me I didn’t understand what it was like when everybody stared at something about your body.”
I waited.
“He wouldn’t explain what he meant. He just said I wouldn’t understand.”
She looked down at her arms.
“I thought he was just being mean. But something about the way he said it made me think there was more.”
For the next few days, Emma and Tyler barely spoke.
She stopped checking her phone every few minutes. She started wearing short-sleeved shirts around the house again, although she still sometimes glanced at her arms when she passed a mirror.
