Anyway, for the last month or so Mr. Hammell had been maybe not exactly coming on to me. Not that I’d have known if he was, because nobody in the world had ever actually come on to me, except Mark Rinzler one time, at a Christmas party. At first it was okay, fun even, and then it just turned gross—no, that’s not the word, it turned stupid and scary, and I made Mark quit, and he never spoke to me again. But Mr. Hammell used to stand right beside me while he was talking, and he’d let his long fingers trail over my desk, and now and then he’d look at me, as though I was the only one in the class who could ever possibly understand what he was saying. Which was not true. And after class, or if we met in the hall, he’d stop me and ask what I thought about Antigone or poor dumb Desdemona, whichever, while I stood there getting redder and redder and sweatier and sweatier. He even gave me his home phone number, in case I ever had any questions about the homework assignment. I didn’t throw it away for a couple of days.
Meena keeps saying I should have complained about sexual harassment. Only Meena’s pretty, and there’s a lot of stuff pretty people don’t know. Pretty people like Stacy Altieri and Vanessa Whitfield and Morgan Baskin, they’d come drifting up to me at my locker and they’d ask, “So. What’s it like with him?” And they’d look at me, the way people do when they’re waiting for some kind of right answer from you, some kind of password. And all I had to do was say it, the word, and there I’d be, I’d be with them. But I didn’t know any password, I never do. So they’d go on looking at me for a while, and then they’d drift off again, back to their cool boyfriends, back to pretty. And I’m standing there, still pink sweaty me, and I’m going to know what’s sexual harassment and what isn’t? Right, Meena.