I see a set of pink-and-white striped flats stop in front of my stall.

“Anna?”

It’s Marissa. Even if I didn’t recognize the voice, the flats are a dead giveaway.

“Yeah?” I say, making sure I don’t show any weakness in my voice. I’m just tired of being looked at.

“You okay?”

“Maybe. Are you?”

“Kind of.” She’s quiet for a moment, then she sighs. “Winning one big battle doesn’t fix all your problems. Guess that’s a lesson we’re both learning.”

“Guess so.”

“I don’t know how to stand up to all of them, how to move on from here.”

I open the bathroom door to face her. “You need to get your power back, remember?”

“Yeah,” she smiles. “But maybe you do, too.” She takes a few steps back and then retreats out the bathroom. I’m not sure if we’re friends now. I’m not sure where she’s at, but I do know things are better than before. Maybe we’re both still learning.

I take a deep breath and run her words through my mind. Didn’t I already face my monsters? Wasn’t that getting my power back? I faced Luis and his friends, the ones who pushed me to have sex with them and then paid me. Wasn’t that enough?

Then again, if it were enough, would I still be hiding in the bathroom? Maybe I do have a few more battles to fight before this is completely over.

Class is…interesting. Even the teachers seem awkward around me now. I guess maybe they thought the rumors were, well, rumors before. Now it’s pretty public knowledge. Shit, there was even an article about me in the newspaper.

Mr. Shelf can’t even look at me now. Mrs. Robert’s eyes just glaze over me.

Only Mr. Harkins seems unchanged. He keeps pushing me to get better and better at art, and it’s kind of working. He posts my self-portrait in the hallway, and every time I walk by it, I feel a little bit better.

It’s watercolor, mostly blues and blacks, like a bruise. But on the white background, it doesn’t seem too somber. It’s just a face, no connecting neck or whatever, like I’m floating. The girl is looking down with a hood up over her head.

It’s me, I guess, though it doesn’t look much like me anymore. The girl in that picture is hiding. But for better or worse, everyone sees me now. I’m exposed. Naked.

Then someone sits at my table. I didn’t realize how much I needed to see him until he was here.

Jackson.

He smiles at me, and my heart stops. He sits beside me without saying much as we work on finishing our third-quarter projects. It’s nice just to be near him, to know he doesn’t hate me. But I still wonder where exactly we’re at now.

I try to ignore my unresolved feelings with him and focus on my artwork. I’m drawing a black bird taking flight, except this section is on “pointillism,” so it has to be drawn with hundreds of little dots. You get shading by putting more dots in one spot than another.

“Any idea what you’ll do for your last project? It’s a big one,” Jackson eventually says.

I groan and press my head to the table. “No. No clue.” I look up. “You?”

Mr. Harkins wants us to do something that “makes a difference.” He tells us a few examples, like how last year one of his students brought in an old fuzzy picture she had of her birth mother whom she’d never met. All she had was the picture and a name. She painted the picture and posted it all over the internet with the first name, hoping to find her.

It took a few months, but eventually a friend of a friend pointed her in the right direction, and she found her.

Another year, a girl painted a picture of her father in his army fatigues hugging her little sister and sold them to raise money for a charity that supported veterans after their service.

Now she wants us to do something amazing.

I look to Jackson, sure he’ll know something fantastic to do for this kind of project.

“I don’t know,” he says. “You should have something good, right? I mean, you’ve got a killer story.”

I shake my head. “But I already told it and no one cares. I’m back where I started. Besides, who would that help but me?”

“I think people care more than you think. But if you don’t want to do something about yourself, pick something else you care about. Something that bothers you.”

I’m looking at him, thinking about what to say, when I realize something is different between us after all. Something’s missing. And then I realize what it is. That cold, heavy fear I’ve lived with for so long. It’s gone.

I take in a deep breath. “What about you? What ‘issue’ are you going for?”

His face turns a little red, and now I see the old Jackson. The one who blushed when he first saw me. I wonder if he could ever be that boy again. I wonder if I could ever be the girl he thought I was.

“I was thinking maybe drugs, you know, since my mom… Or I was thinking maybe something to support people who come forward as witnesses. You know, like you did. It was brave.”

“Oh,” I say, totally taken off guard. He thought I was brave? “I just told the truth.”

He shakes his head. “Maybe you don’t see it, but it was brave. You could have kept it inside yourself until…”

He doesn’t have to say it. Until it was too late. He knows better than anyone.

“I think you should do the one about your mom,” I say. “That’s part of who you are, you know?”

I think about the Jackson I first met, seemingly confident and at ease but hiding his own fear inside…and then I think about the Jackson who came between me and the janitor. Defending me because of who I am, because I was too weak to tell the truth before it blew up in my face—again. Because I was too scared to trust someone to help me.

The bell rings a few seconds later, and I’m not any closer to coming up with an idea for this project. I don’t even know what I want my project to be about. Do I really want to go the obvious route and make my life even more about my past than it already is? Seal my identity with the horrors of my past? I’ve faced them. Now I want to move on.

Does it make me selfish to want that?

I don’t want to be a former hooker forever.

I enter the crowded halls, too distracted to even pay attention to the strange looks. They’re just background noise at this point. A part of life.

But then I look up into the faces that surround me and I realize how many of them I don’t know. I don’t have any names to go with their faces, any memories of them. I don’t know their secrets the way they know mine.

But they have secrets, too. Secrets they’re terrified will destroy them if they let them out.

Jackson’s mother overdosed on drugs years ago.

Marissa’s boyfriend used a sex tape to blackmail her.

Jen was raped and called a slut for it.

I slept with men for money.

Most of those are secrets no one knows about, with the exception of mine.

I look into the sea of faces and wonder: what are all their secrets?

Are we really all that different, after all?

I smile when I think about Jackson, before he knew the truth about me, before he knew I was lying to him, before one of my ex-johns threatened him in front of me, he told me something.

“Everyone’s been through something… I mean, what’s normal, anyway?”

How can I prove that Jackson was right all along? My story might be a bit more intense than theirs, but so what? I’m not normal, but neither are they.

I think I know what my final project will be.

I spend the next three weeks planning my project. Truthfully, it’s not really that hard. Not now that I know what to do.

I don’t know if this will turn out the way I hope, because it’s not just about me. This is about everyone in the school and if I can give them the courage to admit who they really are. They don’t have to tell me. They don’t have to tell anyone they don’t want to tell. But if I can use my past for something good, if I can use it to inspire people, maybe I can do more than make peace with what happened. Maybe it can become something I’m proud of.