Sweat

We’re reading the Handmaid’s Tale in class.

I can feel many different types of anger roaring up inside of me as we go from page to page. In the harsh light of the cheap bulbs buzzing on the ceiling, the yellowed pages of this ten-year old book are rough like sandpaper and smudged with pen ink and unidentifiable stains.

My hands are that tingly kind of sweaty. Not the one where your hands are slick and sliding off anything you try to touch. More like where your skin is uncomfortably hot, where you can feel the heat buzzing behind the skin of your palms and the rough pages of a book feel disgusting, just seconds away from being marked by ugly sweat stains.

I wonder if the smudges along the side of the page are from someone else before me with sweaty hands. I wonder if they were just hot, or if they were angry too, like me, and they squeezed the sides of the book too hard and left a mark.

I’m angry for many different reasons. I’m angry in a way that I suppose I’m supposed to be, because this book is supposed to invoke strong emotions. Supposedly. But I’m also angry for a reason I’m not supposed to be, but I’m not sure if it’s my fault. I’m angry because the boys behind me keep saying things they’re not supposed to be saying.

We get to the part where Janine shares that she was gang-raped when she was 14, and then all the other Handmaids scorn her because it was her fault for leading them on, and she starts to cry and they call her a crybaby. This makes me angry. It makes me angry especially because most people in this room are probably thinking that this is ridiculous and unrealistic about the way they are shaming her and punishing her, but it’s okay because she’s just a dystopian character.

But they are pretending? acting like? choosing not to see? not realizing that? the same thing happens in the real world to all types of women. Women wearing clothes covering their entire bodies except for a small sliver of face and women wearing short dresses and lacy bralettes. They act like people don’t go around shaming women for their own bodies and make it their fault when someone touches them. They act like victim blaming and botched court cases don’t exist in our world. They act like we don’t spend our school years learning about why we should cover our shoulders instead of why men should learn to control what’s between their legs.

They act like if I was to say that big ugly mess of words that I just created in my head (yeah, the whole blurb right above this line) out loud, I wouldn’t get laughed at or scoffed at or not taken seriously. Like boys wouldn’t take it and make ‘jokes’ about it and call it dark humor.

That is why I am angry.

But not nearly as angry as I am about what’s happening behind me.

“Serves her right.”

“Slut.”

I am very angry. The bell rings.

Last year maybe I would have marched right up to them and yelled at them and then they would have all laughed at me and it would have just gotten worse. But this year I am too tired of many things to expend any more energy, so I just push past them so I can go to lunch.

But the words bouncing around in my head end up getting thrown into the hallway anyway. Just not by my mouth.

Mandy reminds me of me, but last year me. She’s short and likes to tell the whole world about how short she is and she’s very nice but doesn’t really know what’s worth yelling about and what isn’t. As she marches right up to Matt and swats at him I can’t help but watch.

You probably already guessed that it didn’t end well.

I walk all the way to the empty bathroom on the other side of the school and put my face in my tingly-sweaty hands and cry for a very long time.