“Mom, just stop it. I’m not trying to hear a sermon.”
Her mom stood up and said, “Alright, then I’ll keep it real with you. No one deserves public shaming. People are cruel, so we pray for them. However, if the list is causing you to do some self-reflecting, then we’ll reflect on the positive. I beg to differ. I know you are a young lady. I’m praying about all this negative. I don’t like you being ostracized.”
CHAPTER THREE
Worried (Olive’s Beginning)
Voluptuous and sexy, Olive Bell was in the bedroom of her boyfriend’s trailer, trembling, and it wasn’t because it was cold in the place. Olive didn’t have on a stitch of clothes, so she pulled the sheet around her, thinking she was waiting for Tiger, a local gang leader, to come into the room so they could have fun. Instead, there were two guys Tiger controlled looking to have their way with her.
“Don’t be scared, little momma,” Ice said as he sat on the bed.
“What you doing in here?” she said to the white boy with tattoos across his face.
Before she could get an answer, Shorty, a dude no more than five-four, came over to her. He was licking his lips. Suddenly, he snatched away the sheet.
“You guys better get out of here! Tiger will be here any second,” Olive yelled, covering her body with her hands.
“We get to play with you today, Olive baby,” Ice said.
Shorty unbuckled his belt and said, “Yeah, and don’t act like you ain’t gonna like it.”
“Tiger!” Olive yelled out.
“What the heck?” Tiger said as he burst through the door, looking like he was mad at his boys.
Olive started smiling. She got out of bed, took back the sheet, and covered her whole body. She stood behind Tiger.
“They’re coming on to me. I know these are your boys, but they trying to take what’s yours. This ain’t cool! Control your thugs!” Olive screamed.
“You don’t think my boys would be in here trying to take you without my permission, do you? What kind of riffraff do you think I’m running?” Tiger shouted.
“You want me to be with them?” Olive questioned, thinking he surely didn’t.
“If you love me, you will.”
Olive started crying. Tiger motioned for his boys to leave the room. He came over to her and became gentler. He stroked her cheek and kissed her. “Do this for me.”
“Why? You want me to be your ho?”
“It ain’t like that, baby. I’m going to take care of you; just take care of me.”
“I want to take care of you, not your boys.”
“But you got me, though, right?”
Though she was devastated and torn because she loved him, Olive nodded. Tiger opened the door. Ice and Shorty came in. She slid her cover off. She laid on the bed like a brick. They were acting as if she was taking them on the ride of their lives. With each unwanted thrust, Olive knew something had to change.
All night Olive was unable to sleep. Usually the noise in the group home kept her awake, but this time it was the demons replaying the events of the day that got under her skin. But she made it through. Olive had been on her own since she was six years old. One day her mom dropped her off at school and never came to pick her up. From then on, she bounced from foster home to foster home. Now she was in this group home with six other troubled kids, and most of them were boys.
When Olive got to school the next day, she searched for Tiger. She desperately wanted to let him know she didn’t appreciate him putting her out there like that. Though she had gone along with it, now she was changing her tune. She had psyched herself up to tell him off, but as soon as she saw him, he raised his hand like he wanted to smack her. She clammed up.
He grabbed her by the arm and pulled her over to a corner and said, “We’re through.”
Devastated, she said, “What do you mean we’re through? I did everything you asked me to do.”
“And so it’s over.”
“What do you mean it’s over?”
“What, you deaf? I don’t want no girl who everybody thinks is easy.”
“If people think I’m easy, it’s because you put me out there like that!”
“I know, but that was supposed to be between us. Now look, the world knows,” Tiger said as he shoved a crinkled-up piece of white notebook paper in her face.
It took her a second to read it: “The Swoop List.” The first two names she didn’t know, but the third one stood out, Olive Bell.
“Who did this? Who put my name on this list? What is this? Where’d you get this from? I, I didn’t ... you, you can’t drop me because of this!” Olive finally got out the words.
“It’s over.”
Olive breathed deep to hold back the tears, but she lost control as water fell. The pain was unbearable.
Classes were about to start, but Olive was held up in a corner. She was so embarrassed. She had done the unthinkable for a boy she loved, but he didn’t feel the same way at all.
“Charles, she’s over here,” Shawn, her blonde-headed, blue-eyed foster brother yelled out to her other foster brother Charles. Charles’s skin was richer than chocolate.
“What is going on, Olive?” Charles stood beside her and asked. “We got weird vibes from Tiger and his crew.”
“Yeah, and his boy Ice said we needed to check on you. What’s going on?” Shawn asked.
Olive sobbed, “Nothing, just leave it alone, guys.”
“Leave it alone? You expect us to go on like nothing is wrong?” Charles said.
“Yeah, if we need to whoop up on somebody, we can. We saw you come in late last night and use up all the hot water like you couldn’t get clean enough. Somebody try to take something?” Shawn asked her.
“You were raped?” Charles shouted.
“Shhh!” Olive finally opened up and said, “No! No. And I don’t need y’all’s help, okay.”
“Naw, forget this, man. Somebody messed with you. I’m sick of them feeling like they can pick on people and do any kind of thing. Tiger can’t ... ” Charles said, completely upset and unable to finish.
Olive started to realize what she had already known for a while. These two weren’t just foster brothers. They felt like real brothers. They had her back.
Olive tried to rationalize. “What you going to do? Go fight somebody? You get suspended again, and you’re out of school! You think I want that on me? Come on, Charles, no! You got to calm your temper.”
“She’s right, man,” Shawn said. “You gotta chill, Charles.”
“So what? We going to let him take advantage of her? And we ain’t going to do nothing? Come on. Let’s go find these punks and deal with this crap. You down or what?” He looked at Shawn as he gave him the ultimatum.
Shawn saw Charles was serious. The two went to handle Tiger. Olive ran after them, clearly worried.
CHAPTER FOUR
Thrilled (Octavia’s Beginning)
Octavia Streeter sashayed her self-tanned white skin into Jackson High School with a big, bold smile plastered across her face. It’s like she knew something was about to go down. Whatever was brewing, she loved the idea of it.
Octavia had arrived at school late purposely. She’d always done everything right. Gotten great grades, not given teachers any problems, been a model student, but had it gotten her anywhere? No. Absolutely nowhere. As a Caucasian student at a predominately African American school, she felt no one ever really paid her much attention. She didn’t consider herself an ugly girl, but she didn’t get all the guys—or any guys, for that matter—looking her way.
As she walked into the school building, George, a hottie she’d had her eye on for years, was smiling her way, and her eyes couldn’t stop batting. She’d been trying to catch his brown eyes for months. She noticed people were checking out their phones, pulling out pieces of paper, and nodding as they whispered to others. She didn’t even have to look to see what they were looking at. She knew. She was number four on the swoop list that had come out yeste
rday, and the thought thrilled her.
“So um, when we going to hang out?” George asked, running a hand through his brown hair.
“Anytime,” Octavia said as she batted her eyes.
“How about after school?”
“Sure. That sounds great. You want to grab a bite to eat?”
“Naw, I want you to come over to my place,” George said.
Octavia got a little lump in her throat. The way George was looking at her was new. He sensed her hesitation.
“I need a ride home,” he leaned in and said. “Is that alright? We can talk some, too, so I can get to know you better.”
The way he was looking at her, she loved it, but at the same time it made her extremely nervous. She agreed to meet him after school. She agreed to take him home. But she wasn’t agreeing to anything else, and she wasn’t sure he understood that. Octavia decided she’d deal with all that later. For now, she was ecstatic knowing that she and George would be together.
Octavia was in her car, and she was jittery. She realized she hadn’t thought this all the way through. She wanted George to like her, but her car, which was barely holding on, for sure wouldn’t make a great first impression. The twelve-year-old hand-me-down was probably the last car in the parking lot that anyone in the school would want. But at least she wasn’t walking. So she puffed up her chest, pulled up to the curb, and reached over to unlock the door so that George could get in.
“Hey, beautiful,” he said, not commenting at all about the pitiful car. Instead, he stroked her naturally curly red hair.
“Where to?” she asked.
“Oh, we can’t move just yet.” George placed his hand on her thigh.
Chills went up and down Octavia’s spine. She was feeling things she’d never felt before. Before she could breathe, he was kissing her so that all of the students in the school parking lot could see. She hadn’t put the car in park, and because she was so excited, she accelerated and immediately stopped, throwing his body forward then back.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said, like he was going to get mad or something.
“That’s alright, baby. I want to see if what they wrote about you is true.”
She didn’t know how to take that. She just wanted him to notice her. She just wanted to get to know him better. She didn’t want him to think she was a prude. But he was taking the swoop list seriously.
Thirty minutes later, when they were inside the filthy, dirty apartment that he shared with his mom, he moved clothes out of the way and threw her on the couch, and then he was trying to get in her pants.
“No, no, no,” Octavia uttered.
“What do you mean ‘no’? You didn’t think I brought you over here to talk, did you?”
“George, I like you,” she said.
“And I want to give you something to like. You know what I’m saying?” He looked down between his legs.
Octavia found strength she didn’t know she had and wrestled her way out from under him and stood up. “I’m a virgin.”
George looked perplexed. “You’re lying. You’re on the list. Everybody knows you’re easy. That’s all everybody was talking about at school today. If you are pure, I ain’t up for teaching nobody nothing. You need to go.”
As she fixed her clothes, she watched George head towards the bathroom and slam the door. He yelled, “You know how to see yourself out. When I come out, you need to be gone. Leading people on. Crazy wench.”
As the tears started to well up, Ocativa gathered her stuff and walked to the door, hoping he would come out and not be so cruel. She’d thought getting on the swoop list would get her close to the guy she’d admired for years, but now she wasn’t feeling so good about making herself look so bad. What had she done?
It was Wednesday morning, and Octavia didn’t have the same pep in her step as she did the day before. She knew she was on the swoop list and that people were talking about her. Somewhere deep within that didn’t make her that upset, but it didn’t give her the same pleasure as it had the day before either. She was beginning to see obscurity wasn’t such a bad thing. Better to be unknown than known for something bad. But she knew the truth. She knew she wasn’t what was written on the list. She could handle this.
Octavia spotted George. As she got closer she knew he was mocking her. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. George started giving the guys dab. He was making them think more happened than did.
“Was it good, man?” another guy asked.
George just looked like “What do you think?”
Octavia couldn’t move.
“You don’t need to go back for seconds, my turn now!” a girl with dreads said to George as she came over and rubbed his chest. “He can’t talk to you,” she said to Octavia. “You had your turn, boo. Everybody here knows George ain’t a one-girl man.”
“Yeah, I’m through with that,” George boldly said, and he rolled his eyes at Octavia.
Octavia wanted to challenge him. But her mouth couldn’t say what her brain was thinking. This joker had bragged that he’d been with her. Guys weren’t looking at her like they were impressed anymore; they were looking at her like she was stank. People were laughing at her.
“Sticks, you can get with her!” George yelled back.
Sticks said, “Naw, dude, heifers on the swoop list nasty. Word’s out they all got diseases and stuff.”
Octavia wanted to run outside, get in her broken-down car, and go home. Being on the swoop list was the worst thing she could have wanted to happen. Now that she was standing alone and ostracized, she was not thrilled.
CHAPTER FIVE
Raped (Pia’s Beginning)
Pia Alvarez sat in class, shaking. She couldn’t believe the picture that her best friend Claire had just shown on her phone—it was a list with Pia’s name as number five. She wasn’t a hoochie, skank, or worse. No, Pia had been a good girl all her seventeen years of life. She was the shy Latina cheerleader on the mostly African American squad. All she wanted was to have a better life for herself than the one her single, struggling, working-sometimes and on-welfare-most-of-the-time mom’s life afforded for the two of them.
Pia knew the importance of getting a good American education. Her mom didn’t have one, and as a result, her options in life were limited. Men came in and out of her apartment to spend time with her mom. Pia didn’t judge, but she did vow that her life would be different. But now everything seemed messed up, and she couldn’t take it.
“Ms. Alvarez, you’re shaking,” said Ms. McWilliams, her government teacher.
Pia didn’t want to look up. She believed the shame she felt inside would spill out if she looked at her teacher. She turned away, but tears still dropped from both eyes.
“You know what, Pia? Come here.” Ms. McWilliams, who was a no-nonsense teacher, stepped outside into the hallway with Pia. “I’m going to write you a pass. I want you to head on down there to see Ms. Davis.”
Offended, Pia cried out, “I don’t need to talk to a shrink.”
“You need to talk to somebody.”
She took the pass and reluctantly walked to the counselor’s office. Ms. Davis was waiting. She invited Pia to sit on the couch. After ten silent minutes in Ms. Davis’s calm and caring presence, Pia opened up. Her story came out in a rush.
“I’m on this list, and I don’t deserve to be on it. The things that they are saying about me, that are going around the school, only happened one time. It’s not because I willingly did it. But during the holidays, when we had that basketball tournament, we came back to the school, and I waited for my mom ... guess she forgot all about me. So I was waiting around, and I could hear some guys laughing as they walked up behind me. I was grabbed, hit in the face, and thrown in a car. They took me to some dark road, and there three different guys forced themselves on me. I was dropped off at my apartment complex, so apparently they knew me. I was raped, and now my name is on some list like I asked for it to be there. Oh my goodness.”
Ms. Davis didn’t like seeing Pia rattled. “Just stay strong, Pia. We’re going to get to the bottom of this.”
“No, nobody can know.” Pia stood up quickly.
“Okay calm down. Nobody will know. Okay? I won’t push you.”
“Am I going to be broken for the rest of my life?”
Ms. Davis hugged Pia until she calmed down. “No, dealing with this is going to make you strong. You won’t be broken forever. I promise.”
Pia didn’t think Ms. Davis was telling the truth. Pia was having countless nightmares over the whole ordeal, and that scared her.
By day’s end, Pia got herself together. School was finally over. The last place she wanted to go was cheerleading practice. Being one of the quiet girls, she always made sure she kept herself out of the drama. She loved cheering because she loved doing the wild, funky, buck cheers. But now everyone was talking about her. She was in the spotlight, and there was going to be no way around it. She didn’t know how she was going to handle it when the girls started talking about her to her face. She wasn’t a wimp, but she wasn’t combative either. She wished she could just be alone in the locker room a little longer.
Claire, who was also a cheerleader, looked over and said, “Come on, we’re going to be late. I’m not trying to run no laps.”
“Did you ever spend time with that counselor lady?” Pia asked, partly because she was trying to stall and also because she really wanted to know. Ms. Davis seemed sweet. However, Pia was rethinking the session. She’d told her secret, and she wanted confirmation that the lady was trustworthy.
“Yeah, I told her one time when I missed a period.”
“You did?”
“Yeah, you remember. Last year ... ”
“Yeah, but you weren’t pregnant.”
“I know. I went to see her before I knew I wasn’t. She told me to relax, and when we calculated it all, she didn’t think I was pregnant. When it turned out I wasn’t, she had me come to this group with other girls who had pregnancy scares. She called herself our mentor. She made a lot of sense.”