Dear Medusa: (A Novel in Verse) - Hardcover

Cole, Olivia A.

 
9780593485736: Dear Medusa: (A Novel in Verse)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593485734 ISBN 13: 9780593485736
Verlag: Labyrinth Road, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

This searing and intimate novel in verse follows a sixteen-year-old girl coping with sexual abuse as she grapples with how to reclaim her story, her anger, and her body in a world that seems determined to punish her for the sin of surviving.

"This is more than a story about sexual violence—this book is about race, sexuality, love, and how anger can be a catalyst for healing."
—Gabrielle Union, bestselling author, actress, and producer

Sixteen-year-old Alicia Rivers has a reputation that precedes her. But there’s more to her story than the whispers that follow her throughout the hallways at school—whispers that splinter into a million different insults that really mean: a girl who has had sex. But what her classmates don't know is that Alicia was sexually abused by a popular teacher, and that trauma has rewritten every cell in her body into someone she doesn't recognize. To the world around her, she’s been cast, like the mythical Medusa, as not the victim but the monster of her own story: the slut who asked for it. 

Alicia was abandoned by her best friend, quit the track team, and now spends her days in detention feeling isolated and invisible. When mysterious letters left in her locker hint at another victim, Alicia struggles to keep up the walls she's built around her trauma. At the same time, her growing attraction to a new girl in school makes her question what those walls are really keeping out. 

"[This] fierce and brightly burning feminist roar…paints a devastating and haunting portrait of a vulnerable young woman discovering the power of her voice, her courage, and her rage." —Samira Ahmed, New York Times bestselling author of Internment and Hollow Fires

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Olivia A. Cole is a writer from Louisville, Kentucky whose essays have been published by Bitch Media, Real Simple, the Los Angeles Times, HuffPost, Teen Vogue, Gay Mag, and more. Olivia is the author of several books for children and adults.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Friday, August 31

The worst part of working fast food is the name tag


because there’s always somebody’s mom with coupons

who thinks they are somehow being cheated by the teenager

at the register, and their eyes always dart down

to your chest to look for a way to be in charge.


“Listen,” she says, and I see her eyes laser in,

search out my name.

“Alicia. You overcharged me for my mozzarella sticks. Now,

do I need to ask for the manager or are you going to make it right?”


Make it right. Ever since last year, everything

sounds like justice or

its burning absence.


She thinks she’s been done grievous wrong

by the two dollars extra on her waxy receipt

and my mouth is supposed to be apologizing

but my mind is on everything else:


• the whole school/world calling me a whore

• Sarah cutting me out of her life like a tumor

• my parents, the wood chipper of their life between them


In the end I just say, “Ma’am, I’ll do my best.

I’ll do my very best.”


We both know

she’ll still call the manager over,

will still make the world a witness

to all the things she thinks she deserves

even with my smile so bright

it shatters.


It’s my last weekday shift before school


and it’s just girls on the clock, no creepy manager,

no too-old guys pretending they’re still in high school

and eyeing you over curly fries.


Slow day. No construction workers,

no cops expecting free food,

no guys in suits who refuse coupons

because they want you to know

they’re rich:


just teenage girls who don’t go

to the same school,


carrying different gossip

not about each other

and thus unimportant.


Stephanie is the shift manager

and she’s only twenty-one so

when there’s no customers

she lets us turn up the lobby music

and all of us sing along.


The final day of August is like a guillotine


separating September from the rest of the summer

in one clean slice, the red sun bleeding out

over my feet as I circle the school

in my Meat Palace uniform

one more time before I start junior year.


It’s empty. No one but me

would ever come to school while the freedom

summer drops like gold confetti

still sparkles on our shoulders.


But I like it like this, the quiet, the way

the beige bricks drink up the sunset,

taking on a color that reminds me

of a desert. Dry, baked,

vicious.


I’ve never been anywhere but here.


My feet take me to the track, like they miss it.

Maybe they do. Maybe they remember

how it felt to transform

from girl to mustang

with grateful lungs heaving.


Freshman year

I could fly.


Then sophomore year happened.


I look back at the pink bricks,

settling into a deeper shade

now that the sun is sinking.


I’m sinking too, down onto the bleachers,


the metal warm against my thighs.

This school is empty of people

and full of memories

and I don’t want

any of them.


My mother offers to iron my school uniform and even though I want her to, I say no,


because sometimes

in this place

where I am


it feels good to refuse

help, because saying yes

to even something like an iron


feels like saying yes

to everything else


when my whole life

has become a pipe bomb

full of pieces

that explode in a furious

no.


Tuesday, September 4

The school bus stops on my block but I don’t get on.


I’ve been taking the city bus all summer

and I like the way it makes me feel

like I’m living in a different world

than the people who are supposed to be

my peers. What’s the difference?


At least on the city bus

I can pull the string,

and it makes me feel

like I’m in control.


I can get off whenever I want

wherever I want

even if my destination

is predetermined.


On the city bus I can still wonder

what the people there think about me,

whereas at school

once I walk through the door

I already know what they’re all thinking,

what they’re all going

to say

about all the versions of me they think they know,

laid alongside

all the girls I was before

in stark contrast.


Flashbacks


They are like ripples on a pond and they begin

in my earliest memories of myself:


Playing in the fountains at Elwain Park

with no shirt on, five-year-old bird

chest


Eight and pointing at bras in Target, my brother

wearing them like hats while my mother

shopped and I laughed


Sarah getting her first bikini, me ten

and silent and feeling a brand-new envy

grow in like ivy


Me eleven

Me twelve

Me thirteen

Me fourteen


Curious and curious

Me warming up

Me sneaking to buy my first thong

Me excited for someone

anyone

to notice


Me kissing Michael Strong

the day I got my braces off

just to feel what someone’s tongue felt like

sliding across new teeth


Me hearing about what good girls

do and think and say

and always feeling like a neon opposite

even if only in shadow.


Me thinking I had secrets until last year

when I learned what it meant--

what it really meant--

to hide.


There’s always a white kid who says “Why do the Black kids sit together in the cafeteria? They segregate themselves.”


And I’m a white girl too so what do I know

but I think the answer is so obvious in a school as white

as this one

where Halloween parties still feature blackface and redface

where the student council only barely voted

(5–6)

to maintain a special events calendar for Black History Month

and the cheerleading squad is all white but shouts yas queen, werk! between routines.


Dawn of Day 1

and we’re all in the cafeteria waiting to be dismissed,

the swell of the student body heaving as if on a ship at rough sea,

all of us deciding where we fit, where to squeeze in, if anyone we hate or love

has rendered certain sections unsittable.


The girl who says it this year is skinny and blond,

a sophomore, and her whole table murmurs and laughs,

casts glances at the three tables where the couple dozen Black students,

the half-dozen kids from Mexico and El Salvador,

all take refuge in each other’s presence.


Why wouldn’t they


when to sit anywhere else in this sea of narrowed eyes and fake laughs

would be like throwing yourself overboard?


I’d never say that I consider my pain equal

but I can say I know

how it feels to step onto a ship

and be confident that everyone on board

is watching you, thinking that you’re not a...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Labyrinth Road
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593485734
ISBN 13 
9780593485736
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
384
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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