Chapter 6 Superposition
I was on the floor practically hyperventilating when someone knocked on my door. When I didn’t answer, because of the aforementioned hyperventilating, they knocked again. And when I still didn’t answer, they just barged in.
“What’s going on?” Victoria put her hand on her hip. She was a little blurry, since I’d put my glasses on the nightstand to spare them from my meltdown. “Why are you on the floor? Did Zooms kick you off the bed again?”
“No, I—” My voice came out a croak. I couldn’t possibly explain what happened. Not to Victoria. Instead, I nudged my phone in her general direction. It moved half an inch. “This will explain everything.”
“So dramatic.” She sighed, closed the door behind her, and came to sit on the floor beside me. “Passcode?” she asked, picking up my phone.
I mumbled the numbers. My face felt hot and stuffy. “Look at Scrollr. The account tagging me.”
“Okaaay.” She unlocked my phone and tapped around. Then she said a word we definitely weren’t allowed to say in front of Mom and Dad. “Virginia. What—Are these your texts?”
Miserably, I nodded.
The account actually had a bunch more text screenshots posted now—and not just mine.
Dylan had apparently said Elizabeth had “fake, waxy hair,” whatever that meant, and Christina accused Dylan of eating glue sticks.
These screenshots were probably intended to disguise the account owners, since the people featured came from several different friend groups. But it was obvious who was doing this.
“I know my texts weren’t nice. But it was a private group chat. And it’s not like I was the only one being a jerk! It was Kat, Mary Heather, and Jess, too! We all said stuff like that. Kat and Mary Heather say horrible stuff every day!”
“So this is their Scrollr.”
“Or maybe just one of them. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. They all hate me now. Everyone hates me.”
Victoria clicked her tongue. “How many texts did you write? Nasty things that could be posted, I mean.”
“I—I don’t know.” My eyes were burning again.
Another huge sob burst through me. “They were private! And why are they acting like I’m the only one who said things like that?
” Snot was erupting from my nose at an alarming rate.
I wiped it on my sleeve. I didn’t even care anymore.
I deserved to live in my own filth. “They’re making everyone think I’m a horrible person! But I’m not!”
Some of the comments on the posts—yeah, there were comments now—said things like, “Virginia is the worst!” and “Does this violate Scrollr’s no-bullying rules?
Or does outing a bully get a pass? It SHOULD.
Virginia is terrible!” And, “Okay, Virginia is kind of funny, but this is real mean girl behavior.”
A few people had even found my personal account and left messages saying I should be expelled from school.
And the absolute deepest stab in the back was the public apology on the “Four Takes” scroll, from which I’d been removed as a contributor.
The apology read, “its come to are attention that a former member of this group does not display the dignity or kindness we value. we’re sry to everyone she may have hurt.
we’ve removed her from this scroll as of now and we’ll do better in the future”
Like they didn’t say the exact same crap as I had all the time. Like they weren’t usually the ones to start it.
Victoria was eerily quiet as she looked through everything. After a few minutes, she said, “You haven’t posted any kind of denial?”
I scrubbed my hands over my face. “What’s there to deny? I said those things. But I’m not the only one.” That sparked an idea, though. “I have their texts, too. And Kat is so much meaner than me.”
“You’re going to hit back?” Victoria asked. “Retaliate?”
“I have to! I can’t let them get away with this.” I imagined posting some of the things Kat had said about our classmates. Considering how brutal she was, she wouldn’t survive the angry mob that followed.
Victoria sighed. It was the kind of sigh that sounded both frustrated and sympathetic. A real skill. “Do I even want to know what caused all this?”
I thought about the photo of Grayson and the fight at the table, neither of which would be easy to summarize.
But, honestly, it was so much more than that.
Kat was just … mean. Not a mean girl with a heart of gold.
Just a mean girl. And she had been all along.
I’d just never thought she’d be mean to me.
When I didn’t speak, Victoria said, “I don’t think you should retaliate. It’ll make things worse.”
“But shouldn’t everyone know what kind of people they are?” I wiped my eyes and grabbed my glasses from the nightstand. My sister came into tear-spotted focus.
“I think everyone will figure out what kind of people they are eventually.”
“How?” I sniffed.
“People like that always tell on themselves.” Her jaw clenched as she handed my phone back to me. “You do you. But I think if you try to hit back, then this fight will go on forever. Live your life and let them lose interest. You’ll make new friends.”
I clutched my phone. Scrollr was right there, the app icon an old-timey scroll with a giant purple S.
It would be so easy to take screenshots and post them to my personal scroll.
People were already looking at it, so new posts would take off really fast. All the mean things Kat and Mary Heather had ever said would roll over our class like a pyroclastic flow from a volcanic eruption. They could have their own apocalypses.
It would feel good to ruin them the same way they were ruining me.
“If I were a bossier sister,” Victoria said quietly, “I’d take your phone and just … delete it. Everything.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’d start by deleting Scrollr, then deleting your Scrollr password, and also deleting the group chat entirely.”
“Why?”
She flashed a smile. “Out of sight, out of mind.”
“That’s not how this works. I still have to go to school. Other people have Scrollr!”
“Sure, but you’d have some peace at home, at least. Because seeing those tags pop up all the time? Miserable.”
I opened my mouth and closed it.
Victoria crossed her arms. “Look, you don’t deserve this. You said things you shouldn’t have. That wasn’t great. But, like you pointed out, you said it in private. It’s wrong of your friends—”
“Ex-friends.”
“Ex-friends to violate the sacred ground of the group chat. You trusted them. They betrayed that trust.”
This felt like someone else’s life. Like it couldn’t be happening to me.
“You can’t control what they do,” Victoria went on, “but you don’t have to be aware of it every time they come after you.” Her gaze swept around my room and stopped on the library books piled on my nightstand. “Have you gotten to the part about superposition yet?”
“What? Is that better than regular position?”
She pointed to the book on the top of the stack. The title was something about quantum physics. “In that book. Superposition.”
“I checked it out because there was a cat on the cover.”
Victoria blinked at me. “Okay. Well, read it. Superposition is a little like ‘out of sight, out of mind,’ but with more science. I think you’ll like it. There’s a cat.”
“All right.” If superposition was better than regular position, maybe science could help me get there. Because the position I was in … was garbage.
“Honestly,” she said, “they’re trying to provoke you into a response. But if you don’t engage, it will blow over.”
“But what do I do?” I dropped to my bed, rudely bouncing Zooms. She got up and left the room.
“Do I have to say anything? Make a public announcement? Buy a page in the local paper to apologize?” Did they even run things like that?
“And now I don’t have any friends! I’ve burned it all down.
I don’t—I don’t have any friends.” The words came out small.
Victoria sighed that sigh again, frustrated and sympathetic. “If I said touch grass, would you kill me?”
“It’s winter,” I moaned. “The grass is dead.”
“It’s metaphorical. But really, that’s what you do.” She looked thoughtful. “Let’s go hiking this weekend. You and me.”
My first instinct was a giant NO. I was not made for hiking. In the woods, there were snakes, bugs, and treacherous cliffs just waiting for me to fall off.
“We’ll get you some cute hiking clothes,” she wheedled.
I choked out a laugh. “You should have led with that.” At least I would look adorable when I met my untimely demise.
“Okay, good. I’ll get someone to trade shifts with me on Saturday.”
Wait, she was taking off work for me? But she was building her savings, like the perfect eldest daughter. This was some kind of mistake.
“And don’t worry about dinner tonight. I’ll tell Mom and Dad you’re not feeling good,” Victoria said. “And I’ll bring you something and clean up.”
“You don’t have to—”
“Just say thanks.”
“Thanks,” I said weakly.
The shock of everything was starting to turn into numb resignation.
“Hey.” She rested her hand on the doorknob. “I know you don’t want to delete everything, but I really think you should.”
Tears threatened to spill again. Fortunately, Victoria seemed to realize that I wanted to finish drowning in misery by myself. Quietly, she left the room.
I crawled across my bed and cried a little more, until Zooms nudged open the door again and hopped up beside me.
“Your life is so easy.” I sighed. “I want to be a cat when I grow up.”
She kneaded my pajamas and offered no advice for how to make this dream a reality.
My phone buzzed with yet another notification. They’d updated “Deer Hill Dirt” again. Scrollr glowed at me. “What do you think, Zooms? Should I look at it?”
She yawned, completely uninterested in my petty human drama.
“Okay, I’ll think about deleting it. But first …” I changed my phone’s lock screen and wallpaper to blurry photos of Zooms, instead of the group shot of me and the girls. “You’re my best friend now, Zooms.”
She sniffed at my left eyeball. Then she sneezed.
“Gross! But good point. I do need to clean up. Then we’ll read about quantum kitties.” I hauled myself into the bathroom to wash my face. On my way back, I heard Victoria telling Mom and Dad that I wasn’t feeling good.
“Is she sick?” Dad asked. “Should I take her to the doctor? It’ll be tight with the holiday, but—”
“No.” Victoria paused, and I wondered if she’d tell them everything. But then she said, “She just needs space tonight.”
My shoulders dropped with relief. Telling my sister about this catastrophe was one thing. She’d arrived at a vulnerable moment.
Telling Mom and Dad what a huge, mean, friendless disappointment I was? No thank you.
“All right,” Dad said. Then: “So I gave in and called someone about the basement… .”
Oh thank goodness I was having a crisis and didn’t have to listen to that again.
I crept back to my room and curled up with Zooms and our book …
which Zooms immediately sat on. I pulled it out from under her, but she sat on it again.
Finally, I put out a decoy book—which she fell for—and then we both read together.
Quantum physics, it turned out, was a little above me. Like, at least a mile. Or ten. But I was committed to getting to the cat part, so I flipped pages until I found a section titled “Superposition” with an accompanying drawing of a cat in a box.
Just as Victoria had foretold.
The short, non-brain-breaking version was this: Sometimes, two realities could be real.
Something to do with subatomic particles and probability.
But this was what I cared about: Both realities were real until the thing in superposition was observed.
Once observation happened, superposition collapsed and only one of those realities was real.
To demonstrate this, a scientist had described putting a cat in a box with a vial of poison gas and a radioactive source.
(This seemed like a lot of work, and not very nice…
.) If a subatomic thing happened, a lever would break the vial and (ugh) kill the unsuspecting cat.
If the subatomic thing didn’t happen, the cat survived.
With the box closed (its contents unobserved), you couldn’t know whether or not the vial was broken.
So until someone opened the box, the vial was both broken and not broken.
And the cat—which seemed to be involved in this through no fault of its own—was both alive and dead. At the same time.
Both realities were real.
The cat, I should mention, was hypothetical. No real cats were harmed in this thought experiment. (It actually seemed like the cat was only part of this to make people care.)
Still, Victoria had been right. It definitely seemed like out-of-sight out-of-mind but with science. And I liked the idea that new posts or comments on Scrollr were real … and not real.
Not until I looked.
It was weirdly comforting. It did hurt my brain to think about two realities existing at once, but that scientist had to be on to something. He knew cats loved boxes.
Okay. Yeah. Actively monitoring my swift social downfall was a bad idea. I’d have to deal with it at school. I should save myself the pain at home.
Superposition, here I come.
I grabbed my phone and swiped over to Scrollr. Then, before I could reconsider what I was doing, I deleted the app.
My phone buzzed.
I shrieked and dropped it. Scrollr’s ghost! Then I saw it was just a text message, no name attached. Just a phone number. My phone number—but one digit off.
I’d forgotten I’d texted my text-door neighbor. It had been a whole breakdown ago, after all. Cautiously, I unlocked my phone and tapped on the message.
text-door neighbor:
Uh, hey neighbor
What’s up?
Everything okay?