Chapter 23: Part 23 - Disgust

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Part 23 — Disgust

The most disgusting I ever felt in my life was earlier this year, at the start of 9th grade.

At Pearl Grove High School.

Where Leierna Scott and her friends humiliated me in front of everyone.

I left behind Hillman’s Middle School in the summer of this year and started at Pearl Grove with Anna. Pearl Grove was a K-12 school, which means it went right the way through from kindergarten to senior year. Most of the kids who went there had known each other since they were little. Right from the first day it was obvious I didn’t fit in.

Leierna Scott was a tall and thin girl with long, straight, brown hair. She used to brush it in lessons. Even when the teacher told her to stop. She’d just carry on, smile, and declare, “My father pays your wages.” Once — just once — I’d have liked to hear a teacher tell her to sit down, shut up, and watch them earn those wages.

Leierna disliked me from day one. Probably because I was the only girl in the class who was taller than she was. She used to flick screwed up balls of paper at me in class, trying to land them in my hair. At recess and lunch, she’d always make sure to hang around wherever I was and talk about how ‘The new girl is such a freak!’ It was hard. It was daily bullying. That kind of bullying that flies below the radar of most teachers, mostly because it’s so hard to prove when you’re the only one who heard the slur and all the bully’s friends back her up. It made school unpleasant, but it didn’t make it unbearable. I could get through four years of it. If I had to. But one day, things came to a head in the most unexpected way.

It was right after English class. On a Wednesday. We’d been learning about Shakespeare. The Taming of the Shrew. Leierna and her band of bad were clustered around her phone laughing. It wasn’t the fact that they were laughing that triggered me. Nor the fact that they were doing it within earshot of me. It was the fact that they were looking between the phone and where I was sitting while they were laughing that seemed to offer absolute proof that they were talking (and laughing) about me.

“Omigoddddddd,” Leierna crooned in her drawn out nasal tones. “You’re right, Chardonnay. That does look like the new girl!”

The gaggle laughed again as I approached them.

“Hey Ella,” Leierna’s friend Chardonnay asked, “did you ever date a guy called Rafa Couzins?!”

My shoulders started to tense, my heart started to pound in my chest. I could feel the blood draining away from my skin. Of course they knew Rafa. Wicked finds out wicked in this world.

“No,” Leierna cried, burgling into the conversation, “It can’t be Ella. Look at the description.”

I was close enough now to see it was a TikTok post they were looking at. Leierna turned the phone screen towards me and fired off, “It can’t be Ella. This says ‘Loser Guys I Used To Date (part 7)’.”

I looked at the post. It was a series of still images set to some music by an artist called LØLØ. She was right. It was me. My hair was shorter and I was wearing boys’ clothes. But it was my chin, my nose, my face. That was when I saw it. That look on Leierna’s face. The one that told me she knew!

“Wait til my father finds out that they’ve let a tranny in the same changing room as me,” Leierna proclaimed, drawing herself up to the full height of her self-importance.

Chardonnay held up her hand in a dramatic ‘stop gurl’ gesture; her long, stick-on nails pointing to the sky like talons.

“You mean Ella’s got a dingle-dangle between his legs?”

She scoffed, and then raked me with her eyes.

“If Ella even is its name,” Leierna derided.

“Looks more like a Lance,” one of her male friends declared – Kyle, I think was his name. “Or a Spenther,” he added, lisping the C.

I was starting to back away now. When you’ve been bullied your whole life for one thing or another, you know when a situation is about to go bad. You know when things are sliding inevitably from verbal to physical. You brace yourself for it and your fight or flight kicks in. They had that look now, Leierna and her five – no, six – friends. Like hyenas, sensing that a wounded prey was about to stagger and fall, they sauntered towards me, letting their shoulder-blades announce the violence of their intentions. I could feel my whole body prime, as the fight or flight injected the adrenaline I’d need to survive the coming assault. The trouble with fight or flight is that while it floods your body with the chemicals it needs to survive, those same chemicals drown your brain. I couldn’t see it as I was backing away. But I was backing into a wall.

It was a Wednesday. It had rained hard on the night of the Tuesday and the ground was wet. It had rained so hard that my favorite skirt had gotten wet. I was wearing sweatpants instead. Baby pink with sports lettering up the side.

“You been thinking about me, Spencer?” Leierna asked, advancing on me at the head of her pack. “You been thinking about what you might do to me in the girls’ change rooms with that dingle-dangle of yours?”

“No–” I tried to explain. “–I never–”

But this wasn’t a conversation.

This was an ambush!

Leierna grabbed me by the hair and twisted my body over to the side. I was so shocked, I nearly bit the dirt of the wet ground. I nearly forgot to fight back at all. By the time I tried to swing an arm, Kyle and one of the other boys were already holding them. Chardonnay was holding her phone, filming the whole thing. And all around, a mass of spectating children seemed to seep, like pus around a wound, to watch me get beat.

Leierna punched me in the stomach and I doubled over. I probably would have fallen, or at the very least sunk to my knees, had it not been for the two bigger boys holding me up.

“Eeuww!” Chardonnay squealed after the hit. “You nearly touched it!”

I knew what they were talking about.

“Do you wanna see it?” Leierna asked, seemingly to the crowd. “Do you wanna see what Spencer-Ellington has been hiding in his pants?!”

I recognized some of the faces in that crowd. They weren’t exactly friends, but I’d talked to many of them. The 9th graders tend to all hang out in the same desolate spots, mostly because all the good spots have been claimed by the older years. This was my year group. My classmates. They were reasonable people, most of them. Decent people who believed in morals and right and wrong. But that’s the thing with a crowd. As the numbers go up, the IQ goes down. The capacity for rational thought always plays second fiddle to the orchestra of destruction. In large numbers, people secretly long for things to fall apart. So they can say they were there. So they can say they were right. So they can sate their desire for drama. The mob had no morals. The masses would grow fat on misery, and glut themselves until they vomited only bile.

Leierna didn’t even wait for a response. She marched straight over to me, slid my sweatpants down unceremoniously, tore my panties down with them, and exposed my truth to the world.

I don’t know at what point the teachers intervened. I know it was after the smiling and the laughter and the manic excitement that peeled peoples faces into expressions of entranced delight. I know they got to Chardonnay and her phone before she had chance to post whatever she had filmed. And I had to be thankful for that.

The disgust never left me from that day. It was maybe not the biggest rock in my bag, but it was the sharpest. It was more than the humiliation of being exposed to a school full of people, more than the utter revulsion of being attacked like that. What Leierna Scott really attacked that day was my identity. Who I was. Until that point, the journey of my transition had been about me coming to terms with the mistake the doctors had made all those years ago. A mistake that I embodied in my male genitalia (but that ran so much deeper than that). But now, everyone had seen that mistake for themselves – and more – had seen the shame it brought me. I was ashamed. I was ashamed that when my clothes had been pulled down and my body exposed to the world, that I didn’t look like a real girl should look.

I left the school shortly after that. Leierna and Chardonnay left before me. Jumped before they were pushed. The two boys were suspended for their role in the attack. But no police were ever called and I never saw any of the statements from other students that the school said it had taken. Better to handle it off the books. Away from the public eye. I quietly slunk away from Pearl Grove, dragging my disgust in tatters behind me.

Submitted: January 15, 2025

Young Adult teen drama ya lgbtq trans