Tease
by Amanda Maciel
review by Bronto Incognito
Age: Young Adult
Contains: suicide, bullying, cursing, underage drinking, drug use
“I mean, I don’t remember calling her a slut that day.” I do remember pushing Emma against the lockers. Her dark-red hair wasn’t pulled back yet and it settled in those annoyingly pretty curls around her shoulders as she sort of scrunched up defensively, wincing and crying in that helpless-little-girl way that just made me angrier.
Book-a-likes: After by Amy Efaw, Hate List by Jennifer Brown, By the Time You Read This, I’ll Be Dead by Julie Ann Peters
Let’s start with the cover. The pic here doesn’t do it justice. The actual cover is so shiny it’s like a mirror (and thus my baby wants to yank it off every chance she gets). And I’m actually wondering if they didn’t want to call the book “Slut”, but decided Tease played better. Or maybe Tease was always the name. I don’t know. But there’s a lot of symbolism in that mirrored cover.
Tease is the story of Sara and her friends. They were mean and they were bullies and a girl (Emma) killed herself. Now everyone’s on their way to trial over the parts they played in the whole thing.
The story is told in alternating timelines between the escalating events leading up to Emma’s suicide and the days leading up to the teens’ trial. The thing that really makes Tease both captivating and hard to read is Sara. Because see, Sara doesn’t seem to feel a lick of guilt over what happened. She insists that Emma is the one who ruined her life, even before she killed herself. And the suicide has only made everything worse for everyone else. So, needless to say, she’s not all that likeable.
And the thing is, you want to disagree with her as she blames everything on her best friend and tells you how Emma created problems, but some of it is true. Her friend did seem to cause more of it, though Sara plays a pretty big role herself. And no, they weren’t the only ones hating on this girl. And yeah, some of her actions do help escalate the problems.
In high school there was this girl–no one I associated with, but I knew who she was. Short, chunky, and very well endowed. She was a transfer in the days before social media, but even then rumors got around. She’d left her old school because she’d “stolen” the wrong, ghetto girl’s boyfriend. Who belonged to a Mexican girls’ gang. Though, honestly, if anything was made up that part probably was the biggest part. Anyway she and the stolen-boy-toy go to the dance together and jilted ex shows up with her friends and throw raw chick breast at her while calling her “Boobzilla”. Even then I got sick to my stomach thinking about it, but I do know that when people quietly referred to her in my presence as Boobzilla I definitely wasn’t sticking up for her.
I didn’t think about her much. She wasn’t even adjacent to my circles of friends. She was just dating a guy I sort of barely knew from an extra-curricular I was in.
And then, one day, minding my own business, strolling through the school towards the band hall and I come upon the two of them…well, keeping this PG-13, we’ll just say they were finishing up an inappropriate sexual act in an abandoned hallway. And I just pretended not to get what was happening and kept walking, the whole time thinking, “Wow. That’s really dumb. If you’re trying to escape your rep at your old school, you really should be making something different choices.”
Or you know, whatever the 15 yr old version of that thought would be.
Now as an adult I can look back and say that there were a lot of other things probably going on for that girl and I have much less judgement and a lot more sympathy for that girl than I would have at that age.
But I still think the sentiment is right. If you’re trying to escape a particular image at school, you probably shouldn’t do things in public areas that are going to enhance that image. At least use the practice rooms like I’m assuming plenty of other kids did.
Point is, I get some of what Sara is saying. But at the end of the day none of that excuses her actions either, and that’s why you’ll read through to the end of her story. To see her come to that realization on her own.
Usually I don’t do more than mention the book-a-likes for our reviews, but on this one I wanted to note them again. After is the story of a girl who didn’t realize she was pregnant and left her baby in a Dumpster. Spoiler alert–baby lives. Which is really the only way you can read her story. Hate List is about a girl and her boyfriend who are on the receiving end of some pretty intense bullying, which would make them the victims of the story if it weren’t for the fact that Valerie’s boyfriend decides to shoot up the school because of it. And By the Time You Read This is another story of bullying and suicide from the victim’s POV. All are tough reads that deal with some hard issues. But all are fantastic, contemporary reads if you’re in the mood for something a bit more serious.
Also, because of the topic in this book, let me just leave this here, in case you or someone you know might need it. Things may suck now and they may suck worse later (they may not), but things can always get better.
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