You Don’t Complain About the Weather

Craig puts the sole of his shoe on Simon’s chest, and the hallway “reacts the way it always did”: the noise dips slightly, the eyes slide away. “People here knew how not to see.” Every freshman girl learns it in her first week: what happens to people like Simon is weather. That is the most exact definition of normalization: violence stops being an event and becomes background, a climate no one is responsible for.

What is at work here is not malice but economy: to see is to be obliged to do something, while not seeing is cheap and safe (see “A Hundred Raised Phones”). The longer the bullying lasts, the stronger this effect: its invisibility becomes proof of its normality. The one person who for years refused to treat it as weather is Ashley — and that is exactly why the hallway looks at her as the strange one. “You didn’t complain about the weather” is a sentence worth saying aloud, just to hear how it sounds.