Seeing my burst of anger, the girl did a complete one-eighty, from awe and surprise to desperate apologies. That didn’t necessarily improve things. “Oh god, I’m sorry. You know, I didn’t think about how it would bother you, saying that. I really did want to help, you know, to do something back then, but-”
And now you’re reminding her of the fact that you didn’t. Nobody did.
At least she realizes what she just did wrong.
“But you didn’t,” I growled at her. “Just like everyone else, you left me in that locker. You didn’t go get help. You didn’t report the people who did it, not even anonymously. You felt bad? You wanted to help? Is that supposed to mean something to me? Is it supposed to be some consolation? You were too lazy or cowardly to step up and do anything about it, but hey, at least your heart was in the right fucking place, huh?”
Yeeeah. You just fucked up, miss rescued girl.
The juxtaposition here between the girl falling into bystander syndrome during the locker incident and Taylor having just rescued this girl when she could’ve left her alone is very, very good.
On top of highlighting the commentary on bystander syndrome even more, it also reminds the reader, or at least me, that the locker experience would be a major reason why Taylor is so prone to guilt over the idea of being a bystander herself in the first place. As she put it, she wouldn’t fucking sleep if they didn’t do something here, and this being brought up reminds us that she knows very personally what it’s like to get bystandered.
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