Maybe He Just Likes You

When Maybe He Just Likes You was first published in 2019, the #MeToo movement had been present in the news and social media for only a few years. As the viral hashtag spread across social media, difficult conversations arose tackling sexual harassment, consent, and boundaries. In Maybe He Just Likes You, Dee shines a light on the reality of sexual harassment among children and how harassment can start at any age. Dee also highlights the insidious nature of gaslighting and how perpetrators use psychological manipulation to intensify feelings of shame and confusion in survivors.

The basketball boys describe what they are doing to Mila as “a joke,” “a game,” and just “goofing around.” By using dismissive language like this, the boys think they can downplay the severity of their teasing. Mila becomes furious, especially because the behavior doesn’t feel like a joke to her. The boys tell Mila to lighten up and “have a sense of humor” (74) while they continue to violate her personal space and ignore her boundaries. There is a level of intimidation behind the touching that the boys do: Dante spreads his legs and refuses to stand on the bus so Mila can’t leave without pressing her body against his, and Callum intentionally sits too close to Mila to assert his dominance in the trumpet section. Mila and her body are treated as nothing more than equipment for a game, like the basketball hoop or the blacktop, and the boys feel entitled to use her as they see fit regardless of her protests. At the end of the novel, Callum claims that the boys didn’t mean to hurt Mila, and they “just didn’t get it before” (276). However, Tobias claims that he always knew the “game” was wrong. He wanted to stop, but he was afraid of what his friends would say if he did.

While touching without consent is bad enough, the basketball boys take the bullying a step further and try to gaslight Mila into complying with their “game.” They accuse Mila of “overreacting” when she gets angry with them for touching her, invading her personal space, or making inappropriate comments about her. Even Zara joins the victim-blaming and accuses Mila of letting the boys touch her. When Max calls the behavior “bullying,” Zara quickly jumps to the boys’ defense and says that “no one’s bullying anybody [...]. It’s called flirting” (120). Mila knows she hasn’t done anything wrong but starts questioning her sanity. She initially calls herself paranoid and tries to dismiss her strange gut feeling that something is off. Still, the situation starts to weigh on Mila. She feels like she is the one being punished for reacting to the boys: “Mr. McCabe had basically ignored Callum’s action, and only focused on my reaction” (226), and even Ms. Fender “banishe[s] [Mila] to the back of the trumpet section and let[s] Callum still have his solo” (226). Mila starts to think that no one will take her side or try to stop the harassment, and if she dares to speak up or try to stop it, things will only get worse.

The boys claim that what they are doing is just a joke and have convinced themselves and each other that they aren’t actually hurting Mila. However, the “joke” directly impacts Mila’s well-being. She starts to feel her “neck getting damp and [her] heart speeding” (23) whenever the boys come near her, and when Dante bumps into her on purpose in the hallway, Mila gets “small random motions in [her] stomach, almost like hiccups” (31). Stress begins to wreak havoc on Mila’s mental state, and as she looks around for help, no one who witnesses the behavior seems willing to come to her defense. However, when Mila finally breaks down and tells Ms. Fender, there is hope at last: Ms. Fender doesn’t dismiss Mila’s feelings or blame her for her reactions. She calls this situation what it is—“sexual harassment”—and she makes it clear that this will not be swept under the rug or ignored on her watch. Above all, Ms. Fender emphasizes that this is not Mila’s fault: the boys are responsible for their behavior.