Eventually the crying slowed enough so that I could breathe again, which wasn’t altogether good.
“I’m going to throw up,” I said.
The nurse produced a bedpan from out of nowhere and stuffed it under my chin. I heaved into it.
“If you’ll step out for just a few minutes,” she told the officers. They nodded and silently left the room. When they opened the door, I could hear muffled talking in voices that belonged to my parents out in the hallway. Frankie stayed put.
I heaved again, making ugly noises and letting my nose run in snotty ropes into the bedpan. I caught my breath and the nurse used a wet washcloth to wipe my face clean. It felt good—cold, soothing. I closed my eyes and rested my head back on the pillow.
“Nausea is normal after anesthesia,” the nurse told me in a voice I can best describe as institutional. “It will subside with time. In the meantime, keep this close.” She handed me a clean bedpan, folded the washcloth and laid it across my forehead then left the room on her silent shoes.
I tried to blank my mind. Tried to make myself turn those images in my mind black. But I couldn’t do it. They shoved in on me, each one more horrible than the one before.
“Is he in jail?” I asked Frankie. Stupid question. Of course Nick would be in jail after something like this.
Frankie looked up at me, kind of startled, like he’d forgotten I was in the room with him.
“Valerie,” he said, blinking, shaking his head, his voice husky. “What… what did you do?”
“Is Nick in jail?” I repeated.
He shook his head no.
“He got away?” I asked.
Again he shook his head.
I knew that left only one other option. “They shot him.” I said this more as a statement than a question and was surprised when Frankie again shook his head no.
“He shot himself,” he said. “He’s dead.”
MAY 2008
“I didn’t do it.”
7
It’s funny that the name that would turn out to be the most recognizable of my class—Nick Levil—was a name nobody’d even heard of before our freshman year.
Nick was new to Garvin that year, and he didn’t fit in. Garvin was one of those small suburban cities with a lot of big houses and rich kids. Nick lived on one of the few low-income streets that dotted the outsides of the city like boundary lines. His clothes were ratty, sometimes too big, and never stylish. He was skinny and looked like a brooder and had an I Don’t Give a Shit air about him that people tended to take personally.
Right away I was drawn to him. He had these really sparkly dark eyes and a lopsided smile that was adorably apologetic and never showed his teeth. Like me, he wasn’t part of the in crowd and, like me, he didn’t want to be.
Not that I never belonged in the in crowd. When you’re in elementary school, pretty much everybody is part of the in crowd and, sure, I was, too. I liked the things that were popular—the clothes, the toys, the boys, the songs that drove everyone wild at the school family fun nights.
But somewhere around 6th grade, all of that seemed to change. I began to look around me and think that maybe I didn’t have all that much in common with those other kids. Their families didn’t seem miserable like mine. I couldn’t imagine them feeling the same frozen feeling at home like I did, as if they’d walked into a snowstorm when they opened their front doors. At school gatherings, their dads called them “Muffin” or “Baby Girl,” while mine didn’t even show up. As I began to doubt where I fit in, Christy Bruter, my “one person,” gained momentum in popularity and suddenly it was no longer doubt, but truth: I wasn’t like them.
So I liked Nick’s attitude. I adopted a matching I Don’t Give a Shit outlook and began cutting holes in my “cute” clothes to make them look ratty, to lose the pristine Valerie persona my parents totally bought into and had been trying extra hard to make me buy into lately, too. It also helped that my mom and dad would die if they saw me hanging out with Nick. They had this idea that I was Miss Popularity at school, which just showed how out of touch they were. Sixth grade was a long time ago.
Nick and I had Algebra together. That’s how we met. He liked my shoes, which had been duct-taped around the toes, not to keep them together, but because I wanted them to look like they were falling apart. That’s how we started, with him saying, “I like your shoes,” and me answering, “Thanks. I hate Algebra,” and him saying, “Me, too.”
“Hey,” he whispered later while Mrs. Parr was passing out ditto sheets, “don’t you hang out with Stacey?”
I nodded, passing a stack of papers to the geeky kid behind me. “You know her?”
“She rides my bus, I think,” he said. “Seems cool, I guess.”
“Yeah, she is. We’ve been friends since kindergarten.”
“That’s cool.”
Mrs. Parr told us to shut up and we went about our business, but every day before and after class we talked. I introduced him to Stacey and Duce and the gang and he fit in with us right away, especially with Duce. But it was obvious from the beginning that he and I fit better than everyone else.
Pretty soon we were walking to class together, meeting at his locker, and walking out of class together. And sometimes meeting on the bleachers in the mornings with Stacey and Duce and Mason.
And then one day I was having a really crappy day and all I wanted to do was get back at everyone who was making it that way. So I got this idea that I would write down all their names in a notebook, like the notebook was some kind of paper voodoo doll or something. I think I had this feeling that just writing down their names in the book would prove that they were assholes and that I was the victim.
So I opened my trusty red notebook and numbered every line down the column of the page and started writing names of people, of celebrities, of concepts, of everything I hated. By the end of third period I had half a page filled out, things like Christy Bruter and Algebra—you can’t add letters and numbers together!!! and Hairspray. And I still didn’t feel done, so I schlepped the notebook off to Algebra class with me and was hard at work on it when Nick walked in.
“Hey,” he said, after he slumped into his chair. “I didn’t see you at the lockers.”
“I wasn’t there,” I said, not looking up. I was busy writing Mom and Dad’s marriage problems in the notebook. That was an important one. I wrote it four more times.
“Oh,” he said, and then he was silent for a minute, but I could feel him looking over my shoulder. “What’s that?” he finally asked, kind of laughing.
“It’s my Hate List,” I answered, without even thinking.
After class, as we were walking out, Nick came up behind me and nonchalantly said, “I think you should add today’s homework to that list. It sucks.” I looked back and he was grinning at me.
I smiled. He got it, and somehow it totally made me feel better to know I wasn’t alone. “You’re right,” I said. “I’ll add it next period.”
And that’s how it started: the infamous Hate List. Started as a joke. A way to vent frustration. But it grew into something else I’d never have guessed.
Every day in Algebra class we’d get it out and write down the names of all the people in the school that we secretly hated, the two of us sitting in the back row, side by side, griping about Christy Bruter and Mrs. Harfelz. People who irritated us. People who got on our nerves. And especially people who bullied us, who bullied other people.
I think at one time we may have had this idea that the list would be published—that we could make the world see how horrible some people could be. That we would have the last laugh against those people, the cheerleaders who called me Sister Death and the jocks who punched Nick in the chest in the hallways when nobody was looking, those “perfect kids” who nobody would believe were just as bad as the “bad kids.” We had talked about how the world would be a better place with lists like ours around, people being held accountable for their actions.
The list was m
y idea. My brainchild. I started it, I kept it going. It began our friendship and it kept us together. With that list, neither one of us was so alone anymore.
The first time I went over to Nick’s house was the day I officially fell in love with him. We stepped into his kitchen, which was dirty and unkempt. I heard a TV off in the distance and a smoker’s cough echoing over it. Nick opened a door just off the kitchen and motioned for me to follow him down a flight of wood steps into the basement.
The floor was cement, but there was a small orange rug tossed on it, right next to a mattress, which sat on the floor, unmade. Nick tossed his backpack on the mattress, and flopped back on it himself. He sighed deeply, running his hands over his eyes.
“Long day,” he said. “I can’t wait for summer.”
I turned in a slow circle. A washer and dryer stood off against a wall, shirts draping off the corners of them. A mousetrap in another corner. Some moving boxes stacked by one wall. A squat dresser next to them, clothes spilling out of open drawers, an assortment of junk littering the top of it.
“This is your room?” I asked.
“Yep. Wanna watch TV? Or I’ve got Playstation.”
He had flipped himself over onto his stomach and was fumbling with a small TV that sat propped on a box on the other side of the bed.
“Okay,” I said. “Playstation.”
As I settled on the bed next to him, I noticed a plastic crate between his bed and the wall, overflowing with books. I knee-walked across the mattress and picked one up.
“Othello,” I said, reading the cover. “Shakespeare?”
He glanced at me, his face taking on a guarded look. He didn’t say anything.
I picked up another. “Macbeth.” And two more. “The Shakespeare Sonnets. The Quest for Shakespeare. What is this stuff?” I asked.
“It’s nothing,” he said. “Here.” He thrust a Playstation controller at me.
I ignored it, kept digging in the crate. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Romeo and Juliet. Hamlet. All of these are Shakespeare.”
“That one’s my favorite,” he said softly, gesturing to a book in my hand. “Hamlet.”
I studied the cover, and then opened the book to a random page and read aloud:
“O heavy deed!
It had been so with us, had we been there:
His liberty is full of threats to all;
To you yourself, to us, to everyone.”
“Alas, how shall this bloody deed be answer’d?” Nick said, quoting the next line before I had a chance to read it.
I sat back and looked at him over the top of the book. “You read this stuff?”
He shrugged. “It’s nothing.”
“Are you serious? It’s cool. You totally have this memorized. I don’t even understand what it’s saying.”
“Well, you kind of have to know what else is going on in the story to understand,” he said.
“So tell me,” I said.
He looked at me uncertainly, took a deep breath, and hesitantly started talking. His voice grew more and more animated as he told me about Hamlet and Claudius and Ophelia and murder and betrayal. About Hamlet’s hesitation being his fatal flaw. About how he totally berated the woman he loved. And as he told me the story, quoted passages about divinity as if he’d written them himself, I knew. I knew I was falling in love with him, this boy with the ratty clothes and the bad attitude who smiled so shyly and quoted Shakespeare.
“How’d you get into this?” I asked. “I mean, you’ve got a lot of books here.”
Nick ducked his head. He told me about how he discovered reading when his mom was divorcing dad number two, how he’d spent long nights at home alone, a kid with nothing to do while his mom trawled the bars for guys, sometimes not bothering to pay the electricity bill, forcing him to read for entertainment. How his grandma would bring him books and he’d devour them the same day. He’d read everything—Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Artemis Fowl, Ender’s Game.
“And then one day Louis—that’s dad number three,” he said, “He brought home this book he’d found at some garage sale. It was his big joke.” Nick pulled Hamlet out of my hands and waved it in the air. “‘Like to see you read this one, Smartypants,’” he mimicked in a gravelly voice. “He laughed when he said it. Thought he was being really funny. So did my mom.”
“So you read it to prove them wrong,” I said, flipping through the pages of Othello.
“At first,” he said. “But then,” he crawled up onto the bed next to me, leaning back against the wall just as I was, looking over my shoulder at the pages I was turning. I liked the heat of his shoulder against mine. “I started to like it, you know? Like putting together a puzzle or something. Plus I thought it was really funny because Louis was too stupid to know that he’d given me a book where the stepdad was the bad guy.” He shook his head. “Moron.”
“So your grandma bought you all these?”
He shrugged. “Some. I bought some myself. Most of them came from a librarian who helped me out a lot back then. She knew I liked Shakespeare. I think she felt sorry for me or something.”
I dropped Othello back into the crate and then dug around and pulled out Macbeth. “So tell me about this one,” I said, and he did, the Playstation controller forgotten on the floor next to the bed.
I spent my first days in the hospital remembering that day. Racking my brain until I recalled every little detail. The sheets on his bed were red. His pillow didn’t have a pillowcase on it. There was a framed photo of a blond woman—his mom—perching on the edge of his dresser. The toilet upstairs flushed while we talked about King Lear. Footsteps creaked over our heads as his mom went from bedroom to bathroom to kitchen. Every detail. The more I remembered those details, the more unbelievable I found what they were saying about Nick on the news, which I’d turn on surreptitiously, almost guiltily, when everyone had gone home for the night and I was alone.
When I wasn’t remembering that day in Nick’s bedroom, I was piecing together what had happened in the cafeteria, which wasn’t easy for a lot of reasons.
First, I spent a lot of time during those two days in some sort of medicated alternate universe. Funny how you’d think the worst part of the pain when you get shot would be right when it happens, but that’s not true. In fact, I really don’t even remember feeling anything at the time that it happened. Fear, maybe. A strange heavy feeling, I guess. But not pain. The real pain didn’t start until the next day, after the surgery, after my skin and nerves and muscles had a day to get used to the idea that something had forever changed.
I cried a lot during those first two days, and most of my crying was about wanting something to make the pain go away. This wasn’t a bee sting. It hurt like hell.
So the nurse, who still didn’t like me, I could tell, would come in every so often and give me a shot of this drug or a swallow of that one and next thing I knew everyone sounded weird and the room looked all grainy and stuff. I don’t know how much of that time I was asleep, but I do know that after those first couple days when I stopped getting the mind-bending pain relievers and just started getting the regular ones, I wished I was asleep more often.
But the bigger reason it was tough to put the pieces back together was that it just didn’t all seem to fit. Like my brain just couldn’t make sense of it all. I felt like it had been snapped in two. Actually, I asked the nurse at one point if it was possible for the noise of the gun to make something in my brain get sort of jumbled up so I couldn’t think straight. All I could really think was how much I wanted to sleep. How much I wanted to be in a different world other than the one I was in.
She said, “The body has many mechanisms to protect it from trauma,” and I wished mine had more.
Every night when I would turn on the TV mounted to the wall across from my bed, I would watch pictures of my high school—aerial pictures that made it look about as faraway as I felt, and institutional and foreboding, not the place where I’d spent three years of my life—
and I would have this weird sensation where I was sure I was watching some sort of fiction. But the nauseated feeling in my stomach reminded me that this was no fictional scenario. It was real and I was right in the middle of it.
Mom sat by my bed constantly for those first two days, the whole time dumping one emotion or another on me. One minute she’d be crying softly into a palmed tissue, shaking her head sadly and calling me her baby, the next she’d be an angry-faced, puckered-mouthed woman blaming me and saying she couldn’t believe she gave birth to such a monster.
I really didn’t have much to say to that. To her. To anyone. After Frankie told me Nick was dead, that he’d shot himself, I sort of just curled up like a salted slug. Turned to my side and curled up around my sheets and blankets, tucked my knees into my chest as best as I could with the bandaging and the throbbing in my thigh and the tubes and wires that kept me tethered to the bed. Just curled into a ball and after my body stopped curling my soul kept going. Curling, curling, curling into something tight, wound, tiny.
It wasn’t some big decision that I would stop speaking or anything. It was just that I didn’t know what to say. Mainly because every time I opened my mouth I wanted to scream in horror. All I could see in my head was Nick, lying dead somewhere. I wanted to go to his funeral. I wanted to go to his grave, at least. I wanted to kiss him mostly, to tell him I forgave him for shooting me.
But I also wanted to scream in horror for Mr. Kline. For Abby Dempsey and the others who’d been shot. Even for Christy Bruter. For my mom. For Frankie. And, yeah, for me, too. But none of those feelings seemed to really match up, like when you’re putting together a puzzle and two pieces almost—maddeningly, just almost—fit. You could shove the pieces together and force them to fit, but even after they’re successfully stuck together they still don’t fit exactly, don’t look quite right. That’s how my brain felt. Like I was shoving odd puzzle pieces together.