Nick stood up and bent his legs in a fighting stance. No way did that skinny kid have a chance against those two refrigerators, but that didn’t stop him from standing his ground, which only served to deepen my humiliation as I continued to inch backward.
“Protecting your girlfriend, freak?” Jacob said. “How precious.”
“You’re always calling everyone else gay, but you can’t seem to keep your hands to yourself in the locker room. Maybe you have a little secret,” Nick answered.
Chris stepped forward and shoved Nick, who banged against the lockers a second time. “Calm down, freak. I didn’t know you and Judy had a thing. I thought you were into skinny, ugly corpses with stringy hair.”
His face twisted with rage, Nick got his footing and sprang toward Chris.
But just as he reached Chris, Coach Radford stepped out of his office.
“Hey. Hey!” he yelled, rushing between them. They both stopped short as he stared them down. “Everyone get to your next class. Levil, Summers, you can come with me.”
“He started it, Coach,” Chris said, and Jacob nodded like his head was on a spring. Boing! Boing! Boing!
Coach turned to Nick questioningly. Nick wiped his mouth with his sleeve, his eyes darting from me to Coach and back. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out—story of my freaking life.
“Yeah,” Nick finally said. “You wouldn’t believe the truth, anyway, about your precious football stars.” He followed Coach.
It turned out not to be so bad for Nick—maybe because he had been losing the fight when Coach stepped in, or maybe because the school was sick of breaking up Nick’s fights. Maybe the principal figured if suspensions hadn’t worked yet, they were never going to. Maybe he’d given up on Nick and just wanted him to graduate and leave GHS. Whatever the reason, Angerson only gave Nick a Saturday detention and let him go back to class.
“Whatever,” Nick said as we walked home that afternoon. He kicked a chunk of asphalt, which skittered across the road and into a drainage ditch. “Not like I care. I’m used to Saturday detention by now. When I graduate, they’re gonna have to name a desk after me or something.”
We paused at his driveway. “Well, see ya later,” I said awkwardly, stupidly, because in my head all I could think about was how he had detention because he was defending me and how I should be the one in detention, because it was my new resolution to stop taking Summers’s shit and ten seconds into an altercation with him I’d caved. I should have at least thanked Nick, but somehow thanking him would be like admitting something I didn’t want to admit.
“Hey, why don’t you come to the lake with us tonight?” Nick called from halfway up his driveway. “Duce is gonna bring some beer.”
“Is Valerie…” I started, then blushed. “I mean, are you sure it’s okay with everyone? That I come, I mean?”
He gave me a strange look. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Okay,” I said.
For a change, I wouldn’t be spending my Friday night sitting next to Dad, gluing toothpicks to newspaper or God knew what else. For a change, I wouldn’t have to hear Brandon’s crap about me having no friends, or Sara’s pitiful admonishment of him for saying something so mean.
“Come by around six,” Nick said, and opened the half-ripped screen door and disappeared into his gloomy house.
***
I came back fifteen minutes before six, kicking myself for looking eager and desperate, but at the same time so pumped to see Valerie outside of school, I could barely stand it. I hoped I didn’t smell as drenched in body spray as I felt. I hoped I didn’t look razor-burned, like some dweeb preteen. I hoped she would notice me in a good way.
Nick opened the door, his ear glued to a phone, and let me in. I blinked in the shadows, making out the back of a blond head on the couch, watching TV, eating something, then wiping her fingers on a towel that was being used as a curtain over the big bay window.
Nick motioned for me to follow him, and we went downstairs to his basement-turned-bedroom.
“Uh-huh,” he kept saying into the phone. After a few minutes, he hung up. “Val,” he said.
“Oh.” I tried not to look as miserable as I felt. Valerie didn’t call me, because I wasn’t her boyfriend. I could wish it all I wanted, but Nick was the one who had her. “She still coming tonight?” I picked up a PlayStation controller and idly pushed the buttons, though the TV wasn’t on.
“Yep,” he said, messing with something on his dresser, shoving things into his pockets. “Duce is picking her up at Stacey’s house.” He turned to me. “You like her?”
I froze. Was it that obvious? “Who, Val? She’s great,” I said, trying to sound uninterested.
“Yeah, she is,” he agreed. He turned and rooted through more stuff on his dresser, and I let out a breath while his back was turned. “There’s something about her. She’s, like, delicate or something. And smart. I don’t know.… I always thought I’d get bored if I dated someone for more than a month, but that’s not how it is with her.”
“Oh,” I said. A lump formed in my throat.
“Her family’s crap, though. Her parents fight constantly. Her dad’s some big-time lawyer, and he treats everyone like they’re something he stepped in. Not that my family’s the best or anything, but at least we don’t pretend to be great. Hers is all about show. They’re afraid to admit what they’re really like. Afraid of what people will think.”
I sat back on Nick’s bed, which was just a mattress on the floor, and my eyes landed on a battered red spiral notebook lying on top of some books heaped inside a milk crate. I dropped the controller and bent to pick it up. “Valerie’s not like that, though,” I said, opening the notebook and thumbing through it.
“I know, right? That’s what I like about her. She’s real. We think alike.”
There was a pause. I turned pages in the notebook. It was filled with inks in every color, in two different hands—a list.
“What is this?” I asked.
Nick made a noise that was somewhere between a cough and a laugh. “It’s nothing. Just a list. It’s Val’s, actually.”
“ ‘Number thirty-two, people who stare at you too long when talking to you. Number thirty-three, Beefy Ellen,’ ” I read aloud, then snickered and glanced up. “Ellen Mass? Val calls her Beefy Ellen?”
Nick nodded and shrugged. “She’s beefy,” he said simply.
I read on, flipping another couple of pages. “Number eighty-nine, CB’s thunder thighs. Who’s CB?”
“That Christy Bruter chick, the one on the softball team. I don’t really know her, but Valerie hates her. You ready to go?”
“So this is a hate list?” I asked, amused.
“Something like that.”
“Who all’s on it? Besides Ellen and Christy, I mean.”
“Lots of people. Whoever’s pissing us off at any given moment,” he said. He dug a brush out from behind his pillow and ran it through his hair. “People who deserve it.”
“Chris Summers should be on it,” I blurted out. I couldn’t help myself. “He should be top of the list.”
Nick tossed the brush back onto his bed. “Trust me, he’s on it,” he said grimly.
I turned a few more pages, looking for Chris’s name. “I had no idea Val had this,” I mused. “It’s funny. ‘Number forty-four, Hollister clothes. Number forty-five, people who talk in abbreviations. OMG! JK! LOL!’ ” I chuckled.
“See? You get it. That’s why Val likes you so much,” Nick said.
A current of hopefulness worked its way up my spine, then stopped cold. She liked me, but she would never love me. Not the way she loved him. And why would she? Everything about me was all wrong. I was too skinny, too feminine; I would never have confidence. I would never ask anyone out. I would never stand up for myself against guys like Chris Summers. I swallowed against the blackness building up in my throat.
“Can I add to it?” I asked.
His eyes flicked to the notebook, and he seem
ed to hesitate, as if he didn’t want me to. As if it were theirs only. But after that tiniest of hesitations, he walked over to the dresser and rummaged around until he found a pen. He tossed it to me. “Sure.”
I grabbed the pen and flipped to the last page of the list. Chris may have already been on it, but guys like him couldn’t be on it enough.
Pressing so hard my pen cut through the paper in some places, I wrote: 104. Chris Summers.
Senior Year
In first period, Jean-Ann Splittern was all in an uproar about StuCo.
“Can you believe they let her in?” she kept hissing to anyone who would listen, her overly made up eyes all big and scandalized. Mostly nobody could believe it, whatever she was talking about.
I really hadn’t been paying attention—I couldn’t care less about Jean-Ann Splittern’s little dramas—but when she pivoted in her seat and said to Leesy Blackburn, who sat next to me, “I mean, really, to let her into Student Council after what her boyfriend did last May? My mom is flipping out about it. I’ll bet she calls to complain.”
And then I knew. And suddenly I cared a lot about Jean-Ann’s little drama. Who else could she have been talking about, if not Valerie?
I basically didn’t hear anything Mr. Dennis had to say about tectonic plates and blah blah blah, because all I could think was that what Jean-Ann was saying didn’t make sense. Valerie on Student Council?
Val?
The girl who hated—and the whole world had proof now—pretty much every single person on Student Council? The girl who leaned into me as we walked to lunch every day junior year, whispering about every petty little thing Jessica Campbell did? The girl who cried, literally, on my shoulder the day Christy Bruter tripped her in the Commons, causing her to spill an ink blot of ketchup down the front of her shirt?
It was impossible.
I caught up with Valerie between second and third periods.
“Hey, David,” she said. She looked nervous, the skin around her fingernails picked ragged, a slight limp carrying her along.
“Hey,” I said, and even though I was unsure how I felt about Valerie anymore, my palms still squeezed out about half a gallon of sweat. I hadn’t talked to her—not really—since that first day. Duce had made it pretty much impossible. He didn’t say it outright, but the message was clear: talk to Valerie, and you could find other friends to hang out with.
And if people knew the truth about me, about what I knew and wasn’t telling, I wouldn’t be able to find a friend, not to save my life.
Say something, my brain started in, but I slammed the thought away.
“So Jean-Ann Splittern was talking about you this morning,” I said.
Valerie’s expression immediately disappeared behind a wary veil. “Most people do,” she murmured. “I’m used to it by now.”
“She’s saying you joined StuCo.” It sounded like an accusation.
She stopped. “I didn’t join it.” She looked so cold, like she didn’t even recognize me. And in some ways maybe she didn’t. I’d known Val for more than a year, and over that time I’d seen her change from the gentle girl with the jet-black hair and big, searching eyes to a girl bathed in darkness. A girl whose face seemed forever guarded. I’d watched Nick change her, outwardly, inwardly, and now I barely recognized her as the same girl who’d leaned across the computer kiosk and invited me to hang out at Blue Lake sometime with the gang.
“I didn’t think so,” I said. “Jean-Ann’s a liar. Just like the others.”
But it turned out Valerie was the liar. She may not have officially joined StuCo. She may not have been putting up posters and giving speeches and getting elected, but she was part of StuCo now, just the same. A few days after our conversation, I saw her go to a meeting. I saw her walk into Mrs. Stone’s room after school, watched through the tiny bulletproof window Angerson had installed, as Valerie sat down between Jessica Campbell and Josh Payne. I saw her with my own eyes.
She was becoming one of them.
I turned the corner angrily, trying not to feel betrayed and like I was losing grasp of everything and like, ever since the shooting, I had nothing. Nothing but a brain full of blame.
I stopped by my locker, and I was so pissed it took me a minute to realize what I was seeing—my locker door unlatched, as if someone had been in there. I ripped the door all the way open, and there it was, scrawled across the inside of my locker door in black Sharpie:
FAG!
Immediately I scanned the hallway, half expecting to see Chris Summers standing behind me, bumping shoulders and laughing with Jacob Kinney and their other friends. But I knew that was ridiculous—Chris Summers was dead—and the hallway was empty.
Why would I think this would die with him? How could I possibly make myself believe that anyone had changed? I saw Jacob Kinney pants Doug Hobson in the field house, business as usual, and yet I’d still convinced myself that I’d somehow escape the same treatment.
104. Chris Summers
104. Chris Summers
104. Chris fucking Summers
Just like that, I was transported to that day in the Commons. I was standing inside the doorway, my ears full of gunshots and screams.
And that voice. He’s shooting! Go!
That voice.
I leaned my head against the cool metal of the locker next to mine and shut my eyes. Come on, we need to get out of here! He’s shooting! Go!
Slowly, my hand curled into a fist. I punched the door softly, then harder, harder, my knuckles scraping over the word—FAG! FAG! FAG!
I pushed away from the locker and slammed the door so hard, it bounced right back open, and then I just walked away, not even caring anymore. Let them see.
I barreled down the hallway, refusing to look into the StuCo room, where Valerie was chumming it up with half the people who were on her hate list just a few months before.
I knew I couldn’t outrun this… problem… of mine. I knew it was bigger than me, bigger than Chris Summers or Nick Levil or any of the other crap that was chasing me down.
But still, I picked up speed, and soon I was sprinting, pushing through the double doors out into the abandoned parking lot. I ran all the way home and barged into my house, choking for air like I’d just come out of a fire, my hands on my hips, sweat sticking my T-shirt and jacket to me.
“David?” Mom called from the kitchen.
But I ignored her—just kept going through the dimly lit living room, where Brandon was parked on the recliner, down the depressing hallway of what I now was beginning to realize was my entirely embarrassing life, to the bathroom. I kicked the cheap wood door shut behind me and lunged to the floor, throwing up the nothing I’d eaten for lunch.
FAG!
I was not who they said I was, but given the secrets I kept, how could I ever convince anyone of that?
Junior Year
54. People who think it’s okay to insult you as long as they say “just kidding” afterward
55. Angerson
56. The Commons
57. HOMEWORK
It was so gradual and so complete, it was almost unnoticeable, the transformation in Valerie. She and Nick became such an interchangeable couple, they began to physically resemble each other. They even shared clothes sometimes—Nick would take off his shirt in the parking lot after school, and Val would ball it up in the bottom of her backpack. Then the next day she’d show up to school wearing it, tucking her nose down into the collar, smelling his scent.
They talked about the same things, too, and they seemed to get increasingly darker, angrier.
“I hate that bitch,” Val said one day in the Commons. She used her fork, which had a French fry speared on the end, to motion toward a sophomore. “Here, have one,” she said, scooting her tray toward me.
“Who is she?” I asked, munching gratefully.
“No idea,” Val answered. “Just some SBRB. That’s all I need to know.”
“What’s an SBRB?”
“Someth
ing Nick and I came up with to describe bitches like her. It means Skinny Barbie Rich Bitches.”
Not five minutes later, Nick showed up, swigging an energy drink and carrying a pink tardy slip. He motioned over his shoulder at the same girl.
“I hate that bitch,” he said as he sat down. “SBRB.”
Same person. They had become the same person.
There were other changes, too, especially as we got closer to the end of the year. Val became quieter, more withdrawn, like she was forever in mourning. She seemed so unhappy, so angry, and I didn’t understand why she wanted to be with him if he did that to her. I could have made her happy.
Junior year was winding down, all of us getting antsy for school to be out and make us officially seniors.
One day, as spring was just starting to warm up the air, I went to Nick’s house after school and was surprised to find my brother there, along with his friend Jeremy Watson. Jeremy was the one who Sara called the Dedicated Life Loser and who my mom didn’t want hanging around the house because, she swore, things went missing every time he so much as stepped in the yard.
They were pulling out of Nick’s driveway when I walked up, Brandon flipping me off through the passenger-side window. Nick stood on the front porch.
“I didn’t know you hung out with my brother.”
“I don’t,” Nick said, leading the way into his house. “He came with Jeremy.”
Nick had a sweet, smoky smell to him—a smell I recognized from Brandon’s bedroom. I’d never smoked weed, but I wasn’t an idiot. Weed was what Jeremy specialized in.
“Where you been? Val said you’ve been skipping a lot.” I followed him down the now-familiar stairs to his bedroom.
“School’s a joke,” he answered. “A joke full of jokes.” He laughed and sat down on a padlocked trunk, stretching his feet out in front of him and leaning his head back against the concrete wall. “A joke full of jokes, and not one of ’em be laughing for long.”
I squinted at him, trying to decipher what he was talking about, but decided he was too messed up to make sense. “Val’s worried,” I said.