Say Something

SAY SOMETHING

A HATE LIST Novella

Jennifer Brown

In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

For Scott

Summer hadn’t been long enough. Of course it hadn’t been long enough. It could have gone on for a millennium—and there were days when my parents were staring at me across the kitchen table, waiting for my posttraumatic whatever to set in, that it felt like it had—and still summer would not have been long enough.

Funerals.

Flowers.

Limos.

People—pretty much everyone—walking around behind dark sunglasses.

Reporters.

TV cameras pointing at us constantly.

And teddy bears. So many teddy bears, the air stank when it rained, their moldy fur making them look like rotting corpses, like the battle-maimed miniatures in my dad’s warscapes.

I never went back over summer break. I heard that some kids did—hung out on the front steps and the bleachers “to remember.” But not me. After that final bell on that final day, I practically left skid marks on the steps trying to beat feet out of there.
Junior year, you sucked. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass.

Besides, I had already replayed every second of that morning in my head a million times. I remembered, whether I wanted to or not. Why they all wanted to hang on to it was beyond me. I was doing everything I could to forget. What I saw, what I heard, what I knew. If I let myself remember all the things I knew, all the things I wasn’t telling, the guilt would eat me up. Let those other morbid sons of bitches remember—just give me blank space.

But now summer was over and senior year was here, and I had no choice but to go back. I sat at the table in my empty kitchen, trying to talk myself into not hating the idea of another year at Garvin High.

I heard Dad’s slow and steady boot steps coming up the basement stairs, and I could smell the paint thinner he always used to rub the model paint off his hands when he was done tinkering with a battle scene. Dad was a huge war buff and had spent most of his life creating, destroying, and re-creating miniature battle scenes—his warscapes—on an old Ping-Pong table in our basement, building up papier-mâché hills and Popsicle-stick buildings. It was awesome. I’d spent more hours than I could count down there, watching him painstakingly dab blues and browns on uniforms with a toothpick, imagining the chaos and sulfuric smells of battle.

Now I knew the chaos firsthand.

Now I couldn’t get the sulfuric smell out of my nose. Why couldn’t summer at least be long enough for me to get the smell out of my nose?

“First day,” Dad said, announcing the obvious as he rinsed his hands off in the sink. “Senior year. Where does the time go?”

I sat in front of my cereal bowl, watching tiny milk bubbles form as the cereal soaked it up. I made a noncommittal noise.

Dad dried his hands and poured coffee into the travel mug Mom always left out for him before heading to her job at the school bus lot. “You nervous?”

Again I made a meaningless noise, this time accompanied by a shrug. What kind of question was that? Of course I was nervous. I was crazy nervous.

Dad set his mug on the table—little tendrils of steam snaking out the holes on top—and put his hand on my shoulder. “Just try to have the best day you can, bud,” he said.

“I will,” I managed, and somehow even forced myself to take a limp bite of my mushy cereal. “It’ll be fine.”

Dad left, and not long after, I heard Mason’s footsteps pounding up the walk. He opened the front door without knocking.

“Yo, David, you ready to go?” he asked. He wiped sweat off his forehead with his arm. “It’s hotter than a strip club out there already.” He bent to flutter his fingers along the side of the aquarium in the living room, scaring the fish.

I picked up my bowl and dumped it in the sink, grinding cereal dregs down the disposal. “Like you’d know,” I said.

“Dude, you have no idea what Duce and I been up to this summer. All locked up in your house like Mother Superior.”

“Whatever,” I said, heading to my bedroom to grab my backpack. “I know you haven’t been to any strip clubs. Stacey would kill you both. Duce for going, and you for taking him.”

We left the house and plunged out onto the sidewalk. Mason immediately lit a cigarette.

He took a long drag and blew the smoke through the side of his mouth. “What Stacey doesn’t know about her faithful little Ducey-poo won’t kill her,” he said. “He’s
dating
her, not
married to
her. A dude’s got needs.”

I chuckled. “You’ve got needs, all right. Special needs.”

Mason punched me in the arm and took another drag off his cigarette. A bus groaned past us, and we heard chatter spill out its open windows. It was weird how normal the noise sounded. Like any other first day of school. Definitely not like the first day of a new school year after the infamous Garvin High Massacre, courtesy of one sick bastard, my friend Nick Levil.

“No, seriously,” Mason said after the engine rumble had died down. “Where you been, man? Feel like I haven’t seen you in forever.”

“Home, mostly,” I answered. “My parents basically wigged out on me all summer.”

“Awww, did wittle baybee stay home wif Mommy all summer? How sweet,” he said. He reached over to pat my head. I ducked, knocking his hand away with my forearm.

“No,” I said. “Besides, Sara was home. So.”

“Oh, the sexy coed back for summer break. She get boobs yet?”

“Gross. I don’t know.”

“Dude, when you gonna go through puberty?”

“Never, when it comes to looking at my sister’s boobs. You’re a freak. Does your sister, Amy, know what kind of a freak you are? Somebody should warn her.”

He stopped, looked at me earnestly. “It’s okay, Friar Tuck. I’ll still be your friend even if you never discover girls.”

“Fuck off,” I said, socking him in the shoulder. He meant it as a joke, but the truth was it was the last thing I found funny.

Fag.

Queer.

Gayboy.

Princess.

How many times had I been called those things, and worse? How many times had Chris Summers punched me in the chest, smacked a cap off my head, wrenched my skin between his fingers?
Oh, don’t cry about it, fag. It’s just a joke. Can’t you take a joke? I thought gays were supposed to have a good sense of humor. David Judy—that your real last name?—you even got a girl’s name for a last name. What’s the matter, are your ovaries hurting? You’re acting exceptionally PMS-y today. Maybe your boyfriend will make it all better.…

I tried to shrug off the memory of Chris Summers saying or doing anything. He wasn’t calling anyone a fag now. He was dead.

Mason rubbed his shoulder where I’d hit him. “Dang, man, just kidding.”

“Sorry,” I mumbled.

We walked in silence for a few minutes, then I asked, “You think there’s gonna be a bunch of… I don’t know… assemblies or something? About it?” I asked.

Mason took a last long draw off his smoke and flicked the butt ahead of us onto the gravel. Four steps later, I ground it out with my shoe, without missing a beat.

“Nah, I think they wanna move on. Pretend it didn’t happen. Bridget said her dad’s one of the contractors, and they’ve painted and remodeled everything. Doesn’t even look like the same place anymore.”

We turned the corner of Starling and stepped onto the soccer field, still crunchy from summer neglect. The school loomed ahead of us, a hive of energy and activity—buses rumbling idle at the curb as freshmen in stiff new clothes tumbled out; cars stopping short, honking, dancing around one another for spaces; Mr. Angerson standing on the sidewalk, waving students around. Immediately I remembered Nick and Val, how they used to imitate him.
Boys and girls, make smart choices today. Garvin students, let’s show our school spirit by conducting ourselves as ladies and gentlemen.

“Duce and Stacey,” Mason said, pointing toward a couple making out on the bleachers. They were in our usual area on the end farthest away from the school, in Angerson’s blind spot. Liz and Rebecca sat nearby. Normally, all our friends would meet there. But this year some of our crew was missing.

Obviously.

Nick was dead.

Valerie was… well, nobody really knew what was up with Valerie these days.

We hustled across the field, Mason making loud, obscene moaning noises as we got to the bleachers and began to climb up.

“Oh, Duce,” he called in a falsetto. “Oh, Duce, you make me so hot! You make me have naughty thoughts!”

Duce and Stacey separated, Stacey using one hand to wipe smeared lip gloss from around her mouth. She flipped Mason off with her other hand.

“Is that an offer?” Mason asked, and Stacey rolled her eyes.

“Original.”

“Hi, David,” Stacey said, and Duce acknowledged me with a curt head tip.

“Hey,” I replied, and then we all sat around kind of awkwardly. I knew why. All of them had been getting together all summer, having a good time, and I’d been at home, alone, reliving May 2nd over and over in my mind. Watching the news and knowing they were looking for information that I had and was too afraid to give.

“Got your hair buzzed,” Stacey said, running her palm over my head.

“You look like a drill sergeant,” Duce said, getting up and pushing past me, leading the group down the bleachers. When he reached the sidewalk, he turned and flicked me a salute. “Sir, yes, sir!”

“Funny,” I murmured, following behind. Duce and Nick had been best friends, tight. Yet today Duce was joking around like Nick was just ditching again, no big deal. Meanwhile, I had a gut full of dread that was getting heavier with every step I took closer to those double doors.

Maybe Chris Summers had been right about me. Maybe I was too sensitive. Maybe I was girlish.

Duce was talking as we walked, and I was tuning him out, when all of a sudden Stacey took in a sharp breath.

“No way,” she gasped. “Val?”

I looked up to see Stacey’s best friend, Valerie Leftman, standing on the sidewalk, looking lost and afraid. Well, they used to be best friends, anyway. Before.

“Hey,” Valerie said sheepishly, and for a second my stomach did the jump-and-lurch thing it always did when I saw her. I stepped past Stacey and hugged Val, but everything felt stiff, everyone felt angry, and I quickly let go and stepped back, dropping my eyes to the ground.

I barely heard Stacey asking Val about her leg, and Val answering. And then Duce grilled her about Nick’s grave, and my stomach dropped even further.

His voice was hard and cynical, thick with blame.

Nick. She should have known about Nick. That was what everyone thought. That was what everyone blamed her for.

She should have known.

She swore she didn’t.

But someone else did.

Someone else knew and didn’t say a word.

Val witnessed one of the most embarrassing moments of my life.

I was new to Garvin, having just moved in over the summer. If you ask me, the worst thing you can do to your kid is make him start at a new school at the beginning of junior year, especially if he’s a kid like me—quiet, shy, skittish. The chances that I was going to be jumping into any popularity circles were slim to none.

We were in P. E., which sucked, because I hadn’t beefed out yet like a lot of the guys. Some of the girls were bigger than I was. Taller, more mature, better-looking. But while I was walking around like a gawky, just-hatched alien, two guys in our class looked like they’d been shaving since the day they were born: Chris Summers and his football jock friend Jacob Kinney. I hadn’t been at GHS long, but it took only about a day to figure out that the girls thought Chris and Jacob were the only two males on earth.

It was fall, and Coach Radford was all about “taking advantage of the beautiful weather,” which meant he was going to torture us outside instead of inside, making us run the bus loop and soccer field to warm up. What it really amounted to was us swallowing enough bugs to make us puke, and rolling our ankles trying not to get sucked into the mud pit behind the Porta-Potties.

“Four laps,” Coach called out to us as we lined up on the blacktop. “And hustle.” He waited as we scrambled for our places, Chris and Jacob and a few other guys shoving their way to the front, the asthmatic kids elbowing for places in the back, and me somewhere in the middle.

I wasn’t a bad runner. I had played a lot of sports as a kid. I was pretty skinny, which helped, but I hadn’t played anything since junior high, when everybody started filing into little cliques and categories—jocks, potheads, smart kids, artists, whatever. I don’t care what anyone says; if you’re not accepted into the jock population early on, you can forget playing sports, no matter how good you are. That’s just a truth.

Coach checked his watch and blew his whistle, and we all took off, at first everyone running way too fast, just to show… I don’t know…
somebody
—maybe Coach or Chris and Jacob—
something
. That we weren’t all that inferior? Or maybe that we just weren’t as inferior as the guy behind us.

The weather really wasn’t bad. The sky was clear and cool, there were birds and sunshine and stuff, and the puddle behind the Porta-Potties had kind of dried up. Best of all, the girls’ P. E. class was stretching out on the soccer field. We about tripped into a pileup on our first loop, as we craned our necks, hoping to see a bent-over hamstring stretch.

All in all, it was an okay run. Until we came around the final lap.

Coach had stepped up onto the sidewalk to talk to the girls’ coach. We had gotten spaced apart by then, some kids burning out and walking, Chris and Jacob lapping pretty much everyone else.

I came around the corner next to the soccer field and plunged into the grass, doing my best to keep a good pace. My lungs were aching, and I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it, that I could keep up with the athletes, even if I wasn’t one of them. My legs pumped over the grass, and I was so in my own world that I didn’t even see Chris and Jacob until I was almost on them.

“Hey, Judy!” Chris called. “Is that your real last name, Judy? Dude, that’s my mom’s name!” I ignored him. “Judy! Come here!” I took a wide curve, going around him, and kept running, sucking in wind, kicking back so hard my calves burned. I angled sharp around the soccer field and pushed myself up the hill to the bus loop, edging out two other runners as I hit the blacktop.

“Walk a lap,” Coach Radford called, then turned back to the girls’ coach and continued talking.

I wasn’t even thinking about Chris and Jacob as I started another lap, coughing, my arms and legs tingling. I was proud of myself. I felt good.

But they were still standing next to the soccer field.

“Hey, I thought I told you to stop,” Chris said as I neared them. They placed themselves right in my path. My heart, which had just slowed down from my run, sped up again.

“My gaydar is going off,” Jacob said, and then laughed like he should have his own cable special.

“Leave me alone,” I said, hoping I sounded tough.

But they stepped together, shoulder to shoulder, so I couldn’t pass.

“Did you hear a little girl cry?” Chris asked Jacob.

“Yeah,” Jacob said. “It sounded like PMS to me. Are you having your period, Judy?”

“Come on, guys, just let me get through,” I said. I hated pleading, but there was no way I could take them on, so what else was I going to do?

“I told you to stop and you didn’t stop. You know what happens to little fags who don’t do what they’re told?” Chris asked. I didn’t answer. “They get punished. Drop and give me ten.”

I slumped, met his eye. “Come on, Chris, just let me go,” I said, this time begging for real.

“Push-ups, bitch,” Chris said.

“Show off those massive guns for the girls. Or the boys. That’s more your speed,” Jacob added, pinching my bicep so hard I had to yank away.

They knew I couldn’t do push-ups. They’d seen me during calisthenics. My arms were twigs.

I hesitated, rubbing my bicep. Most everybody had already finished the walking lap. A few girls had turned and were watching us.

“I guess I could find a different punishment for you,” Chris said. “But you won’t like it.” He turned to Jacob. “How fast you think he would run if we tossed his shorts onto the soccer field?”

“Okay, okay,” I said. Slowly, I got into push-up position. My arms started shaking immediately.

“Count ’em out! One!” Chris barked, and I lowered myself, getting about halfway down before having to come back up again. “Lower! Two!” I inched myself closer to the ground, sweat rolling down the tip of my nose. I blew out a breath. “Lower! Three!” I went down again, but this time my arms gave out and my chest flopped to the ground. “Get up! Now, girlfriend!”

Jacob toed me with his sneaker, and I pushed myself up.

We kept going—four, five, six, seven—and each time my arms gave out and I fell, my nose filling with grass. Eight, nine.

“Last one! Ten!” Chris called, and as I lowered myself, he kicked a wet dog turd under me, milliseconds before my arms gave way.

I tried to avoid it but only managed to roll about halfway over, my ribs landing square on the poop. I let out a disgusted cry as the two of them fell over each other with laughter.

I sat up and the turd was stuck to my shirt. It clung, curled, and fell back into the grass, leaving a smelly stain. Chris and Jacob bumped shoulders, laughing, their faces red and their eyes watery.

We heard two whistles trill, and they jogged off, still laughing. I gagged and spit a few times, then staggered to my feet, buzzing with anger and embarrassment.

And that’s when I saw her. A petite girl with long black hair and dark, haunted eyes, staring at me through the net of the soccer goal. She was cute, even with her mouth puckered with anger. She didn’t say anything, just waited until all the other girls had jogged up the hill to the bus loop and then slowly stepped out of the net and followed them up.

***

Later, in Computers, she plunked her books down at the console next to mine.

“I hate that guy,” she said, by way of introduction.

“Who?” I asked, pulling the headphones off my ears and letting them dangle around my neck.

“Chris Summers. The guy who was messing with you during P. E.”

My face burned. Up close she was even cuter, despite all the black eyeliner and the torn clothes. She smelled good, too. “We were just playing around,” I lied, and I felt stupid, because I knew there was no way she was going to believe that.

“My boyfriend? Nick Levil?” She said these as questions. I nodded. “Chris messes with him all the time. Jacob, too. They all do. Yesterday they threw his Algebra book up on the roof of one of the mobile units. Nick got in trouble for it. They act all golden child in class, and they’re the football stars, so the teachers never believe they could do anything wrong. Angerson actually accused Nick of throwing his book up there himself. For attention.”

She sat and started clicking around on the computer.

“I think I know that guy,” I said. “Nick Levil. He lives on my street.”

She narrowed her eyes, biting her lip and studying me intensely. “You should hang out with us after school sometime,” she said. “You know where Blue Lake is?”

I nodded.

“We go there pretty much every day. Stacey and Duce, you know them? And Mason Markum.”

Again, I nodded. I knew of them, but we weren’t exactly friends. Duce was one of those real hard kinds of people, always glaring and punching walls and stuff. Mason Markum lived a couple houses down from mine.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll come by sometime.”

Mrs. Burroughs shut the classroom door and told everyone to get started, so we put on our headphones and got to work. But after a few minutes, Valerie tapped my shoulder with her black fingernails. I lifted one headphone away from my ear.

“Eventually, Chris and Jacob will get theirs. Karma, baby.” She grinned. I grinned back.

Yeah. Karma.