Hate List (13 page)

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 my 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.