151 Days (63 page)

I’
M
NOT
even sure why they bother having school after prom.

It’s like a hundred times worse than normal summer vacation jitters, knowing these were the last days you were going to be sitting in this classroom. There was a ton of other things that needed to get done, but in the class itself, we might as well have played hangman for the next week for all we were paying attention.

And that we were kind of rich was distracting me.

If it seems incredible to you to hear about someone giving someone else that much money, try to think how it feels to get it. Tyler said it was what Robbie needed to make a clean break. It just seemed like an incredible, generous act that I was never going to be able to repay.

That and I think I was kind of related to Robbie now.

He said he was going to stay long enough to see us graduate, and then he was leaving Foster for good. I asked him if I was ever going to see him again, and he just gave me that snarky smile and said, “Don’t ask me. I’m not the one with money to burn.”

So yeah, sooner or later I was going to take a trip to New York.

But right now, Brad and I were looking online at places around Berkeley to rent while I was in school. Thankfully, Coach Gunn didn’t care what we were doing on Brad’s laptop as long as it was quiet.

That was when one of the office aids came into the class and handed Gunn a note.

“Stilleno,” he said, holding the piece of paper up. “Principal’s office, now.”

“Jeez, what did I do now?” I asked Brad under my breath.

Brad flashed me a “no worries” smile and said, “Hey, if he’s going to charge you for the prom, tell him you’ll write him a check.”

He had a point.

I walked into the office, and there seemed to be a flurry of activity all over the place, more so than usual. There were boxes being moved and people on the phone, none of them sounding that pleased. I showed one of the secretaries the note, and she pointed to Raymond’s office.

I took a deep breath and knocked on the open door.

There was a strange man on the phone. He motioned me to come in as he kept talking. “No, I don’t think so and frankly don’t care if it is. Look, John, it’s two weeks. All I need to do is keep the trains running on time.” He pointed to one of the chairs as John spoke to him. “I agree, if I have any problems, I’ll call, but we should be good.” He nodded and rolled his eyes as John kept talking. “Great, call you tonight.”

He hung up the phone and shook his head. “Let me tell you something—people in Texas can talk your ear off. You’re Kyle?”

I nodded, confused. “Yes, sir, but I was supposed to see Mr. Raymond.”

He shook his head as he began to sort through the papers on his desk. “No, you were supposed to see the principal. That’s me now.” He pulled a file out of the mess. “Here we go, UC Berkeley? Nice school, fantastic GPA. Wow, can’t say I’ve seen a record like this before.”

“I’m sorry, you’re who?”

“Mr. Fisher,” he said, putting the file down. “So looks like you’ve had a pretty shitty year.”

I just stared at him, not even ready for an adult, much less a principal, to say that out loud.

“Coming out, your friend’s suicide, and then the shooting.” He shook his head. “And through all that, you got a full ride to Berkeley. I would have just fell apart after all that.”

My mind finally found some traction. “Wait, you’re what now?”

He laughed and sat down. “Mr. Raymond doesn’t work here anymore. He has decided to spend some more time with his family, which is polite of saying he was asked to leave or we would fire him. Mostly because of the way he handled the situation with you. So on behalf of Foster High, the school board, and, to be honest, the entire Texas education system, I apologize for all that and want to make it right.”

Raymond was really gone?

“Now, I can’t do much about everything that has gone on, but I can give you something that most people don’t ever get.” He paused for a moment to make sure he had my attention. “The last word.”

I cocked my head, confused more than ever.

“If there is another student better suited to being your class’s valedictorian, I haven’t seen them.” I began to shake my head, but he leaned forward. “Kyle, look, as a principal I’m supposed to tell you that you should give an uplifting speech about where you guys are heading and what you hope for the future, and I am, but I’m also saying something else. Tell the truth. Tell how it is and what you were never allowed to say before. Stand up for your class and speak for them, talk about this Kelly guy, about being gay, about whatever you want. I’m literally giving you the last word on this whole year. If you don’t take it, you’ll regret it.”

I just nodded, not trusting my mouth to say anything that made sense.

“Anyway,” he said, standing up, signaling the meeting was over. “Let the graduation committee know how much time you’ll need, and they will work you into the program. Any questions?”

“Was I the reason he lost his job?”

Mr. Fisher’s face grew serious, and he shook his head. “No, Kyle. He lost his job all on his own. You just happened to be the person he was doing it to. The fault is all his own.”

“But I don’t understand,” I said slowly. “He’s been here forever. Why do something about it now?”

Fisher was already back to deciphering his desk again. “Austin got a complaint about him. Actually, turns out one of the commissioners’ moms lives here, and she told him what was going on.”

“Who?”

He looked up and thought about it. “He is Chad Cunningham.” He tried to remember. “Um… Gayle. Her name is Gayle.”

I walked out of the office without another word.

During lunch, Brad and I went to Nancy’s to talk to her. She was in the middle of her normal rush when we walked in. She saw us enter, and I could see the smile cross her face. She said something to one of the waitresses and pointed to the kitchen. We walked out to the back of the diner. “So how was school today?”

“You got him fired?” I asked, completely seeing her in another light all of a sudden.

She gave me that all-knowing smile. “Honey, he got himself fired. I just got tired of seeing him bully innocent students.”

“Why didn’t you do something earlier?” Brad asked. I nudged him to be nice, but the question had already been asked.

“Because the Jeff Raymond I used to know didn’t used to be filled with hate and intolerance. I thought he was just on the wrong side of an argument and needed some time to come around to the right side. Once I saw him the day of the shooting, I knew it wasn’t something he was going to come back from. So I did something.”

“You really run this town, don’t you?” I asked her, slowly grasping how Foster worked for once.

She laughed. “I just serve food, silly. Foster isn’t a thing that needs to be run. It’s a collection of people, lots of people, who all feel and think different things. But at its heart, at the center of it all, it’s a good place. It just needed someone to give them a kick in the ass.”

“So you kicked them?” Brad asked.

She shook her head as she began to lead us back into the diner. “No, that was you two who did that. And by the way, good job.”

B
RAD

T
HE
DAY
of graduation was like a series of sprints that made up a long-ass race.

By the time we were all sitting in our seats, waiting to pass, we were pretty tired. All our families were sitting together: my parents, Kyle’s mom with Tyler and Matt, Robbie, Gayle, Jennifer’s dad. I saw them all in the same place, and my eyes began to mist up, realizing how many people we had on our side. How could we ever think we were alone?

Kyle was already gone, getting ready to give his speech as Jennifer, with Josh hanging on her, was arguing with her dad.

“But why not a real college?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Because I want to do this more. Maybe I can go to community college to get my degree in criminology, but this is what I want to do now.”

“You want to do what?” I asked her, realizing I had spaced out at the beginning of the discussion.

She turned to me, looking like a model for a second as the setting sun hit her blonde hair. I know I was gay, and that girls didn’t do anything for me, but not even a blind man could miss how beautiful she was. “I want to join the police academy.”

Josh looked back at me with a huge grin. “Dude, she’s going to wear a uniform and everything.”

God, those two were bad.

“Brad, help me out here,” her dad pleaded with me. “Tell her to go to school for something else.”

She raised one eyebrow, and I was reminded of how ridiculously brave she was during the shooting. “Sorry, sir, but I think in five years she’ll have your job.”

He scowled at me, but she mouthed “thank you” at me and gave me a huge hug.

Which was when they asked us all to take our seats.

There was a prayer, and the new principal gave a nice speech about the school, and then he moved aside and introduced Kyle.

The crowd grew silent as he walked up to the podium.

I had never been so proud nor so in love with a single person in my life. He reached into his gown and pulled out some index cards and looked at them for a moment. After a second he put them down and took a deep breath. When he looked up, I knew, this was not going to be the speech they had thought he would say.

“They want me to talk about us,” he said, sounding tired. “They want me to talk about the future and where we’re going.” He looked down at his cards and then back to the crowd. His eyes caught mine, and I smiled at him. He gave me a ghost of a smile back and then said to the crowd, “So here is my speech. I have no idea.”

The crowd went wild as everyone under the age of thirty burst into wild cheering.

“I have no earthly clue to what we are going to do with the rest of our lives. All I know is where we’ve been and what we are.” He waited for the crowd to calm down. “We are the ones who made it. We are the survivors.” There were a few chuckles from parents, who thought he was telling a joke. “I know that may seem crazy to those who have already graduated. It used to be getting good grades and scoring a good college was all you needed to do. That’s not true now. We don’t care about that. We just care about living. We just don’t want to die.”

No one said a word. It was as if the whole crowd held its breath.

“There are those not with us. There are people who literally didn’t make it through high school alive. We are the ones who made it, so we have an obligation now. We have an obligation to ourselves and to the world. We have to love and fight and to do stupid things and just live. We have to live for those who can’t. That’s our job now, and it’s not fair. Life just isn’t fair.”

He took a second to gather his thoughts. “The world sucks, and everyone knows it. Kids kill kids, people are spit on because of things as stupid as skin color or who they love, the people who have everything refuse to share with those who have nothing, and no one does a thing. I see people much older than me just shake their heads and say ‘Oh well, that’s life. Not much we can do about it.’ That is not life!” he said, slamming his hand down on the podium. “You want to make the world a better place?
Do
it. You want to be a better person?
Be
it. Those of us here, those of us who have survived, we know. We know the truth about the world, and we aren’t going to be lied to anymore. We aren’t going to be told that the problem is too big or there is only so much one person can do. We aren’t going to accept there is a time and place for things, and that someday they will get better. The place is here, and the time is now.”

A few kids cheered. The adults looked like they were in shock.

“We are tired of your world. We are sick of your hatred and your bigotry and of your bullshit. We are not going to stand for it anymore—we won’t. We are going to go out into the world, and we are going to change it, one person at a time. We are going to meet people, and we are going to tell them these stories from where we grew up, and we are going to share them. And one by one we will change the way people think about the world and the people in it. One by one we will find hatred and intolerance, and we will destroy it.”

More kids started cheering.

“We are going to go out into the world, and we are going to find those people who are filled with hatred, and we are going to tell them their time is done here. That we will not tolerate that crap anymore. You want to know who we are and where we are going?”

The kids were going crazy now, myself included.

“We are coming for you, and we are coming for your world, and we are pissed. If you stand for hate and for discrimination and you can’t see that
all
people are worth something, then know this. We are the graduating class of Foster High, and your days are numbered.”

He grabbed the microphone and screamed, “
We are the ones who survived
!”

Nothing much was said after that because we all rushed the stage and ran toward Kyle.

We had just been given our marching orders. We all had a life to live.

K
YLE

T
HEY
TELL
me I stood up and gave a speech at graduation. I don’t remember a word of it.

I remember walking out there on stage and seeing everyone looking back at me and being incredibly grateful I had a gown on so they couldn’t see my legs shaking. I saw Brad smiling at me, and for a moment the fear and the trepidation passed because I knew, no matter how bad I was going to be up here, he was always there waiting.

I saw my mom sitting with Tyler and Matt, who was sitting next to Robbie, who was crying as hard as my mom was.

When I was done with my speech, the whole crowd went crazy. Well, the kids did. The parents looked a little scared, which was okay with me. Once everything got settled down and Mr. Fisher said I could have a seat, I saw one seat empty.