In public. So everyone hears.
And after that …
And after that?
I don’t know what happens after that. I really don’t. Something. I don’t remember much, not a whole lot that makes sense, anyway. A light flashes and the air moves in a swirling distortion, like the whole world has suddenly tilted on its side.
And there’s music. Definitely music. Who is playing music? Why is music playing? My mind latches on to the individual notes, a series of them that rise and fall in an eerie, whistling way. I don’t know this song.
But then, I do know it. I do! I don’t want it to ever go away.
Under the music, someone is laughing. And then someone else is shouting the word
hate.
Hate! Hate! Hate!
A hand cups my shoulder, but I push it aside. There’s so much power surging through me. Someone is pulling on the hem of my shirt. I slap at it.
“Meg!” Pause. “Meg!”
I hear a bell then, loud and sharp, and I tremble with a jolt, as if waking suddenly out of a dream when you have a 103-degree fever. The music is gone. An empty silence has taken over. Reluctantly, I blink open my eyes.
I’m standing.
Not standing on the ground like your average, normal person, but standing on my chair.
In the middle of class. With my neck muscles straining and a layer of sweat on my forehead. And my throat dry and raw. And my fists clenched in tight balls at my side.
Ms. Pallas, directly in front of me, slams her ruler on my desk, and I feel the vibration ripple up through the bottom of my feet to my head. My brain feels like it’s been punched in the gut.
It all becomes clear then, too clear, and the word
humiliation
doesn’t begin to cover it.
It had been Raymond tugging on my shirt, calling my name. The bell was the end of class. And I was the one standing on my chair shouting, “Hate! Hate! Hate! I hate all of you.”
2
“Meg-o-mania,
what the hell was that about?”
That’s what Raymond wants to know, and I can’t blame him for pouncing on me as soon as I leave the classroom. While I was getting a stern talking-to from Ms. Pallas and promising her that an outburst like that will never happen again, and that I completely understand how Hunter High is a hate-free zone, and that words have consequences, and that shouting in class is definitely on the school’s list of no-nos, and that in her class
especially
she won’t tolerate that kind of ugly talk, Raymond waited patiently for me in the hallway. His long, thin body is slouched against a locker. I’m so happy and relieved to see him. I give him a sheepish smile and a weak shrug.
“Just a warning,” I say.
He lets out a low whistle of relief. “Lucky. Pallas doesn’t usually suffer from Pushover Teacher Syndrome. I figured you’d pull detention for that spontaneous outburst of misanthropy.”
Classic Raymond vocabulary. According to Hunter High mythology, my best friend started talking in complete sentences when he was six months old and hasn’t shut up since. That’s not his only achievement. He’s a whiz in math. He skipped fourth grade. He plays first violin in the school orchestra and composes his own music. Plus, he can speak pig Latin in Latin. He’s by far the youngest, smartest, most accomplished person in our class, but also kind of an idiot.
His most recent form of self-amusement is saying things like “What I lack in maturity, I make up for in infantile behavior,” followed by his enormous high-pitched laugh.
The truth is—and I’m not talking behind his back because Raymond would admit it himself—he drives most people up a wall. It’s not polite to say this, and maybe my thinking it makes me an awful person, but I’m actually grateful that Raymond is so irritating. Otherwise he might not have been so desperate to have me as a friend when I met him three years ago. On the surface, I know that our friendship doesn’t make much sense—the ethnically ambiguous, awkward girl who loves BLT sandwiches and happy romantic comedies who is inseparable from the big-brain gay kid who’s a vegetarian and obsessed with horror films—the older the better, especially the campy black-and-white ones from the 1960s.
But it comes down to this: he and I click in a way that we’ve never clicked with anyone else before. We can tell each other anything. To Raymond, I’m not some shy dork who, when she does speak, always manages to say the wrong thing. I’m—get this!—smart, tolerant, funny, a deep thinker, a survivor, and a closet optimist.
And I think that he’s the most unique person on the planet.
“Let’s get out of here,” I say. I glance around nervously to see who might have heard about my Western Civ breakdown. There’s only a couple of freshmen hurrying to their next class, and none of them are staring or smirking. Raymond and I have study hall next period and can easily ditch that. With a quick pivot, I start walking down the corridor and he follows, not bothering to lower his voice. “Not so fast, Meg. You were dauntingly intimidating. Terrifying! You hate everyone? Speak!”
And say what?
I push through a set of double doors into a stairwell, and I’m so befuddled that I can’t decide what to do next. Where was I going? Up? Down? My hands claw through my hair in frustration.
“Sit!” he orders, pressing on my shoulder.
I do. He joins me on the bottom step. “Deep breath in and out. Explain.”
I swallow hard, shiver a little. How do I start? I can’t explain it to myself. I just want to rub out the whole incident, make the collective memory of thirty-two students disappear. I don’t want to think about every pair of eyes trained on me, some kids laughing so hard they had to put their heads on their desks, others dropping their eyes in embarrassment, like I just confessed in public that I masturbate every night. I don’t want to think about how angry Ms. Pallas is at me and how Brendon—that boy with the crinkle eyes—turned so pale, like he somehow sensed that my hate was focused on him.
“Well?” Raymond asks again, and the question echoes in the empty stairwell.
I let my body cave in on itself, dropping my eyes to the floor, my voice a mumble, as if making myself smaller will make the whole subject disappear. “It was nothing. A blood sugar drop or something.”
“Blood sugar?” His voice is loud and cracking.
I cobble together a few coherent sentences that I hope will satisfy him for at least right now. “I don’t know what happened. I was thinking. It was … slippage.”
“Slippage?”
“From my brain.”
His face lights up. “Oh! You mean brain slippage! Good old brain slippage. That explains everything.”
“It does?”
Raymond sighs, not buying it for a second. “I’m not talking about the content of your impromptu confession—we’ll come back to Meg’s astounding moment of existential crisis in a minute. It was how you said it.” He cups his hand into a megaphone. “Cue the zombie.”
I shush him. His eyes search my face. I look away—at my feet, at my nails, at the square tiles of acoustical ceiling, at a big wad of bubble gum fossilized on the wall. But it’s no use. Raymond has infinite patience for my avoidance techniques. He will wait in annoying silence until I spill every detail.
“Talking it through might help,” I finally admit. Who else can I talk to about it, anyway? My understanding foster mom? My
other
friend? “Okay. But Raymond, don’t you dare laugh.”
“Why would I laugh?”
“’Cause you laugh at everything.”
He makes a big drama of swiping a hand magician-style across his face, pretending to wipe away any trace of humor. “Totally serious.” Pause. “Devoid of levity. You may proceed.”
I force a calmness into my voice that I don’t actually feel. “I know it was strange…”
So much for calmness: I blurt everything, at least as much as I can remember, because it’s all beginning to fade. “That’s the best I can do, my explanation for being, you know, not like myself.”
“Not yourself? You were positively Demon Girl—with a strong hint of Possessed Person.” Raymond turns his body rigid, arms glued to his thighs. “I hhhhhhhate everyone.”
“Well, I do!”
“Do what?”
“Hate!”
Only when I say the word
hate
right now, it’s nothing like what I was feeling before. This hate is ordinary hate, like when you hate Brussels sprouts or PE. That
other
hate had weight and texture; it took up space and vibrated in my chest like a gong being struck. I try to explain.
“I don’t hate
you
, Raymond! And not everyone all the time. But some people some of the time. Like Brendon—you know I hate him, but when I say that now, it’s different than when I said it in class. That was
hate
hate. I don’t … I can’t…”
Raymond puts an open hand completely over my face, fingers spread, palm on my lips—“Interrupting starfish”—then removes it. He studies me. “This is serious. You’re mega upset.”
“It was horrible, Raymond. Humiliating! Everyone laughing at me. But before it was horrible, it was…”
I stop short because I realize that I’m about to say something I’m not sure I want to say aloud. Because saying it aloud will make it real, and I’m not sure I want it to be real and I’m not sure that anyone should know this about me, not even my best friend who knows just about everything else.
“The truth? It’s kind of ugly.”
He puts his fingertips on his wrist, mock checks his pulse. “I took my vitamins today. I can handle it.”
“Before. When I shouted ‘I hate everyone.’ It was fun—the best feeling I ever had in my life.”
He looks puzzled. “You mean, letting it all out and saying what you felt? I get it. That can feel good.”
“Yes! No! It was more than that. A power! The way it took over and took me away. I wanted to stay there.”
He’s still confused. “What took you over? Stay where?”
“There!”
I realize how whacked that must sound. I don’t have a clue about where
there
is or what I’m really trying to say, so I give a nervous giggle and pretend to make light of it. “So what do you think? Am I a complete raging psycho?”
Instead of answering with one of his wisecracks, Raymond lets his eyes go vacant and his jaw drop open. I hear him breathing through his mouth. The first time I saw him get this look, it freaked me out. I worried that he was having a seizure that knocked out fifty IQ points. But with Raymond, the more stupid he looks, the harder you know he’s thinking. Right now he looks really dumb, so I assume his synapses are working overtime. He murmurs a few random words and half phrases. I know to keep my mouth shut until he’s ready.
He drapes his arm around my shoulder again. He’s a toucher, another thing that annoys most people. I scoot closer to him on the step. I like feeling Raymond’s weight on my shoulder, knowing that he’s on my side.
3
When
I
wake
the next morning, the sunlight is streaming in the window. It’s so toasty in bed I don’t want to move. I study the dust particles in the slant of light, watch them twirl. My eyes move around my small bedroom and admire how I’ve perked it up with some of the personal things I cart from foster home to foster home. On the dresser there’s a ceramic frog planter that I named Francine. My comforter has a bright sunflower pattern. I stretch and yawn, feel myself crackle to life, then spring out of bed feeling light and optimistic. I even think I smell fresh-squeezed orange juice.
That’s the truly messed-up thing about sunshine. All that bright, glittery yellowness blinds you. It takes about two more seconds to register: I am screwed. This day is going to totally suck. No amount of sunshine can undo that.
By now, word of my freaky outburst is sure to have made the rounds of all the Hunter High cabals—especially the merciless group of smug, too-tanned surfer royalty that rules my bus ride every morning. Those
dudes
will be my first hurdle of the day. I am going to be bombarded—zombie imitations on the bus, zombie imitations in first-period physics, in second-period English, in Western Civ of course, and on and on. And each and every one of my pop-eyed, twisted-mouthed tormentors will think his particular imitation is the funniest, most original thing ever.
I hate everyone
, I say to myself.
I really do.
I brush my teeth, spit a big gob of white foam into the sink. How will I get through this day? I have no idea how I’m going to survive. Where will I look? What will I do with my hands?
I try to conjure up some of the power I felt yesterday, but thinking about it only makes my stomach hurt.
I dab on a little face powder, smear rouge on my cheeks. I clip and then unclip my hair, feeling it spring into its usual uncontrollable state. If every teenage girl in the world of every ethnicity started complaining about the problems with her hair—
too frizzy, too limp, too wiry, too big, too kinky, too flyaway, too flat on top, not brown or blond or red enough, just a blah, watered-down nothing color—
I could join in the conversation at any point. I run my fingers through the maze of knots, tuck what I can behind my ears, and feel the rest of it frizzing out.
My stomach still hurts. What if I have the flu? That would be a good thing. I could stay home all week, and by that time I would be old, tired news.
I pray for food poisoning.
I open my closet. How
does
one dress for one of the worst days of her life?
I settle on my usual black pullover and jeans. Safe.
I take a deep breath and remind myself of three things that Raymond says I should love about me: I’m smart. I’m strong. I’m a survivor.
But before this dream of a day gets off the ground, it’s time to go into the kitchen and get my usual send-off to school from Lottie Leach, my foster mother, and He-Cat, her butt-ugly pet whose most prominent physical characteristic is the goopy stuff that hardens white in the corners of his eyes. They both hate me.