Hate List (3 page)

“Yeah.”

He leaned over me. “You think we could be like them?”

I crinkled my nose. “I don’t know. I guess. Sure.”

He turned again and stared out into the lake. “Yeah, we could. We really could. We think alike.”

I stood up and brushed the backs of my thighs, which felt dimply from the texture of the rock we’d been sitting on. “Are you
asking me out?”

He turned, lurched toward me, and grabbed me around the waist. He picked me up until my feet were dangling above the ground
and I couldn’t help it—I let out a squeal that turned into a giggle. He kissed me and my body felt so electric up against
his even my toes tingled. It seemed like forever that I’d been waiting for him to do this. “Would you say no if I did?” he
asked.

“Hell, no, Romeo,” I said. I kissed him back.

“Then I guess I am, Juliet,” he’d said, and I swear as I touched his face in the photo I could hear it again. Could feel him
in the room with me. Even though in May he became a monster in the eyes of the world, in my eyes he was still that guy holding
me above the ground, kissing me and calling me Juliet.

I stuffed the photo into my back pocket. “Eighty-three and counting,” I said aloud, taking a deep breath and heading downstairs.

My cell phone chirped
and I grabbed it before Mom or Frankie or, God forbid, Dad heard it. It was still early and dim outside. One of those tough
mornings to wake up to. Summer break was right around the corner, which meant three months of sleeping in and not having to
put up with Garvin High. Not that I hated school or anything, but Christy Bruter was, like always, giving me trouble on the
bus and I had a D in Science because of a quiz I forgot to study for, and finals were going to be a killer this year.

Nick had been a little quiet lately. In fact, he hadn’t shown up at school for two days, and had texted me all day long, asking
about “the shits in homeroom” or “the fat bitches in P. E.” or “that scab McNeal.”

He’d been hanging around with this guy, Jeremy, for the last month and every day he seemed to pull further and further away
from me. I was afraid he was going to break up with me, so I just played along like it was no big deal that we hardly ever
saw each other anymore. I didn’t want to push him—he’d been so volatile lately and I didn’t want to start a fight. I didn’t
ask him what he was doing on those days he didn’t show up and instead just texted him back that “the shits in Bio need 2 B
dunked in formaldehyde” and that “I h8 those bitches” and that “McNeal is lucky I don’t have a gun.” That last one would really
come back to bite me later. Really, they all would. But that last one… that last one would make me vomit every time I thought
about it for a long time. And it would inspire a three-hour conversation between me and Detective Panzella. And it would make
my dad forever look at me differently, like I was some sort of monster deep down and he could see it.

Jeremy was this older guy—like twenty-one or something—who’d graduated from Garvin a few years ago. He didn’t go to college.
He didn’t have a job. From what I could tell, all Jeremy did was beat up his girlfriend and sit around smoking pot and watching
cartoons all day. Until he met Nick and then he stopped watching the cartoons and started smoking his dope with Nick and only
beat up his girlfriend on nights when he wasn’t in Nick’s garage, playing drums, too stoned to remember she existed. On the
rare occasions that I’d been over there when Jeremy was there, Nick was a totally different guy. Someone I didn’t even recognize,
really.

For a long time I thought maybe I just never knew Nick at all. Maybe when Nick and I were watching TV in his basement or dunking
each other at the pool and laughing, I was totally not seeing the real Nick. Like the real Nick was the one that showed up
when Jeremy came over—that hard-eyed, selfish Nick.

I’d heard of women who were completely blind and ignored all these signs that their man was some sort of pervert or monster,
but no way could you convince me I was one of them. When Jeremy wasn’t around… when it was just me and Nick and I looked in
Nick’s eyes… I knew what I saw and it was good. He was good. He had a sick sense of humor sometimes—we all did—but no
way did we mean it. So sometimes it makes sense to me that maybe it was Jeremy who put those ideas about shooting up the school
in Nick’s head. Not me. Jeremy. He’s the bad guy. He’s the one.

I picked up the cell and fumbled it down under the covers where I had been slowly waking up to the idea that I had to get
through another school day.

“’Lo?”

“Baby.” Nick’s voice was thin, almost wired-sounding, although at the time I just figured that was because it was so early
and Nick hardly ever got up early anymore.

“Hey,” I whispered. “Going to school today for a change?”

He chuckled. Sounded really happy. “Yeah. Jeremy’s gonna drive me.”

I pulled myself to a sitting position. “Cool. Stacey was asking about you yesterday. Said she saw you and Jeremy driving out
toward Blue Lake.” I let the unspoken question hang in the air.

“Yeah.” I heard the flick of his lighter and the crackle of a cigarette filter. He exhaled. “We had some stuff to do out there.”

“Like… ?”

He didn’t answer. Just the sound of the filter burning and his steady exhale.

Disappointment washed over me. He wasn’t going to tell me. I hated the way he was acting. He’d never kept secrets from me
before. We’d always talked about everything, even the hard stuff like our parents’ marriages and the names kids called us
at school and how sometimes we felt like nothing. Like less than nothing.

I almost pressed him, told him I wanted to know, I deserved to know, but decided to change the subject instead—if I was
finally going to get to see him, I didn’t want to waste that time fighting with him. “Hey, I’ve got some names for the list,”
I said.

“Who?”

I rubbed the corners of my eyes with my fingertips. “People who say ‘sorry’ after everything. Fast-food commercials. And Jessica
Campbell.”
Jeremy
, I almost added, but thought better of it.

“That skinny blond chick that goes out with Jake Diehl?”

“Uh-huh, but Jake’s okay. I mean a little jockish, but he’s no way as annoying as her. Yesterday in health I was totally just
spacing out and I guess I was looking in her direction. So all of a sudden she looks at me and goes, ‘What’re you looking
at, Sister Death?’ and she had this scowl on her face and she rolled her eyes and goes, ‘Hell-o, mind your own business,’
and I was all, ‘Trust me, I don’t give a shit about what you were saying anyway,’ and she was like, ‘Don’t you have a funeral
to go to?’ and then her stupid friends started laughing like she was some sort of stand-up comedian or something. She’s such
a bitch.”

“Yeah, you’re right.” He coughed. I heard a rattle of papers being turned and could imagine Nick sitting on his mattress writing
in the red spiral notebook we shared. “All those blond chicks should just disappear.”

At the time I’d laughed. It was funny. I agreed with him. At least I said I did. And, okay, I really thought I did. I didn’t
feel like a horrible person, but I laughed because to me,
they
were the horrible people. They deserved it.

“Yeah, they should be run over by their parents’ Beemers,” I said.

“I put that Chelle girl on the list, too.”

“Good one. She won’t shut up about making varsity. I don’t know what her problem is.”

“Yeah. Well.”

We sat in silence for a minute. I don’t know what Nick was thinking. At the time I took his silence to be some sort of unspoken
agreement with me, like we were speaking at the same time in some wavelength that had no breath. But now I know that’s just
one of those “inferences” Dr. Hieler was always telling me about. People do it all the time—assume that they “know” what’s
going on in someone else’s head. That’s impossible. And to think it’s possible is a mistake. A really big mistake. A life-ruining
one if you’re not careful.

I heard some mumbling in the background. “Gotta go,” Nick said. “We gotta take Jeremy’s kid to day care. His girlfriend’s
being a pain in the ass about it. See you in the Commons?”

“Sure. I’ll have Stacey save us a seat.”

“Cool.”

“Love you.”

“You too, baby.”

I hung up, smiling. Maybe whatever was bugging him was resolved. Maybe he was getting sick of Jeremy and Jeremy’s kid and
Jeremy’s cartoons and Jeremy’s pot. Maybe I could talk him into skipping lunch and walking with me across the highway to Casey’s
for a sandwich. Just the two of us. Like old times. Us sitting on the concrete median, picking onions off our sandwiches and
asking each other music trivia questions, our shoulders butted up against one another, our feet swinging.

I jumped in the shower without bothering to turn on the light and stood enveloped by the steam in the dark, hoping maybe Nick
would bring me something special today. He was pretty good at that—showing up to school with a rose he’d picked up at the
gas station or sliding a candy bar into my locker between classes, slipping a note into my notebook when I wasn’t looking.
When he wanted to, Nick had a hell of a romantic side.

I got out of the shower and dried off. I took extra time on my hair and eyeliner and wore a torn black denim miniskirt with
my favorite pair of striped black and white tights with the hole in the knee. I stuffed my feet into socks and a pair of canvas
shoes and grabbed my backpack.

My little brother, Frankie, was eating cereal at the kitchen table. His hair was spiked and he looked like one of those kids
in PopTart commercials: perfectly coiffed skater types. Frankie was fourteen and totally full of himself. He thought he was
some sort of fashion guru and was always dressed so stylishly he looked like he’d just stepped out of a catalog. We were close,
despite the fact that we tended to hang out with totally different crowds and we had completely different definitions of what
was cool. He could be annoying at times, but most of the time he was a pretty good little brother.

He had his American history textbook open on the table next to him and was frantically scribbling on a piece of notebook paper,
stopping only to shovel a bite of cereal into his mouth every so often.

“Shooting a hair gel commercial today?” I asked, bumping into his chair with my hip on the way past.

“What?” he said, running the palm of his hand over the spikes of his hair. “The ladies love it.”

I rolled my eyes, smiling. “I’ll bet. Dad leave yet?”

He took another bite of cereal and went back to writing. “Yeah,” he said around the food in his mouth. “He left a few minutes
ago.”

I grabbed a waffle out of the freezer and popped it into the toaster. “I see you were too busy with the ladies to do your
homework last night,” I teased, leaning over him to read what he was writing. “What did the women in the… Civil War era… think
of excess hair gel, exactly?”

“Give me a break,” he said, bumping me with his elbow. “I was talking to Tina until midnight. I gotta get this done. Mom’ll
freak if I get another C in history. She’ll take my cell phone away again.”