151 Days (65 page)

If I wasn’t trying to be an antisocial asshole, I would have felt like an outsider.

No one came over to me and asked who I was. No one inquired what I was reading or who I was listening to. Of course, I had never asked a new kid at my old school any of those questions in the past, but for some reason I half wanted someone to at least notice. I didn’t even hear the bell ring and only noticed the time when the quad was almost devoid of people.

“Shit,” I muttered, tossing my Kindle into my bag, and began looking for my class schedule. Precious seconds passed as I dug for the piece of paper in desperation. Even if I found it right
now
, I still had no idea where anything was. Fuck, I was so busy trying to be all brooding when I should have been figuring out where these buildings were so I wouldn’t be the new kid who walked into class late.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” I exclaimed, not finding the schedule.

Sighing, I closed my pack up and walked to the office. Perfect start, Jared. Sit there pouting about how stupid everyone in this town was going to be, and you’re the idiot who has to get his schedule printed again because you’re too stupid to live.

If that angry god is still listening, I get it. Really. I am so, so sorry, and if you want me to do some Hail Marys or whatever they do in confession to get rid of sin, just text me, dude. You so don’t need to keep kicking me in the balls.

So, ten minutes and several hundred levels of embarrassment later, I walked into my first-period history class. And as
every
person who ever walked into a class late knows, I, of course, interrupted the teacher in the middle of something and got everyone’s attention instantly.

“Awesome,” I said to myself as thirty strangers looked at me blankly.

“New?” the teacher asked, grabbing his roll book off his desk.

“Um, yes, sir,” I said in a voice that would have made Justin Bieber sound butch. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Yes, sir. Jared Fisher.”

He nodded and checked something off. “Take a seat, Fisher. I’m Coach Gunn, and welcome to history.”

I looked around for a seat in the back, but those had long been taken. The only one left was right up front, next to a cute-ass boy with dirty-blond hair. I moved into the seat, trying my best not to look at him since I so did not want people to start talking about how the new kid was perving on Johnny whatever-his-name-was five minutes into class.

“You have a good build,” the coach said as I sat down. “You play football in your old school?”

I looked at him for a moment, wondering if somehow my dad had set him up to ask that. It was pretty obvious from the look on the guy’s face he was deathly serious and was waiting for an answer. Of course everyone else was too, which just made me feel like dying.

I nodded as I pulled out my notebook.

“A couple of players just graduated,” he said, putting a history book on my desk. “You should try out today after school.”

I don’t know where it came from or why I did it, but something in me just snapped, and my mouth began talking before I could stop it. “Yeah, you should know before you ask that I’m gay.”

I had told myself I wasn’t going to take a step back into the closet, not after what I had gone through in Chicago. I didn’t care if these backward fucks hated me or wanted to kill me. I wasn’t going to spend the last couple of years of high school hiding who I was anymore. And they could just shove it. I looked at him defiantly and waited for his response.

He blinked a few times in confusion and then said, “So does that mean you don’t want to try out?”

My mind came to a grinding halt as I tried to figure out if I had just heard what I thought I just heard.

“Huh?” I finally asked.

He chuckled and shook his head. “Son, I don’t much care who you date. I’m looking for football players. If you want to try out, it’s the boys’ gym after school.” He picked up some papers and flipped through them for a moment. “Okay, we were going over how much each test is going to be worth.”

His words faded away as I looked around to see if anyone was watching and laughing at me.

They weren’t.

“What the fuck?” I mumbled in complete confusion.

I felt someone tap my hand, and I looked over to see the cute boy trying to get my attention. “Hey, I’m Joel. We already did the gay jock thing last year.” He smiled and winked at me. “Welcome to Foster High.” He handed me a folded-up piece of paper before going back to his notes.

I slowly unfolded it and gaped.
You’re cute, call me!
and then his number.

I looked at the note and then back to him and then back to the note.

I folded it back up and slipped it in my pocket, resting my hand on it lest it vanish in a puff of whatever things vanish into.

“Okay, let’s open our books and jump into it,” Coach Gunn said, grabbing his own book off his desk. “We have a lot to cover this year.”

As we began to read, I had to smile. I thought I was going to like this town after all.

I
USUALLY
write these right after I am done with the book.

Generally I use them as snapshots of where my mind was when I finished a novel, but not this time. When I was done with
151 Days,
I submitted it and walked away from it, for a few reasons. One was because it was an intense book to write. If you are reading this, I assume you’ve read it; if not, there might be spoilers, so… sorry for that. Jeremy was a hard character to write, for obvious reasons and some not so obvious. Obviously he was bitter and angry, and that is hard to channel for a long period of time. I have always found if you want to convey real emotion, then you must feel the emotion, or at least a shade of it, while you are writing it. So of course that was no fun to live with. But one of the not so obvious reasons was because I hadn’t been that guy for a long time.

When I was in high school, I spent a good portion of my time angry at the world. For some real things, for some I made up, but mostly because I wasn’t a happy guy. My home life sucked, we didn’t have any money, I was gay and didn’t want anyone to know, I felt bored in class, and spent a lot of time wondering if my friends knew the real me if they would still be my friends. So I was angry, I was bitter, and not a pleasant person to be around all the time.

I am still not a peach to socialize with, by the way; I just know my shortcomings better now.

So bringing up my inner Jeremy was akin to raising the dead, and as we all know, that is never a good thing to do. But I thought he needed to tell his story. His words needed to be put down for so many reasons today. I’ve noticed there are a lot of angry kids walking around lately, bitter and jaded beyond their age, and it doesn’t seem to be getting any better.

It could be getting better. I just can’t see it yet.

There is a negativity that seems to permeate the world today, and it is affecting people younger and younger every year. It can’t be easy growing up in this world, with so much information and so little wisdom at their fingertips. To have so much access to sexual content and so little explanation of what love is. So many people thinking that that they know so much more at their age and not realizing that they are just as lost as any of us were at that age. It’s easy to look at a kid today and think they are just a smaller adult. They talk more maturely, they know so damn much, and they carry themselves a few inches away from the world, as if already shielding themselves from everyone else.

In the end, though, they are still just kids.

People like Jeremy are not the bad guys. It’s easy to think they are: they have guns, they have anger, they do violent things…. I mean, on paper it sounds like the textbook definition of a bad guy. But they aren’t. Most people who are in that situation just want something they can’t figure out how to get: acceptance, compassion, love, a couple of seconds to just be themselves….

It’s sad because a lot of the time we never know what they wanted. Most of the time the story has a tragic ending, one we are all too familiar with today. These incidents are coming faster, they are more brutal, and worst of all, they are almost expected now. Too many people just shake their head and go, “That’s s a shame,” and then change the channel because it’s just too depressing to watch. There is just too much despair in the world sometimes to keep looking at it in the face.

And these are the words of a grown man who has a lifetime of experience behind him. I cannot imagine what it must be like for the kids who have to live in that world.

This book was not written to justify people like Jeremy. This book was not written to make people sympathetic to those who have killed other people. This book was not written as an excuse for their actions. This book was written to show those kids out there, the ones who are going down Jeremy’s road, that even if you make a mistake, even if you think there is no other choice… it doesn’t have to end the way you think it does.

We see this story again and again and the shooter is killed, by police or by their own hands. It happens so much, we simply expect the story to end that way. It happens so much that the kids who find themselves in that situation assume it’s going to end that way.

Well, I am telling you it doesn’t.

If you think there is no other way out, you’re wrong. If you think there is no other choice out there, you’re wrong. And if you think no one cares, you’re wrong.

When I was seventeen, I brought my grandfather’s pistol to school.

I was unpopular, unattractive, tired of being mocked by others, and was just at the end of my rope. I had no idea what I was going to do with the gun. I had no intention of killing anyone with it. I just needed the power, the choice that it provided in my pocket. My friends found out, and instead of shunning me or screaming at me, they asked me what I needed and told me I didn’t need to do that.

I wonder sometimes if that was today, and people assumed the story ends like we think it does now, would they have reacted the same way? I don’t know. I just know I’m glad they were there.

So I am living proof, it doesn’t have to end that way. I know it seems dark, and I know it seems like there is no way out. But trust me on this, just this one thing. It doesn’t have to go down like that. There are people out there who want to help you; there are people out there who want to be your friend. The story doesn’t have to end with you dying.

So yeah, that was one reason I waited to write this, because the book brought up a whole bunch of ugly memories. The other was, it was hard to say good-bye.

This is the last Foster High book. A lot of people have asked about this online and that has been my answer, but let me try to explain what I mean by it. These books, these three books, were about how one person can change the people around them. How one person, just by being a better person, can inspire others to want to change as well. The character that does the most changing in the story is Foster itself. These three books are that story.

There is no more story to tell about the town. What else would it be? There is another gay kid and some people are crappy to him and the other people think that’s uncool. We just did that story, literally that exact story. Foster, Texas is a better place because of Kyle, so the message here is, be your own Kyle. Just be the best you you know how to be, and I promise you, people will react to it. Not instantly, not everyone, but some people will react to it, and you will make a difference. There you go—story completed.

But this is not the last Kyle and Brad book.

Their story will go on, as well as Robbie’s, and I am willing to bet Tyler and Matt’s as well. But as for Foster High and the town, that story is done, and the tales are done. So I don’t want you to think I am going to abandon the boys. I’m not. I am just done telling the town’s story.

It’s time for a different story.

A&M
IS
in this book, and I want to take a second to address that.

I thought about using a fictional school for Brad to want to go after, but everything else in these books is based on something real, so I felt it would be disingenuous. But I also feel like I took a shot at the place, when in fact they hadn’t done anything.

If you have never met an Aggie, I can’t explain it, but they are special people. They have a code of conduct that is on par with the Marines, and most of the ones I know are just incredible people. Yes, they did try to pass a bill that would allow people to opt out of funding a GLBT resource center based on their religious beliefs. But the fact that the student president vetoed that bill after it passed, saying that it just wasn’t right, kind of makes my point.

The A&M in this book is fictional, and in no way is meant to condemn the actual school and the way they treat gay students. They have an openly gay swimmer who came out because of the codes that Aggies live by. I think that is a pretty cool thing, and I wanted it to be said somewhere in this book that just because you think a place is intolerant doesn’t mean everyone there is intolerant. Sure, it’s easy to think that everyone in Texas is small-minded or conservative, but I assure you, they are not.

There are great people living everywhere in this country, and there are horrible people as well. To stereotype a place and all the people in it isn’t right, and I hope this book shows you that. Is Texas the most progressive state in the union? No. Does that mean everyone here is antigay or ultraconservative? No.

I just wanted to say, the A&M portrayed isn’t based on actual events that occurred at that college. Those events did occur at other colleges, just not A&M.

John Goode

2014

J
OHN
G
OODE
is a member of the class of ’88 from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, specializing in incantations and spoken spells. At the age of fourteen, he proudly represented District 13 in the 65th Panem games, where he was disqualified for crying uncontrollably before the competition began. After that he moved to Forks, Washington, where against all odds he dated the hot, incredibly approachable werewolf instead of the stuck-up jerk of a vampire, but was crushed when he found out the werewolf was actually gayer than he was. After that he turned down the mandatory operation everyone must receive at sixteen to become pretty, citing that everyone pretty was just too stupid to live, before moving away for greener pastures. After falling down an oddly large rabbit hole, he became huge when his love for cakes combined with his inability to resist the commands of sparsely worded notes, and was finally kicked out when he began playing solitaire with the Red Queen’s 4th armored division. By eighteen he had found the land in the back of his wardrobe, but decided that thinly veiled religious allegories were not the neighbors he desired. When last seen, he had become obsessed with growing a pair of wings after discovering Fang’s blog and hasn’t been seen since.