Hate List (11 page)

Mom was the first car in line and I couldn’t have been more grateful to see that tan Buick. I practically sprinted for it
when the bell rang, forgetting all about stopping by my locker for homework.

I slid into the car and took my first real breath of the day. Mom looked at me, frown lines stretching across her forehead.
They looked pretty deep, like she’d been working on them for a long time.

“How’d it go?” she asked. I could tell she was trying to sound bright and cheery, but the worried edge was in there, too.
I think she’d been working on that for a long time as well.

“Okay,” I said. “Sucked, really. But okay.”

She put the car into gear and pulled out of the lot. “Did you see Stacey?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. That must have been nice to see your old friend.”

“Mom,” I said. “Just let it go.”

Mom glanced away from traffic and looked at me, the frown lines deepening. Her lips were pressed together hard and I almost
wished I had lied and told her everything went great today because I knew how important it was for her to hear that I got
back with all my old friends and even made some new ones and everybody knew that I had nothing to do with the shooting and
I was part of the big old happy crowd we kept hearing about on TV. But the glance really was for just a second and then she
looked back into traffic.

“Mom, really, it’s no big deal.”

“I told her mother. I told her you weren’t responsible for this. You would have thought she’d listen. She was your Brownie
troop leader, for Christ’s sake.”

“Mom, c’mon. You know what Dr. Hieler said about how people were going to react to me.”

“Yes, but the Brinkses should be different. They should know. We shouldn’t have to convince them. You grew up together. We
raised our girls together.”

We were both silent for the rest of the ride home. Mom eased the car into the garage and shut it off. Then she leaned her
forehead against the steering wheel and closed her eyes.

I wasn’t sure what to do. I didn’t think it was right to just get out of the car and bail on her. But I didn’t think she necessarily
wanted to chat, either. She looked like she’d had one heck of a bad day.

Finally I broke the silence. “Stacey told me that you talked to her mom.” She didn’t answer. “She said you told her mother
to blow it out her ass.”

Mom chuckled. “Well, you know how Lorraine can be. So uppity. I’ve wanted to tell her to blow it out her ass for a long time.”
She chuckled again, and then giggled, her eyes still closed, her head still against the steering wheel. “This was just my
first good opportunity. It felt pretty nice.”

She peeked at me with one eye and then started laughing harder. I couldn’t help it—pretty soon I was giggling, too. Before
I knew it we were both howling in the front seat of the car in the closed garage.

“What I really said is, ‘blow it out your snotty fat ass, Lorraine.’” We both laughed harder. Between breaths, she said, “And
I told her that Howard hit on me at last year’s pool party.”

I gasped. “Get out! Stacey’s dad hit on you? Disgusting! He’s like all hairy and nasty and old.”

She shook her head, barely able to breathe long enough to talk. “I just… made… it up. God, I wish… I could have… been there
when… she accused him… of it.”

We sank backward into the seat then and howled for what seemed like forever. I couldn’t remember smiling like that. Laughter
felt weird in my mouth. It almost had a taste to it.

“You’re evil,” I said at last, once we started catching our breath again. “I love it, but you’re evil.”

She shook her head again, wiping her eyes with her pinkies. “No. The evil people are the ones who won’t give you another chance.”

I looked down at my backpack and shrugged. “I guess I can’t blame them. I looked guilty. You don’t have to stick up for me,
Mom. I’ll be okay.”

Mom was wiping at her eyes with the cuffs of her jacket. “But they need to understand that Nick was the one who did this,
honey. He’s the bad one. I’ve been telling you that for years. You’re so pretty—you really belong with a nice boy. Not a
boy like Nick. You never belonged with a boy like Nick.”

I rolled my eyes. Oh jeez, here we go again. Mom telling me that Nick was bad for me. Mom telling me that I shouldn’t be hanging
around with guys like him. Mom telling me that there was something wrong with Nick—she could see it in his eyes. Mom apparently
forgetting that Nick is dead now and that she doesn’t need to lecture me about how bad he was because it doesn’t matter now
anyway.

I reached for the door handle. “Not again. Seriously, Mom. He’s dead. Can we move on?” I popped open the door and stepped
out, schlepping my backpack behind me. I grimaced when I put weight on my leg.

Mom struggled out of her seat belt and got out of the car on the other side. “I’m not fighting with you, Valerie,” she said.
“It’s just that I want to see you happy. You’re never happy. Dr. Hieler suggested…”

My instinct was to glare at her. To tell her what I knew about happiness, which was that you never know when it can change
to terror. That it never stays around. That I haven’t known happiness for a long time, before Nick was ever in my life in
the first place, that she and Dad ought to know why. That, by the way, she was never happy, either, in case she hadn’t noticed.
But seeing her peer at me over the top of the car in her wrinkled suit, tears welling in her eyes, her face still flushed
from laughing, saying all of those things would’ve just felt mean. Even if they were true.

“Mom. I’m okay. Really,” I said. “I don’t even think about Nick anymore.” I turned and walked into the house.

Frankie was leaning against the kitchen counter, eating a sandwich. His hair was slightly wilted and his cell phone was in
his hand, his thumb working the keypad, texting someone.

“What’s up?” he asked when I came into the room.

“Mom,” I answered. “Don’t ask.”

I opened the refrigerator and pulled out a Coke. I leaned against the counter next to him and opened it. “Why can’t she just
get it through her head that Nick’s dead and she can quit bugging me about him now? Why does she have to lecture me all the
time?”

Frankie turned in his chair and looked at me, chewing. “She’s probably afraid you’ll turn out like her and be married to someone
you can’t stand,” he said.

I started to say something back, but heard the garage door rattle and knew Mom was coming in. I stole upstairs to my bedroom.

Frankie was probably right. Mom and Dad were anything but happy. Before last May they’d been all about getting a divorce,
which would have totally been a blessing. Frankie and I were practically giddy at the thought of all the fighting coming to
an end.

But the shooting, while it may have torn apart countless families, ironically brought mine back together. They said they were
“afraid of fracturing the family further in an extreme time of stress like this,” but I knew the truth.

1) Dad was a pretty successful attorney, and the last thing he needed was a bunch of news coverage insinuating to the world
that his marriage problems were at the root of the Garvin High massacre.

2) Mom had a job, but nothing like Dad’s job. Mom made money, but not that much money. And we all knew that some major psychiatric
bills were coming down the pike.

Frankie and I were just along for the ride with their relationship, which was usually civil disregard, but sometimes bubbled
into hostility that made us both want to toss their things in garbage bags and buy them plane tickets to anywhere else but
here.

I walked into my bedroom, which looked a lot mustier and more cluttered than it had when I’d left it this morning. I stopped
in the doorway and looked around, sort of surprised that I’d more or less lived in this room since May and had never noticed
how disgusting it was. Depressing, really. Not that I was ever big on cleaning my room. But except for the Great Nick Extrication
that Mom had done after the shooting, nothing had been picked up or cleaned in months.

I picked up a glass that had been on my nightstand for, like, forever and stacked it on top of a plate. I reached over and
scrunched up a paper towel that was discarded nearby and stuffed it into the glass.

I had this fleeting feeling that maybe I should clean it all up. Make a clean start. Do a Great Valerie Extrication of my
own. But I scanned the clothes crumpled on the floor, the books tossed to the side of the bed, the TV with its smudged and
mucky screen, and I stopped in place. It seemed like way too much work, cleaning up my grief.

I could hear Mom and Frankie talking down in the kitchen. Her voice sounded agitated, sort of like it did when she and Dad
were left in the kitchen together for too long. I felt a brief pang of guilt for leaving Frankie down there alone to bear
the brunt of her frustrations since I was technically the one who had her frustrated. But Frankie never got it as bad as I
did. In fact, ever since the shooting, Frankie really didn’t exist much. No curfew, no chores, no limits. Mom and Dad were
always too busy fighting with one another and worrying about me to remember they had another kid to worry about. I didn’t
know if I should feel really jealous of Frankie for that, or really sorry for him. Maybe both.

That weary feeling came back and I dropped the glass and plate into my trash can and flopped backward on my bed. I reached
into my backpack. I pulled out my notebook and flipped it open. I chewed my lip, staring at the pictures I’d drawn throughout
the day.

I rolled over and pushed the button to turn on my stereo and cranked it. Mom would be up in a few minutes hollering at me
through the door to turn it down, but she’d already confiscated all my “concerning” music—you know, the music that she and
Dad and probably Dr. Hieler and every other old fart in the world thought would incite me to slit my wrists in the bathtub—which still ticked me off since I bought most of that music with my own money. I turned up the volume loud enough that I
wouldn’t even hear her. She’d get tired of pounding long before I’d get tired of her pounding. So let her pound.

I reached into my backpack again and pulled out a pencil. I chewed on the eraser for a minute, looking at the picture I’d
started of Mrs. Tennille. She looked so sad. Wasn’t it funny that not all that long ago I would’ve said I’d wanted Tennille
to feel sad? I’d hated her. But today, seeing how sad she was, I felt horrible. I felt responsible. I wanted her to smile,
and I wondered if she smiled when she got home and held her kids or if she just came home and sat back in her recliner with
a vodka and drank until she couldn’t hear the gunshots anymore.

I bent my head and started drawing—drawing her doing both at the same time, curling around a little boy like a peanut inside
a shell, her hand curling around a bottle of vodka like the shell clings to the vine.

When I opened my eyes again, I was actually surprised to find that I wasn’t still asleep in my own bed, waking to start a
new school day. That’s the way it was supposed to work, right? Nick was supposed to call and I was supposed to go on to school,
hating every minute of it, worrying that he and Jeremy were at Blue Lake doing God-knows-what and agonizing that Nick was
going to break up with me and getting pestered by Christy Bruter on the bus. I was supposed to wake up and the scraps that
I could remember about Nick shooting up the Commons were supposed to be a dream, drifting away before I could even drum up
the images fully in my awakened mind.