Hate List (12 page)

I woke up in the hospital. There were police in my room and the TV was turned on to a crime scene. Their backs were turned
to me, their faces tilted up toward the TV screen. I squinted at the TV where images of a parking lot, a brick building, a
football field, all vaguely familiar, blipped on and off of the screen. I shut my eyes again. I felt groggy. My eyes were
very dry and my leg throbbed, and I started to remember not exactly what happened, but that something really bad had happened.

“She’s waking up,” I heard. I recognized the voice as Frankie’s, but I hadn’t seen him when I’d opened my eyes before and
it seemed easier to just imagine him standing next to the bed saying that than to try to see him. So I let myself drift into
this imaginary world where Frankie was standing nearby, saying
She’s waking up
and it was true, but I wasn’t in the hospital and my leg didn’t hurt.

“I’ll go find a nurse,” another voice said. My dad’s. That one was easy. The voice was tense, strained, terse. Just like Dad.
He popped into my imaginary scene as well, in the background, floating out of view. He was tapping something into his PDA
and he had a cell phone between his ear and his shoulder. He popped out just as quickly and it was just Frankie looking at
me again.

“Val,” Frankie said. “Hey, Val. You awake?”

The vision morphed into a morning in my bedroom. Frankie trying to wake me up to do something fun, like in the old days when
Mom and Dad got along and we were just two little kids. Find our Easter baskets, maybe, or a Christmas present, or pancakes.
I liked this place. I really did. So I have no idea why my eyes fluttered open again. They did it without my consent.

They opened onto Frankie, standing at the end of my bed, by my toes. Only it wasn’t my bed, but a strange one with crisp,
scratchy white sheets and a brown blanket that looked like oatmeal. His hair was completely limp and I had a minute of trying
to clear my head because I honestly couldn’t remember the last time I saw Frankie with limp hair. I had a hard time matching
the fourteen-year-old Frankie face to the eleven-year-old Frankie hair. I had to blink several times before I could make sense
of it.

“Frankie,” I said, but before I could say anything else my attention was distracted to a wet sort of sniffling to my right.
I turned my head slowly. My mom was there, sitting in a pink upholstered chair. Her legs were crossed at the knees and she
had one elbow propped on top of them. In that hand she held a crumpled-up tissue she kept using to dab her nose.

I squinted at her. I somehow wasn’t surprised that she was crying, because I knew that whatever the bad thing was that had
happened, I was involved in it—even though I hadn’t yet put together why I was waking up in what was beginning to look like
a hospital bed rather than in my own bed waiting for Nick to call.

I reached out and placed my hand on Mom’s wrist (the one holding the snotty tissue). “Mom,” I whispered. My throat hurt. “Mom,”
I said again.

But she leaned away from me. Not jerked away—it was way too subtle of a movement to be considered a jerk. But more leaned
away, out of my grasp. Leaned away, like she was physically separating herself from me. Leaned away, not like I was to be
feared, but like she no longer wanted to be identified with me at all.

“You’re awake,” she said. “How do you feel?”

I looked down at myself and wondered why I wouldn’t feel okay. I checked myself out and everything seemed to be there, including
several wires that weren’t normally a part of my body. I still wasn’t sure why I was there, but I knew it had to be something
I was going to live through. I’d somehow hurt my leg—that much I could glean from the dull throbbing under the sheet. Yet
the leg still seemed to be there, so I knew there wasn’t too much to be worried about.

“Mom,” I said one more time, wishing I could think of something else to say. Something more important. My throat was achy
and felt swollen. I tried clearing it, but found it was dry, too, and all I could do was make a squeaky little noise that
did nothing to help it. “What happened?”

A nurse in pink scrubs fluttering around behind Mom moved to a little table and picked up a plastic cup with a straw hanging
over the side of it. She handed it to Mom. Mom held it, looked at it like she’d never seen such a contraption before, and
then looked over her shoulder at one of the police officers, who had turned away from the TV and was staring down at me, his
fingers hooked into his belt.

“You were shot,” the officer said plainly from over Mom’s shoulder and I saw Mom kind of wince when he said it, although she
was still facing him, not me, and I couldn’t see her face exactly. “Nick Levil shot you.”

I frowned. Nick Levil shot me. “But that’s my boyfriend’s name,” I said. Later I would realize how stupid I sounded, and would
even be a little bit embarrassed by it. But at the time it just didn’t make sense, mostly because I hadn’t put it all together
yet and because I was just coming out of the anesthesia, and probably even a little bit because my brain didn’t want me to
remember everything right away. Once I saw a documentary about different things the brain will do to protect itself. Like
when a kid who’s abused ends up with multiple personalities and stuff. I think my brain was doing that to me—protecting
me—but it didn’t do it for very long. Not long enough, anyway.

The officer nodded at me, like he already knew this about Nick and I wasn’t giving him any new information, and Mom turned
around again and kind of looked down at the sheets. I scanned their faces, all of them—Mom’s, the officer’s, the nurse’s,
Frankie’s, even Dad’s (I hadn’t seen him pop back into the room, but there he was, standing by the window, his arms folded
across his chest)—but none of them were looking directly at me. Not a good sign.

“What’s going on?” I asked. “Frankie?”

Frankie didn’t say anything—just clenched his jaw in his pissed-off pose, and shook his head. His face was getting really
red.

“Valerie, do you remember anything about school today?” Mom asked quietly. I won’t say she asked it gently or tenderly or
any of that motherly stuff. Because she didn’t. She asked it to the sheets, in a low voice, a flat voice I barely recognized.

“School?”

And then things started flooding in on me. Funny, because when I first started waking up, what happened at school felt like
a dream and I thought,
surely they aren’t talking about that, because that was just some stupid, horrible dream
. But within a few seconds the realization that it wasn’t a dream sunk in on me and I almost felt physically squashed beneath
the images.

“Valerie, something terrible happened at school today. Do you remember it?” Mom asked.

I couldn’t answer her. I couldn’t answer anyone. I couldn’t say anything. All I could do was stare at the TV screen, at the
aerial view of Garvin High and all the ambulances and cop cars surrounding it. Stare at it until I swear I could see the individual
little squares of color on the screen. Mom’s voice was faraway, and I could hear her, but it wasn’t like she was talking to
me exactly. Not in my world. Not under this avalanche of horrible. I was alone here.

“Valerie, I’m talking to you. Nurse, is she okay? Valerie? Can you hear me? Jesus, Ted, do something!”

And then my dad’s voice: “What do you want me to do, Jenny? What do I do?”

“More than just stand there! This is your family, Ted, for Christ’s sake, your daughter! Valerie, answer me! Val!”

But I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the TV screen, which I saw and didn’t see at the same time.

Nick. He shot people. He shot Christy Bruter. Mr. Kline. Oh, God, he shot them. He really did it. I saw it and he shot them.
He shot…

I reached down and felt the bandages wrapped around my thigh. And then I started to cry. Not loud crying or anything like
that, but shoulder-twitching, lip-curling crying—the kind I once heard Oprah call the Ugly Cry.

Mom jumped up from her chair, leaning over me, but she wasn’t talking to me.

“Nurse, I think she’s in pain. I think you need to do something for her pain. Ted, make them do something for her pain.” And
I noticed, only barely and through a gauzy sort of wonderment, that she was crying, too. Crying so that her commands took
on this frantic sort of gruffness, so that her words were hitched and desperate.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Dad come up behind her and grab her by the shoulders and pull her away from the bed. She
went reluctantly, but she did go, and she turned her face into Dad’s chest, and they both walked out of the room. I could
hear her harsh barks recede down the hall.

The nurse was pushing buttons on some monitor behind me and the cop had turned and was watching the TV again. Frankie stood
staring at my blankets, motionless.

I cried until my stomach hurt and I was pretty sure I was going to throw up. My eyes felt sandy and my nose was completely
plugged up. I cried a little bit after that even. I can’t say what was going through my mind with all that crying—only that
it was murky and dark and hateful and woeful and miserable all at once. Only that I wanted Nick and I wanted to never see
him again. Only that I wanted my mom and that I wanted to never see her again, either. Only that I knew, somewhere back there
in the recesses that my brain was keeping safe from itself, that in some way I was responsible for what had happened today,
too. That I had a part in it, and that I never meant to. And that I couldn’t say for sure I wouldn’t have been part of it
if I had to do it all over again. And I couldn’t say for sure that I would.

Eventually the crying slowed enough so that I could breathe again, which wasn’t altogether good.

“I’m going to throw up,” I said.

The nurse produced a bedpan from out of nowhere and stuffed it under my chin. I heaved into it.

“If you’ll step out for just a few minutes,” she told the officers. They nodded and silently left the room. When they opened
the door, I could hear muffled talking in voices that belonged to my parents out in the hallway. Frankie stayed put.

I heaved again, making ugly noises and letting my nose run in snotty ropes into the bedpan. I caught my breath and the nurse
used a wet washcloth to wipe my face clean. It felt good—cold, soothing. I closed my eyes and rested my head back on the
pillow.

“Nausea is normal after anesthesia,” the nurse told me in a voice I can best describe as institutional. “It will subside with
time. In the meantime, keep this close.” She handed me a clean bedpan, folded the washcloth and laid it across my forehead
then left the room on her silent shoes.

I tried to blank my mind. Tried to make myself turn those images in my mind black. But I couldn’t do it. They shoved in on
me, each one more horrible than the one before.

“Is he in jail?” I asked Frankie. Stupid question. Of course Nick would be in jail after something like this.

Frankie looked up at me, kind of startled, like he’d forgotten I was in the room with him.

“Valerie,” he said, blinking, shaking his head, his voice husky. “What… what did you do?”

“Is Nick in jail?” I repeated.

He shook his head no.

“He got away?” I asked.

Again he shook his head.

I knew that left only one other option. “They shot him.” I said this more as a statement than a question and was surprised
when Frankie again shook his head no.

“He shot himself,” he said. “He’s dead.”

It’s funny that the name that would turn out to be the most recognizable of my class—Nick Levil—was a name nobody’d even
heard of before our freshman year.

Nick was new to Garvin that year, and he didn’t fit in. Garvin was one of those small suburban cities with a lot of big houses
and rich kids. Nick lived on one of the few low-income streets that dotted the outsides of the city like boundary lines. His
clothes were ratty, sometimes too big, and never stylish. He was skinny and looked like a brooder and had an I Don’t Give
a Shit air about him that people tended to take personally.