Hate List

by Jennifer Brown

  “I have homework,” I said. “So…”

  She got up. “Sure. Okay.” She swished that blond hair around like a pendulum. I think that hair swish thing was on the Hate List at one point. I tried not to think about that. “Listen, the reason I came over… StuCo has this project going on. A memorial. For graduation, you know. Think you could work on it with us?”

  I chewed my bottom lip. Work with Student Council on a project? Something was definitely up. I shrugged. “I’ll think about it.”

  “Cool. We have a meeting Thursday in Mrs. Stone’s room. Just, you know, brainstorming.”

  “Are you sure they want me? I mean, don’t you have to be voted into Student Council?”

  It was her turn to shrug. She looked toward the window when she did it, which made me think she definitely thought they didn’t. “I want you there,” she said, as if that’s all that mattered.

  I nodded, didn’t say anything. She seemed to hover in the middle of my room for a few seconds, thinking. Like she couldn’t decide if she should stay or go. Like she couldn’t figure out how she got there in the first place.

  “So everybody’s saying how you were in on it. The shooting, I mean,” she said in a very quiet voice. “Did you know he was planning it?”

  I swallowed, looked out the window.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I didn’t know he really meant all that stuff. That probably sounds really lame, but it’s the best I can do right now. He wasn’t a bad guy.”

  She considered my answer, followed my gaze out the window and nodded just slightly. “Did you save me on purpose?” she asked.

  “I don’t think so,” I said again, then changed my mind. “No, I’m pretty sure I didn’t.”

  She nodded again. I think that was the answer she expected. She left just as quietly as she came.

  Later, as I sat in Dr. Hieler’s office, a can of Coke balanced on my knee, I recounted the whole strange scenario to him.

  “Sitting there with Jessica Campbell on my bed was totally weird. I mean, I felt… naked or something with her in the room. Like everything she looked at was private. It made me nervous.”

  He scratched his ear, grinned. “Good.”

  “It was good that I was nervous?”

  “It was good that you handled it.”

  In other words, I didn’t tell her to go away.

  Instead, she just left. And after she’d gone, I turned on my stereo and stretched out on my bed. I turned on my side and stared at the horses on my wallpaper. One of them seemed to shimmer just a little—the longer I looked at it, the more it looked like it wanted to take off.

  17

  [FROM THE GARVIN COUNTY SUN-TRIBUNE,

  MAY 3, 2008, REPORTER ANGELA DASH]

  Katie Renfro, 15—Sophomore Katie Renfro was not in the Commons when she became victim of the shooting. “Katie was just passing by after leaving the guidance office,” Adriana Tate, the school guidance counselor, told reporters. “She didn’t even know Nick Levil, I don’t think,” she added.

  Renfro, whose injuries were not life-threatening, was hit in the bicep by a stray bullet that appeared to have ricocheted off of a locker near the Commons area.

  “It didn’t really hurt that bad,” Renfro said. “It felt more like a sting. I didn’t even know I was hit until I got outside and one of the firefighters told me there was blood running down the back of my arm. Then I started freaking out. But mainly I think I was just freaking out because everybody else was freaking out, you know?”

  Renfro’s parents report that they have made the decision to pull Katie out of public high school permanently.

  “It was a no-brainer for us,” Vic Renfro said. “We’d always been a little bit worried about Katie going to public school. This just sealed the deal.”

  “You never know,” added Katie’s mother, Kimber Renfro, somberly, “who your child is going to school with in a public school. They let anybody in those places. Even the disturbed kids. And we don’t want our daughter hanging around disturbed kids.”

  “She’s making such a big deal out of this,” I said. I was pacing—something I didn’t ordinarily do in Dr. Hieler’s office. Of course, ordinarily I wasn’t in there under Mom’s microscope, which had gotten more intense with every passing day. It was as if, rather than trusting me more as time went on, Mom actually managed to trust me less. Like she was afraid that if she stopped watching me, even for a second, I would end up involved in another shooting.

  “Well, do you blame me?” Mom said. She sniffed and dabbed her nose with a balled-up Kleenex she’d pulled out of her coat pocket. “I just have a hard time believing that she now wants to hang out with those people and that they want to hang out with her. And now a memorial project? Surely it can’t be healthy for her to continue to focus on the incident. Surely she should be moving on now, right?”

  “For the last time, Mom, I don’t want to hang out with them. I’m working on a project. That’s all. A school project. I thought you wanted me to get back into school projects. This is me ‘moving on’ with my life.”

  Mom shook her head. “Two days ago she didn’t even want to be in school. And now she wants to work on a school project with the very kids that were on that list of hers,” she said to Dr. Hieler. “It seems suspicious, doesn’t it? Sounds like a fake to me.”

  This time I turned to Dr. Hieler. “She didn’t talk to Jessica. I did. Jessica was serious when she asked me. It wasn’t a fake.”

  Dr. Hieler nodded, still rubbing his lip, but didn’t say anything.

  Mom shook her head, like I was some fool for believing Jessica Campbell. Like I was a fool for everything I ever believed, just because I once believed Nick. It was silent in the office and Mom was staring at me.

  “What?” I finally said. My voice was getting too loud. “Why are you looking at me like that? She’s not going to hurt me. She didn’t set me up, okay? Why is that so hard to understand? Haven’t you been watching TV? Haven’t you seen all the stories about how the shooting changed everything at the school? People aren’t like that anymore. They aren’t going to hurt me.”

  “I’m not worried about them hurting you,” Mom said in a hoarse voice. She looked up at me with her red eyes. She dabbed at her nose again with her tissue.

  I looked from her to Dr. Hieler. He still sat with his index finger resting on his lip. He didn’t say anything. Didn’t move.

  “What are you worried about then?” I asked.

  “Are you going to hurt them?” Mom said. “Are you joining up with them so you can finish the job that Nick started?”

  I slumped backward into a chair. In all of her bawling and begging and forbidding and hiding newspapers and dragging me to Dr. Hieler… it was never to protect me from the other kids. It was to protect them from me. It was always about me hurting them. About me being the bad guy. No matter what I said, I couldn’t change that in my mother’s eyes.

  “It’s just that I wasn’t paying attention before,” she said, half to me and half to Dr. Hieler. “And look what happened. People think I’m a horrible parent and, I don’t know, I think maybe they’re right. A mother should know these things. A mother shouldn’t be surprised like I was. The more I let her go… the more I’m afraid that I’ll have more deaths on my conscience.”

  She wiped her nose as Dr. Hieler talked to her in his soft, understanding voice. But I was too numb to listen to what he was saying.

  I had changed Mom. Had changed her role as parent. No longer was her sole purpose so easy and clear-cut as it had been on the day I was born. No longer was her job to protect me from the rest of the world. Now her job was to protect the rest of the world from me.

  And that was so unfair.

  18

  [FROM THE GARVIN COUNTY SUN-TRIBUNE,

  MAY 3, 2008, REPORTER ANGELA DASH]

  Chris Summers, 16—Summers was said by witnesses to have died as a hero.

  “He was trying to get everyone out of the way,” says 16-year-old An
na Ellerton. “He was helping people out the door into the hallway. That’s the kind of thing Chris would do, you know? Try to organize things.”

  According to Ellerton, Summers was pushed backward by frantic students trying to flee the cafeteria and as a result he fell into Levil’s path.

  “Nick laughed at him and asked him who was the big guy now and then he shot him,” Ellerton says. “I figured he was dead so I just kept running. I don’t know if he died right then or not. All I know is he was trying to help. All he was doing was trying to help.”

  I almost turned away. I looked through the long narrow window on the classroom door and saw a crowd of kids draped across chairs in a rough circle—Jessica Campbell in the middle of them, talking earnestly. Mrs. Stone, the Student Council faculty advisor, was sitting on a desk slightly off to the side. She had her legs crossed and one shoe dangling off her toe. It reminded me of a newspaper picture I’d seen during the aftermath of the shooting—a single high heel lying abandoned on the front walk outside the school, its wearer too frightened or too injured or too dead to go back and pick it up.

  Was it really less than a year ago that we were sitting in the school auditorium listening to the Student Council candidate speeches? Was it really not that long ago, Nick and I filing in with our homeroom classes then immediately searching out one another from across the room, rolling our eyes as the StuCo candidates, one by one, took the stage, saying in body language what we couldn’t say out loud?

  “Who’d you vote for at the assembly today?” I’d asked him later that evening when we met up. He was bare-chested, lying next to me in a tent we’d erected in the field behind his house. We’d been coming to the tent every evening since the weather had turned, just using it as a place to get away and be alone and read to each other and talk about things important to us.

  He’d flipped on his flashlight and shone it across the top of the tent. A shadow spider danced in the light, struggling to climb to the summit of the tent. I wondered what it planned to do once it got there. Or was that how a spider’s life was spent—forever scrabbling to reach a peak of something, the scrabbling its only goal?

  “Nobody,” Nick said, sullenly. “Why would I? I couldn’t care less who wins anyway.”

  “I wrote in Homer Simpson’s name,” I said. We both laughed. “I hope Jessica Campbell doesn’t get president.”

  “You know she will,” he said. He turned the light off and suddenly it was way dark in the tent again. I couldn’t see anything—could only tell I wasn’t alone from the heat vibrating off of Nick’s side next to me. I shifted in my sleeping bag and scratched my calf with the toe of my other foot, certain that now that I couldn’t see the shadow spider it was surely crawling all over my body—its next conquest.

  “Do you think our senior year will be different?” I asked.

  “You mean if we vote in Jessica Campbell will she stop calling you Sister Death and will Chris Summers quit being an asshole?” he asked. “No.”

  We were both silent then, listening to the frogs outside our tent, holding a chorus around the pond off to our left.

  “Not unless we make it different,” he added, very quietly.

  In the hallway outside the Student Council door, I started to feel a little light-headed and leaned my forehead against the cool brick of the wall. I was just going to take a few deep breaths and leave. I couldn’t go through with this. No way. People were dead and if ever there was a definition of “too far gone to fix,” I’d say this was it.

  Someone must have seen me. The door opened.

  “Hey,” a voice said. “Thanks for coming.”

  I looked up. Jessica was hanging out the door. She gestured for me to come in. My body went on autopilot and I followed her.

  Everyone was looking at me. To say that not all of the faces were kind would be inaccurate. More like none of them were. Not even Jessica’s. Hers had more of a detached businesslike set to it, as if she were escorting a prisoner to the death chamber.

  Meghan Norris stared at me through lowered lids, her lips set in a loose pucker, her knees bobbing up and down under the desk impatiently. I met her gaze and she rolled her eyes, then looked upward and out the window.

  “Okay,” Jessica said, sitting down. I sat next to her, still holding my books tight in front of me. I still wasn’t sure I wasn’t going to pass out. I took a deep breath, held it for ten seconds, and let it out slowly, as inaudibly as I could. “Okay,” she repeated. She shuffled a few papers, all business. “I talked to Mr. Angerson and we’re definitely going to have a space in the northwest corner of the courtyard, right by the doors to the Commons. We can put anything we want there, as long as it passes PTA approval, which shouldn’t be too hard.”

  “Permanent?” asked Micky Randolf.

  Jessica nodded. “Yeah, we’ll have a dedication ceremony during graduation, but we can leave a permanent fixture.”

  “Like a statue or something,” Josh said.

  “Yeah, or a tree,” Meghan said, sounding excited—forgetting, at least for a moment, that I was fouling up her personal space.

  “Statues will be expensive,” Mrs. Stone pointed out. “Do we have the money for something like that?”

  Jessica rifled through some papers again. “The PTA is going to pledge some money to it. And we have our account. And doughnut… sales…” There was an uncomfortable beat of silence. Doughnuts hadn’t been sold since the incident. Since Abby Dempsey, Jessica’s best friend, had been killed selling them on May second. Jessica cleared her throat. “Abby would’ve wanted us to use that money for this,” she said. I felt eyes on me but didn’t look up to see whose they were. I squirmed in my chair, took another deep breath, held it, let it out.

  “We can have another fundraiser,” Rachel Manne said. “We can sell suckers and send them out like candy-grams.”

  “Good idea,” Jessica said. She scribbled something on a piece of paper. “And we can have an ice cream social.”

  “Ice cream social is a great idea. I can talk to Mr. Hudspeth about having the drama department put on a variety act for it,” Mrs. Stone added.

  “Oh yeah! And maybe concert choir will sing or something,” someone said. Ideas were coming fast and furious now as chatter erupted about the event. I was blessedly left out, blessedly forgotten by everyone.

  “That settles it,” Jessica said, closing her notebook and putting her pencil down. “We’ll have a variety night and ice cream social. Now we just have to decide what the memorial will actually be. Any ideas?” She crossed her arms. Everyone was silent.

  “Time capsule,” I said. Jessica looked at me.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We could have a time capsule. Put a plaque or something marking the spot and have it set to be opened in, like, fifty years or something. So people could see that there was more to this class than the… well… that there was more.”

  Silence stretched across the room while everyone considered this.

  “We could put a bench next to it,” I added. “And have the names of… of…” Suddenly I couldn’t go on.

  “The victims,” Josh said. His voice sounded edgy. “That’s what you were about to say, right? The names of the victims etched on the bench. Or on the plaque.”

  “Everyone or just the ones that died?” Meghan asked. The air felt very heavy around me. I kept my eyes down. Didn’t want to know who they were all looking at. I had a pretty good idea it was me.

  “Everyone,” Josh said. “I mean, like, Ginny Baker’s name should be on it, don’t you think?”

  “Then it’s not strictly a memorial,” Mrs. Stone said and everyone started talking at once again.

  “But Ginny’s face…”

  “… doesn’t have to be a memorial, what about just a monument…”

  “… should have the names of everyone in the whole class…”

  “That would be cool.…”

  “Because everyone got affected by it in one way or another…”

&
nbsp; “… memorial could be about loss of life, but could also be about loss of other things, too, like…”

  “… not just our class, though. Freshmen died, too.…”

  “… can’t afford to have the whole school’s names put on it…”

  “Let’s just put on everyone who died,” Jessica said.

  “Not everyone,” Josh said in a voice loud enough to stop the chatter. “Not everyone,” he repeated. “Not Nick Levil. No way.”

  “Technically, he was a victim, too,” Mrs. Stone barely whispered. “Technically, if you’re going to have the names of the victims, his name should be there.”

  Josh shook his head. His face had gotten red. “I don’t think that’s right.”

  “I don’t either,” I said before I even knew my mouth had opened. “It wouldn’t be fair to everyone else.” I almost gasped when I realized what I had just done. Nick had been everything to me. I still didn’t believe he was a monster, even after what he’d done to the school. I still didn’t feel innocent about my part in it, either. But here I’d just thrown him under the bus… and for what? To please the Student Council? To get along with these people who, just months ago, had laughed when Chris Summers made a fool of Nick, laughed when Christy Bruter called me Sister Death? To make a show for Jessica Campbell, when I still couldn’t tell if she hated me or if she’d somehow changed? Or did I really believe it? Was a part of me that I hadn’t yet identified suddenly popping up, voicing my fear aloud: that Nick and I weren’t the victims… we were the ultimate bullies?

  I felt a shift inside myself so abrupt it was almost physical. I could practically see myself splitting into two people on the inside: the Valerie before the shooting and the Valerie now. And it just didn’t match up.

  Suddenly it felt impossible to sit there anymore, taking these kids’ side over Nick’s. “I’ve gotta go,” I said. “Um, my mom is waiting for me.” I grabbed my books and bolted for the door, thanking God that I’d called Mom earlier and told her to come at the normal time and wait for me, just in case I chickened out on the meeting. Thanking God that, for once, Mom’s mistrust of me would pay off, that she’d be there, gnawing a fingernail and watching the school windows for sign of trouble.