Say something.
That was what kept going through my head. Over and over again, on a loop. Say something, say something, say something.
But what was I supposed to say? Who was I supposed to tell? Every minute that ticked by, every second, took me farther away from that horrible day. At some point, not saying something turns into an accusation all its own. How would I answer the first question that would come out of everyone’s mouth—Why? Why didn’t you speak up?
Valerie wasn’t in any of my classes. For the first time since coming to GHS, I didn’t have at least one hour to look forward to, at least one hour where I could stare at the way she crossed her legs at the knee and then tucked the crossed foot back behind her other ankle like a pretzel, or watch her roll her eyes over something a teacher said. It was like Nick had killed her, too.
We did have lunch shift together. And on the first day, we all gathered around our usual table in the back—me, Mason, Duce, Bridget, and Joey—and I was excited, because I’d seen Val go into the lunch line with Stacey. I sat across from Duce, next to the empty chair where Valerie usually sat.
“Where’s your lunch?” Mason asked.
I shrugged. “Not hungry.”
“What’s that like?” Duce asked, cramming a handful of fries into his mouth.
“I can spot you if you need it,” Bridget said, pulling out her purse, unzipping it.
True, my family didn’t have the most money in the world, but that wasn’t why I didn’t eat. I didn’t eat because it was never worth it. You got food, and next thing you knew, you had Chris Summers’s snot ball on your burger or his gum in your mashed potatoes or an open container of chocolate milk dropped in your lap. He used to mess with Nick’s food all the time, and as shitty a friend as it made me, I was always just glad that it wasn’t me Chris was messing with. The best way to keep out of the line of fire was to starve. So I did.
And I was still starving.
Even though Chris was gone.
Like penance or something.
“No, thanks,” I mumbled, and Bridget slid her purse back under the table.
“Dude, there they are,” Mason said to Duce, and they craned their necks to look at the cashier, where Valerie and Stacey were paying for their lunches.
“No way, man, I’m not dealing with this today,” Duce answered after a moment. He stuck a few more fries in his mouth, wiped his hands on his jeans, and stood. He moved the chair on the other side of him to the table behind us. Without missing a beat, he sat down and went back to eating his fries. “This cafeteria’s getting crowded,” he said.
Before my brain could put together what was going on, Stacey and Valerie walked up. Stacey slid into the chair between me and Duce, and Valerie just stood there, holding her tray, her weight shifted onto her good leg, her face pale and tired-looking.
“Oh, yeah,” Stacey said all of a sudden. “Yeah. Um. Val. We um… ran out of chairs, I guess,” she said, and then sank back into Duce’s arm, both of them looking so superior and slithery it made me want to puke.
I started to get up. Screw this dumb game they were playing. Valerie was our friend. But as I started to push back, Duce clipped the leg of my chair with his boot and glared at me. I knew what that glare meant. He wasn’t playing. He didn’t want her at the table.
So instead of offering Valerie a seat, instead of fighting back, saying something, I did what I always did. I lowered myself into the chair and fixed my eyes on a point on the table and stared at it until it started to look funny and I had to force myself to blink.
Bridget started talking, and even though I was so mad I wanted to flip the whole damn table upside down so nobody could sit there, I pretended like I was interested, not hearing a thing. I noticed Valerie’s shadow drift out of my periphery and guiltily flicked my eyes after her as she slunk out of the cafeteria, carrying her lunch tray.
I felt like such a jerk.
And I was so disappointed. Twenty minutes I might have had with her, and I’d lost that, too.
After that I didn’t see Valerie much, other than here and there in the hallway. I was always afraid to talk to her, afraid she’d ask me why I’d let Duce do that. I was ashamed that she’d seen me back down to someone bigger and meaner once again. The cornerstone of our relationship.
By the second month of school, she was pretty much just another face in the Garvin High crowd. I felt like I didn’t even know her anymore, especially when, after school one day, I saw her talking to Jessica Campbell—that volleyball chick who always acted like she was better than everyone else. I stood by the restrooms outside the field house, watching them as they walked toward the art hallway, looking like a yin-and-yang symbol. Valerie, dressed in all black, her hair straggly and caught in one backpack strap; Jessica in her white volleyball uniform, her blond hair perfect and silky, teasing the back of her shirt as it swung, pendulum-style, across her shoulder blades.
It didn’t make sense to me. I thought Valerie hated that girl. I knew Nick had hated her. I thought he hated her for Valerie.
I rounded the corner into the field house, which was thumping with basketballs—the basketball team heading in for after-school practice.
I hadn’t walked through the field house in a long time, and I wouldn’t have that day, had Mrs. Helmsly not asked me to take a paper to Coach Radford. Teachers always sent me on little errands like that. My mom said it was because I was “such a good, reliable boy,” but I knew they did it for the same reason bullies pushed me around: I was easy. People expected me to do stuff, because they knew I would, plain and simple.
I strolled toward Coach Radford’s office. He wasn’t there, so I dropped the paper on his desk and headed back the way I’d come. But halfway across the field house, I was startled by laughter near the water fountain. I turned to look, just in time to see Jacob Kinney grab the legs of Doug Hobson’s sweatpants and give them a yank.
The pants went all the way to the floor, Doug’s boxers stuck around his knees, and a glut of basketball jocks burst out laughing, some of them literally falling down on their elbows with wooden clunks. A couple of girls passing through put their hands over their mouths and made gaspy, shrieky noises, and Doug Hobson dropped his backpack in his hurry to get covered up.
“Very funny,” he said, his voice echoing off the walls. “You got me again.”
Doug had been pantsed probably a million times in that field house. It was almost a tradition at GHS.
A tradition started by Chris Summers. Of course.
I knew I should do something. Should step in. Help the guy out. But instead I turned and hurried out of the field house.
Once outside, I leaned against the brick wall and took a few deep breaths, feeling like shit about myself for running away, and trying to tamp down the anxiety rushing up through me.
I closed my eyes, trying not to hear that sound, that sound of gunshots and screams, that sound of Chris Summers’s haunting laughter intermingling with sirens and shouted instructions and hey-fag, hey-fag, hey-fag—the soundtrack to my nightmares. I forced my eyes open, wiped the sweat from my hairline, from my upper lip. My hands were shaking. Hey, Judy, come here.
I could hear the squeal of bus doors closing and the hiss and creak of buses leaving the lot. I pushed away from the wall and picked up my backpack from the ground between my feet. Just as I began to hoist the bag over my shoulder, Doug Hobson came out of the field house and had to stop short to keep from smacking into me.
“Watch out,” he said gruffly, and cornered around me.
“Hey,” I said, but he didn’t stop, so I said it louder. “Hey!”
He glanced over his shoulder. There were red patches on his cheekbones, and his bangs looked damp with sweat. “What?”
I hurried to catch him. “You’re in my fourth period, right? Ms. Vasquez?”
He made a face. “I don’t know.”
He continued walking, and I could see pit stains on his shirt. The poor kid was practically bathing in nerves. I had to walk fast to keep up with him.
“I saw what happened,” I said, my heart pounding beneath my Adam’s apple. I gestured over my shoulder. “Back there in the field house.”
“Good for you. Maybe next time I’ll get you a ticket for a front-row seat.”
“Jacob’s a dick, man,” I added.
He turned, looked like he might say something, but seemed to think better of it and simply shrugged, reaching behind him to pull up his hood.
“It’s just a joke,” he said, but I didn’t believe him. How many times had I given the same shrug, the same excuse? How many times had Chris Summers said it—It’s just a joke. Lighten up, fag.
Jokes. And we were supposed to be good sports, to laugh. Nick hadn’t been taking it as a joke, though. Everyone knew that now. Was it so easy for them to forget?
The bleachers were empty as I slugged toward them, toward Starling. Mason hadn’t waited for me, had probably ridden home with Duce again. I zipped my jacket. Just as good. I didn’t really want company. Every time I was around people, my brain just started in again—say something… say something.
***
My brother, Brandon, was sitting on the front porch, wearing only a pair of boxers. Mom wouldn’t let him smoke inside anymore, so he had to go outside if he wanted a cigarette. His eyes were bloodshot and puffy. He rubbed his hand over his buzz cut and yawned.
I looked at my wrist like I was checking the time, even though I didn’t have a watch on. “Up early, Sleeping Beauty. It’s only three thirty.”
He rested the palm of his hand against his forehead and flipped me off, then lowered it and squinted up at me. “Have a good day at school, Peewee? Did you learn to tie your shoes yet?”
“Clever,” I said. “Come up with that on your own, or did Grandma help you with it?”
I stepped up onto the porch, and he punched my calf with one knuckle. “Grandma taught me that, too, punk.”
I rubbed my leg absently and spied my dad’s car in the driveway. “Dad here?”
Brandon belched, a plume of smoke racing into the air. “Came home about an hour ago.”
“Why?”
“Not enough work, I guess. Do I look like his nanny?”
I went inside and dropped my backpack on the kitchen table. This was why we never had any money. Mom drove a school bus for a living, and Dad worked at a factory. Neither made much money to begin with, but when things were slow, Dad got sent home with no pay. In Garvin you either had money or you didn’t. People like Jessica Campbell and Ginny Baker and even Jacob Kinney had money. People like me and Mason and Duce didn’t.
Not that something like economic status mattered when you were already the “class queer.” In the tiny minds at GHS, being gay was worse than being poor.
I knew exactly where Dad would be, so I grabbed a soda and jogged downstairs. There he was, on a stool, bent over his bombed city, a miniature Dresden.
“Hey, bud, how was school?”
“Okay,” I said, popping open the soda and taking a swig.
He glanced up, his hand frozen over the warscape. “Yeah?”
“It’s school. Boring. Annoying. Pointless.” I reached out with my index finger and inched a tiny blown-out car off the road. Dad watched intently.
“Well, only one more year,” he said. “Less than, actually. Then you can go to college and move on. Forget all about the bad stuff, you know.…”
My ears buzzed. Forget. If he only knew how much I wanted to forget. But he didn’t, because I hadn’t told him. I hadn’t told anyone what I knew about the shooting.
Say something.
“Dad,” I said.
“Uh-huh,” he said absently, placing a soldier behind a crumbled brick wall.
“I…” My throat tightened. It’s all a joke, Judy. Don’t be a pussy. You take things so seriously. Not everything is a reason to run to the guidance office.
Dad paused, the soldier still hovering above the scene. “Yeah?”
Say something.
“I…” I swallowed, mashed my lips together. “I think you need to add some smoke over here.”
Dad hesitated, studying me, then followed where I was pointing.
“Huh. Good catch, bud,” he said. “Thanks.”
“No problem,” I answered, willing the buzz in my ears away. “No problem at all.”