17. Tennille’s angry eyebrows
18. SBRBs
19. Feminine Hygiene Commercials—GROSS!
20. Jessica Campbell!!!!
“Hey, princess, where’s your tiara?”
I walked as fast as I could from the showers back to my locker, holding tight to the towel around my waist, having learned the hard way that Chris Summers would find all kinds of tricks to rip your towel off if you weren’t being vigilant.
“Why, you want to borrow it?” I asked, part of my new strategy to stop taking his shit and start slinging it right back at him every chance I got.
His eyes crinkled with a smile. He bumped shoulders with Jacob. “You hear that? Our little girl is growing up. She’s getting sassy on us.”
“I always heard flamers were sassy,” Jacob said with a grin. Chris turned to Jacob as if I weren’t there, shivering in my towel, my skinny, hairless chest still beaded with water. “What should we do about this new sassy attitude she has?”
“I don’t know,” Jacob said, all mock innocence.
“Maybe we should toss her out into the field house,” Chris said.
“But first we should make sure she’s not overdressed.”
“Come on, guys,” I mumbled, my heart speeding up. I hated how quickly my new bravado had disappeared.
“Don’t worry, man,” Chris said, his voice going soft and friendly, which I knew was a trap. “We’re not going to throw you out there. We’re just going to twist things up.”
At that, they both lunged toward me. My body tensed, and my hands clutched the towel desperately. Chris reached forward with one hand and wrenched my bare nipple between his thumb and forefinger. Jacob twisted the other one at the same time, both of them squeezing so hard, my skin felt like it was being ripped off. I cried out, but my voice was lost under their laughter.
“Cut it out, dickwads,” I heard, and then saw Chris jerk back as someone came up behind him.
There was the sound of scuffling, and I opened my eyes just in time to see Chris throw Nick Levil backward. Nick fell and skidded on his butt, his body making a dull clang against a set of lockers. Other people had begun to gather around us to see what was going on. I huddled back as far away from the scuffle as I could get, praying nobody would see the purple bruises already blooming on my chest.
Nick stood up and bent his legs in a fighting stance. No way did that skinny kid have a chance against those two refrigerators, but that didn’t stop him from standing his ground, which only served to deepen my humiliation as I continued to inch backward.
“Protecting your girlfriend, freak?” Jacob said. “How precious.”
“You’re always calling everyone else gay, but you can’t seem to keep your hands to yourself in the locker room. Maybe you have a little secret,” Nick answered.
Chris stepped forward and shoved Nick, who banged against the lockers a second time. “Calm down, freak. I didn’t know you and Judy had a thing. I thought you were into skinny, ugly corpses with stringy hair.”
His face twisted with rage, Nick got his footing and sprang toward Chris.
But just as he reached Chris, Coach Radford stepped out of his office.
“Hey. Hey!” he yelled, rushing between them. They both stopped short as he stared them down. “Everyone get to your next class. Levil, Summers, you can come with me.”
“He started it, Coach,” Chris said, and Jacob nodded like his head was on a spring. Boing! Boing! Boing!
Coach turned to Nick questioningly. Nick wiped his mouth with his sleeve, his eyes darting from me to Coach and back. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out—story of my freaking life.
“Yeah,” Nick finally said. “You wouldn’t believe the truth, anyway, about your precious football stars.” He followed Coach.
It turned out not to be so bad for Nick—maybe because he had been losing the fight when Coach stepped in, or maybe because the school was sick of breaking up Nick’s fights. Maybe the principal figured if suspensions hadn’t worked yet, they were never going to. Maybe he’d given up on Nick and just wanted him to graduate and leave GHS. Whatever the reason, Angerson only gave Nick a Saturday detention and let him go back to class.
“Whatever,” Nick said as we walked home that afternoon. He kicked a chunk of asphalt, which skittered across the road and into a drainage ditch. “Not like I care. I’m used to Saturday detention by now. When I graduate, they’re gonna have to name a desk after me or something.”
We paused at his driveway. “Well, see ya later,” I said awkwardly, stupidly, because in my head all I could think about was how he had detention because he was defending me and how I should be the one in detention, because it was my new resolution to stop taking Summers’s shit and ten seconds into an altercation with him I’d caved. I should have at least thanked Nick, but somehow thanking him would be like admitting something I didn’t want to admit.
“Hey, why don’t you come to the lake with us tonight?” Nick called from halfway up his driveway. “Duce is gonna bring some beer.”
“Is Valerie…” I started, then blushed. “I mean, are you sure it’s okay with everyone? That I come, I mean?”
He gave me a strange look. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Okay,” I said.
For a change, I wouldn’t be spending my Friday night sitting next to Dad, gluing toothpicks to newspaper or God knew what else. For a change, I wouldn’t have to hear Brandon’s crap about me having no friends, or Sara’s pitiful admonishment of him for saying something so mean.
“Come by around six,” Nick said, and opened the half-ripped screen door and disappeared into his gloomy house.
***
I came back fifteen minutes before six, kicking myself for looking eager and desperate, but at the same time so pumped to see Valerie outside of school, I could barely stand it. I hoped I didn’t smell as drenched in body spray as I felt. I hoped I didn’t look razor-burned, like some dweeb preteen. I hoped she would notice me in a good way.
Nick opened the door, his ear glued to a phone, and let me in. I blinked in the shadows, making out the back of a blond head on the couch, watching TV, eating something, then wiping her fingers on a towel that was being used as a curtain over the big bay window.
Nick motioned for me to follow him, and we went downstairs to his basement-turned-bedroom.
“Uh-huh,” he kept saying into the phone. After a few minutes, he hung up. “Val,” he said.
“Oh.” I tried not to look as miserable as I felt. Valerie didn’t call me, because I wasn’t her boyfriend. I could wish it all I wanted, but Nick was the one who had her. “She still coming tonight?” I picked up a PlayStation controller and idly pushed the buttons, though the TV wasn’t on.
“Yep,” he said, messing with something on his dresser, shoving things into his pockets. “Duce is picking her up at Stacey’s house.” He turned to me. “You like her?”
I froze. Was it that obvious? “Who, Val? She’s great,” I said, trying to sound uninterested.
“Yeah, she is,” he agreed. He turned and rooted through more stuff on his dresser, and I let out a breath while his back was turned. “There’s something about her. She’s, like, delicate or something. And smart. I don’t know.… I always thought I’d get bored if I dated someone for more than a month, but that’s not how it is with her.”
“Oh,” I said. A lump formed in my throat.
“Her family’s crap, though. Her parents fight constantly. Her dad’s some big-time lawyer, and he treats everyone like they’re something he stepped in. Not that my family’s the best or anything, but at least we don’t pretend to be great. Hers is all about show. They’re afraid to admit what they’re really like. Afraid of what people will think.”
I sat back on Nick’s bed, which was just a mattress on the floor, and my eyes landed on a battered red spiral notebook lying on top of some books heaped inside a milk crate. I dropped the controller and bent to pick it up. “Valerie’s not like that, though,” I said, opening the notebook and thumbing through it.
“I know, right? That’s what I like about her. She’s real. We think alike.”
There was a pause. I turned pages in the notebook. It was filled with inks in every color, in two different hands—a list.
“What is this?” I asked.
Nick made a noise that was somewhere between a cough and a laugh. “It’s nothing. Just a list. It’s Val’s, actually.”
“ ‘Number thirty-two, people who stare at you too long when talking to you. Number thirty-three, Beefy Ellen,’ ” I read aloud, then snickered and glanced up. “Ellen Mass? Val calls her Beefy Ellen?”
Nick nodded and shrugged. “She’s beefy,” he said simply.
I read on, flipping another couple of pages. “Number eighty-nine, CB’s thunder thighs. Who’s CB?”
“That Christy Bruter chick, the one on the softball team. I don’t really know her, but Valerie hates her. You ready to go?”
“So this is a hate list?” I asked, amused.
“Something like that.”
“Who all’s on it? Besides Ellen and Christy, I mean.”
“Lots of people. Whoever’s pissing us off at any given moment,” he said. He dug a brush out from behind his pillow and ran it through his hair. “People who deserve it.”
“Chris Summers should be on it,” I blurted out. I couldn’t help myself. “He should be top of the list.”
Nick tossed the brush back onto his bed. “Trust me, he’s on it,” he said grimly.
I turned a few more pages, looking for Chris’s name. “I had no idea Val had this,” I mused. “It’s funny. ‘Number forty-four, Hollister clothes. Number forty-five, people who talk in abbreviations. OMG! JK! LOL!’ ” I chuckled.
“See? You get it. That’s why Val likes you so much,” Nick said.
A current of hopefulness worked its way up my spine, then stopped cold. She liked me, but she would never love me. Not the way she loved him. And why would she? Everything about me was all wrong. I was too skinny, too feminine; I would never have confidence. I would never ask anyone out. I would never stand up for myself against guys like Chris Summers. I swallowed against the blackness building up in my throat.
“Can I add to it?” I asked.
His eyes flicked to the notebook, and he seemed to hesitate, as if he didn’t want me to. As if it were theirs only. But after that tiniest of hesitations, he walked over to the dresser and rummaged around until he found a pen. He tossed it to me. “Sure.”
I grabbed the pen and flipped to the last page of the list. Chris may have already been on it, but guys like him couldn’t be on it enough.
Pressing so hard my pen cut through the paper in some places, I wrote: 104. Chris Summers.