201. Jacob Kinney
202. Jessica Campbell and her SBRBs!!! ←DIE ALREADY AND MAKE EVERYONE HAPPY!
203. Parents and their relationship issues. Grow up.
204. All of them. ALL!!! OF!!! THEM!!!
May 2nd. Like any other May morning. Mom running off to get to her bus before I was even out of bed. Dad downstairs, the radio playing some old Pearl Jam song from his glory years. Brandon sleeping. Sara and I numbly eating cereal. Sara was going to be graduating in two weeks, but I still had another year of numbly eating cereal ahead of me.
Mason came in, messed with the fish, and we walked, the grass making the toes of our shoes wet, Mason’s cigarette smoke punching through the air ahead of us.
“I can’t make it twenty more days,” he was saying. “I will throw myself off that bridge over there if I have to listen to one more minute of World History.”
A black muscle car rumbled up next to us and stopped. Jeremy was at the wheel. The passenger-side window rolled down, bringing with it the sound of a baby crying in the backseat. Nick’s face, pale behind sunglasses, tilted up at us.
“Want a ride?” he asked.
As much as Mason liked to get his smoke on in the mornings, and as much as that crying baby was already making my ears bleed, we weren’t about to pass up an offer. We jumped in, squeezing in the back, next to the car seat. The baby cried harder.
“Shut the fuck up, Dylan! Damn!” Jeremy shouted before rolling up the windows and taking off again. “Bitch owes me big for taking him today.”
Nick mumbled something that we couldn’t hear over the squalling, and he and Jeremy both laughed. They were high. I could tell from the smell. And from the weird way Nick was smiling into the side mirror.
“So you ready for the last day of school?” Nick asked, turning around, aiming that creepy smile right at us.
“Twenty days left,” I mumbled. He watched me for a while—or at least I think he did, behind those glasses—and then turned back.
“Yeah, man, not long before it’s all over,” he finally said.
“Gonna be over before you know it,” Jeremy added, and again with the laughter.
I glanced at Mason, but he was just looking out the window. He didn’t seem to be weirded out by Nick and Jeremy. Of course, he hadn’t seen the list or the scratched-out names. Or the gun at the lake.
Jeremy rolled to a stop on Starling, right by the soccer fields. I could see Stacey and Duce already on the bleachers.
“Time to take the brat to day care,” Jeremy said. “And I gotta get me some road-trip food. Gonna be holed up for a while after today. So you can get out here.”
Mason opened the door, and we slid out. I was so glad to be rid of the crying, I didn’t notice until the car rumbled away that Nick hadn’t come with us. “You think he’s acting weird?” I asked.
“That dude’s always weird. I think he fried one too many brain cells,” Mason said.
“No, I mean Nick.”
Mason shrugged. “Not really. Other than ditching more than usual.”
We walked across the field, side by side, and in my head I kept trying to convince myself that it was just me. That Nick was acting fine and I was being paranoid, and that if something was up, he would tell us. Running to tattle would make me look like a little kid and would totally piss Nick off. It was all in my mind.
But I couldn’t quite make myself believe it.
We got to the bleachers, and everybody was talking and jacking around, and soon I forgot about the ride in Jeremy’s car. It was just another day. Just another May 2nd.
Valerie’s bus arrived, and I could see right away that something was wrong.
“Look what that bitch Christy Bruter did to my MP3 player,” she said, coming up the bleachers.
“Oh, man,” I said, looking at the cracked screen. “You could get it fixed or something.” In the back of my mind I was thinking maybe I could fix it for her, and she’d start to see me as more than just a friend. But I knew that was stupid.
Something behind me caught her eye. She thumped up the last few bleachers and waved at Jeremy’s car, which had come back. Nick got out and, with a cool chin tip, headed toward us. Valerie ran down the bleachers to meet him, forgetting me completely. Why would I ever think that offering to fix a stupid MP3 player might make her change her mind about me? Why would I ever think I could outdo Nick Levil? It was hopeless.
Angerson scurried up to us and said, “All right, Garvin students, let’s not linger this morning. Time to go to class.” Duce took off, and then Stacey. Mason called out to Joey, and he was gone, too, leaving just me at the bottom of the bleachers, and Val and Nick slowly sauntering toward the school a few steps away.
I heard little snippets of their conversation—I totally hate her. I’ll take care of it. Let’s go get this finished—and I purposely hung behind them, walking slowly, sick of being the third wheel in their little lovers’ conversation. Sick of Nick’s weird behavior and Valerie’s devotion to someone who wasn’t even around anymore.
And that’s when I saw it.
A gust of wind blew, and Nick’s jacket flapped up in the back. Not much, just enough to reveal black metal sticking out from his waistband.
I looked around, but nobody else had seemed to notice. Nobody had seen a thing. But I’d seen it, I knew I had, and it was the same gun Jeremy had hidden under his leg at Blue Lake the day before.
Just like that, everything clicked into place. Everything I had known since that first day I found the hate list, since I wrote Chris Summers’s name on it and saw the predatory glee on Nick’s face. I’d known it when Jeremy said I could visit him down in Warsaw after.
I gotta get me some road-trip food. Gonna be holed up for a while after today.
I’d known it all along and had been telling myself I was wrong.
But I was so right.
Nick Levil was going to shoot up the school.