3

[FROM THE GARVIN COUNTY SUN-TRIBUNE,
MAY 3, 2008, REPORTER ANGELA DASH]

Jeff Hicks, 15—As a freshman, Hicks would have ordinarily not been walking through the Commons, according to some students. “We don’t go through there if we can help it,” freshman Marcie Stindler told reporters. “The seniors hassle us if we go down there. It’s sort of like an unwritten freshman rule to stay away from the Commons except during lunch. Every incoming freshman knows that.”

But Hicks was running late on the morning of May 2nd and cut through the Commons in his hurry to get to class, which some are calling a classic case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He suffered a shot to the back of the head and died instantly at the scene. A memorial has been set up in his name at Garvin County State Bank. Police say it’s unclear whether Levil knew Hicks or if Hicks was accidentally hit by a bullet intended for someone else.

Because Mrs. Tate had kept me in her office for so long I missed the first period bell and walked in right in the middle of Mrs. Tennille’s First Day of School speech. I know Tate had done it to keep me from having to brave the pre-first period hallways, but I almost would have preferred that to the eyes boring into me when I walked into class. At least in the hallways I could sort of walk in the shadows.

I opened the door and I swear the entire class stopped what they were doing and looked up at me. Billy Jenkins dropped his pencil and just let it roll off his desk. Mandy Horn’s mouth flopped open so hard I thought I heard her jaw crack. Even Mrs. Tennille stopped talking and stood motionless for a few seconds.

I stood in the doorway, wondering if it would really be all that noticeable if I just turned around and walked out. Out of the classroom. Out of the school. Back home to bed. Tell Mom and Dr. Hieler that I was wrong, that I wanted to finish high school with a tutor after all. That I wasn’t as strong as I originally thought.

Mrs. Tennille cleared her throat and put down the marker she was using on the whiteboard. I took a deep breath and shuffled to her desk, holding out the hall pass Mrs. Tate’s secretary had given me on my way out.

“We’re just going over this year’s syllabus,” Mrs. Tennille said, taking the pass. Her face remained stonelike. “Go ahead and take your seat. If you have any questions on something we’ve already covered, you can ask me after the bell.”

I stared at her for a beat longer. Mrs. Tennille had hardly been one of my fans to begin with. She always had a problem with the fact that I wouldn’t participate in labs and with the fact that Nick sort of “accidentally” set fire to a test tube in third period once. I can’t even count how many times she’d landed Nick’s butt in detention, and she’d always glared at me when I loitered on the sidewalk in front of the school waiting for him to get out.

I couldn’t imagine what she must feel for me now. Pity, maybe, for not seeing in Nick what she always saw? Did she want to shake me and shout, “I told you so, you stupid girl!”? Or maybe she felt loathing for what happened with Mr. Kline.

Maybe she, like me, replayed that scene over and over in her head a million times a day: Mr. Kline, the chemistry teacher, using his body to literally shield about a dozen students. He was crying. Snot running out of his nose, body shaking. He had his arms held out to each side, Christlike, and was shaking his head at Nick, defiant and scared.

I liked Kline. Everybody liked Kline. Kline was the kind of guy who’d come to your graduation party. The kind of guy who’d stop and talk to you in the mall—and none of that “Hello, youngster,” Mr. Angerson the Principal kind of crap, either. Kline would say, “Hey, what’s up? Keeping your nose clean?” Kline would turn a blind eye if he saw you sneak a beer at a restaurant and get away with it. Kline would give his life for you. We always kind of knew that about Kline. Now the whole world knew that about him.

Thanks to impressive TV coverage of the shooting, and that annoying Angela Dash writing for the Sun-Tribune, pretty much everyone in the world knew that Mr. Kline had died because he wouldn’t tell Nick where Mrs. Tennille was. So I suppose it wasn’t news to Mrs. Tennille. I also suppose that’s why she looked at me like I was a plague set free in her classroom.

I turned and scuffed to an empty chair. I tried to keep my eyes rooted solely to the chair, but found it was impossible. I swallowed. My throat felt too thick. My hands were so sweaty my notebook was slipping out. My leg throbbed and I felt myself limping and silently cursed myself for doing it.

I curled into my desk and looked up at Mrs. Tennille. She stared at me until I was settled and then turned back to the whiteboard, clearing her throat again and finishing writing her e-mail address on the board.

Slowly the heads of my classmates turned back toward the front of the room and I felt myself begin to breathe once again. Eighty-three, I chanted in my head. Eighty-two, if you don’t count today.

While Tennille talked about the best ways to contact her, I concentrated on my hands, trying to slow my breathing the way Dr. Hieler had taught me to do. I stared at my nails, which were chipped and ugly. I’d never found the energy to file them smooth and now I was oddly self-conscious about them. All the other girls would have prepared for the first day of school by doing things like painting their nails, picking out their best clothes. I’d barely even washed. It was just another way that I was different from all of them, and somehow, oddly, it was just another way that I was different from the way I used to be.

I tucked my nails into my palms. I didn’t want them to show, afraid that someone would notice how ugly they were, but found myself strangely calmed by the feeling of them jabbing jaggedly into my palms. I lowered my hands to my lap and made hard fists, squeezing until the nails dug into my palms and I could take a breath without a wave of nausea rolling over me.

“E-mail me any time you have a question,” Mrs. Tennille was saying, pointing to what she’d written on the board, and then she stopped short.

There was some commotion going on to my left. The kids were rustling around, one girl stuffing books and papers into her backpack quickly. Tears were streaking down her face and she was hiccupping, trying to keep it inside.

A few other girls were hovering over her, rubbing her back and talking to her.

“Is there a problem?” Mrs. Tennille asked. “Kelsey? Meghan? Is there a reason you’re not in your chairs?”

“It’s Ginny,” Meghan said, pointing at the crying girl, who I now realized was Ginny Baker. I’d heard on the news about all the plastic surgery she’d had, but hadn’t really realized how much it had changed her face until now.

Mrs. Tennille placed the dry erase marker into the tray at the bottom of the board, then quietly and steadily folded her hands in front of her. “Ginny?” she said in a voice so soft I wasn’t sure at first it had come out of Tennille. “Is there something I can do to help? Do you need to go get a drink maybe?”

Ginny zipped her backpack and stood. Her whole body was shaking.

“It’s her,” she said, without moving. Everyone knew who she was talking about, though, and they all turned to look at me. Even Tennille glanced in my direction. I put my face back down toward my hands and squeezed my fingernails into my palms even harder. I sucked my lips inside my mouth and bit down on them hard from the inside, clamping them shut. “I can’t sit here with her without thinking about… about…” she sucked in a breath and then let it out with a stream of anguish that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. “Why did they let her come back?”

She grabbed her backpack with both hands in front of her, hugged it to her belly, and rushed up the aisle, pushing both Meghan and Kelsey backward into desks.

Mrs. Tennille took a couple steps toward her and stopped. She nodded slightly and Ginny rushed out of the room, her contorted and ragged face pulled up into a grimace.

Everything was completely still for a minute and I squeezed my eyes shut and silently counted backward from fifty—another one of those coping methods I’d learned. From Mom or Dr. Hieler, I couldn’t remember. I heard bells in my ears and I felt twitchy. Should I leave, too? Go after Ginny, tell her I’m sorry? Go home and never come back? Should I say something to the class? What do I do?

Finally, Mrs. Tennille cleared her throat again, turned back to the whiteboard, and picked up her marker. Her face looked unsettled, but her manner remained stoic. Good old steady Tennille. Couldn’t charm her nor faze her.

“As I was saying,” she began, and then she launched back into her lecture.

I blinked away the little white lights that were dancing in front of my eyes and tried to focus on what she was saying, which was hard because pretty much nobody stopped staring at me.

“The next unit will focus on…”

There was more restlessness and once again she turned and stopped. I glanced to my left and saw a couple kids talking heatedly among each other.

“Class,” Mrs. Tennille said, her voice still stern but losing its grip on authoritative. “May I have your attention now, please?”

The kids stopped talking but remained restless.

“I would like to get on with this so we don’t fall behind before the year even begins.”

Sean McDannon raised his hand.

“Yes, Sean?” she said, a little exasperation creeping into her voice.

Sean coughed into his fist the way some men do when they want to change their voices from regular to super-powerful and manly. He looked at me, then looked away quickly. I tried a weak smile, but it was wasted because he’d already turned back.

Sean was an okay kid. Never a problem with anyone. Nobody really liked or hated him. He sort of flew under the radar most of the time, which can sometimes be the difference between getting along in high school and getting picked on in high school. He didn’t get picked on that I ever knew about. He got good grades, joined academic clubs, kept his nose clean, had an unassuming girlfriend. And he lived about six houses down from me, which meant we’d played together as kids. We hadn’t really talked much since about 5th grade, but there was no hostility between us. We said hi to each other if we passed in the hallway or at the bus stop. No big deal.

“Um, Mrs. Tennille, Mrs. Tate told us that we should talk about… um, about these things, and—”

“And it’s not fair that Ginny should have to be the one to leave,” said Meghan. While Sean had been pointedly not looking at me ever since that first glance, Meghan made an effort to swing her head around and glare at me. “It’s not like Ginny did anything wrong.”

Mrs. Tennille twisted the dry erase marker between her hands. “Nobody asked Ginny to leave, Meghan. And I’m sure Mrs. Tate meant that you could come up to her office to talk about these—”

“No,” said a voice at the desk behind me. It sounded like Alex Gold, but my body felt frozen and I couldn’t turn my head to be sure. My fingernails dug deeper into my palms, leaving painful purple crescents across them. “No, when the school had that trauma guy here he told us we should feel free to talk about stuff whenever we need to. Not that I need to or anything. I’m so over this.”

Meghan rolled her eyes and shifted her hateful stare from me to a spot over my shoulder . “Well, good for you. But you didn’t have your face blown off.”

“Well, maybe that’s because I never ticked off Nick Levil.”

“Okay, that’s really enough,” said Mrs. Tennille, but by then the conversation had gotten well out of control. “Maybe we should get back to our discussion…”

“Neither did you, Meghan,” Susan Crayson said, sitting just to Meghan’s right. “Your face didn’t get blown off either. You weren’t even really friends with Ginny before the shooting. You just like the drama.”

And that’s basically when all hell broke loose. So many kids were talking on top of one another, it was almost impossible to tell who was saying what.

“… all a bunch of drama? My friend died…”

“… not like Valerie shot anybody anyway. She just had Nick do it. And Nick’s dead, so who cares?”

“Mrs. Tate said arguing wouldn’t solve…”

“… bad enough that I have to have nightmares every night about it, but to come to class and…”

“… you saying I liked that Ginny got shot because it was good drama? Are you seriously saying that?”

“… had been nice to Nick, maybe this wouldn’t have happened. Isn’t that the whole point of…”

“… ask me, he deserved to die. I’m glad he’s gone…”

“… what do you know about friends, anyway, you loser…”

It was kind of weird because eventually they were all so busy hating each other, they forgot about hating me. Nobody was looking at me. Mrs. Tennille had even sunk into the chair behind her desk and was just silently staring out the window, her fingers playing around her collar, her chin quivering just a little.

To hear the reporters on TV tell it, these guys were sitting around in the cafeteria holding hands and singing “Give Peace a Chance” every day. But it wasn’t like that at all. They were at one another’s throats. All the old rivalries, the old jokes, the old sour feelings were right there, festering under the plastic surgery and sympathetic head nods and crumpled Kleenex.

Finally my neck seemed to loosen and I felt able to look around—really look around—at the kids, who were yelling and waving their arms. A couple crying. A couple laughing.

I felt like I should say something, but I didn’t know what to say. To remind them that I wasn’t the shooter would make me sound defensive. To try to console somebody would be beyond weird. To do anything would feel like overload. I wasn’t ready for this yet and couldn’t believe that I’d ever thought I was. I didn’t have answers to my own questions; how could I possibly answer any of theirs? My hand involuntarily drifted to the cell phone in my pocket. Maybe I should call Mom. Beg to go home. Beg to never come back. Maybe I should call Dr. Hieler; tell him that, for the first time, he was wrong. I couldn’t make it eighty-three minutes, much less eighty-three days.

After a while, Mrs. Tennille was able to get the class back under control, and we sat there, tension riding above our heads like a cloud, while she finished going over the syllabus.

Slowly, people started to forget I was there. I began to feel like maybe this wasn’t totally impossible, sitting in that desk, in that class. In that school. You’ve got to find a way to see what’s really there, Valerie, Dr. Hieler had told me. You’ve got to start trusting that what you see is what’s really there.

I opened up my notebook and picked up a pencil. Only, instead of taking notes on what Tennille was saying, I began sketching what I saw. The kids were in kid bodies, wearing kid clothes, their kid shoes untied and their kid jeans ripped. But their faces were different. Where I would normally see angry faces, scowls, jeers, instead I saw confusion. They were all just as confused as I was.

I drew their faces in as giant question marks, sprouting out of their Hollister jackets and Old Navy T-shirts. The question marks had wide, shouting mouths. Some were shedding tears. Some were tucked in on themselves, looking snaillike.

I don’t know if it’s what Dr. Hieler had meant when he told me to start seeing what’s really there. But I know that drawing those question marks did far more for me than counting backward from fifty ever could have.

MAY 2, 2008

7:37 A.M.

“Oh my God! Somebody! Help!”

Nick and I plunged in through the school doors, the wind taking hold of mine and shutting it abruptly behind me. As always, the hall was packed with kids hustling to their lockers, griping about their parents or teachers or each other. Lots of laughter, lots of sarcastic grunts, lots of lockers slamming—early morning noises that are just naturally a part of the soundtrack behind high school life.

We rounded the corner into the Commons, where the orderly motion of the halls poured into a stagnant milling of kids getting in their before-school gossip. Some were at the Student Council table buying doughnuts, others sitting on the floors with their backs propped against the walls, eating doughnuts they’d already scored. Some cheerleaders were balanced on chairs hanging assembly posters. A few kids were tucked back against the stage area making out. The school losers—our friends—were waiting for us, draped over chairs turned backward at a round table near the closed kitchen entrance. A few teachers—the brave ones like Kline and Mrs. Flores, the art teacher—were wandering through the crowd, trying to keep some semblance of order among them. But everyone knew it was a losing battle. Order and the Commons rarely went together.

Nick and I stopped just after we entered the room. I stood on my tiptoes and craned my neck. Nick was surveying the entire room, a cold grin swiped across his face.

“Over there!” I said, pointing. “There she is!”

Nick scanned where I was pointing and found her.

“I’m so going to get a new MP3 player out of her,” I said.

Nick unzipped his jacket slowly, but he didn’t take it off. “Let’s go get this finished,” he said, and I smiled because I was so happy he was going to stick up for me. And I was happy that Christy Bruter was finally going to get what she had coming to her, too. This was the old Nick—the Nick I’d fallen in love with. The Nick who stood up to Christy Bruter and whoever else was making life miserable for me, who never backed down when one of the football players would come after him, trying to make him look small. The Nick who understood what it felt like to be me—crappy family, crappy school life, people like Christy Bruter constantly in my face reminding me that I wasn’t like them, that I was somehow less than them.

His eyes took on a strange faraway look and he began walking briskly through the crowd ahead of me. He wasn’t paying attention to where he was going. He was just walking through people, his shoulders butting theirs and knocking them backward. He left me in a wake of angry faces and indignant shouts, but I ignored them and just followed him as closely as I could.

He reached Christy a few steps before I did. I had to crane my neck to see her over his shoulder. But I could still hear him. I was straining to hear him because I didn’t want to miss a second of him scaring the heck out of Christy. So I’m sure of what I heard. I still hear it just about every day.

He must have bumped Christy on the shoulder or something, just like she’d done to me on the bus. I couldn’t really see for sure because at that point his back was still to me. But I saw her pitch forward a little bit, almost knocking into her friend Willa. She turned around with a surprised look and said, “What’s your problem?”

By then I had caught up with Nick and was standing just behind him. On the security video it looked like I was standing right next to him, all of us so close together it was impossible to tell whose body was whose. But I was just a step behind him, and all I could really see was the top half of Christy over Nick’s shoulder.

“You’ve been on the list for a long time,” he said, and I immediately went cold because I couldn’t believe he’d just told her about the list. I was pissed, honestly. That list was our secret. Just between us. And he’d just blown it. And I knew that with Christy Bruter there would be hell to pay. She’d probably tell her friends and they would have something else to make fun of us about. She’d probably even tell her parents about it and they’d call mine and I’d get grounded. Maybe we’d even end up suspended and then I’d be screwed when it came to finals.

“What list?” she asked and then she looked down just slightly and her eyes grew big. She started to laugh, and so did Willa, and I started to pull up onto my tiptoes to see what they were laughing at.

And then there was the noise.

It wasn’t so much a noise in my ears as it was in my brain. It sounded like the whole world was shutting down on me. I screamed. I know I did because I felt my mouth open and my vocal cords vibrate, but I heard nothing. I shut my eyes and let out a total scream and my arms instinctively flung themselves over my head and the only thought I had was this is something bad, this is something bad, this is something bad, which I’m pretty sure was my body going on autopilot. Lifesaving autopilot. It was more like a message from my brain to my body—danger: run away!

I opened my eyes and reached out to grab Nick, but he had moved to the side and instead I found myself looking at Christy, who had this totally shocked look on her face. Her mouth was open like she was going to say something, and her hands were both clutching her stomach. They were covered with blood.

She wavered and then began to fall forward. I jumped out of the way and she hit the floor between me and Nick. I looked down at her, feeling like I was in slow-motion, and saw that there was blood spreading across the back of her shirt as well and there was a hole in the fabric right in the middle of the blood.

“Got her,” Nick said, looking down at her, too. He was holding a gun and his hand was shaking. “Got her,” he repeated. He kind of laughed a little, this high-pitched laugh I still think was surprise more than anything. I have to believe it was a surprised laugh. I have to believe he was as surprised by what he did as I was. That somewhere underneath the drugs and the obsession with Jeremy was a Nick who, like me, thought it was all a joke, all a what-if.

And then everything snapped into real time. Kids were screaming and running, clogging the doorways and falling over one another. Some were standing around looking amused like someone had just pulled off a good prank and they were sorry they’d missed it. Mr. Kline was shoving kids out of the way, and Mrs. Flores was screaming commands at them.

Nick started to rush through the crowd, too, leaving me with Christy and all that blood. I turned my head and Willa and I locked eyes.

“Oh my God!” somebody screamed. “Somebody! Help!”

I think it was me screaming, but even today I can’t be sure.