Bench tromped into the grass after his ball so that I had to keep shouting at his back.
“But I bet you know who did. Was it Cameron? Was it Noah? Jason? Or somebody else. Another one of your friends.”
Bench froze, bent over the ball at his feet. “They aren’t my friends.” He came back to the blacktop with it cradled tight. “I don’t hang out with Cameron and those guys. I don’t even talk to them. You know that.”
“But people say stuff,” I reminded him.
“Not me.” He lined up another shot.
“Yeah, right.”
The ball clanged off the rim. We both let it roll past us down the driveway and into the street. “What’s that supposed to mean?” He turned toward me, taking a step closer. For a moment I thought he was going to push me and I braced myself.
“You’re telling me you’ve never said anything about any of us. Not me, not Wolf, not Rose—”
“Don’t bring her into this,” Bench said, holding up a finger. “Everybody says stuff about her. You’ve said stuff about her.” He stuck that same finger in my chest.
That stopped me. I couldn’t remember what all I’d said about Rose in those first few days. I’d thought plenty of things. And I’d heard so many more and said or done nothing. “What about Deedee?” I asked. “You’re telling me you’ve never said anything about him to the guys you hang out with?”
Bench frowned, shaking his head. Dead giveaway.
“I didn’t tell Cameron about Deedee’s stupid dice,” he muttered.
“But you told somebody.” I stared at him. People always told me I had my mother’s eyes.
Frustrated, Bench threw his hands in the air. “Fine. I told somebody. Big deal. I was with some of the guys on my team—we were getting something to eat that night after the game.” He paused, realizing what else he’d just let slip. The night after the game, after “the catch.” The night Rose showed up at Wolf’s door and saved us all from the undead horde. All of us but Bench. “There were six of us. And one of ’em couldn’t decide what to order so somebody else said ‘flip a coin,’ and I started laughing.”
“You told them.”
“I said I knew somebody who did that all the time. I was just kidding around,” Bench protested. “Just a bunch of guys talking smack. They rolled their eyes, called Deedee a freak. That was it. I didn’t know Cameron would find out or that he’d do what he did. I mean, who cares what Deedee keeps in his pocket?”
“Deedee, for one,” I snapped. “And me. And you too. At least you used to.”
Bench rolled his eyes, still trying to blow it off. “I told you. Cameron’s not my friend. I can’t control what he says or does. What any of them do.”
Any of them. He knew. I knew he knew.
“You still shouldn’t have said anything.”
“Well, maybe Deedee shouldn’t carry his toys around with him everywhere he goes. Maybe he needs to grow up too.” Bench glared at me.
I glared right back. “Funny. That’s what Cameron said before he tried to stuff Deedee’s head in the toilet.”
And where were you? I wanted to add. But I’m pretty sure he got the message. He took a step back, putting more space between us.
“What do you want me to say?” he shouted. “You want me to apologize? Fine. I’m sorry you and Deedee got jumped in the bathroom, all right? I’m sorry I ever said anything about Deedee’s stupid dice. I’m sorry I’m not there to babysit you guys every time you walk down the halls or sit and play your stupid little games at lunch. I’m sorry not everybody likes you or the people you hang out with. I’m sorry people call you names behind your back. Did I miss anything?”
“How about ‘I’m sorry for acting like a total jackwad and completely dissing all my friends’?”
“I didn’t diss you,” Bench insisted.
“You left us.”
Bench groaned, both hands on his head. “God, Frost, do you even hear yourself? You make it sound like we’re some kind of secret superhero society. That’s not how it is.”
“You’re wrong. You find your people,” I said, repeating the mantra that carried me through those first two weeks in the sixth grade, my mother’s promise that held up when a boy named J.J. came and sat next to me on the bus. “You find your people and you make your tribe.”
“That’s exactly what I’m talking about, man,” Bench said. “There is no tribe. And even if there was, I’m not the one who changed things. You come here and blame me for screwing things up, but I’m not the one who invited that girl to come sit with us in the first place.”
That girl. Maybe he didn’t know what to call her. There were too many names to choose from. “So you’re just going to blame it all on Rose, then?”
“I’m not the one looking for someone to blame,” Bench yelled, jamming a thumb to his chest, stepping up, closing the gap between us again.
“You don’t like her, so to heck with the rest of us?”
“I never said that.”
“Or maybe it’s Wolf you have a problem with.”
“Man, don’t even go there,” Bench snarled.
“Because you know. You heard all the stuff people were saying.”
“Just stop right now, Frost.”
“Because it’s easier to just go with the crowd than to stand up for your friends.”
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
“Then what are you saying?”
“I’m saying that it’s not even about you!” Bench shouted.
He was so close now that I could count his heartbeats through the throbbing veins in his neck. I didn’t back away, though, even as he kept on yelling right in my face.
“Did it ever dawn on you that maybe I didn’t feel like I belonged sometimes? That I might want to hang out with somebody else? That maybe, just maybe I might not want to be with you guys all the time? I mean . . . ,” he sputtered, “I don’t even like Dungeons and Dragons!”
Silence.
We stood right next to each other, bodies stiff, locked in an epic eyeball-burning staring contest, the kind that you expect to devolve into grunts and shoves as two kids wrestle each other to the ground. My lower lip started to tremble.
And then I laughed. I laughed right in his face.
I couldn’t help it. It came out first as a snort, then a building giggle, high-pitched and uncontrollable and ridiculous, laughing so hard that my chest hurt.
Bench looked at me like I’d lost my mind, but then it hit him too, and he chuckled softly to himself.
“Which part don’t you like?” I asked breathlessly. “The dungeons or the dragons?”
Bench shook his head. “None of it, man. Honestly. I was faking it the whole time.”
For some reason that just made me laugh harder. I thought about so many Saturday nights at Deedee’s house, rolling the dice, Garthrox the Barbarian shouting and swinging. Bench cutting up and carrying on. He had me fooled. He had us all fooled. “Seriously? I mean you never liked it?”
“I only played because I wanted to hang out with you guys.”
I stopped suddenly, wiping hot tears from my eyes. Wanted to. Past tense. “But not anymore,” I said softly, sniffling.
Bench shrugged. I wasn’t sure if it was an I-don’t-know shrug or a that’s-just-how-it-is shrug. I wasn’t sure what to say. I felt drained. All used up. I flashed back to the night my father left, how I’d been the first to let go, just a little. I thought about the blank spaces in my mother’s senior yearbook. About the empty seat next to me on the bus. I’d been here before.
I waited for him to talk first. When he did, his voice was softer.
“After that game last week, things were just . . . different. I can’t explain it. I caught that ball and they all swooped in and lifted me up and carried me out and it was almost like I was this other person, you know? I mean, it was incredible.”
“I was there,” I said. “I saw.” I cheered you on, I thought. Even though you couldn’t hear me. Even though thi
ngs had already started to change between us, I was there. You just didn’t realize it.
“I didn’t mean for what happened with you and Deedee. And I didn’t have anything to do with Wolf. I swear. I’d heard people say it. I knew what it meant. But I didn’t get involved. And I didn’t write that on his locker. I swear.”
“But you know who did,” I pressed.
Bench looked back down the street again. I don’t think he was looking to see if anyone was there. I think he just didn’t want to look at me.
“This isn’t about you either,” I told him. It wasn’t about him or me or Deedee or even Rose. This was about Wolf.
Bench took a deep breath and nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “I know who wrote it. But if I tell you, you gotta promise me you won’t go and do anything stupid.”
I promised. I had no idea what I was going to do, but I promised anyways.
“All right,” he said.
And even though there wasn’t another soul around, Bench still leaned over to whisper in my ear.
THE RESPONSE
I KNEW. I KNEW WHO LEFT THAT MESSAGE ON WOLF’S LOCKER, AND I spent the whole weekend thinking of ways to break my promise to Bench, the promise to not do anything stupid.
I spent the whole weekend dreaming of breaking Jason Baker’s jaw.
People say things. And when you are part of certain circles you hear them. Jason had been the one to come up with the phrase, then he bragged to one too many someones that it was his idea and Bench was close enough to hear. It wasn’t a revelation. Jason had been nudging Wolf for as long as I could remember. All off-the-cuff, in-the-moment stuff to get a laugh out of his friends. But the locker felt different somehow. Premeditated and purposeful and permanent in a way his other comments hadn’t been.
Which had me premeditating how to go about punching him in the face.
It was either that or rat him out to Principal Wittingham, though I wasn’t sure what that would accomplish. No more notes, though. There was nothing I could write on Jason’s locker that would hurt him as bad as he’d hurt Wolf. But maybe if I could dislocate his jaw, he wouldn’t be able to talk for a while. That would be something.
Forget the fact that I’d never punched anyone before. Not like Rose. I Googled how to do it, just in case (strike with your knuckles, don’t tuck your thumb inside, put your hips into it). I practiced on my pillow (the wall seemed too hard). At least he wouldn’t see it coming. No way Jason Baker would expect the poet laureate of Branton to take a swing at him. It probably wouldn’t fix anything—not in the long term—but I was pretty sure it would make me feel better.
And hopefully not just me. It had been a miserable couple of days. When I wasn’t dreaming of fattening Jason’s lip, I was leaving phone messages for Wolf that he didn’t respond to. Sending him emails that he didn’t reply to. Seeing him, again and again, his face salt streaked with dried tears, standing on his backyard, destroying a fleet of planes and ships, telling me to go away. It was the Big Split all over again, and I couldn’t help but feel like I was on the verge of losing two friends at once, which only made me want to hit somebody even more. I wanted to just go knock on Wolf’s door, but I was afraid he wouldn’t let me in. And I wasn’t sure what I would say.
“He’s not talking to me either,” Rose said when I gave in and emailed her my number, asking her to call. It made me feel better at first, knowing he was ignoring all of us and not just me, but then I felt worse, knowing he was shutting everyone out. “We just need to give him some space, I think.”
And in the meantime, I thought, we need to protect each other from the wolves.
I sat on the bus that Monday morning, making and unmaking fists and grimacing back at the gray sky that had been threatening rain for days and was finally fulfilling its promise, weighing the pros and cons, knowing I’d probably get suspended if I started a fight, wondering if I even had the guts to go through with it. I blocked out the people around me. I didn’t even realize the bus had stopped for a train and was running ten minutes later than normal. I played the whole scene out in slow motion, picturing the exact moment of impact, Jason’s skin rippling out along his cheek, counting the individual droplets of spit spraying from his soon-to-be-split lips. I couldn’t stop imagining it, because when I did, I just came back to Wolf standing in his backyard, baseball bat in hand, telling me that nothing would ever change.
Too many things had changed already.
The bus pulled up and I fought down the urge to vomit as I stepped into the rain, walking into school with my head down, hoping to avoid anyone I knew—Deedee, Rose, even Bench. I was afraid they would try to stop me. As soon as I entered, though, I sensed it. The hum. I saw the crowd of students spilling out into the main foyer from B Hall, even though the first bell had rung and everybody should already be heading to class. Instead they were all funneling to the same place, whispering, tugging on each other to hurry.
Whatever it was, it had to be serious.
I followed the buzzing crowd and found myself swallowed by a hive of students, all crammed together, all staring at the same something. I suddenly felt light-headed and put a hand against the wall to steady myself.
It was Wolf’s locker. Newly painted. A brighter blue than all the rest.
What you could still see of it, anyways.
I caught sight of Rose near the front of the horde, towering over the students beside her, Deedee at her shoulder. She saw me on my tiptoes and beckoned me over. I pushed my way through until I was standing beside them both, right in front of locker B78. Except you couldn’t actually see the locker number anymore.
Because of the notes.
The whole upper half was covered in them. At least a hundred. Maybe more. Different sizes and colors. Overlapping like links of chain-mail armor.
I just stood there and stared.
“Go on,” Rose whispered to me. “Read them.”
I started reading the closest ones silently to myself. One said, You’re Awesome! Another, You’re hilarious! Several notes simply said, Morgan Thompson Rocks. One note said, You’re So Talented You Make Me Want to Puke, which I assumed was a compliment. There were several Stay Strongs and Be Prouds. There was at least one I THINK YOU’RE HOT.
There were so many.
Some of the messages had drawings: hearts and smiley faces and peace signs. There was a rainbow done in marker and another done in colored pencil. The latter was shaped like a flag.
There were quotes, too. Or maybe they were aphorisms. Some of them at least had a name attached. Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King. Taylor Swift. A pink note with fancy cursive said, Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind. Whoever wrote it attributed it to Dr. Seuss, though I had my doubts, because it didn’t rhyme. Love thy neighbor as thyself, said another. That one was signed by Jesus.
More than one square said, You are not alone.
And there were still more coming. I looked to see students with pads of sticky notes, slapping them into waiting hands. Kids leaned against the wall to scrawl something before making their way through the crowd to add their message to the locker. The collection of notes fanned out from the center, growing like a virus. Sprouting. Spreading.
Proliferating.
“They’ve been coming for the last twenty minutes,” Rose said beside me, her voice hushed. “Not just students. Teachers too. Nobody even knows who started it.” The second bell rang above us. We were all officially tardy now. But only a few students bothered to head off to class, and no teachers came to shoo us away. I spotted Mr. Sword off to the right. He was handing out blank notes too. “I wish Wolf was here,” Rose added.
I looked over at her, then bent down and dug into my backpack, down to the very bottom, with its broken eraser tops and random bits of paper. I pulled out the crumpled sticky note—the one I’d meant to give back, the one that had been so easily dismissed the first time around. I smoothed it out as best as I could,
then found the closest empty space, about halfway down. I was afraid it wouldn’t stay, so I pressed hard. It stuck.
Wolf’s aphorism on his own locker. Words are ghosts that can haunt us forever.
Behind me I heard a familiar snort of laughter and twisted to see first the breakable jaw and then the rest of Jason Baker’s slug-worthy face at the edge of the crowd, whispering something to Noah Kyle. Noah smiled and shook his head.
I had absolutely no idea what they’d said.
I didn’t care anymore.
I turned around and started pushing my way back through the crowd, heard both Deedee and Rose calling after me. “Frost. Hang on. Where are you going?”
I ignored them. I couldn’t get Jason’s arrogant smile out of my head. Sometimes you have to shut up and do something. Rose could appreciate that.
I got free of the mob and turned the corner.
And walked straight to Principal Wittingham’s office. I didn’t even bother to ask the secretary or wait for him to see me. I just barged in.
“I know who put those words on Morgan’s locker,” I blurted out. I’d almost said Wolf’s, but then I remembered, he probably wouldn’t know who Wolf was.
Principal Wittingham folded his hands in front of him with a sigh that suggested his patience had dried up weeks ago. “Thanks, Eric. But I already know who did it,” he said. He nodded to the chairs across from him. The one closest to me was empty.
Bench looked up at me from the other one and nodded.
“I saved you a seat,” he said.
Words accumulate. And once they’re free there’s no taking them back.
You can do an awful lot of damage with a handful of words. Destroy a friendship. End a marriage. Start a war. Some words can break you to pieces.
But that’s not all. Words can be beautiful. They can make you feel things you’ve never felt before. Gather enough of them and they can stick those same pieces back together, provided they’re the right words, said at the right time. But that takes more courage than you’d think.
I went to Wolf’s house that night, after I’d told Mr. Wittingham everything I knew, after Jason was called down to the office and not seen for the rest of the day. Wolf’s mother met me at the door. She looked exhausted, eyes swollen, shoulders slumped. I wondered out loud if it was a bad time, but she and Mr. Thompson both welcomed me inside. “He’s upstairs in his room,” Mrs. Thompson said. “And I’m sure he’d like to see you.”
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