Ignoring my classmates, I glanced at the clock and tried to nonchalantly sniff my T-shirt. At least I didn’t smell like that nasty beef gravy they served with the mashed potatoes in the cafeteria. Even though the incident in the lunchroom had left me in a foul mood, class was a good distraction.
AP Lit was by far my favorite class. Yesterday, we’d finished reading The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. It had immediately become one of my all-time favorite books. I’d loved it so much, I bought my own copy and filled the margins with notes. I’d also color coordinated florescent tabs with matching highlighters. That way, I could quickly locate the sections with important themes and my favorite quotes.
More giggles. This time louder. The rage that had been simmering since getting to class and seeing Fuller’s stupid face began to boil.
I spun around in my seat and opened my mouth to say something, but nothing came out.
“Jealous much?” Lyla hissed.
You wish. I cursed myself for not being able to say the words out loud.
Fuller’s eyes danced with amusement as he watched me squirm.
Why did he have to act like such a d-bag all the time? We were both seniors. By now, he should be smart enough to figure out how to act like a decent human being from time to time. Or at least pretend to.
Before I could turn around, Lyla rolled her eyes. “Loosen up, Wrentainer. It’s not like you’re ever going to be in the back of the class with a guy.”
I thought I saw Fuller’s smile falter for a moment, and then he was back to being obnoxiously handsome.
Mrs. Brewster cleared her throat. “If you three are done.” She tapped the whiteboard. “You’ll have two days to come up with a topic for your essay. Once I approve it, you can begin writing. You’ll have one week to complete this paper.” She set down the whiteboard marker. “Are there any questions?”
“Is that, like, one week from today or one week from the two days?” Lyla asked.
“One week after your topic is approved. That would make your paper due next Wednesday,” Mrs. Brewster said, circling the due date in red dry erase marker on the whiteboard. “Any other questions?”
My mind raced. I’d already considered several topics for my paper. I’d typed up a list and had it tucked away in the front pocket of my binder. I wanted to go over my ideas one more time next period in study hall before I picked my favorite and ran it by Mrs. Brewster.
Several of my classmates groaned as they began shuffling dog-eared paperbacks into their backpacks. The girl sitting next to me sneezed into a tissue. I immediately grabbed the bottle of antibacterial hand sanitizer clipped on to my backpack and applied a liberal portion to my hands. I couldn’t risk bringing any germs home to Gramps. He’d come down with a bad case of the flu last winter, and it had been really scary.
After rubbing the clear gel all over my hands, I waved them in the air and checked the clock mounted to the wall above Mrs. Brewster’s head. One minute left, then study hall, where I’d have to start my math homework over again from scratch. Stupid mashed potatoes. Scratch that. Stupid Fuller James.
“Also, if you turn in your topic late, I’ll deduct ten percent from your paper.” Mrs. Brewster pushed her glasses back up the bridge of her long, thin nose. More groans erupted from behind me. “Oh, and, Wren, please see me before you leave class.”
“Ooh,” Fuller called from behind me. “Somebody’s in trouble.”
“Shut it, Fuller,” I snapped. Holy crap. I called him out. I hated to admit it, but my constant lack of sleep had been playing a major role in my moodiness both during the day while I was at school and in the evenings when I was at home. Not that it mattered in this situation. Fuller was a complete jerk, and he deserved everything I threw at him.
Our eyes locked for several seconds before Lyla placed her hand on his leg.
Whatever. By next week, Lyla would be a distant memory in Fuller’s black book. He and Marissa would probably be back together and we’d all have to be witness to their spit-swapping, over-the-top make-out sessions in between every class.
“Don’t talk to him like that,” Lyla sneered just loud enough for me to hear.
“Wren’s agi-tatered,” Fuller said, chuckling. “Get it?”
Liam, the varsity quarterback, burst out laughing. In the process, he knocked over his water bottle, which instantly soaked through the back of Jenny’s shirt.
“Ugh,” she screeched.
Mrs. Brewster put her hands on her hips. She looked like she was about to reprimand the boys, but before she could open her mouth, the bell rang.
Shaking my head, I stepped out of Jenny’s way and shot a withering look at Fuller before making my way to Mrs. Brewster’s desk. Two large bookshelves stood on either side. There were stacks of books overflowing from both, and smaller piles had started to accumulate on the top.
“Agi-tatered?” she asked as Fuller and the rest of the students filed out of the classroom.
I glanced down at her desk. There were papers and red pens covering every square inch. She must have been in the midst of grading essays from another class. “Yeah, Fuller thought it would be cute to throw mashed potatoes at lunch. He hit me in the back of the neck. I’m still sticky.”
“Oh,” she said, giving me a sympathetic nod. “Agi-tatered, as in the taters he threw at you.”
“Yeah, apparently Fuller thinks starchy vegetables are funny,” I said. “It’s a bit of a stretch, but so are most things that involve thinking when it comes to Fuller James.”
Mrs. Brewster picked up one of the pens on her desk. Tapping it against her open palm, she tilted her head to the side and said, “I have a favor to ask you.”
“Sure, what’s up?” I asked.
She stopped tapping the pen against her hand. “I need you to tutor someone in class for a couple of weeks.”
I looked around at the empty desks. There were a few kids who struggled in class, but I didn’t think anyone was failing. I mean, most of the time, if an AP class got too hard, kids would just switch to a regular class.
“Sure,” I said, “happy to help.”
“Great,” Mrs. Brewster said. “I’ll give you ten extra credit points on your paper in return. Plus, you two already have study hall together the last period of the day, so it should work perfectly.”
“Okay, that sounds fair,” I said, racking my brain. “Who do I need to work with?”
“Full—”
“No way,” I said, waving my hands in front of me before she could finish saying his name. “He’s seriously the worst!”
“Fuller James,” she said, ignoring my frantic gestures. “You’re my top student, and he really needs your help.”
I crossed my arms and stared at Mrs. Brewster. “I’m not tutoring Fuller. I’m literally covered in food because of him.”
Her dark hair framed her face perfectly. “I know he can be difficult, but—”
“Difficult? There are so many words I could use to describe him,” I said, cutting her off. “But ‘tutee’ isn’t ever going to be one of them.”
Mrs. Brewster sighed. “He really needs your help, Wren.”
Wow, I can’t believe Fuller is failing. He’s always so confident. I guess even the King of Magnolia Valley High has a few secrets.
“Wren?” Mrs. Brewster said, tilting her head to the side sympathetically.
“If it was anyone else, I’d do it in a second. Promise.” I shook my head. “Plus, I’m sure there are other kids in class who can work with him. Why not ask Lyla?”
“If he doesn’t bring his grade up, he won’t be able to play basketball,” Mrs. Brewster admitted. “And Coach is really worried.” There it was, the real reason I’d been asked to tutor Fuller. My uncle knew I had great grades and that I used to tutor kids after school.
Too bad for him it would never happen.
“Perhaps you could try today and—”
I held up my hands, knowing my uncle would be disappointed in me. “I apologize for interrupting, but, Mrs. Brewster, I’d literally tutor anyone else in the class. I swear. But there is no way, no how, that I’d ever tutor Fuller James.”
Chapter Two
Fuller
“I’m incredibly sorry, Principal Davis,” I said, hanging my head in apparent shame and dropping my gaze to his desk. He and I were running through the same routine we always did. I’d apologize and he’d respond with something like, “I’m going to give you one more chance, son. Do you understand?” I’d agree, call him “sir,” and all would be good until the next incident.
Normally, being called into the principal’s office didn’t bother me too much. I’d sit in the chair across from Principal Davis, where we’d usually end up talking about basketball and reliving the highlights of his high school career as the star center forward. We’d then move on to his time at the University of Virginia. We’d usually wrap up with how he could see a lot of himself in me.
But, this time, instead of it being the two of us, Coach and Wren Carter were here, too.
Coach Carter shook his head. “Fuller, we’ve been over this before. In order to play, you have to be passing all your classes. We’ve made a lot of exceptions for you over the years, but this is one that you know we can’t break.”
My cheeks burned with embarrassment. It was bad enough Coach knew that my AP Lit grade had dropped to an F, but it was like rubbing salt in an open wound to have Wren find out, too. She was hands down the smartest kid in the entire school. I kept my gaze cast downward, on Principal Davis’s desk. There was no way I could handle seeing a smug grin on Wren’s face or, even worse, a look of pity. I’d never failed a class before. But, between the before school workouts, a full day of school, basketball practice, shooting hoops for an additional hour after practice ended, and hanging out with my little brother, I barely had enough time to eat and get a few hours of sleep, let alone read books and write AP Lit papers. I managed to keep up a 3.2 grade point average by getting most of my homework done and earning decent grades on tests, but that certainly wasn’t high enough to earn any kind of academic scholarship.
I wanted to drop down to regular Lit, but my parents forbade me from doing it. “You aren’t applying yourself, Fuller,” my dad would say. “If you spent half as much time on your homework as you did on basketball and with the ladies, you’d be doing fine in school.” Like he had a clue. He was an emergency room doctor with an eidetic memory. He was constantly at work and, unlike him, my only path to a full scholarship was basketball.
Plus, most people at school, including Wren, assumed I was a dumb jock. Who was I to prove them wrong?
I should have been able to coast through senior year, not have to worry about my spot on the team because of some English class that I’d never need again. Last time I checked, professional basketball players weren’t worried about using proper APA citations when they were tearing up the court.
When I wasn’t training, I spent time with my little brother. We watched Deadpool and read comic books together. Even though he knew the character Deadpool wasn’t real, he always claimed he was going to be just like him when he grew up: indestructible. Instead, he was forced to deal with a diagnosis that had taken that dream from him and left him with an uncertain future.
A lump formed in the back of my throat whenever I thought about him. It wasn’t fair. Here I was, voted athlete of the year by my peers, and my little brother was stuck in a body that couldn’t even handle getting shoved in the hallway.
Fighting back the hot tears that welled up in my eyes, I pushed thoughts of Hudson to the back of my mind. I kept that part of my life private, and I certainly wasn’t going to let Wren in on it. Speaking of Wren, my thoughts drifted to her copy of The Hate U Give. I’d spotted it on her desk today, cluttered with dozens of tabs and about a million notes in the margins. She’d probably already had her topic prepared for Mrs. Brewster and written half the paper. Me, on the other hand, well, I hadn’t even had time to crack open the book.
Not that this or any other paper should even matter. If this basketball season went well, I’d win a scholarship to the University of Georgia to play basketball. That way my parents could focus on my little brother’s medical bills.
A single session of physical therapy cost them ninety-five dollars. He had at least two sessions a week, every single week except during Christmas and one week during the summer when he went to a special camp for kids with serious medical conditions. The cost of those sessions, plus all his hospital bills, appointments with specialists, and trips to the emergency room for accidents, added up quickly. Even if my parents were to offer to help put me through college, I’d decided a long time ago that I wouldn’t accept a single penny of their money when my brother’s life was at stake.
To put it bleakly, if I didn’t get a full scholarship, I wouldn’t be able to afford to go to college.
Glancing up, my gaze fell on Wren. She sat two chairs over with her arms crossed and her lips pursed. She was so uptight she could produce a diamond if someone gave her a chunk of coal.
Her eyes had drifted to the bookcase to the right of Principal Davis’s desk. At the top sat the basketball we’d won the state title with last year. All the guys on the team had signed it. The day we presented it to the principal, I thought he might actually cry. The school hadn’t won a championship since his senior year, which had been over twenty years ago.
Sunlight streamed in through the window in the corner. I stole a glance, immediately wishing I was outside shooting free throws. There was a great court down the street from my house. Like the rest of Magnolia Valley, the basketball court was surrounded by the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina, and the view was really incredible. I’d definitely miss it next year when I was playing for UGA.
Scratch that, if I was playing for UGA.
“Excuse me. I don’t mean to interrupt, but why am I here?” Wren asked, dragging my mind from my happy place back to the depressing situation at hand. “I have a ton of homework, and I’d like to head back to study hall.”
She refused to look at me. I couldn’t blame her… Even though I wasn’t the guilty party and nearly five years had passed, I still felt responsible for her hideous nickname. I’d never admit it, but I hadn’t been brave enough to shut my classmates down when they were teasing Wren and calling her Wrentainer. I cared too much what they thought about me. Marissa was the one who came up with it, but I was the one who repeated it, loudly. I was the one who made all our classmates laugh. I was the reason Wren got bullied.
If it hadn’t been for that night and the repercussions that followed, I totally would have gone for Wren back in the day. Not only was she smart, but in middle school, she used to have a wicked sense of humor. I bet she still did. On top of that, she was pretty and not in that ten-pounds-of-makeup way like Marissa. Like today, her light brown hair was pulled back into a high ponytail, which accented her hazel eyes. She wasn’t very tall, maybe five foot three at best, but her legs were long and lean from the countless hours she spent running around the track. Thank you, cross-country team.
Principal Davis cleared his throat, bringing me back to reality. “Wren, Coach tells me that you’re refusing to tutor Fuller.”
“It’s not fair,” Wren said quietly.
“Not exactly,” the principal said, tapping on the screen of a tablet that sat on his desk.
When Wren’s eyes landed on the video that he’d pulled up, her face turned ashen.
“It appears that the two of you were engaged in a food fight today in the cafeteria,” Principal Davis said. He paused the video and zoomed in on Wren launching a handful of food in my direction.
His voice had taken on a serious tone, but I knew that we wouldn’t get in trouble for the fight. It all made sense. The only reason
he’d dragged Wren in here was to guilt her into tutoring me. She was hands down the best student in AP Lit, and we already had study hall together. Now that Principal Davis had some leverage over one of the smartest students in the entire school, he’d apply pressure.
I had his moves pegged.
Principal Davis looked directly at me and then Wren. “Normally, I’d hand down your punishments and not think twice about it, but today, I’m giving you two an ultimatum.”
Wren’s entire body tensed. “What about all the other kids involved in the food fight?” As far as I knew, she’d never been called to the principal’s office or gotten into any kind of trouble at school. I wasn’t sure if she was scared of earning a black mark on her record or just plain furious with me.
Probably the latter, since that was her default setting.
Mr. Davis straightened his tie and stole a quick glance at the game-winning basketball. “They’ll be dealt with, Wren. Don’t you worry. Now, you owe our custodians, Mr. Tillson and Miss Constance, an apology. That part is not debatable. And either you both agree to this tutoring arrangement, or you’re both suspended for two days and given five days of detention.”
“What?” Wren gasped.
“Was that not you throwing food in the lunch room today, Ms. Carter?” the principal asked. He arched an eyebrow and pointed to his tablet. “Or do my eyes deceive me?”
“It was me, but I…” Wren stopped speaking and looked down at her hands.
I watched as her fingers tightened and she dug her nails into her jeans.
“Wren, I’d hate for you to lose the opportunity to go to the STEM Academy Camp at UNC over winter break…” Mr. Davis sat back in his chair.
“Wait. What?” Her jaw fell open in disbelief.
Mr. Davis steepled his fingers. “Any record of suspension automatically revokes your spot in the program.”
Wren didn’t say anything. Instead, she just sat there, looking totally shell-shocked. I felt bad for her, but getting that scholarship was more important than some nerd camp.
I Hate You, Fuller James Page 2