“I mean, just shut it.” Chris takes a step forward and stands between his friends and us. “Leave them alone.”
“What’s the matter with you, Abbott?” Wade asks.
Chris just stares at him. “Nothing is the matter with me. But you? You’re being a tool, dude.” He turns on his heel and storms down the hall, away from the cafeteria.
Jed shrugs. “What got into him?”
“No idea,” Wade says. “But I’m hungry and I’m tired of talking to these losers.”
“Yeah,” Jed says, and they head into the caf.
Farida, Ken, Adam, and I stand there, stunned, watching Chris stalk off.
“That was weird,” Ken says in a low voice.
“Extremely strange,” Farida agrees.
It was something more, too, and I need to understand it.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” I tell them, and start to follow Chris down the hall, ignoring the “What?” “Where are you going?” questions called out in my wake.
I call after Chris to wait. To my surprise, he does.
When I catch up to him, he stands with his arms crossed across his chest, leaning against the lockers.
“What do you want, Walker?”
“I was wondering if we could talk,” I say.
“Isn’t that what we’re doing now?”
I glance up at the clock and see that the bell is going to ring in forty-five seconds.
“I mean talk for real. For more than a minute. Not in school.”
His eyes search my face. I can tell he’s not sure what to make of this. So I risk saying one thing.
“Thanks for doing that.”
Something flickers in his eyes.
“After school. Three o’clock. I’ll meet you by the band shell.”
“Okay. See you then,” I tell him.
Without another word, he turns and walks away, and I head to the cafeteria to have lunch with my friends.
When I get to the Argleton band shell after school, Chris isn’t there, and I wonder if he’s decided to blow me off. It’s at the end of the town green. My family has gone here every year to see the fireworks on the Fourth of July, with a local band playing patriotic songs. It’s something Rob’s not sure he’ll ever be able to enjoy again, and I frown thinking about how it’s another small way his life has been changed by war.
“You look sad.”
I turn around and Chris is standing there, his hands jammed in his jacket pockets.
“I was thinking about my brother.”
Chris shifts from foot to foot. “So, uh, you wanted to talk?”
“Yeah. I guess I just wanted to thank you. For what you did today.”
He kicks a pebble and then glances at me briefly. “It was no big deal.”
“It kind of was, coming from you. It took me by surprise,” I tell him. “What made you do it, when you haven’t before?”
“I don’t know … I guess I’ve learned something lately. It’s like …” He looks up at the sky, where the sun is trying to peak out from behind a massive puff of clouds. “Well … imagine if all your life the person you admire and look up to the most in the world told you the sky was green.” His eyes meet mine. “Then one day you looked up and you saw that it was really blue. What would you do then?”
He’s opened a door. I don’t want it to slam shut in my face by saying the wrong thing.
“Could you talk to that person you admire?” I ask, because even though I can’t imagine having conversations with Mayor Abbott like I do with my dad, he’s not my father. Maybe he and Chris are really tight. “Could you tell him that you see the color of the sky differently?”
“Yeah. Tried that,” Chris says with a wry grin. “The fireworks display on July Fourth was nothing compared to the argument that started.”
“I’m sorry. Maybe … maybe it’ll just take time.”
“Dad running for governor doesn’t help,” Chris says. “It means I can’t disagree with him publicly. You know, because”—he rolls his eyes—“it’s important that we’re all on the same page.”
His shoulders slump. “It doesn’t seem to matter to him that I might want to turn the page. That I might have developed different opinions on things.”
“I get that you can’t make a big public speech or anything. But … didn’t speaking up today feel big?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know. They were being idiots. I just told them to stop. It wasn’t such a big deal.”
“It’s not the first time your friends have given Farida a hard time. Not just her. Other kids, too,” I point out. “What made you say something today?”
Chris’s eyes widen. “You never let it go, do you, Walker?”
I shrug. “I’m curious. It’s a problem I have.”
“So was the cat. And look how that turned out,” Chris says.
I laugh. “I’ll take my chances,” I tell him. “So … why did you?”
“Well … I guess I never really thought about any of it before all the stuff happened with your brother. My dad’s a politician; he has a lot of opinions about a lot of things. He can be pretty convincing and you just learn to go with it at my house. But then I kept hearing and reading things that made me think, and I started wondering if what I believed was right after all.”
“Is that bad, though?” I ask him. “I mean, isn’t that what we’re supposed to be doing? Learning to figure out what color the sky is for ourselves? Because it’s not just blue. Sometimes it’s gray, and at sunset it’s orange, red, and purple, even.”
“I guess,” he mutters. “But it’s making things really hard at home. And with my friends.”
“If it were easy to be courageous, they wouldn’t give medals for bravery.”
“I don’t want a medal. I just want to eat dinner without getting into a shouting match with my dad and listening to my mom sigh because the two of us are fighting again. And then being reminded, yet again, that I better keep my thoughts to myself because of the campaign. Like voters really care what I think.”
“That must be really hard.”
He shrugs. “You know, you really pissed me off when you made such a big deal about my campaign posters. Dad said it was ‘typical ugly feminists trying to ruin everything.’ And as mad as I was at you and Farida about it, I thought, wait, they’re not ugly. Why does he automatically assume they’re ugly?”
He starts flushing. “I can’t even repeat some of the other stuff he said. So I went to talk to Mom after dinner. Turns out that she thought the posters were wrong, too. But she won’t say so in front of Dad.”
He falls silent and I don’t really know what to say. I guess while I was navigating my version of this mess, so was Chris. We just sort of stand there in the breeze, not talking for a minute. He jams his hands back in his jacket pockets, as if he’s suddenly aware of how much of himself he’s revealed and he’s beginning to regret it.
“Stella … you can’t tell anyone about this. What it’s like for me with my dad. If it gets out, I’m toast,” Chris says quietly.
I don’t answer his unasked question. Instead, I ask one of my own. “I know today was hard for you, but I’m really glad you did it. It matters. Will you keep doing it?”
“What do you mean?” he asks.
“I mean you have power. You’re popular. People look up to you. If you just stand there when your friends do crappy things, you’re as good as saying it’s okay.”
“I don’t always agree with them—”
“Doesn’t matter. You might as well be doing it yourself if you don’t say anything and just let it happen.”
I see the look in his eye that he gets when we’re taking opposing sides in a debate.
“But what about their right to free speech?” he says. “Aren’t they entitled to express their opinions? Or does everywhere have to be a ‘safe space’?”
He does air quotes with his fingers to make his point.
“Is that really about a ‘safe space’”—I air-quote bac
k at him—“or is it actually, to use the words of a certain Chris Abbott, about not ‘being a tool’?”
Chris opens his mouth to speak and then closes it. He gives me a rueful look and shakes his head.
“You’re a pain in the butt, Walker, but you make me think.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” I say with a grin.
“I’m sorry. For what happened with your brother, and how my dad used it. And that Farida and her family got dragged into it.”
He says it so quietly that at first I think I’ve misheard him.
Then he half smiles, gives me a thumbs-up, and we both head our separate ways.
I’m not naive enough to imagine that this is a happily ever after, or that Chris and I are suddenly going to be BFFs. But hey, we have to start somewhere.
Maybe talking and starting to understand each other a little is that first step. Even if we don’t agree on everything, or really hardly anything, maybe we can find common ground on the important things—like at least showing respect for each other.
Roadrunner—
Last night I entered Caitlin’s number into my phone. I started to text her twenty-nine times. You know me, ThunderGeek, I had to count.
Ha! I can hear you guys now, calling me a wimp and things that are a lot worse.
But it’s not that. Well, maybe a small fraction was the usual “What if I ask her out and she says no?” Still, if it were only that, I’d have texted her after the first false start. Because that’s one thing that I learned from Afghanistan—hesitation can be just as fatal as rushing in blindly.
I lay awake until the small hours trying to figure out why I couldn’t pull the trigger.
Oh crap. Sorry, buddy. Lack of sleep is making me stupid.
What I meant to say is that I was trying to figure out why I couldn’t press “send.” The fact is, I’m afraid that she’ll realize how messed up I am. Right now, she liked me enough to give me her number. She thinks I’m okay. But if she gets to know me any more, she’ll find out that I’m not.
She’ll find out about the nightmares, the little things that send me back there in an instant without any warning.
She’ll find out that I still can’t make sense of it all no matter how much I try, and I don’t know if I ever will. I don’t know if it’s possible, even.
How do I make peace with that?
What if she finds out that my biggest fear is that I really am what they’re trying to make me out to be?
That’s why I decided to go to the counseling office at the community college today. It’s taking forever to get an appointment at the VA. Maybe this way I can talk to someone sooner.
Before I lose the chance to imagine someone else with me on a picnic. Before I lose a chance to hope.
ThunderGeek out.
It’s sunny and unseasonably warm on class election day, which means I have to rethink my outfit at the last minute and I’m running late for school. Farida had a meeting with Mr. Walsh, so she had to go without me. Now Rob’s honking the horn in the driveway and Mom’s shoving a granola bar in my hand to eat on the way.
“Good luck!” she says, giving me a quick kiss on the cheek. “Remember, you’re a winner with me no matter what the final tally says.”
“You have to say that, you’re my mom,” I point out.
“Doesn’t mean it isn’t true,” she says.
I concede the point because I’m late.
“Dinner at Tigris in your honor tonight, either way,” my mom calls after me.
I throw her a thumbs-up as I dash out the door.
Rob is drumming his fingers on the steering wheel as I slide into the passenger seat.
“What, you want to be fashionably late to cast your vote?” he says. “Emphasis on fashionably.”
“Wait a minute … is that … a stealth compliment?”
“Might be.”
“Not that one can really trust the judgment of a guy who thinks cargo shorts are the height of fashion, but thanks!”
“Anytime,” he says. “So what are the odds of me greeting Madam President at dinner tonight?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” I reply. “I guess I’m a teensy bit more confident than I was yesterday? But I could still lose to the false promise of softer toilet paper.”
“You wouldn’t be the first person who lost an election to someone who makes completely unrealistic promises,” Rob points out. “Nor the last.”
“I know. It just seems ridiculous that people aren’t clued up enough to see through all that crap.”
“Frank Meyers says democracy is messy but it’s better than all the other options,” Rob says. “Doesn’t matter if it’s American-style democracy or a different kind. As long as the people have a voice.”
“People are messy and complex, and so is life,” I say.
“Some lives are messier and more complex than others. Like mine, for example.”
I reach over and pat his shoulder awkwardly.
“Everything’s going to be okay,” I tell him.
He half smiles. “Yeah. It’ll all be okay.”
We’re both smart enough to realize that there’s no way of knowing if that’s true, but that’s all right, because we’re lying to make each other feel better.
Rob wishes me good luck when he drops me off at school. “Vote early and often!”
“Are you encouraging me to engage in voter fraud? Shame on you!” I scold him, laughing, as I wave good-bye.
We have from the beginning of the day through sixth period to vote online by logging in using our student ID numbers. It’s strange to mark the ballot next to my own name. I realize it’s the biggest expression of confidence I’ve ever given myself.
Now to wait until seventh period, when the election results will be announced.
“It’s going to be a long day,” Farida says to me in AP Gov.
“Tell me about it.” I sigh. “I don’t know how I’m going to make it till the end of the day.”
“How are you holding up?” Adam asks, giving my shoulder a comforting squeeze.
“I’m not sure if I’ll feel better or worse when the results come out, but at least it’ll be over,” I tell him. “So there’s that.”
“Here’s something to keep you going,” he says, and he hands me some Hershey’s Dark Chocolate Kisses.
“You sure know the way to my heart,” I say, unwrapping one.
“That’s kind of what I was hoping,” he replies with an adorable grin.
His smile fades as Chris walks over.
“May the best person win,” Chris says, sticking out his hand to shake.
I laugh at the formality but shake his hand. “Or the one who made the best promises, even if they can’t be kept,” I say. “ ’Cause I mean, let’s face it, we both have a good chance of losing to Amy.”
“Yeah. If we both lose to ice cream and toilet paper, then there’s something wrong,” Chris says. “I just wish my dad’s election would be over by the end of today.”
Farida shoots me a quick glance, like she’s wondering if I’m going to tell him how much I wish his dad’s election would be over, too, and that his dad loses big time.
But there’s no point in me saying those words out loud. He already knows that’s what I want, and not just because of his political views.
If Mayor Abbott loses, it’s more likely that Rob will get to make a plea bargain and we can avoid a trial. Then Rob will know where he stands, and we can focus on getting him treatment. Life can move forward.
Instead, I just say, “Yeah, I’ll bet. But not long now.”
“It still feels like a million years,” he says.
Kind of like waiting for the announcement of the election results during seventh period.
When Principal Hart finally does come over the loudspeaker to announce the election results, my mouth becomes cotton dry and my hands clench into fists beneath the desk.
The freshman and sophomore class officers come first before h
e says, “The results of the junior class elections are as follows,” and then he goes to list the secretary, the treasurer, and the vice president. Then, at last, he announces the results for president: “In third place, Amy Sarducci with one hundred and thirteen votes; second place, Stella Walker with one hundred and ninety votes; and your new Junior Class President is Chris Abbott with two hundred and six votes. Congratulations, Chris!”
Well, that’s it. I lost. It was close, closer than I thought it would ever be when I decided to run, but I still lost. I lost to Chris, who was the whole reason that Farida wanted me to run in the first place. I failed. All that work for nothing. I feel the weight of it, of knowing that I’ve let my friends down. Disappointment worms its way into my stomach.
“Hey, sorry you didn’t win,” Tanzie tells me. “The video you did was lit.”
“Seriously,” Mary Maddox agrees.
“Yeah, I was going to vote for Amy, but that made me change my mind,” Jenny Bradford says. “ ’Cause it was real, you know? But my boyfriend voted for Chris.”
I wonder how many other people’s boyfriends voted for Chris.
But whatever. It’s over. I lost.
When I see Farida in the hall, she doesn’t say anything. She just envelopes me in a big bear hug.
“I’m sorry,” I say, swallowing hard. “I failed you. I failed everyone.”
“Sheesh, Stella, who do you think you are, Atlas? Stop taking the whole world on your shoulders,” she says. “It was close. Closer than we thought it would be, especially with all the other crap going on. And people are talking about the video.” She pulls away and gives me an encouraging little shake. “You’re allowed a short SulkFest, but then it’s on to the next fight, okay?”
The thought of another fight right now is exhausting, but I nod.
“Can you come over and sulk with me? Sulking alone is no fun. We can eat ice cream and watch Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Then we can talk about all the ways the title alone is wrong.”
“I can’t—I have to work a shift at the restaurant this afternoon. We’ve been slammed lately,” she says with a smile on her face.
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