chapter 2
“Meg-o-mania, what the hell was that about?”
That’s what Raymond wants to know, and I can’t blame him for pouncing on me as soon as I leave the classroom. While I was getting a stern talking-to from Ms. Pallas and promising her that an outburst like that will never happen again, and that I completely understand how Hunter High is a hate-free zone, and that words have consequences, and that shouting in class is definitely on the school’s list of no-nos, and that in her class especially she won’t tolerate that kind of ugly talk, Raymond waited patiently for me in the hallway. His long, thin body is slouched against a locker. I’m so happy and relieved to see him. I give him a sheepish smile and a weak shrug.
“Just a warning,” I say.
He lets out a low whistle of relief. “Lucky. Pallas doesn’t usually suffer from Pushover Teacher Syndrome. I figured you’d pull detention for that spontaneous outburst of misanthropy.”
Classic Raymond vocabulary. According to Hunter High mythology, my best friend started talking in complete sentences when he was six months old and hasn’t shut up since. That’s not his only achievement. He’s a whiz in math. He skipped fourth grade. He plays first violin in the school orchestra and composes his own music. Plus, he can speak pig Latin in Latin. He’s by far the youngest, smartest, most accomplished person in our class, but also kind of an idiot.
His most recent form of self-amusement is saying things like “What I lack in maturity, I make up for in infantile behavior,” followed by his enormous high-pitched laugh.
The truth is—and I’m not talking behind his back because Raymond would admit it himself—he drives most people up a wall. It’s not polite to say this, and maybe my thinking it makes me an awful person, but I’m actually grateful that Raymond is so irritating. Otherwise he might not have been so desperate to have me as a friend when I met him three years ago. On the surface, I know that our friendship doesn’t make much sense—the ethnically ambiguous, awkward girl who loves BLT sandwiches and happy romantic comedies who is inseparable from the big-brain gay kid who’s a vegetarian and obsessed with horror films—the older the better, especially the campy black-and-white ones from the 1960s.
But it comes down to this: he and I click in a way that we’ve never clicked with anyone else before. We can tell each other anything. To Raymond, I’m not some shy dork who, when she does speak, always manages to say the wrong thing. I’m—get this!—smart, tolerant, funny, a deep thinker, a survivor, and a closet optimist.
And I think that he’s the most unique person on the planet.
“Let’s get out of here,” I say. I glance around nervously to see who might have heard about my Western Civ breakdown. There’s only a couple of freshmen hurrying to their next class, and none of them are staring or smirking. Raymond and I have study hall next period and can easily ditch that. With a quick pivot, I start walking down the corridor and he follows, not bothering to lower his voice. “Not so fast, Meg. You were dauntingly intimidating. Terrifying! You hate everyone? Speak!”
And say what?
I push through a set of double doors into a stairwell, and I’m so befuddled that I can’t decide what to do next. Where was I going? Up? Down? My hands claw through my hair in frustration.
“Sit!” he orders, pressing on my shoulder.
I do. He joins me on the bottom step. “Deep breath in and out. Explain.”
I swallow hard, shiver a little. How do I start? I can’t explain it to myself. I just want to rub out the whole incident, make the collective memory of thirty-two students disappear. I don’t want to think about every pair of eyes trained on me, some kids laughing so hard they had to put their heads on their desks, others dropping their eyes in embarrassment, like I just confessed in public that I masturbate every night. I don’t want to think about how angry Ms. Pallas is at me and how Brendon—that boy with the crinkle eyes—turned so pale, like he somehow sensed that my hate was focused on him.
“Well?” Raymond asks again, and the question echoes in the empty stairwell.
I let my body cave in on itself, dropping my eyes to the floor, my voice a mumble, as if making myself smaller will make the whole subject disappear. “It was nothing. A blood sugar drop or something.”
“Blood sugar?” His voice is loud and cracking.
I cobble together a few coherent sentences that I hope will satisfy him for at least right now. “I don’t know what happened. I was thinking. It was … slippage.”
“Slippage?”
“From my brain.”
His face lights up. “Oh! You mean brain slippage! Good old brain slippage. That explains everything.”
“It does?”
Raymond sighs, not buying it for a second. “I’m not talking about the content of your impromptu confession—we’ll come back to Meg’s astounding moment of existential crisis in a minute. It was how you said it.” He cups his hand into a megaphone. “Cue the zombie.”
I shush him. His eyes search my face. I look away—at my feet, at my nails, at the square tiles of acoustical ceiling, at a big wad of bubble gum fossilized on the wall. But it’s no use. Raymond has infinite patience for my avoidance techniques. He will wait in annoying silence until I spill every detail.
“Talking it through might help,” I finally admit. Who else can I talk to about it, anyway? My understanding foster mom? My other friend? “Okay. But Raymond, don’t you dare laugh.”
“Why would I laugh?”
“’Cause you laugh at everything.”
He makes a big drama of swiping a hand magician-style across his face, pretending to wipe away any trace of humor. “Totally serious.” Pause. “Devoid of levity. You may proceed.”
I force a calmness into my voice that I don’t actually feel. “I know it was strange…”
So much for calmness: I blurt everything, at least as much as I can remember, because it’s all beginning to fade. “That’s the best I can do, my explanation for being, you know, not like myself.”
“Not yourself? You were positively Demon Girl—with a strong hint of Possessed Person.” Raymond turns his body rigid, arms glued to his thighs. “I hhhhhhhate everyone.”
“Well, I do!”
“Do what?”
“Hate!”
Only when I say the word hate right now, it’s nothing like what I was feeling before. This hate is ordinary hate, like when you hate Brussels sprouts or PE. That other hate had weight and texture; it took up space and vibrated in my chest like a gong being struck. I try to explain.
“I don’t hate you, Raymond! And not everyone all the time. But some people some of the time. Like Brendon—you know I hate him, but when I say that now, it’s different than when I said it in class. That was hate hate. I don’t … I can’t…”
Raymond puts an open hand completely over my face, fingers spread, palm on my lips—“Interrupting starfish”—then removes it. He studies me. “This is serious. You’re mega upset.”
“It was horrible, Raymond. Humiliating! Everyone laughing at me. But before it was horrible, it was…”
I stop short because I realize that I’m about to say something I’m not sure I want to say aloud. Because saying it aloud will make it real, and I’m not sure I want it to be real and I’m not sure that anyone should know this about me, not even my best friend who knows just about everything else.
“The truth? It’s kind of ugly.”
He puts his fingertips on his wrist, mock checks his pulse. “I took my vitamins today. I can handle it.”
“Before. When I shouted ‘I hate everyone.’ It was fun—the best feeling I ever had in my life.”
He looks puzzled. “You mean, letting it all out and saying what you felt? I get it. That can feel good.”
“Yes! No! It was more than that. A power! The way it took over and took me away. I wanted to stay there.”
He’s still confused. “What took you over? Stay where?”
“There!”
I realize how whacked that must sound. I don’t have a clue about where there is or what I’m really trying to say, so I give a nervous giggle and pretend to make light of it. “So what do you think? Am I a complete raging psycho?”
Instead of answering with one of his wisecracks, Raymond lets his eyes go vacant and his jaw drop open. I hear him breathing through his mouth. The first time I saw him get this look, it freaked me out. I worried that he was having a seizure that knocked out fifty IQ points. But with Raymond, the more stupid he looks, the harder you know he’s thinking. Right now he looks really dumb, so I assume his synapses are working overtime. He murmurs a few random words and half phrases. I know to keep my mouth shut until he’s ready.
He drapes his arm around my shoulder again. He’s a toucher, another thing that annoys most people. I scoot closer to him on the step. I like feeling Raymond’s weight on my shoulder, knowing that he’s on my side.