The Fallout Chapter 7

By lunch, I’m a mess. I spend the period in the girls’ room with a bag of chips from the vending machine, but I can’t eat.

I roll up my sleeves and stare at what’s left of my bruises.

I want to run away and I never want to come back.

When the last bell signals freedom, I’m on edge. Spent. I get my stuff from my locker—warped history books and all—and push through a flood of students.

Totally alone.

I’m halfway down the stairs when someone pushes me from behind. I lurch forward and I’m flying, steps blurring past. I land at the bottom of them with a sick thud. The pain is immediate. So is the laughter. It comes in from all sides, and I stay on the floor, surrounded by it. It’s amazing how one day you wake up and this is your life.

I am not going to cry.

“Way to walk, Hayley.”

I look up. Kara. Dakota. Cassadee . Jeremy. Taylor. Taylor averts his eyes, and Dakota grins and she’s gone; Kara whisks her away. They low-five. Taylor and Jeremy follow after them. I am not going to cry.

“Oh!” Ms. Arnett, the school’s secretary, materializes in the middle of the crowd and hurries over to me, her face full of wrinkly concern. “That was a nasty fall you took, Hayley! Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I mutter. She pulls me up by the elbow and looks me over. My left knee aches, and a small patch of blood is soaking through my jeans.

“Oh, but you’re bleeding. Come to the office and we’ll get—”

I shrug her off me. “I said I’m fine.”

She stares at me with her watery blue eyes.

“Well…,” she says, “if you’re sure.”

I hobble away from Arnett, everyone, and push through the front doors. The warm air envelops me, and my head is full of the fall and after the fall: the stairs, my palms pressed against the floor, Dakota, Kara, Taylor. Way to walk, Hayley. Arnett. As soon as I’m out of the parking lot and onto the street, I stop. I just stop.

I think of the year stretched out before me like a tunnel, and I see myself in it, awake and running.

A car pulls up to the curb and snaps me back to life. I resume my stilted walk home. Ten steps later, I notice the car is keeping pace with me. I have this crazy thought it’s Dakota and Kara and they’re going to egg me or something, but when I look, it’s only Josh in the shoddy blue Saturn he drives to school every day. The window is rolled down, and his arm hangs out the side, casual. He taps his fingers along the door, dividing his gaze between the road and me.

“I’ll give you a ride home,” he says.

“No, you won’t.”

“Kara pushed you.” I ignore him. “Are you sure you don’t want a ride?”

It’s tempting: It’s hot and gross out, and my knee hurts. But I won’t. Not after what happened in the cafeteria yesterday. I force myself to keep going, and he keeps creeping alongside me in the car. I squint up at the sun.

“Do you have air-conditioning?”

“It’s one of the few things in this wreck that works.”

Josh rolls up his window as I walk around to the passenger’s side and get in. It’s really weird to think that not that long ago, this would be Taylor’s car and I’d be sitting in it.

Josh pulls away from the curb. “Where do you live?”

“Keep going down this road, past the phone booth. It’s the second left turn, seven houses down. You’ll see it. It’s the first brick house.”

I run my hand over my knee. It’s stopped bleeding. “I was so sure you’d go crawling back to them by now,” he comments. “I’m amazed you have any pride.” I don’t say anything for a minute.

“I bet you’re sure of a lot of things.” I eye the Moleskine resting on the dash. “All you do is watch us and write.”

“Yeah.”

“So what do you see?”

“Everyone’s afraid.” He looks at me. “But no one more than you.” I point. “That’s my house.”

He eases the car to a halt and lets it idle while I sit there and try to think of something to say, but I can’t.

I get out of the car and step back into the heat, stand on the curb, and watch him pull out. As soon as the Saturn is a speck in the distance, I roll up the leg of my jeans and inspect the damage. Superficial wound.

It still really stings, though.

I’m in the girls’ washroom when Kara comes in. She’s in red.

Today they’re wearing red.

She takes her place beside me, and our eyes meet in the mirrors. I rinse the lather from my hands and watch the suds swirl down the drain. I turn the water off and reach for the paper towels resting in a nearby puddle of water. Kara pushes the soap dispenser and lets the electric green liquid gush onto the cheap plastic counter below.

I just want to kill her. I’ve never felt a more honest urge in my life.

“You look like shit,” she says. “It suits you.”

“You’ll pay for this,” I tell her. It’s an empty threat. Empty threats and the strong urge to bash her head against the pavement—the only two things I seem to have these days. They’re better than nothing.

“No, I won’t,” Kara says. Her eyes light up. “Hey, I never said thank you, did I?”

“That’s so fucked up. Do you even get what Chad—”

“Yeah, and I should thank him, too. It’s like winning the lottery. I couldn’t believe you actually thought I’d want to help you after everything you’ve done to me—”

“I was a lot nicer to you than I could’ve been—”

“No,” she interrupts. “You weren’t.”

We stare at each other. There’s always this one girl. She’s desperate and she’s weird and she’s jealous, and you’re stuck with her, no matter how hard you try to get her off your back. Just throw some really fucked-up self-esteem issues into the mix and you have Kara. She could never keep up with us, and she knew it. And we knew it. And she was fat. Our relationship is as simple as it is complicated. I played messenger for Dakota one too many times.

And I guess I enjoyed it more than I should have.

“The best part about all of this—” she stops for a second, unable to contain herself. “Is how awesomely Dakota sold you out. I thought she’d hold back a little, but she told me everything. I never had anything on you before—nothing she’d let me get away with using— but now…it’s going to be a great year, Hayley.”

“Just wait until she finds out you lied to her.”

“It’s not going to happen. And what are you going to do about it, anyway? It’s not like you can rally the troops. You have no one. Well, except Chad. Maybe he’ll have you.”

She leaves. I’m a volcano. Something inside me snaps, and next thing I know, I’m in the hall and Kara’s there, meandering, and all I can think about is how much I want her to hurt.

She doesn’t see me coming until it’s too late. I shove her and she yelps, and I shove her again, into a row of lockers. The sound she makes as she hits them is nice—it’s so nice—that I shove her again. She tries to shove back, but I’m too quick. Another bang against the locker. Her head. A crowd assembles behind us and I know they’re thinking Fight! even if they never say it. I can feel it coming off them andme; I’m adrenaline.

I’ll give them a fight.

But before I can make another move, I’m pulled back.

There are hands on me and they’re pulling me back.

“Get off her, Hayley! Jesus, what the fuck are you doing?!”

The comedown is fast, intense. It’s over. I’m suddenly aware of how noisy the halls are, that people are talking loudly, and they’re pointing at me.

They all look surprised.

“Crazy bitch,” one of them mutters.

The hands that are on me belong to Taylor. Kara’s pressed up against the locker looking like I’ve done exactly what I just did. Her face is red and her hair is everywhere. I shove Taylor away.

“Don’t touch me.”

“Kara—oh, my God, Kara, are you okay?”

Dakota pushes through the crowd and starts fussing over Kara, who points at me, panting. Dakota doesn’t miss a beat and marches over, livid. Taylor moves, positioning himself beside her.

“What is your problem, Hayley?”

I glare past the edges of Dakota’s red hair, to Kara, because I’m too afraid to look at her, and then she grabs me by the chin and makes me do it. I grab her wrist, get her hand off me. Big mistake. She raises her other hand like she’s going to slap me. She doesn’t, but the threat is enough to make me flinch, and the whole, hall goes quiet.

We stare at each other. I jerk away.

My problem, my problem, what’s my problem?

I walk away from all of them, turning corner after corner until I end up in a deserted hallway with doors that offshoot into nowhere rooms. The fight that almost was feels like a memory already, like it didn’t even happen, and I’m numb all over except for my stomach, which is just acid, so I take an antacid, even though what I really want to do is scream until I can’t scream anymore.

“Hayley?”

Josh. He startles me. He must have seen the whole thing.

“What?” I have to fight every part of myself to let that simple word come out of my mouth, because I really, really want to scream. “What do you want, Josh?”

He blinks, taken aback. “Jesus, just forget it.”

I watch him stalk back down the hall. I stand there alone until the urge to scream disappears, and then I decide to follow after him, because he can’t just tell me to forget it and walk away.

He has to know I’m trailing him, but he doesn’t look back. He keeps walking until he finally forces his way through the front doors