Handwritten ✓

07 | story

ORIGINALLY, I THOUGHT INVITING PRACTICALLY the whole town — under twenty years of age, specifically — to our seventeenth birthday party was a good idea.

It was casting a wide net, right? I made sure I increased the chances of enticing my secret detractor to the house party. But then they showed up, scribbled a tempting taunt on the back of my birthday card, and disappeared without so much as bitch-slapping me.

That was when the downside of casting a wide net became apparent. I had no clue who my hater was. It could have been anyone in the school, considering the number of people that came and went on Saturday evening.

But not to worry. I was an optimist.

The way Jamie and I invited people gave me a chain of communication that I could follow. We had put out the original invitations to Sophie and Killian. Then we tasked them with inviting the football team and whatever band geeks wanted a chance to get drunk. So it was likely, following their mutual connections, my hater either knew a football player or they either knew a nerd.

This called for some collaboration.

Handwriting comparison was not going to pin my hater if they weren't in any of my classes, or my grade. Sure, the teachers let me get away with a lot over the years, but I doubted I could sneak into many classrooms — in which I was not supposed to be — before they gave me detention, and Coach gave me a verbal butt-whooping for subsequently compromising my practice time. Maybe a physical butt-whooping, depending on how long my detention stretched for.

Coach had big dreams for the golden trio of the juniors: Kay and the Jays. He envisioned football scholarships, NFL, if we really worked hard for it. But, like I'd told Mrs. Ackerman, other than what lay in my immediate future — and I'm talking, what's for dinner tonight — I had no idea what I really wanted to do with my life.

The only thing in my immediate future, come Monday lunchtime, was catching my hater.

I called a special meeting in the cafeteria today. Jamie, Kay, and I weren't sitting at the football team's table this time. We drifted across the room to where Sophie and her friends were, talking lazily among themselves. Nova tensed up immediately when she saw us approaching and narrowed her eyes at Kay, thinking he was up to something. Avalon closed her Chemistry workbook with mild intrigue in her eyes and slipped it into her backpack.

Before Nova could castrate Kay for invading her personal space, I slid into an empty chair and explained the situation. Sophie and Jamie knew the brunt of my dilemma, having listened to me complain after Sunday dinner at the Olsens' house yesterday — while the parents drank a glass of wine and one beer, in Dad's case. Luke, in middle school, could not be fucked following high school drama and tuned into his Nintendo console in lieu of the conversation.

I told them that I needed the nerds' help on this. Everyone knew that the type of person I grated the most was a nerd. My loud mouth disrupted plenty of classes, which might have hindered some poor, irritable geek's learning environment. Maybe I hit them in the face one too many times with a dodgeball. Whatever the reason, the way the hate note was written — with study-focused points and fancy vocabulary — screamed academic.

I really needed Sophie to pull through for me. She and her crew of friends could blend into the academic and artistic scene at Bishop much easier than Jamie and Killian could. The latter were going to feel out the athletic side of the school, though I wasn't confident they would turn up any results.

To my endless gratitude, Sophie managed to get Avalon, Declan, and Graeme onside. Nova hadn't explicitly agreed to help without first hearing my plan laid out precisely, but she didn't bolt when Killian smugly squished onto the bench next to her — though maybe that meant she couldn't bolt — which nevertheless was a promising sign. I opened my mouth and relayed my mission to my friends.