Read Online Say Something by Jennifer Brown - Free Book Online Page B

the soccer field until the sun had moved and the hair under our caps was damp with sweat. We never spoke another word. And eventually Valerie got up and left, walking back toward the school and leaving me alone on the bleachers.
    It was the last time I saw her.

A few days later, Dad and I went to the police together. I told them everything I knew, and even Brandon helped fill in the blanks where he could. He swore he never heard Jeremy and Nick talk about any plans in front of him, but he didn’t seem all that surprised to find out Jeremy was involved, either.
    “Dude was psychotic,” he said. “Had all kinds of weapons stashed in his mom’s house. Paranoid as shit. That Nick kid followed him around like a puppy. Shoulda known nothing good would come of it. But he never said nothing to me about it. I’da punched his face in.”
    When we were done, I sat in the passenger seat of my dad’s car, numb, feeling like the whole world was about to fall down on me. Not knowing when it would happen terrified me. I’d seen how the community had treated Valerie when they thought she was the one who was involved. The fallout she’d gotten would probably be nothing compared to what it would be like when what I’d been sitting on came to light. Would I be as strong as Valerie? I wasn’t sure.
    “It’s over,” Dad said before starting up the ignition.
    I made a scoffing noise. He couldn’t possibly really believe that, could he?
    “It’s time to move on, then,” he said. “For everyone.”
    And it seemed like everyone was moving on.
    I had tried to call Valerie from the police station, to tell her it was done, to beg her to forgive me. A part of me was still hopeful that I could fix the gap between us. Maybe, with time, we could start up a little something. She could see how good I could be to her. How different I was from Nick. But her phone had been disconnected.
    Stacey got into college up in northwest Missouri, so she would be leaving at the end of the summer, and Duce got some sort of construction job that sent him down south the day after graduation. I wasn’t there for the breakup, but according to Mason, it was an epic bawlfest.
    Mason was spending every waking second with a girl he’d met at an after-grad party. Bridget was getting an apartment downtown, and Joey, who’d been too high to make it to graduation, had reportedly gotten busted with a huge amount of weed and was being shipped off to rehab. And who knew where everyone else was headed? Who cared? I didn’t.
    All I cared about was what would happen with me. I’d gotten into community college. I wasn’t too excited about the idea of more school, but I didn’t know what else I would do with my life, so I figured I would go. I had no idea what I wanted to study but thought I’d start with a few psychology classes. Someone once told me that people major in psychology to figure out what’s wrong with themselves. Maybe I could figure out what made me such an easy target. Though I suppose I already knew the answer to that question—easy targets don’t talk. Easy targets don’t turn people in.
    As I sat in my dad’s passenger seat, though, looking at the front of the police station, I couldn’t even think about college, psychology, fixing myself. All I could think about was telling him the one thing I still hadn’t fessed up to. The one thing that scared me, not because I was afraid of external fallout, but because I was afraid of what it meant about me, internally.
    “I put Chris Summers’s name on the list,” I said. “I mean, Nick had already put it on there, but so did I. And he’s dead now, and I don’t know if that was what I was after—I mean, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t—but I still feel responsible, because when I put it there, I hated him so much. God, I hated him.” I punched the dashboard. “Fuck.”
    Dad turned the car key, let his hand fall into his lap. “You didn’t know Nick was going to shoot him,” he said.
    “But