It’s Not Weird to Say I Love You is the story of a fragile new friendship determined to grow stronger in spite of the bullies and beliefs bent on its destruction. A tender, awkward, and at times heart-wrenching tale of first love, buried grief, and found family reminiscent of Eleanor & Park and The Perks of Being a Wallflower, It’s Not Weird… offers an emotional escape from our tech-centered lives to a time when DMs were sent as hand-written notes, scrawled onto napkins and slid into locker vents. When talking outside of school meant talking on the telephone and hoping no one in your house “picked up” and embarrassed you. When trolls had names and faces and sat beside you in home room. When making a connection required the courage to show up, speak up, and open up… just as you are.
New chapters of Annie and Merrick’s story will post every Wednesday morning.
Dive in anytime or join the journey from page one.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Drake was already in the principal’s office when I got there. He wasn’t wearing the brace anymore, so he looked a little less… abused. But it was still hard to look at him. For a lot of reasons.
“Here,” he said, handing me a folded piece of notebook paper.
I considered taking the time to read what he wrote, but I honestly didn’t care. I just wanted our punishment to end. I took out a pen and unfolded the paper on the edge of the desk. My eyes went to the bottom of the page and found where he’d signed his name. I signed mine next to it. Before I folded the page back up, I spied the last lines without meaning to.
I cleared my throat and mumbled something like a thank you to him for doing the work of writing it. Principal Rehner strode in and stood in front of us with her hands on her hips. I handed her the paper and we sat in silence while she read it to herself. She sighed and crossed behind her desk to sit down.
She looked at Drake and then at me, holding my gaze a tad longer than his, and then she waved us out. We almost bumped into each other as we stood up and tried to make for the door at the same time.
“Sorry,” he said. “Go ahead.”
My cheeks burned at his politeness. I would have thought it was put on, but there was something in his voice that told me it wasn’t. It sounded like he’d given up. On being a jerk? I don’t know. He just sounded tired. And defeated. Sad even.
I’d reminded Danielle on the bus ride to school that she’d promised to put an end to the rape rumors about Drake. But even if she had made the effort, it didn’t changed anyone’s mind. They’d already decided to make Drake’s last days of school hell.
At lunch I saw him sitting by himself in the cafeteria. Danielle was sitting with everyone else at another table. She caught my eye and gave me a look that said, “Sorry. I tried.”
She waved me over to join them, but I turned away, pretending I didn’t see. I headed up the stage steps and behind the curtain. Whatever. She tried. People had obviously gotten fed up with Drake and now he was paying the price for being an asshole his entire life. Even if he didn’t do anything to Danielle, he still pushed Merrick over the edge and got him sent away from me. Drake deserved what he was getting, and I wasn’t about to waste any more time feeling like any of it was my fault.
I pushed through the stage door and blinked into the noon sun. I unpacked my lunch but none of it appealed to me. I put everything back except for the granny smith apple, which I turned over in my hands, rubbing my thumb over the smooth skin as my mouth filled up with saliva at the mere thought of how tart it would be if I bit into it. But I didn’t. I only brought the apples because they reminded me of Merrick. I couldn’t wait to watch him eat an apple again. I just couldn’t wait anymore.
The sound of footsteps over gravel pulled me out of my daydream. My heart fell when I saw it wasn’t Merrick, called home early by my constant wishing.
I steadied myself and gritted my teeth against the impulse to run.
Or to punch him again.
He stopped about two yards away from me. I didn’t look up. A long time passed before he finally spoke.
“Is he going to be okay?” His voice was raspy. He cleared his throat.
“Eventually.”
“Good.”
“Is it good?” I challenged him. “Don’t you want him gone? Isn’t that why you did it?”
He shook his head. “No. That’s not what I want. And I did it because…” He tugged at his fingers to keep them from from shaking. “Maybe I can’t do this,” he said, flustered. “I just… tomorrow’s my last day. And I thought we should at least try to talk about it. Before you never see me again.”
“I think I’d rather jump to the part where I never see you again,” I said.
He went quiet, scuffing his shoes against the gravel distractedly.
“I don’t want you to think I’m trying to make excuses, for being the way I am or doing what I did,” he said. “If I tell you the reason, I’m not expecting you to look at me any differently. Or forgive me.”
“Well, you’re in luck,” I said bitterly. “Because there’s nothing you can say that’s ever going to change the way I see you. You’re a fucking asshole, Drake. You always have been, and you always will be. So go ahead and give me the reason you tortured Merrick for years and forced him to show everyone the part of himself that he hates the most. I promise I won’t forgive you.”
He stood there, in the wake of my honesty, contemplating his next move. I decided not to look at him in case he wanted to slink away and pretend he never came back here looking for me, and I could go back to holding on to my last good memory of him. The one of him curled up in a ball with his face bashed in.
He sat down a few stones away from me. I focused on his shoes because it was too hard to look at his face. Mostly because it was a reminder of what I was capable of doing to another person. And it turned my stomach.
“When we were younger,” he said tentatively, “it was just playground stuff. I was bigger than him back then, so I would knock him on his ass sometimes. Or make fun of his clothes. Call him a … queer. Just… ignorant bullshit.” He shook his head over the memory, as if it disturbed him. I wasn’t buying it.
“We were in sixth grade when his mom died. And it messed him up. I mean, of course it did. I tried to talk to him one day. To tell him I was sorry about what happened. I thought he might think it was nice of me, but he just got really mad. He told me he hated me. He started pushing me, and everyone was watching. I was embarrassed, so I hit him, really hard, in the stomach. It made him throw up. In front of everyone.” His hand fidgeting grew more intense and he seemed desperate to get further into the story. Like the details about his early cruelty toward Merrick were necessary, but he wanted to move past them.
“After that, it was like people only knew me as the guy who beat up Merrick Iverson. And if I wasn’t doing that, I wasn’t who they expected me to be.”
“Sounds like you were just a coward,” I said stiffly. “Who cares what other people expect you to be?” I said it like I didn’t understand what he meant. Even though I did.
“Because I couldn’t be who I really was?” he said, bringing his hands to his face. “They never would have let me.”
“Who wouldn’t?”
“The kids at school. My dad. Everyone.”
“Merrick might have let you,” I said. “If you hadn’t been such an asshole to him for so long.”
“I know that,” he said. “But it was too late. I knew he’d never accept me as a friend or… anything else. So, I just kept being his bully. It was the only way I could…”
He shook his head again. I could tell he was talking himself out of finishing the story. Of coming clean about whatever he was still holding back. I wasn’t going to let him off the hook. Part of me still wanted him to suffer.
“How did you know about Merrick’s scars?” I asked. “Even I didn’t know about his brother and what he did to him until you forced him to tell me. How did you know when no one else did?”
“In eighth grade, when we would change for gym class, he would always wait until everyone else had left the locker room. Always. We never once saw him change in front of us. And one day, I went back in after everyone had left.”
“Why would you do that?” I asked.
“Because…” he sighed, “I wanted to see him.” His cheeks reddened and my pulse kicked up. Penelope had teased Drake at the party. About being obsessed with Merrick. About feeling a certain way about him.
“It freaked me out,” he said. “I knew he was hurting himself. My older sister used to do that. Before she got help. I remember what it looked like. I knew what he was doing before his aunt did. Before she found him, and he got sent away. I should have told someone. I might have stopped it sooner, but I was afraid someone would find out I’d been spying on him in the locker room. And the rest of the scars… I didn’t know what they were from. It looked like he’d been stabbed or burned… something horrible.” He closed his eyes tightly over the image in his mind.
“It was horrible,” I said. “You have no idea.”
He sniffed and winced, bringing his hand to his damaged nose. Crying must have been painful for him. But he didn’t try to stop.
“I do,” he said. “Because he saw me. He panicked and he told me everything. And he made me swear I’d never tell anyone. I thought we might finally get past things and get to start over, because he was trusting me with his secret. But he said people wouldn’t understand why we were suddenly friends with each other, after I’d been so shitty to him for so long. He thought it would look suspicious. Like we were hiding something.”
“So, you’re saying he told you to keep bullying him?” I said incredulously.
“No. He told me to stay away from him. To ignore him. Act like he wasn’t even there.”
“So why didn’t you?”
He looked at me. His broken face was twisted with regret as tears started streaming down his face. “I just… couldn’t.”
My chest throbbed and I clamped my jaw to stop the rise of empathy in my throat.
“Even when we were younger,” he sobbed, “It was like a pull. I couldn’t stay away from him. And it scared me because what my brain was telling me I wanted just… wasn’t right. It was wrong. It had to be wrong. And the only way I could shut it off was to treat him like dirt. To push him down so low that I wouldn’t be able to stand being near him anymore.
“And when he came back this year, I thought I would be able to do what he asked. To ignore him. Just get on with my life. But the pull was still there. But now you were there, too. And I watched him every day in homeroom try to work up the guts to talk to you.” He rubbed his tears away roughly. “I was jealous,” he said. “I was stupid, fucking jealous of you.
“I tried to scare you. To make you think there was something wrong with him, so you’d stay away. I even fed Danielle a bunch of lies about him knowing she’d tell you. But it didn’t matter. Because you’d already seen for yourself that he’s not any of those things.”
I watched him cry into his hands as my heart pounded in my chest. I didn’t know what to say. Or what to think. It wasn’t impossible to imagine. That Drake actually wanted Merrick. The same way I did. No one at our school was openly gay, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there.
“Have you ever heard yourself say something to someone that just… makes you sick?” he asked. “Like you can taste how horrible it is, and you can’t believe it came out of your own mouth? But it did? And you can’t take it back?”
I swallowed hard and nodded, afraid of what my voice would sound like if I answered.
I didn’t like what my heart was doing. The longer I listened to Drake, the more I understood him. And I didn’t want to understand him. I wanted him to stay the jerk he always had been.
And that’s what everyone else wanted too. It was the reason he couldn’t be who he really was. Because they wouldn’t let him.
We wouldn’t let him.
“Does Merrick know?” I asked.
“I wrote him a few letters about it,” he sniffed. “I wrote them all left-handed so no one would recognize my handwriting. And I didn’t sign them. But I didn’t have to. I handed them to him myself in homeroom.”
He turned to me suddenly. “Annie, I promise I wasn’t trying to mess anything up between you. I swear. That’s not why I did it.”
“I know.”
“I just thought, if he knew one of my secrets, like I knew one of his, that it might fix things somehow. But that was stupid. It didn’t fix anything. It just fucked it up more.”
“Is that why you made him take his shirt off at the party?” I asked. “Just to, you know, completely fuck things up?” I smiled a little. I needed things to get less heavy. For both our sakes.
“No,” he said. “I just know how much better he is than me. And I thought if he could show people who he was and survive it… then maybe I could, too.”
“Well, he survived,” I said. “Barely.”
He lowered his head, ashamed.
“Well, when he comes back this time, I won’t be around to fuck anything up for you,” he said. “Either of you.”
“It’s definitely going to make sophomore year easier, not having you around,” I said. “But you’re not leaving because of us, are you?”
“No. But that would be enough of a reason. I’m leaving because my dad kicked me out.”
“For what?”
“For not being the son he raised me to be,” he said. “For wanting to be who I really am.”
“Your dad sounds like an asshole,” I said.
“Thanks. He is. But so am I.”
“That’s true.”
“And I was such a pig to Danielle,” he said, kicking the dirt. “I feel like shit about that.”
“Well, she did tell me it wasn’t all bad,” I said. “Please don’t ask me to elaborate.”
He smiled. “It wasn’t bad at all. I liked her. She gave me facials sometimes.”
I laughed and it felt strange. To be laughing with Drake Fletcher. Not punching him. Laughing with him.
“She used to give me facials,” I said. “Should I be jealous?”
“Nah. She told me. She talked about you a lot. I think she misses hanging out with you.” My chest tightened. I missed hanging out with her, too. “Maybe don’t tell her the truth about me,” he said. “It might be less shitty for her to think we broke up because I was a creep and not because she didn’t have a penis.”
I laughed again, but only after I saw a half smile on his face. “Got it,” I said.
He sighed heavily and his face turned sad again. “This is going to be really hard. What if I just end up being an asshole at my new school, too? What if that’s who I really am?”
I gritted my teeth. I didn’t want to say it. “It’s not.” Then I scrunched up my face like I was tasting something sour.
“Jesus, that was really hard for you to say.”
“Yep. Let’s move on,” I said dismissively. “Where are you going to live?”
“My oldest sister lives upstate. She’s still in college but she has her own apartment. I’m going to stay with her and finish high school there.”
“Okay,” I said. “So. That’s it then.”
“That’s it.”
We sat quietly as a warm breeze passed, sending bits of gravel swirling around our feet.
“I feel like I should punch you one more time for old time’s sake,” I said. I was mostly joking.
“That was the best thing you ever did,” he said. “I hope you don’t feel bad about it.”
“I don’t,” I lied.
“Good.”
An obnoxious swell of sadness filled my chest and my eyes started to prickle, threatening tears.
“Okay, it’s getting weird now. So, get lost,” I said.
“Okay,” he said, standing up and hesitating. Did he want a hug? That was a little much. “I’d say ‘see you later’, but that’s probably not going to happen.”
“Isn’t tomorrow your last day?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Okay. Then. See you later.”
His feet twisted in the gravel, and he walked back around the building and out of sight.
I was glad Drake was moving away. The truthful version of him intimidated me. It reminded me of everything my parents tried to tell me about other kids having it worse than me. Or bullies needing to prove something. Or that everyone has to face scary things, and that it’s their job to figure out how to survive those things.
Or that what people see on the outside isn’t everything.
I hated when my parents were right.
Drake had wasted a lot of time being an asshole. And I’d wasted a lot of time hiding behind my bad skin and lashing out at people I care about.
But it was our choice whether we kept wasting time, or started getting better.
I wanted to start getting better. For Merrick.
And I hoped Drake would get better, too. For… the next guy.
And the fact that we just had an actual conversation that didn’t end with him insulting me and me punching his lights out meant something.
Maybe we were getting better already.
I scan the dance floor until I find [REDACTED], dancing with [REDACTED]. Her heels are off, and she’s tilted her head down, eliminating what remains of their height disparity. Her forehead rests against his. She presses her lips over his eyebrow, and he smiles.
It hurts to watch them. It kills me, really. But I see something there. Something I never wanted to let myself see.
They do love each other.
Even if it’s not in the same enduringly patient way [REDACTED] loves [REDACTED], or the fire-starting way [REDACTED] loves [REDACTED], or the absurdly loyal way [REDACTED] loves every damn one of us. It’s there. Between them.
And it doesn’t matter how badly I want something with [REDACTED]. He’s right. We can’t be together if there’s something—or someone—between us. Because it wouldn’t be perfect.
And I’m not going to settle for less than perfect.
All the [REDACTED]s will be revealed.
February 9th, 2027
Pre-order now!!!
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Thank you for the surprise Sunday chapter. I love this book. A human story, with so much pain, but so much love.
nicely done!