29 | It's Not Weird to Say I Love You
Drake had drawn the scars from memory. And he didn’t miss a single one.
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.
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Chapter Twenty-Nine
“Merrick’s not coming home, Annie. I’m sorry.” Laura’s face is twisted with grief. She holds my hands in hers. “He’s gone.”
Why is she telling me this? It isn’t true. And why are we here, in the principal’s office at school? None of this makes sense.
I pull my hands away and bolt for the door. The knob is scalding, like the handle of a cast iron pan on the stove. I can’t get a grip on it without it burning my skin. But I’m desperate to get out. Something is happening.
The door flies open, and I stumble into the hallway. It doesn’t look right. The lockers are gone and it’s dark. Like it’s nighttime or there’s storm outside. I hear shouting coming from the cafeteria, but when I open the door I’m already on the stage. The shouting is coming from outside. I rush past Brad, seated sleepily at the cash out table. He doesn’t look up.
Outside, I find the crowd of people. Screaming. Cheering. I push through the mob of faceless classmates until I see what’s bringing them so much happiness.
Drake is curled up on the gravel, his face bloody. He’s crying. Travis won’t stop. He kicks him. Spits on him. Screams something at him I can’t understand.
I beg for him to stop, but he won’t. I force my way into the circle and grab Travis’s arm but another arm hooks around my waist and pulls me back through the crowd. My feet land on the ground and I look up into Brad’s face.
“It’s okay, Annie,” he says. “He deserves it.”
My heart is racing, and I try to run back to the crowd. Brad grabs my shoulders and pins me to the wall. “He deserves it,” he says again.
“No, he doesn’t!” I scream. “No one deserves this! You need to stop them! STOP THEM!”
“Annie.”
“Stop hurting him. Stop!”
“Annie, wake up, Lovey.”
“STOP IT!”
“Annie.” Mom’s hands cupped my face, and I opened my eyes to find her leaning over me in my bed. “You were having a nightmare. Are you okay?”
I was drenched in sweat and the room was spinning. My breath was ragged, and I could taste salt.
“Merrick,” I choked out. “Is he… is he gone?” My stomach lurched at the foggy memory of Laura in the principal’s office. No. Not a memory. A dream. It was a dream.
“No, Lovey. He’s okay. I promise.” Mom stroked my hair and kissed my sweaty forehead. “It was just a dream.”
I breathed deeply to center myself back in reality. My head was pounding, and I worried I’d finally caught the flu I’d been wishing for. I prayed that I hadn’t. I needed to go to school to make sure Drake was okay.
Oh my god.
What was happening to me?
I was still feeling shaky on the bus ride to school. I should have stayed home. But I couldn’t. Not today. I had to be there. I willed whatever illness was creeping over me to wait for seven more hours. Then I promised I would relent.
I defaulted to autopilot when I arrived at school, heading directly for the principal’s office instead of homeroom. When I bumped into Laura coming out of the office my heart fell straight through the floor. I was living my nightmare.
“Hey, Annie,” she smiled. “Are you okay?”
“Is he okay?” I stammered. “He’s… still coming home?” My voice caught in my throat and the tears in my eyes were so hot, I knew I must be running a fever.
“Of course, he is,” she said. “I just came to pick up some schoolwork for him, so he doesn’t fall behind.” She looked at me puzzled. “Why would you think he wasn’t coming home?”
“I had a bad dream,” I said like a little kid complaining to her parents in the middle of the night.
Laura wrapped me in a hug. “I’ve been having those, too,” she said. “Geeze, Annie, you’re burning up. Should you be at school today?”
“Maybe not,” I said. “I just need to take care of something. Then I’ll probably call my mom to come get me.”
“Are you sure it can’t wait?” she asked. I was really happy to see her. I’d missed hanging out at her house. At his house.
I shook my head. “Can I babysit this weekend?” I asked randomly.
She laughed. “Sure, as long as you don’t still have whatever plague you’re fighting right now. Here.” She reached in her purse and pulled out a bottle of Tylenol. “Take these. It’ll help bring your fever down long enough to take care of whatever important thing you have to do. Then I want you home and in bed, please.”
I took the two pills she offered with a swig of water from the fountain outside the main office.
Laura gave me another hug and it made me sleepy. “He misses you,” she said softly. “A lot. He’s doing really well, and he’ll be home before you know it.”
It all sounded so beautiful to me in my fever haze. I just wanted to stay in her arms and listen to her tell me what I wanted to hear for the next several hours. But she had to go to work. And I had to find Drake.
By the time I got to homeroom, the first period bell had already rung, and Drake was nowhere to be seen. Why hadn’t I memorized his class schedule like I had Merrick’s? That would have been useful.
I was grateful for the boost of clarity the Tylenol gave me. It kicked in about halfway through algebra. I asked Danielle if she’d seen Drake that day. She said no, which worried me. But only a little. When they were dating, they found ways to see each other constantly between classes. But now Danielle rarely saw Drake before lunch, so maybe they just hadn’t crossed paths in the hallway yet that day.
When I didn’t see Drake in the cafeteria, I started to panic. I went outside in case he’d wandered back there again. Looking for me. Or just looking for a place to hide. But the spot was empty. Out of desperation, I stopped by the main office to determine if he was absent from school. He wasn’t.
I started wandering the halls for him, hoping that didn’t lead to me investigating boy’s bathrooms (which I vowed never to do again). Luckily, I spotted him about halfway through the lunch period. He was alone in the hall, cleaning out his locker. It made sense. It was his last day.
He glanced over when he heard me approach.
“Come to punch me goodbye,” he said with a half-smile.
“Something like that,” I said. “Can I help you clean out your locker?” My eyes fell onto the contents of the trash can he’d been filling up with extraneous papers, empty soda bottles, and broken pencils. A hot pink post-it note lay on top of the pile. “FUCK YOU, RAPIST” it said. It wasn’t the only note I saw discarded in the trash. There were several. In various handwriting. On different types of paper. But they all had the same message.
We hate you.
“You can take the covers off my textbooks if you want,” he said. “And just flip through them and make sure I didn’t leave a winning lottery ticket in there.”
“Okay,” I said, feeling shaky but not from my fever.
Drake was shuffling through a stack of old assignments on the floor next to the trash can. I stepped in front of his locker to retrieve his textbooks. I almost jumped when I saw my reflection in the mirror he had affixed to the back wall of the locker. I reached in and pulled it down, revealing the word “FAGGOT” in thick, black marker. My throat tightened and I clenched my teeth over a wave of disgust. I put the mirror back where it was. Maybe Drake would just leave it there and wouldn’t see what was behind it. More likely, he’d put it there to cover the word himself. Nightmare Brad’s words crept into my head as I stared at myself in the mirror. “He deserves it.”
I shook the words out of my head and pulled out the textbooks. I sat down on the floor a few feet from Drake. His face was looking better. His eyes were still darkened with bruises, but his nose looked almost the same shape it was before I broke it. It was a very strange time to start appreciating Drake’s good looks, but I was stricken with fever, and nothing was making much sense.
Drake drew a lot on his book covers. It wasn’t just ‘school sucks’ propaganda and band names in block lettering. He actually drew pictures of things. Like chairs and trees and musical instruments. He drew people, too. Faces. I didn’t recognize any of them as people at school. They were kind of fuzzy. Drawn in pencil mostly with the edges smudged. But they were really detailed. I did see one that could have been Danielle. The eyes were just like hers. Wide and bright.
I peeled each cover off slowly and tossed it in the trash can, half wondering if he might want to keep them because of all the artwork he’d done. But he didn’t say anything when he saw me toss them.
The bell rang and I jumped.
“Thanks for your help,” he said without looking up. “I’m just going to finish up. You should get to biology.”
I tucked my feet in as a wave of students passed us on their way to class. More than a few of them glared down at Drake with spite in their eyes.
“I’ll stay,” I said.
He looked up at me. “Really? Why?”
A passerby kicked his foot out as he passed, knocking the trashcan over and spilling its contents onto the floor in front of Drake. I stood up so fast I got lightheaded.
“HEY! WATCH IT!” I shouted down the hall at him.
I slumped onto the floor and leaned back against the lockers, my head slowly catching up with my body.
“Assholes,” I said.
“There’s a lot of us out there,” Drake said, righting the trash can and redisposing of the hateful messages that had collected in his locker.
The bustle of students slowed to a shuffle and then the quiet returned.
I started flipping through each textbook, stopping a few times to pull out a sheet of notes or a gum wrapper. Our biology book was huge. Not the little dissection guide we’d worked with for the past few weeks, but the big hardcover one. I’d thumbed through about half of it when it fell open to a full-page drawing.
It took me less than half a second to recognize who it was of.
It was Merrick.
And it was really good.
Drake had drawn his profile perfectly, down to his long eyelashes. The picture was of Merrick sitting at a desk. Maybe his homeroom desk. He was looking straight ahead with his elbows resting on the desktop. The most striking part of the image was not how much detail Drake had put into Merrick’s face, but how perfectly he’d recreated the scars on his right forearm. In the picture, Merrick was wearing short sleeves. Something he’d never done in school. Which meant Drake had drawn the scars from memory. And he didn’t miss a single one.
“Can I have this?” My voice was timid, perhaps because it didn’t have my brain’s permission to speak.
Drake looked up and his eyes widened. “Oh… I… where did you get that?” His cheeks were pink, and he looked ashamed, like I’d walked in on him naked.
“In your biology book,” I said, handing it over to him. He took it and ran his eyes over it. The shame in his face turned to something else. I wasn’t sure what it was. But it looked like it hurt.
“I don’t think it’s wrong,” I said suddenly.
“Don’t think what’s wrong?”
“What your mind told you. About what you want. You shouldn’t feel bad about it. And anyone who makes you feel bad about it is wrong to do that. But it’s not wrong to care about somebody. Even if it seems like it’s breaking the rules.”
Drake’s eyes said thank you to me in a way his mouth couldn’t. I stuck my foot out and tapped it against his. He tapped back so gently I could barely feel it. But it was there.
“I shouldn’t have pushed him so hard,” he said quietly. “It’s my fault he’s gone. You can have it.” He passed the paper back to me, watching the drawing until it had left his hand and I’d collected it in mine.
“It’s really good,” I said. “And it wasn’t all your fault. I pushed him, too.”
“You?” he asked. “What did you do to him that was worse than what I did?”
“I told him I wished he’d never talked to me,” I confessed. “That I would be better off if we never became friends. And I accused him of only wanting to hang out with me because I’m ugly and that made him feel better about himself.”
“Jesus,” Drake said, surprised by my admission. “What made you say that to him?”
“He wouldn’t kiss me,” I said, half laughing at how ridiculous it was.
Drake put his hand over his face to hide his smirk. “And I thought Danielle was pushy about that stuff. If all you want is for somebody to kiss you, I’ll do it.”
My already hot cheeks grew hotter. “No thanks,” I said, forcing myself to forget everything Danielle had told me about what a good kisser Drake was. “But thanks-” I pressed the picture of Merrick to my chest. “For this. I don’t have any pictures of him yet. And I miss seeing him. It’s a really good picture.”
The Tylenol was wearing off.
“Thanks,” he said, putting his attention back on the pile of papers in his lap.
“I’ll trade you for it,” I said, suddenly remembering the reason I needed to come to school today. I reached into my bag and pulled out the mason jar, still slightly cold from the fridge. I set it down next to him.
“What is this?” He held it in front of his face, trying to identify the contents. “Poison?”
I laughed. “No, it’s goop.”
“It’s what?”
“Goop,” I giggled deliriously. “Merrick makes it. It’s for your skin. Like a facial. You’ll like it. Trust me.”
He looked at me suspiciously. He unscrewed the lid and held it up to his face. My stomach fluttered with anticipation.
“It smells like…” He looked at me for confirmation.
“I know,” I said. “That’s the best part.”
He blushed and lowered his eyes, securing the lid back on the jar.
“Why are you being so nice to me?” he asked.
“Honestly?” I said. “Because I had a fever dream that Merrick died, and you got your ass kicked by the entire school.”
“Oh,” he said, chuckling. “I’ll take what I can get, I guess. Even if I don’t deserve it.”
“That’s what’s so messed up about this, though. Everyone deserves to have people be nice to them. And no one deserves to be treated like shit. But we can’t stop treating each other like shit. Unless we just… stop.”
“Yeah,” he said. “You’re right.”
“You shouldn’t have made fun of me,” I said, tears pooling in my eyes. “About my skin. It’s not my fault. And it really hurt my feelings when you did it.”
His brow furrowed and he looked away. “I know. I’m sorry.”
“And you shouldn’t have made a joke of Merrick hurting himself. That’s really sick, Drake. You’re just lucky he’s as strong as he is because if he wasn’t… what if he had…” The lump in my throat choked out the rest of my words, but they’d made their impression. Drake’s eyes were wet, and his lips pressed together. He nodded to tell me he understood. “You can do better,” I said. “So just… be better now. Okay?”
“Okay.”
I leaned my head back and closed my eyes. The fever had reached its peak and my mind was drifting. I would have fallen asleep against the locker if I hadn’t kept on talking.
“Don’t you ever think about how different everything could have been if you had just been nice to Merrick from the beginning?”
“I think about that all the time,” he said. “I don’t think you’d be happy with how things turned out, though.”
“Why not?”
“Because if I’d been nice to him from the beginning, he would have fallen madly in love with me, and you’d be the jealous one.”
I laughed. “I’m too sick to process what you just said to me. But it’s okay. We’re okay. I think. And if we’re not. We will be.”
He suddenly dumped the entire pile of papers he’d been sifting through into the trash can. The sound jolted me out of my haze. He stood up and held his hand out to me.
It took a lot of energy to lift mine up to meet it.
“I need to walk you to the nurse,” he said. “You look like you’re about to barf on me.”
He kept his hand on my elbow as he led me to the nurse’s office. I blearily hoped people saw him being nice to me. Maybe they’d give him a break for the rest of his last day.
“Okay,” I mumbled as we reached the office door. “You’re not the worst person in the world to me anymore.”
“Thanks.” He laughed at my fever compliment. “You aren’t either. But you never were.”
“See you later,” I said, forgetting that I would never see him again.
“Yeah. See you.”
I considered hugging him. But it was a slow consideration and by the time I’d reached a decision he was already too far away. I slogged into the nurse’s office, laid down on the paper covered cot, and let the flu take me.
For our firsts, our forevers, and all the good ones in between.
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Annie is a good apple, but more Pink Lady than Granny Smith. She's sweet, firm & crunchy, with just a hint of tartness.
Loved this chapter.