Free Say Something by Jennifer Brown Page B

wasn’t even thinking when I jumped in between Nick and Jessica. It’s certainly not like I thought, “Here’s my chance to save the girl who used to laugh at me and call me Sister Death, and get myself shot in the process.” By all accounts it was a heroic thing to do, but in my case… well, nobody was really sure.
    I refused to go to the ceremony. Told Mom my leg was hurting too much and I needed some sleep and besides, it was a stupid idea anyway. It was just like the school, I told her, to do something totally lame like that. I wouldn’t go to something so dumb if you paid me, I said.
    But the truth was I was scared of going to the ceremony. I was scared of facing all those people. Afraid they’d all believed everything they’d read about me in the newspaper and seen about me on TV, that I’d been a murderer. That I’d see it in their eyes—
You should’ve committed suicide just like him
—even if they didn’t say it out loud. Or worse, that they’d make me out to be someone brave and selfless, which would only make me feel more awful than I already did, given that it was my boyfriend who killed all those kids and apparently I made him think I wanted them dead too. Not to mention I was the idiot who had no idea that the guy I loved was going to shoot up the school, even though he basically told me so, like, every day. But every time I opened my mouth to tell Mom those things, all that came out was
It’s so lame. I wouldn’t go to something so dumb if you paid me.
Guess old habits die hard for everyone.
    Mr. Angerson, the principal, ended up coming to our house that night instead. He sat at my kitchen table and talked to my mom about… I don’t know—God, destiny, trauma, whatever. Waiting around, I’m sure, for me to come out of my room and smile and tell him how proud I was of my school and how I was more than happy to serve as a human sacrifice for Miss Perfect Jessica Campbell. Maybe he was waiting for me to apologize, too. Which I would do if I could figure out how. But so far I hadn’t come up with words big enough for something this hard.
    When Mr. Angerson was in the kitchen waiting for me I turned up my music and crawled deeper in my sheets and let him sit there. I never came out, not even when my mom started pounding on the door, begging in “company-voice” for me to be polite and come downstairs.
    “Valerie, please!” she hissed, opening the door a crack and poking her head into my room.
    I didn’t answer. I pulled the sheets over my head instead. It’s not that I didn’t want to do it; it’s that I just couldn’t. But Mom would never understand that. The way she saw it, the more people who “forgave” me, the less I had to feel guilty about. The way I saw it… it was just the opposite.
    After a while I saw headlights reflecting off my bedroom window. I sat up and looked into the driveway. Mr. Angerson was pulling away. A few minutes later, Mom knocked on my door again.
    “What?” I said.
    She opened the door and came in, looking all tentative like a baby deer or something. Her face was all red and splotchy and her nose was seriously plugged up. She was holding this dorky medal in her hand, along with a letter of “thanks” from the school district.
    “They don’t blame you,” she said. “They want you to know that. They want you to come back. They’re very appreciative of what you did.” She shoved the medal and letter into my hands. I glanced at the letter and noticed that only about ten teachers had signed it. Noticed that, of course, Mr. Kline wasn’t one of them. For about the millionth time since the shooting, I felt an enormous pang of guilt: Kline was exactly the kind of teacher who would’ve signed that letter, but he couldn’t because he was dead.
    We stared at each other for a minute. I knew my mom was looking for some sort of gratitude from me. Some sense that if the school was moving on, maybe I could, too. Maybe we all could.
    “Um, yeah, Mom,” I