Hate List by Jennifer Brown Page A

said. My dad’s. That one was easy. The voice was tense, strained, terse. Just like Dad.
     He popped into my imaginary scene as well, in the background, floating out of view. He was tapping something into his PDA
     and he had a cell phone between his ear and his shoulder. He popped out just as quickly and it was just Frankie looking at
     me again.
    “Val,” Frankie said. “Hey, Val. You awake?”
    The vision morphed into a morning in my bedroom. Frankie trying to wake me up to do something fun, like in the old days when
     Mom and Dad got along and we were just two little kids. Find our Easter baskets, maybe, or a Christmas present, or pancakes.
     I liked this place. I really did. So I have no idea why my eyes fluttered open again. They did it without my consent.
    They opened onto Frankie, standing at the end of my bed, by my toes. Only it wasn’t my bed, but a strange one with crisp,
     scratchy white sheets and a brown blanket that looked like oatmeal. His hair was completely limp and I had a minute of trying
     to clear my head because I honestly couldn’t remember the last time I saw Frankie with limp hair. I had a hard time matching
     the fourteen-year-old Frankie face to the eleven-year-old Frankie hair. I had to blink several times before I could make sense
     of it.
    “Frankie,” I said, but before I could say anything else my attention was distracted to a wet sort of sniffling to my right.
     I turned my head slowly. My mom was there, sitting in a pink upholstered chair. Her legs were crossed at the knees and she
     had one elbow propped on top of them. In that hand she held a crumpled-up tissue she kept using to dab her nose.
    I squinted at her. I somehow wasn’t surprised that she was crying, because I knew that whatever the bad thing was that had
     happened, I was involved in it—even though I hadn’t yet put together why I was waking up in what was beginning to look like
     a hospital bed rather than in my own bed waiting for Nick to call.
    I reached out and placed my hand on Mom’s wrist (the one holding the snotty tissue). “Mom,” I whispered. My throat hurt. “Mom,”
     I said again.
    But she leaned away from me. Not jerked away—it was way too subtle of a movement to be considered a jerk. But more leaned
     away, out of my grasp. Leaned away, like she was physically separating herself from me. Leaned away, not like I was to be
     feared, but like she no longer wanted to be identified with me at all.
    “You’re awake,” she said. “How do you feel?”
    I looked down at myself and wondered why I wouldn’t feel okay. I checked myself out and everything seemed to be there, including
     several wires that weren’t normally a part of my body. I still wasn’t sure why I was there, but I knew it had to be something
     I was going to live through. I’d somehow hurt my leg—that much I could glean from the dull throbbing under the sheet. Yet
     the leg still seemed to be there, so I knew there wasn’t too much to be worried about.
    “Mom,” I said one more time, wishing I could think of something else to say. Something more important. My throat was achy
     and felt swollen. I tried clearing it, but found it was dry, too, and all I could do was make a squeaky little noise that
     did nothing to help it. “What happened?”
    A nurse in pink scrubs fluttering around behind Mom moved to a little table and picked up a plastic cup with a straw hanging
     over the side of it. She handed it to Mom. Mom held it, looked at it like she’d never seen such a contraption before, and
     then looked over her shoulder at one of the police officers, who had turned away from the TV and was staring down at me, his
     fingers hooked into his belt.
    “You were shot,” the officer said plainly from over Mom’s shoulder and I saw Mom kind of wince when he said it, although she
     was still facing him, not me, and I couldn’t see her face exactly. “Nick Levil shot you.”
    I frowned. Nick Levil shot me. “But that’s my