Furious - By Jill Wolfson Page 0,2

is music playing? My mind latches on to the individual notes, a series of them that rise and fall in an eerie, whistling way. I don’t know this song.

But then, I do know it. I do! I don’t want it to ever go away.

Under the music, someone is laughing. And then someone else is shouting the word hate.

Hate! Hate! Hate!

A hand cups my shoulder, but I push it aside. There’s so much power surging through me. Someone is pulling on the hem of my shirt. I slap at it.

“Meg!” Pause. “Meg!”

I hear a bell then, loud and sharp, and I tremble with a jolt, as if waking suddenly out of a dream when you have a 103-degree fever. The music is gone. An empty silence has taken over. Reluctantly, I blink open my eyes.

I’m standing.

Not standing on the ground like your average, normal person, but standing on my chair.

In the middle of class. With my neck muscles straining and a layer of sweat on my forehead. And my throat dry and raw. And my fists clenched in tight balls at my side.

Ms. Pallas, directly in front of me, slams her ruler on my desk, and I feel the vibration ripple up through the bottom of my feet to my head. My brain feels like it’s been punched in the gut.

It all becomes clear then, too clear, and the word humiliation doesn’t begin to cover it.

It had been Raymond tugging on my shirt, calling my name. The bell was the end of class. And I was the one standing on my chair shouting, “Hate! Hate! Hate! I hate all of you.”

2

“Meg-o-mania, what the hell was that about?”

That’s what Raymond wants to know, and I can’t blame him for pouncing on me as soon as I leave the classroom. While I was getting a stern talking-to from Ms. Pallas and promising her that an outburst like that will never happen again, and that I completely understand how Hunter High is a hate-free zone, and that words have consequences, and that shouting in class is definitely on the school’s list of no-nos, and that in her class especially she won’t tolerate that kind of ugly talk, Raymond waited patiently for me in the hallway. His long, thin body is slouched against a locker. I’m so happy and relieved to see him. I give him a sheepish smile and a weak shrug.

“Just a warning,” I say.

He lets out a low whistle of relief. “Lucky. Pallas doesn’t usually suffer from Pushover Teacher Syndrome. I figured you’d pull detention for that spontaneous outburst of misanthropy.”

Classic Raymond vocabulary. According to Hunter High mythology, my best friend started talking in complete sentences when he was six months old and hasn’t shut up since. That’s not his only achievement. He’s a whiz in math. He skipped fourth grade. He plays first violin in the school orchestra and composes his own music. Plus, he can speak pig Latin in Latin. He’s by far the youngest, smartest, most accomplished person in our class, but also kind of an idiot.

His most recent form of self-amusement is saying things like “What I lack in maturity, I make up for in infantile behavior,” followed by his enormous high-pitched laugh.

The truth is—and I’m not talking behind his back because Raymond would admit it himself—he drives most people up a wall. It’s not polite to say this, and maybe my thinking it makes me an awful person, but I’m actually grateful that Raymond is so irritating. Otherwise he might not have been so desperate to have me as a friend when I met him three years ago. On the surface, I know that our friendship doesn’t make much sense—the ethnically ambiguous, awkward girl who loves BLT sandwiches and happy romantic comedies who is inseparable from the big-brain gay kid who’s a vegetarian and obsessed with horror films—the older the better, especially the campy black-and-white ones from the 1960s.

But it comes down to this: he and I click in a way that we’ve never clicked with anyone else before. We can tell each other anything. To Raymond, I’m not some shy dork who, when she does speak, always manages to say the wrong thing. I’m—get this!—smart, tolerant, funny, a deep thinker, a survivor, and a closet optimist.

And I think that he’s the most unique person on the planet.

“Let’s get out of here,” I say. I glance around nervously to see who might have heard about my Western Civ breakdown. There’s only a couple of freshmen hurrying to