Hate List

Chapter 2 opens with a news story about a victim, Christy Bruter, Nick’s first target the day of the shooting. Nick reveals the list when he taps Christy on the shoulder that day, saying, “You’ve been on the list for a really long time” (34). Again, this news article ties in with the content of the chapter as it introduces a key character, a bully who becomes a victim the day of the shooting. That morning, on the bus, Christy had purposefully pushed Valerie, causing Valerie to drop and break her phone. As Valerie exited the bus, she exclaimed to her friend, Stacey, “I want to kill her” (60). These turn out to be damning words when the police try to make a case against Valerie.

After the flashback, Valerie reminisces about the secret world she shared with Nick, given her troubled life: “Sometimes, in my world where parents hated one another and school was a battleground, it sucked to be me. Nick had been my escape” (36). To Valerie, he is a hero against the evils of the world, though he is evil in the eyes of everyone at Garvin High. As a result, Valerie cannot publicly mourn Nick.

Valerie’s mother drops her off at school on her first day back. Valerie feels at a loss for where to go on school grounds. She spies her former friends, the outsiders, and sees her former best friend, Stacey, talking to Nick’s best friend: “Stacey was laughing at something Duce had said, and I felt more like an outsider than ever” (38). She receives a particularly cool welcome from Nick’s best friend, Duce, who seems angry that Valerie has not been to Nick’s grave yet. Stacey distances herself as well, and Valerie muses about the social ambiguity, thinking, “If I’m guilty by virtue of loving Nick, would she be guilty by loving me? Being my friend would be a tough risk to take—social suicide for anyone at Garvin. And Stacey would no way be strong enough to take that risk” (41). The old gang leaves Valerie in a wake of students, where she notes, “I stood on the sidewalk, feeling marooned with the strange tide of kids moving around me, shoving me backward and forward with their motion, but never breaking me loose into the sea itself” (42-43). Valerie, surrounded by other students, remains still, unsure if she should move backward or forward.

Mrs. Tate, the guidance counselor, comes along, whisking the aimless Valerie away to her office. Valerie notices a security presence on the campus: “A police officer stood at the door, waving a wand over students’ backpacks and jackets” (43). She notices metal detectors as well, new since the shooting. In addition, Mrs. Tate escorts Valerie through the Commons, which normally would be full of students congregating and gossiping before first period; now there’s a memorial in the corner and a only a few kids here and there.

Mrs. Tate brings up Valerie’s prior college-search process, as if the shooting had not occurred; Valerie interrupts her to say she no longer wants to go to college, which Mrs. Tate immediately attributes to Nick and the shooting. Mrs. Tate argues Valerie has a future, unlike Nick, who spent many unhappy days in her office, in trouble or dealing with trouble at home. As she talks, Valerie slips in a reverie about Nick, when Nick rescued her from her home after a particularly brutal fight between her parents. That night, he emphasized that he and Valerie think alike; she begins to wonder if that is true. She interrupts Mrs. Tate’s present characterization of Nick; Valerie is tired of trying to reconcile the Nick she knows with the Nick other people describe. She grows weary of trying to discern the difference between herself and Nick: the girl who created the hate list and the boy who acted on it. She says to Mrs. Tate: “And now my future doesn’t have college in it. My future is about being known around the world as The Girl Who Hates Everyone. That is what the newspapers called me—The Girl Who Hates Everyone” (50).

Chapter 2 ends with a flashback to the day of the shooting. On the bus ride to school, Valerie, curled up in the fetal position, anticipates an attack from Christy Bruter. Valerie explains their long history, from Christy calling her “Bucky Beaver” in elementary school, to spreading rumors about her in middle school, to giving Valerie her penultimate nickname “Sister Death” in high school. And then it comes: Christy grabs Valerie, forcing her to drop and break her phone. In response, Valerie threatens Christy, saying she will pay for this, but Christy and her friends laugh it off. Later, when Nick arrives at school in a big black coat, he tells Valerie he will take care of Christy Bruter, which elates Valerie. Playing into her hero image of Nick, she thinks, right before he opens fire on their classmates, “For right now anyway, Nick was here with me, holding me, going to stand up for me” (62). And, as in Chapter 1, the chapter ends with a cool breeze washing over Valerie as she and Nick enter The Commons together on the morning of May 2, 2008, directly before Nick begins searching for Christy Bruter, the first victim in his killing spree.