“Stevie,” Reg says, “don’t be mad at your mom. It’s my fault.” He shares a look with Mom like eek, sorry! but she dismisses it with a slight shake of her head. “I’ll just go, girls, seriously.”

“No! No, Reg. She’s fine. She’s just acting spoiled,” Mom says, and that is it.

I walk right out of the family room, pulling a stupid print of a girl on a swing off the wall as I go. It crashes to the carpet, and I hear the glass break.

“What the—? Stevie!” Mom yells.

I slam the front door behind me.

There are bees in my ears, and they are buzzing around, and I’m afraid they’re going to take over my brain. I am out of the house and walking down the street now, feeling like I’m dreaming. My face is wet, and I realize I’m crying. When I snap out of it, I see that I have walked to school, through the smokers’ alley, which is covered in graffiti, and am standing outside the football field, hanging on to the chain-link fence, the metal making red grooves in my skin. The only thing that calms me down is planning. The only thing that makes me feel a pulse is action. Everything that we’ve been doing here, in this gladiator stadium of learning, is making me feel alive, seen, when everything else makes me disappear.

Chapter 19

19

Antar still isn’t really talking to me, but even if he is mad, other people have been inspired. Suddenly lots of others are in on the revenge action. It has caught on, the vengeance bug. There are more people, more acts of—as the administration calls them—“mischief,” over the next two weeks. It’s surprising and unsettling and I’m not even sure what to make of it, because we didn’t plan this, me and Dee, and don’t even know who’s doing what now. Things are happening outside our control and the LOVE, HEATHER stunts have taken on a life of their own. Random acts of retribution by people we don’t know. I’m watching; things at Woepine High have taken a turn. The stakes have been raised. It’s a movement. It’s a revolution. It’s verging on chaos.

A senior, who is a known MRA misogynist, has eyes—real eyes, like from a cow or something—left in his bag, with WOMEN ARE WATCHING YOU. LOVE, HEATHER written in red on a note inside. One of his friends pulls it out and reads it out loud while he keeps screaming, “What the fuck? What the fuck?” over and over and shaking his hands. It’s a real Godfather horse-head-in-the-bed moment.

“Where’d they get the eyes?” I ask Dee on the way to class, and she shakes her head in gleeful disbelief while the boy’s screams echo down the hallway.