151 Days Read online

  Readers Love

  Tales from Foster High

  by John Goode

  End of the Innocence

  “This book pretty much made the entire series WORTH it. It elevated it to something… important. And John Goode did some amazing stuff here.”

  —Boys in Our Books

  “All in all, you have to read this novel. Its twists and turns will leave you wanting more.”

  —MM Good Book Reviews

  Tales from Foster High

  “Class is over. Crack a book. Trust me as I trusted Mr. Webb. This story is amazing.”

  —Mrs. Condit and Friends Read Books

  Dear God

  “…twenty incredibly short pages that packed more meaning and more sense into them than the last two HUNDRED page novel I read.”

  —The Novel Approach

  By JOHN GOODE

  NOVELS

  Tales from Foster High

  End of the Innocence

  151 Days

  LORDS OF ARCADIA SERIES

  Distant Rumblings

  Eye of the Storm

  SHORT FICTION

  To Wish for Impossible Things

  Dear God

  Published by HARMONY INK PRESS

  http://www.harmonyinkpress.com

  COPYRIGHT

  Published by

  Harmony Ink Press

  5032 Capital Circle SW

  Suite 2, PMB# 279

  Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886

  USA

  [email protected]

  http://harmonyinkpress.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of author imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  151 Days

  © 2014 John Goode.

  Cover Art

  © 2014 Paul Richmond.

  http://www.paulrichmondstudio.com

  Cover content is for illustrative purposes only and any person depicted on the cover is a model.

  All rights reserved. This book is licensed to the original purchaser only. Duplication or distribution via any means is illegal and a violation of international copyright law, subject to criminal prosecution and upon conviction, fines, and/or imprisonment. Any eBook format cannot be legally loaned or given to others. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Harmony Ink Press, 5032 Capital Circle SW, Suite 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886, USA, or [email protected].

  ISBN: 978-1-62798-747-9

  Library ISBN: 978-1-62798-651-9

  Digital ISBN: 978-1-62798-748-6

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Edition

  March 2014

  Library Edition

  June 2014

  To Gayle, without whose tireless help the book would end up

  sounding like an idiot wrote it. I am not saying an idiot didn’t write it;

  I am saying she makes it so it isn’t that obvious.

  To Sue for making me realize that my words meant something.

  To Sammy, who was my first fan and will always be my friend.

  To Robbie, whose very presence makes life more interesting.

  To Gina, who knows everything I want to say right now.

  And to everyone else out there I’ve never met

  who found a small part of themselves in Foster.

  Without you, these are only words.

  With you, it is a place where we are always welcome.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book is dedicated to Yamil, Yuki, Emma, Amy, Gwendolyn, R.J., Dan, Jacob, Gwengwel, Melora, Trisha, Morgana, Maria, Jerry, Jules, Ami, Daisy, Michael, Tina, Anya, Huston, Brian, Diane, Bernard, Laura, John, Charneen, Kim, Didi, Lorraine, Donice, Natalie, Amie, Yuki, Nadine, Sadonna, Cris, Vicki, Phil, Madison, Christina, Laura, Max, Jana, Kaje, Tanya, John, Scarlett, Fiona, Christopher, and everyone else out there who read the first books, left feedback, and made this one possible. Without you, Foster is just a name in my mind.

  KYLE

  CHANGE IS a bitch.

  I am using the term here to mean a difficult task and not a derogatory name for women or the scientific term for a female dog, just in case there are any who might take offense to the word. Change is a bitch, and that’s because it isn’t always easy to know it when it happens. I mean, sure, sometimes it’s obvious. I go over to Brad’s and end up kissing him, and my whole world turns upside down. Hard to miss that change. I decide to tell the world I like guys. Colossal change that is still affecting crap today. Kelly shoots himself. A change that brings the town to a standstill like an earthquake, and the aftershocks of it keep coming and coming.

  Take race discrimination. After being considered property for far too long, African Americans were finally considered free people in the United States. That was a big change. But what went unnoticed, or at least unspoken, was the way people changed because of that decision. Some people thought the fight was done. The slaves wanted to be free—they were free, so that’s taken care of. Other people resented the fact that these people who were always second-class citizens to them were now supposed to be treated as equals, and they got angry. And their anger motivated a lot of ugly things, and the country changed while no one was looking.

  Now, over a hundred years later, we elected a black president, and some people say, “Well that’s done.” What’s next? Other people reacted to that event in a rather unpopular way. They said the country was being taken over, they said he wasn’t an American, and some even said he wasn’t their president. And the world changed again.

  Big change, little changes.

  When Kelly killed himself, Foster, as a whole, reacted. Since no one thinks a teenage boy putting a gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger is a good thing, the majority of the reactions were sympathetic, with a desire to make sure it could never happen again. People spoke out, said that the way kids were being treated was wrong, and that things had to get better. That was the bulk of the reaction, but there were others.

  Some wanted to place blame on someone for why Kelly did what he did. Some blamed his parents, others blamed the kids on Facebook, and some blamed me. They said none of this stuff happened in Foster before I came out. There were arguments made that things were fine the way they had always been and that by rocking the boat, I had caused this to happen.

  I’ll be honest, a lot of other things were said about me as well, but they were mostly hateful things, so you’ll excuse me if I don’t repeat them.

  Things were changing in Foster, big and small, and most of it seemed to be centered on me.

  Some for the better, some for the worse. The problem was, there was no way for any of us to know which was which until it was far too late. It is impossible for anyone to know what effect our plans will have until they already happen, and by then, there is no going back. I swore the day they put Kelly in the ground that I would change Foster before I left for college. It was a change, and none of us knew what would come of it.

  There are 151 days until graduation. Roughly five months before I plan on running out of this town as fast as I can and never looking back. A lot of things can happen in 151 days. A lot of things that people might not be ready for.

  So I’m telling you now, hold on. This might get a little bumpy.

  JANUARY 14: WAITING ON THE WORLD TO CHANGE

  It’s not that we don’t care, we just know that the fight ain’t fair.
>
  —John Mayer

  151 days left

  BRAD

  “SO I have a plan,” Kyle said during lunch.

  Jennifer and Sammy sat there with us for lunch, but to be honest, no one felt much like eating. A week had passed since Kelly died. School had been closed, and today was our first day back. Foster, which was the center of the world to a lot of us, lurched to a halt as people tried to deal with the fact that one of Foster’s own had shot himself. Students who sent him nasty messages on Facebook were all buttsore now that they had been outed to the rest of Foster by Kyle and us printing out the hateful messages they had sent Kelly. By the end of the week, all the talking and texting quieted down and sadness had settled in.

  The whole school seemed to be in equal parts shock and outrage about the situation. However, by lunch, four of us knew that the rest of the student body had agreed on one point. Our little quartet of freaks was to blame.

  No one was pointing fingers and calling us out, nothing like that. But you know when someone is giving you the stink eye. Even if you never hear the words, you can just tell when someone is talking shit about you behind your back. No one dared to say anything to our faces, but the accusations were there in their expressions.

  Kelly’s death was our fault.

  I’d spent the last week careening between refusing to think about Kelly and bawling my eyes out like a little kid who dropped his ice cream cone. I felt like one of those hanging things in clocks that go back and forth. And mine went from Nothing to Crying Like a Bitch in seconds. Kyle had been there with me like a rock; in fact, he seemed to be dealing way better than I was. Not that I expected him to break down and just lose it, but he was the one keeping me up instead of me being solid for him. And that was unexpected.

  So to find out he had a plan wasn’t shocking to any of us. If you knew Kyle like we did, it wouldn’t have shocked you either.

  “What now?” Jennifer asked. Her voice sounded tired. The circles under her eyes and her less than perfect makeup and hair told me she hadn’t slept much more than I had.

  I wasn’t surprised by her reaction, but I could tell Kyle was. We were all weary, drop-dead exhausted with trying to deal with what had happened and making Kelly’s suicide real in our heads. I know she wasn’t blaming Kyle for what happened, but she was having a hard time being excited about another one of his plans; the last one pretty much revealed the school as being hating assholes who hated each other.

  Kyle paused for half a second, no doubt trying to process her response. Was it sarcasm aimed at him, or had she been just asking a question? He opted for choice two because he explained. “I want to start a gay-straight alliance here.”

  Weird. I understood every individual word he said, but strung together, they made no sense at all.

  “You want to start a what, now?” I asked, confused.

  He opened his mouth to answer, but Sammy beat him to it. “It’s like an after-school club, but instead of, like, choir or cheerleading, it’s a place where kids can talk about their sexuality without judgment.” She glanced over at Kyle and flushed a little. “I’m sorry, Kyle. Brad was asking you.”

  Kyle waved it off. “No, that’s exactly right. How did you know what it was?”

  Sammy shrugged. “I looked alliances up before winter break. I didn’t think we could ever start one here. But that was before….” Her voice trailed off, and she looked out over the quad.

  “We couldn’t have,” Kyle agreed. I looked at him and could see he was excited. “But I think we can force them to make one.” I realized what I had thought was excitement was really determination lighting his eyes.

  “You’re talking about the emergency school board meeting this week, right?” I asked. He nodded, and I instantly sighed. “Dude, have you forgotten the last time we tried to go to one of those?”

  He just smiled back at me and said, “Yeah, but this time we’re not going.”

  That was when I knew the school board was not going to be ready for him, not this time.

  His idea was to go to Mrs. Axeworthy and ask her to help.

  Now, I don’t know about yours, but it seems like every school always had one teacher who was just… weird. I was going to say off the beaten path, but off doesn’t really cover it for Mrs. Axeworthy. She’s one of those teachers who never let the class get boring or just went on about the same stuff day after day. She always tried new things, like having class in the quad, or going on field trips to First Street. One time she made us write a song about Foster and its history. Like I said, in her case weird wasn’t a bad thing. Mrs. Axeworthy knew she was weird, and I think she liked it that way.

  She had talked to Kyle after the last school board thing. From what he said, she had been out on a family emergency or something, so she didn’t find out until after, but she wanted to let him know she was on our side. I never knew what on our side meant, but at least it wasn’t actively against us like most everyone else. I’m going to be honest and say I had almost forgotten she existed until Kyle brought her up again in his plan.

  This gay-straight thing had to have a teacher to run it or the school wouldn’t recognize it, and since most of the teachers at the school were barely tolerating us, I didn’t think asking them to volunteer would be a great idea. But Mrs. Axeworthy had said she was on our side, and Kyle thought that meant something. I silently hoped he was right.

  Part of Mrs. Axeworthy’s weirdness was her wearing a black cat pin on her blouse every day. However, that afternoon, when we walked into her office, I realized we had not even begun to scratch the weird surface. She collected black cat things. Stuffed animals, pictures, mugs, anything that had a black cat on it seemed to have ended up in her office. I mean, sure, on the weirdness scale, black-cat-thing collecting was way low, but the idea of something like black-cat-thing collecting made me nervous. “Weird” meant “unpredictable” in my mind. Things I couldn’t predict always made me nervous, doubly so where Kyle was concerned.

  She greeted Kyle like they were old friends and then stood up when she saw me. “You must be Brad,” she exclaimed. “I’ve heard a lot about you!” She looked like she was about to hug me, but then she stopped and held out her hand. It was odd, but I could swear I saw her glance at her door for a second.

  I looked and Kyle nodded. He’d seen it too.

  “Pleasure to meet you,” I said, trying not to sound confused.

  “I came to ask you a question.” Kyle went straight to the point once she sat back down.

  “Well, that sounds serious,” she replied, gesturing at the chairs across from her.

  I wanted to stand, but then I would have looked like some kind of secret service agent, so I sat down next to Kyle.

  “Have you heard of a gay-straight alliance?”

  She smiled, but the expression didn’t seem very genuine. “Why do you ask?”

  I saw Kyle pause. He hadn’t been expecting that question at all. “Um, I was thinking that we could use one here at school.”

  Most adults are pretty good at hiding what they’re feeling. Case in point: my dad could be plotting how to kill me and hide the body undetected, and the smile on his face wouldn’t waver an inch. Mrs. Axeworthy was not one of those people. Her expression went from fake smile to nervous to almost paranoid as she glanced at the door. She walked over to it and opened it all the way, toeing the doorstop hard so it couldn’t close by accident. “That’s an interesting idea,” she replied, but her voice made the word sound like it was anything but interesting.

  “Do you think you can help us?” Kyle asked.

  She visibly paused.

  “I mean, if you want to,” Kyle added, mentally backtracking. “It was just a thought.”

  “No, it’s okay,” she said, sitting down again. “I am glad you asked me, but I’m afraid I can’t be of much help.”

  I saw Kyle’s hopes deflate slightly around him.

  “Why?” I asked, not really caring if this was a difficult subject for her or n
ot.

  She looked at me, and I could see a sadness in her eyes that hadn’t been there before. Seeing a teacher like a real person is weird, but my friendship with Tyler has taught me that grown-ups don’t know that much more than kids do. They just hide things better. “It’s a long story, and I’m afraid I am not at liberty to share it.” She paused and studied her desktop for a moment.

  “You don’t have to tell us if you don’t want to,” Kyle assured her.

  She gave him a sad smile. “It’s not that I don’t want to, Kyle.” Without knowing it, she’d picked up a pen shaped like a seated cat and started to doodle on a blank piece of paper.

  “It’s that you can’t?” I threw out since she wasn’t saying anything.

  She just looked at me silently.

  “Mrs. Axeworthy, you can trust us.” Kyle reached across the desktop and put his hand on hers. She sat up a little straighter, eyes widening very slightly.

  Then she patted his hand with her free one before gently lifting his hand away and pulling hers clear. At first I couldn’t understand, and then it hit me: if someone saw….

  “You got in trouble,” I blurted out.

  “I wish I could help you, but I can’t,” she stated quietly, not contradicting me. She stood up, ending the meeting.

  Kyle got up after her, confused at what was going on.

  “I hope you find someone who can help you,” she added earnestly.

  “It’s cool, Mrs. A,” I said, standing up. “We’ll just keep trying.”

  “We will?” Kyle asked me, half stunned.

  I smiled and gave him a nod. “Damn right we will.”

  “Thanks for talking with us,” I continued, since Kyle’s big brain was too busy thinking to give him the cue that he should actually talk. She gave me a grateful smile as we walked out. “So what’s plan B?” I asked Kyle.

  He gave me an odd look. “You tell me. She was my only idea.”