Tonight We Rule the World Read online

  TONIGHT WE RULE THE WORLD

  ZACK SMEDLEY

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  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  DEDICATION

  To Brodie Spade, Andy Zhao, Paige Nelson, Jackson Kotch, Alex Al-Jazrawi, Allison Basiley, and Olivia Benton—for our unforgettable time in the neighborhood.

  Long live Old Friendship.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  WELL. I PICKED A BAD YEAR TO WRITE A BOOK WITH heavy subject matter.

  The year 2020 will go down in history as a year that took a great deal from us as a whole: lives, jobs, sanity, perceived decency, and personal joy. While I have no right to complain about my incredibly fortunate circumstances throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s no other way to say it: This book was written during a year that I should never have picked up a pen, and almost every minute spent at my keyboard was thoroughly joyless.

  I always say that my books aren’t about protagonists experiencing trauma, but rather, about them conquering it. When I wrote my debut, Deposing Nathan, this worked because I was a college kid who felt on top. Words poured out of me, and when the content got tough, I could step away to enjoy the beauty and exuberance of the world outside my window. This time, though, I felt entirely unqualified: Who was I to rattle on about overcoming obstacles when I was regularly losing afternoons of writing to hypochondriacal panic attacks? How was I supposed to shine a light on human decency when every headline screamed the opposite? Couple this with the countless hours I spent inhibited by this book’s heavy topics—which I was determined to portray properly—and the whole process felt insurmountable. I’d lie awake at night, dreading the morning when I’d return to it.

  Yet, eventually, I always would. Because every week, I would get letters from readers who told me how much Deposing Nathan had helped them. Those letters went up on my wall, and they became the light that wound up guiding me (however gruelingly) out of my maze. To those readers: Please know I did my best to pour everything I could into this book, during a year when I—like so many others—had almost nothing in the tank to pour. I can honestly say I’m satisfied with the result, so now, it goes properly from my hands to yours.

  Excellence was described by Aristotle as “the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution.” I can’t speak to whether I achieved that last one, but I can tell you this project was born from the first two. Because you deserve nothing less than an excellent book.

  I hope, from the sincerest place in my heart, that I’ve given you one.

  —zs

  12/14/2020

  THE BOY WITH THE BROKEN ARM

  ONE

  OF ALL THE THINGS I LEARNED IN MY YEARS GROWING up, the most important one was to never get in the crosshairs of Lily Caldwell. Lily: the sweetest angel you’d ever meet—as long as she liked you. And in fairness, she liked everyone by default. It was a tall order to wind up on her shit list; but if you did, you had serious problems.

  I saw this firsthand more than once, being her boyfriend and all. And don’t get me wrong; we had some wonderful years together. But trust me when I say I know what I’m talking about.

  Snapsnap. Snapsnap.

  I stretch and release the bracelet around my wrist, letting the wooden beads flick my skin in sets of two. Onetwo. Onetwo. When I was younger, I had more conspicuous forms of stimming when I was on edge—clicking my pen, rocking back and forth in my chair—but then Lily made me this fidget bracelet for my fifteenth birthday, and I’ve used it ever since.

  Our school’s Rent-a-Cop stares at me from his chair. The glint of his badge in the sunlight stabs the edge of my eye. I look away.

  Snapsnap.

  “Did someone die?” I ask the floor. “No.”

  “Did someone get in an accident?”

  “No.”

  “Is someone hurt?” “It’s easier if the other folks explain.” That’s a yes. “Was it my mom, or my dad?” “Your parents are fine, bud. We should be called in any second now.”

  The Rent-a-Cop (identified by his badge as Officer Mat Hewitt) is a skinny blond guy who looks maybe a couple years older than me. When he first knocked on our classroom door, I thought he might be another student. Then I saw the badge and the Glock 22, and had four thoughts in this order:

  Shit—somebody’s in trouble.

  Shit—he’s saying their name.

  Shit—that’s my name.

  Shit.

  He’s been ducking my questions ever since he walked me down here to the admin lair. He’s not exactly unkind, but he’s clearly keyed up by whatever this is. The two of us are waiting to meet with someone—I’m not sure who—so all I can do is sit here tugging my bracelet and wondering what the hell I did.

  Snapsnap.

  “You can go on back. First door on the left,” says a secretary on the other side of the room.

  Officer Hewitt leads me into an office I’ve passed every day but never set foot in. One of the visitor’s chairs is already occupied by a short, ripped Latino man in an athletic polo shirt—Mr. Yacenda, the cross-country coach and my guidance counselor. He’s a laid-back guy; always assuaging my nerves with, “Hey man, I’m not worried about it if you aren’t!”

  (He looks worried.)

  Officer Hewitt closes the door, then takes a seat. All eyes swivel to the woman seated on the other side of the executive desk, dressed in a turtleneck the color of dried blood: Principal Felicity Graham, PhD.

  Principal Graham is the human version of a textbook—aggressively attempting to be relatable and fun, but with a no-nonsense core constantly leaking through the mask. She’s probably mid-forties at most, but something about her stiff persona makes her seem two hundred years old. Her pale skin is practically translucent under the harsh lights, and her hair is pulled back in a pristine bun.

  She leans forward in her black leather throne, thin fingers laced together, and smiles.

  “Here we are,” she says, like I’m a package she’s been waiting for at the foot of her driveway. “Hi, Owen—good to see you again. We chatted for a few minutes at the last senior assembly, but that was a few months back.”

  She reaches out to shake my hand but backs off when I squirm a little.

  “What’s happening?” I blurt out. I snap my bracelet again, a faster tempo this time. I don’t like feeling crowded, and right now there are four of us stuffed in an office the size of a bathroom. I fix my gaze on the window behind her, where a fierce rain hammers against the glass—the kind you could feel if you touched your fingers to the surface.

  Principal Graham’s face tightens. “Why don’t you have a seat?”

  I do as she says, then dig a notebook and pen out of my backpack. Early on growing up, my father taught me the first rule of being in trouble: Whether or not you know what you’re being accused of, take notes of everything you’re told.

  “Owen, I know you do best with directness,” Principal Graham says. “So frankly, I want us to drop the HR lingo for a second and just talk to each other here. We’r
e going to go over this step by step, then we’ll answer every question you have—I promise. To start off, are you familiar with the ERAT system we have?”

  She says it like “air-at.” When I shake my head, she explains, “ERAT is short for Electronic Reporting and Tips Service—it’s a website the county rolled out in schools a few years ago. Students can use it to anonymously report incidents they’ve become aware of concerning their classmates.”

  “Incidents?”

  “Things like bullying or harassment,” Officer Hewitt jumps in. “Even potential crimes.”

  He looks like he’s about to say more, but Principal Graham cuts him off. “Owen, earlier this morning, this system received a report that was filed about a potential incident that may have taken place last month.”

  I’m in the middle of writing out the acronym when my pen freezes.

  “Keep going,” I murmur. An ugly chill works its way from my stomach to my chest to my throat. I’m not religious, but I start saying a vague version of a prayer—hoping for a scenario where this isn’t what I suspect it is.

  “Alright.” Principal Graham’s voice is aggressively even-tempered—each inflection meticulously controlled. “The report that was filed on our site stated that, during the senior class trip to Lanham University last month, you were sexually assaulted by one of your classmates. This would’ve been during spring break, so just over a month ago.”

  It’s like when you spend all night working on a paper and your computer crashes without saving it—all your work vanishes. It’s so quiet, so instant, that you never react right away. There are always those few seconds of overwhelming denial: This isn’t happening.

  The next few seconds feel like that.

  Principal Graham tries to meet my eyes. “Owen?”

  Snapsnap.

  I tug the beads farther back each time, snapping them on my skin with increasing sharpness. Officer Hewitt leans to steady me, but Principal Graham taps his arm, like, let him do his thing.

  “I didn’t write that,” I tell them. “I didn’t submit that, I swear. You can check my phone or whatever if you need to prove it.”

  “So … a few things, to start off,” Principal Graham says. “The first is that you’re not in trouble.”

  “Why would I be in trouble?”

  “Owen, please. The second thing is that our response here is guided by a lot of different policies. Which …” She holds up both hands as though cutting off an audition. “I promise we’ll go over all that, but we need to wait for a parent to be in here.”

  Parent? Oh, God.

  “No,” I say, forceful. “You can’t tell them. Not allowed.”

  “I already gave them a call—Owen, you’re still seventeen; I had to,” says Mr. Yacenda. The rain against the window feels like it grows more violent—increasingly agitated.

  We all sit in silence for a minute, maybe two. I spend it saying another small prayer to myself, urgently hoping that it’s Mom who shows up, and not—

  Down the hall, footsteps thunder so loudly that it’s like they echo through the classrooms. The room damn near shakes. Some woman is saying the word “sir” a bunch, but the steps only grow more menacing, and the door flies open with such force that Principal Graham jumps to her feet. Me—I scoot back in the chair, taking myself as far out of the way as possible. That’s always what you do when he’s pissed.

  “Everyone freeze,” Dad orders, a notebook and pen already in his hand. “Owen, not another word.”

  My bracelet snaps apart.

  TWO

  September 5th—Freshman Year

  Dear Diary,

  My first day of high school began with a mandatory icebreaker and ended with me getting hit by a Ford F-250 pickup truck. In the grand scheme of things, it’s difficult to say which experience was worse.

  The icebreaker was more drawn-out—a boilerplate question posed by my new geometry teacher, Mr. Adler: “Tell us something interesting that happened to you lately.” I didn’t have an answer, but that didn’t stop him from egging me on while several dozen pairs of eyes trained their crosshairs on my chest for a full minute. The pickup truck, on the other hand, was quick but painful: ten seconds of stupidity on my end after the bus dropped me home.

  Old Friendship Landing—aka my home neighborhood since middle school—is a perfectly symmetrical community my family can barely afford. (The HOA likes to pretend it’s just another ’burb, but the entrance is protected by an iron gate and security guard. That’s fuck-you money.) The buses either can’t or won’t go in, so they drop everyone off at the roundabout in front of it. The dozen-or-so kids then march into the neighborhood in a uniform pack, making their way past the gym and the pool so they can split off to their respective houses.

  I can’t stand crowds, so I always try to wait by the gate until they disperse.

  While I waited today, though, I realized one of the girls on my bus had hung back too. She stood frozen on the other side of the road, staring at me with her head tilted. Like she was studying my face.

  The details of the next few seconds are a little fuzzy, if I’m being honest. I remember her raising her hand to wave at me. I took one step forward—another, I think—and I was raising my hand to wave back.

  Then … WHAM!

  It was less dramatic than I’m making it sound, but a pickup truck hit me—mainly the right side of my body—as I stepped into the street toward her. The air was knocked out of my chest, the girl screamed, and as I plunged to the pavement, I only had one coherent thought among the subsequent searing pain and screaming and blackness: Crap, those fingers are backward.

  So all in all, today was not a very good start to high school. But at least I have an answer for Mr. Adler’s icebreaker now.

  Sincerely,

  Owen

  September 6th—Freshman Year

  Dear Diary,

  I had to cut yesterday’s entry short because it’s very hard to type. But I forgot to mention that the girl who waved to me is named Lily Caldwell, and she stayed by my side until my dad showed up to take me to the hospital.

  I mention that because she came and visited me again this afternoon. I was sitting out on my front stoop, listening to my music and watching some of the older kids play basketball in a nearby driveway. On the other side of the street, one of the boys from my bus—a Latino guy about my age—was sitting on his stoop opposite to me. His jet black hair fell halfway over his glasses, and he didn’t look especially friendly, but our eyes kept running into each other as we watched the game.

  Then: a tap on my shoulder.

  “Oh my God, how’s your hand?”

  Lily’s voice made me jump, and I think I squeaked a little too. If so, it didn’t matter to her. She just sat right down next to me, staring at me like I owed her something. As I got a closer look at her, I realized I’d seen her around the halls back in middle school. Her ordinary appearance—wavy blond hair, ice blue eyes, lopsided smile stuffed with braces—was always offset by her socks, which ranged from odd to zany. She was like a reverse chameleon: always changing her colors and spots to stand out.

  Today she was wearing neon yellow leggings, a purple blouse, and a concerned look on her face.

  “How’s your hand?” she repeated, nudging me.

  We both looked to the cast entombing my arm. My right hand had nine broken bones. I didn’t even know there were that many hand bones to break. It turns out there are twenty-seven, and apparently you need every single one in order to type, brush your teeth, or jerk off. (Go figure.)

  Well, I told Lily, it’s broken.

  I didn’t mean it to be funny. But she laughed, so I was proud of myself regardless.

  “That guy is staring at you,” she said. She nudged her elbow toward the boy sitting on his stoop. “Do you know him?”

  I shook my head.

  “He’s not nice. I keep inviting him to hang out with my friend group, and he just ignores me. Watch.” She gave the boy the same vigorous wave she’d g
iven me yesterday.

  He made eye contact, got up, and went back inside his house.

  “See?” Lily crossed her arms. Then she noticed that I still had earbuds in. “What’re you listening to?”

  The answer was “Ascent” by Brian Eno, my favorite song of all time. But I was embarrassed to tell her that because that song was just ambiance … basically a soothing melody without a rhythm or words. Not cool. So instead I said, nothing.

  “Tell me! Come on, I want to know,” she said, giving me a smile surrounded by freckles. She leaned toward me, filling my nose with the synthetic smell of cotton candy, and reached for my phone.

  PLEASE don’t touch that, I snapped, wrinkling my nose.

  That got her attention. She put up both hands, clearly spooked. “Am I allowed to ask what genre it is?”

  I got the sense she wasn’t going to let it go, so I mumbled that it was sleep music.

  “Yeah? Neat,” she said. “Have you heard of the Killers?” I don’t think so, I said, truthfully.

  “Oh my gosh, really? Yes you have—everyone has. I’m obsessed with them. Can I see this?” She reached for my phone again, more cautiously this time. I gave in and let her show me some of their songs, a few of which I recognized from the radio. We shared my earbuds, leaning close together. (The smell bothered me, but our knees got to touch, so I decided the pros outweighed the cons.)

  She tapped my cast and bit her lip, like she was embarrassed. “Does it hurt?”

  I wasn’t sure how to answer that, so I didn’t.

  “Can you still do assignments and stuff?” she asked.

  The school’s getting a tutor, I told her. To write down stuff for me.

  “I can do it!” She said it in a heartbeat, like she was waiting for the cue. When I frowned, she said, “No, seriously, let me. I feel really bad. You don’t have to pay me or anything.”

  I just shrugged. She took that as a yes.