The Rebel of Raleigh High (Raleigh Rebels #1)(102)

I know what he wanted to say, though. I know, because I know him, and I know how his heart works now.

When you say my name, it feels like love, Silver.

When he says my name, it feels like love too.

“She had a nickname for me,” he says, eyes casting around the gym. “She used to call me Passarotto.”

“Ahh, yes. That was in your email address. You promised you were going to tell me what it meant.”

A shy, rueful smile flickers at his mouth, there one second, gone the next. “It means little sparrow,” he says reluctantly.

“Little Sparrow?”

He bumps me with his shoulder. “Laugh and suffer the consequences. It’s common in Italy. It’s more like…precious. And I was a scrawny kid. All knock-kneed and weird looking. I think my head was too fucking big for my body.”

I reach up and run my fingers through the ends of his wavy hair, pretending to assess his head. “Hmm…”

He leans back for me to get a better look at him. “Well? What do you think? Did I grow into it?”

I angle my head to one side, squinting.

“You are skating on such thin ice right now,” he growls.

“All right, all right. Yes, everything’s in proportion now. You’re lucky. You would have looked real weird riding around with an extra, extra large motorcycle helmet.”

We quietly joke with each other, our shoulders and our legs pressed up against one another, neither of us able to get close enough to the other person. After a while, the atmosphere in the gym changes, the air vibrating with tension, and the smiles fade from everyone’s faces.

Principle Darhower enters and walks stiffly toward the small microphone stand that’s been set up in front of the bleachers. His face is pale, and his hands shake as he reaches inside his suit pocket and pulls out a square of paper. You could hear a pin drop as he unfolds it and begins to read.

“When I was a kid, my father was my idol. He was a stock car racer, and every weekend my Mom would sit with me in the stands, and we would watch him race. In high school, I decided I wanted to be just like him. I wanted to be a Nascar driver, and that’s all there was to it. It was seriously all I could ever imagine myself doing.” His voice rings out, clear and loud, reaching every corner of the gym. “I didn’t care about math, or science, or history. I never paid attention in my language classes, and I didn’t care about my GPA. I didn’t need any of that to be a Nascar driver, so I didn’t even try. My father knew how badly I wanted to follow in his footsteps, so he suggested I get my GED and take an internship with his sponsor, learning how the industry worked, learning how to build and fix engines, and most importantly learning how to drive. But I decided not to get my GED.”

He pauses, taking a breath. His hands are shaking so badly now, the paper in his hands shakes too.

“I stayed in high school because I actually loved showing up every day. I loved my friends. I loved my teachers. I loved feeling like I was at a place that mattered, even if I didn’t particularly want to give my studies my all. School, for me, was a safe place, where I felt at home, and I didn’t want to miss any of it.

“My father died when I was the same age as many of you are now. Five days after my seventeenth birthday, another stock car crashed into him on a corner, and he went hurtling into the barricade at ninety-three miles an hour. He was killed instantly. I was there, sitting in the stands with my mother as I always was whenever he raced, and I watched that day as my hero died. It was…officially,” he says, his voice breaking, “the worst day of my life.

“A week later, I went back to school, and I was a wreck. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t function. I was a zombie, stumbling through my day, a war raging inside me because I now hated something that had consumed my entire life. I didn’t want to be a Nascar driver anymore. I didn’t know who or what I wanted to be. All I wanted was to have my father back.

“Grief was a long, lonely road for me. I didn’t want to be consoled. I didn’t want to feel better, because feeling better somehow felt like I cared less, and that…” Principle Darhower dashes at his eyes with the back of his hands, and my throat begins to ache. “I didn’t want to do that. Eventually, when the grief became too much, it nearly finally broke me, and it was my friends and my teachers at school who I turned to for help. They consoled me. They held me together. They saved me. It was then that I decided to teach. To help continue on a legacy of support and care that had been shown to me at a time when I needed it.

“Two weeks ago, one of the students at this school, one of my students, did something terrible. People were hurt. Lives…were…” He clenches his jaw, his nostrils flaring. “Lives were taken,” he rushes out. “Many of you lost friends. Many of you are feeling the same way I felt after I lost my father, crippled with grief and alone…and I am standing before you now…humbly apologizing to each and every one of you. The world has changed so much since I was at school, but that is no excuse. It was my burden of responsibility to ensure that this school was a safe place for you to come to every day, and…two weeks ago, I failed you. This tragedy never should have happened. It should have been prevented long before any of my students ever felt the need to harm others. What he did was wrong. There’s no excuse…ever…for the kind of violence we suffered through here. But I became complacent. My vision became narrowed by years of routine and ritual, and I wasn’t looking for the unexpected. And I am profoundly and deeply sorry for that.