Handwritten ✓

04 | line

TIME TO PUT MY DETECTIVE hat on.

If I was going to find the author of the hate note, I needed all the information I could find. Unfortunately, there were no tracks or fingerprints available to me. I had only the hate note itself, which I mined for as many clues as possible.

In homeroom class, I pulled my Algebra textbook in front of me and pressed the hate note onto the page, so it'd look like I was studying. Everyone shot weird glances my way because I usually fought tooth and nail before willingly cracking open a textbook. But thankfully they all kept to their own discussions, while I pored over the handwritten lines on the page, extracting what information I could.

Jake Tanner:

Does he have to be so loud all the time? Is he overcompensating for something?

Based on that, there was about a sixty per cent chance that the person was in my grade. I mean, they had to have been around me to gauge that I was loud, right? But then again, they could be in the football team, or they might have run into me at a house party — during which I was notoriously raucous.

Treats his twin like a child even though he's only minutes older. Stop being so condescending.

Stop being so condescending. That's something a snobby person would say.

Show off.

Meh. Can't argue.

Fuckboy. Fuckboy. Fuckboy.

See, that line made me reconsider the prospect of it being a football teammate or even a dude. Not to generalise, but few guys in Bishop would frame being a fuckboy as a negative. More women? Great. More sex? Greater. More sex with more women? Greatest.

Dumb. So dumb to choose football because concussions. Then concussions make him dumber, which makes him make more dangerous decisions. Cyclical.

Yeah, my secret detractor was definitely not on the football team. They might even be anti-football, and I flicked through my database of Bishop High School students. The only person who I knew was apathetic towards football was Sophie, but my cousin would just tell me to my face that she hated me if she felt like it.

Caveman sense of humour.

Ouch. This one hurt the most because I personally thought I was hilarious. I actually had this weird habit of searching up new words and weaving them into jokes to make myself sound witty but aloof. I knew this was majorly uncool and tryhard of me, but as I said, my confident charm wasn't always how I felt on the inside. Sometimes it took careful curation to be carelessly funny.

Can he even drive?

Unless the writer of the hate note had a serious case of compartmentalisation and was a raging hypocrite, I could safely assume they drove. Which was pretty much every junior and senior. At least that narrowed down the age bracket, slightly.

Doesn't take studying seriously.

Per the above rationale about compartmentalising, I guessed I was looking for someone who did take studying seriously.

Views all girls as potential flings. Flings. Pretty much number four, but.

Again, looking for a girl.

Mercurial hair.

Pfft. I didn't even know where number ten came from. My hair was as mercurial as every other teenager's. It had good days and it had bad days.

By the end of homeroom, I had a fairly clear picture of what my detractor looked like.

I was looking for a girl, in the junior or senior year. Maybe sophomore year, if they were already learning to drive. I was looking for someone who took their studies seriously. More than that, going by words like cyclical and mercurial and overcompensating I was looking for someone articulate, who might have a personal disdain for football players.