Mercy

by J L Aarne

  Molina wished her older brother, Patrick, was home. He was away at college and he didn’t come home much, but he would have listened to her and let her cry on him and he wouldn’t have made her feel like it was her fault. He would have defended her honor like a pit bull because that was Patrick. But Patrick was also a boy—a man—and that made it different this time. She couldn’t tell Patrick.

  Molina sat in class staring down at the graffiti carved into the top of her desk while at the white board Miss Tolstad wrote a complicated equation from her textbook with green dry-erase marker. The marker squeaked as she wrote. It was a really long equation, spanning one entire side of the white board when she finally stopped. Squeak, squeak, squeak.

  In the desk beside Molina, Hank Hutton was dozing with his head down on his folded arms. In front of her, Tessa Greenhalgh was tweeting like a fiend, her sparkle lacquered nails tapping, pink tongue poking lewdly between the lips of a glossy smirk. Donna Evans and Kristy Lamont had their heads together with Andy Dickerson in the seats behind her and she could hear the hissing of their whispered conversation, broken by frequent laughter, but not what they were talking about.

  Probably Corey Rollins.

  It was the only thing anyone had been talking about for weeks. The disgusting fliers that had been taped up all over the school had finally all disappeared. Mr. McGuinn, the principal had made it his business to get rid of them, probably with a lot of prompting from parents. Or maybe Mr. McGuinn was just scared of Corey’s dad. Sheriff Rollins had been in his office the day after it happened, everyone knew it, and Mr. McGuinn had looked really stressed and kind of sick for the rest of the week. Maybe he couldn’t lose his job over it, but the sheriff could definitely make his life very hard. The pictures had started disappearing after that, all except the ones people kept, smuggling them into the pages between their notebooks and textbooks, stuffing them in their backpacks or coat pockets.

  After Corey tried to kill himself, it only got worse. She had overheard some really awful things being said about him after that. Lots of laughter, lots of joking, lots of smiling. Smug, satisfied, mean smiles, like her mom telling her dad about Emily Dunkirk, saying, She always was a wild one anyway.

  Corey hadn’t returned to school yet, so he hadn’t had to hear it, at least not to his face. Not yet.

  Mercy was back at school though and people gave her a lot of shit about her brother. Mostly she took it, like a boxer taking a punch hoping the other guy would tire out. So far, the other guy wasn’t tired. Molina kept waiting for Mercy to lose her temper and every day she couldn’t believe that she hadn’t.

  In middle school, Molina and Mercy had been close. They were still friends, they still talked sometimes, but they hadn’t been that close since Mercy was moved up a grade into high school ahead of her. If they had remained that close, Molina might have told Mercy her secrets. Mercy could be mean too, but it wasn’t her mother’s kind of meanness. She would have been in Molina’s corner, but right now, Mercy had her own problems.

  “Miss Greenhalgh,” Miss Tolstad said sharply.

  Tessa Greenhalgh fumbled with her phone to close out of Twitter before it was confiscated. “Yes, Miss Tol—uh, Jenny?”

  Molina rolled her eyes. Under her fingers, EAT SHIT was carved deeply into the top of the desk.

  Miss Tolstad smiled sweetly at Tessa, but there was a touch of something sharp in that smile. “Would you like to come up to the board and solve for y?”

  Titters of laughter around the room.

  “Oh, uh… sure,” Tessa said. She slid out of her seat, smoothing the back of her skirt down as she stood, and approached the board like she was going to her own execution.

  “Miss Allsberg, will you please reach over and rouse Mr. Hutton for us?” Miss Tolstad asked Molina. “I’m sure he wouldn’t want to miss today’s lesson.”

  Molina was pretty sure she was dead wrong, but she reached across the aisle to lightly push Henry Hutton’s arm. He groaned and took his face out of his folded arms, but didn’t pick his head up.

  “Good morning, Mr. Hutton,” Miss Tolstad said cheerfully. “So nice of you to join us.”

  More titters of laughter.

  Henry just blinked at her, eyes pinkly bloodshot, and said nothing. His gaze shifted to Tessa standing at the front of the class, now armed with the green Expo marker, slid over her without much interest and rested on the mid-thigh hemline of her short pink skirt. Tessa didn’t notice. She had turned her back on the class to concentrate on finding the value of y.

  The door at the back of the room opened and everyone turned toward it almost as one.

  Corey stood in the doorway for a moment, then closed the door and tried to ignore the eyes following him as he went to an empty desk at the back of the room and sat down. Miss Tolstad looked like she wanted to say something, maybe ask him if he was okay or how he was doing, but she thought better of it and didn’t. Molina watched him take out his book, a notebook and a pen. He looked up and caught her at it and she lifted her fingers in a little wave. He smiled at her and ducked his head to write down the equation on the board.

  There was still a pink mark on his neck under his jaw.

  At the board, Tessa erased what she had written and started over.

  Freddy Rehmke was in the seat just in front of Corey. When he judged that Miss Tolstad’s attention had shifted back to the front of the class, he half turned in his chair to whisper at him. “Hey… Hey, Rollins?”

  Corey kept his head down over his notebook, but he stopped writing.

  “Rollins? Hey, is it true what they say? You get a boner when you—?”

  “Mr. Rehmke,” Miss Tolstad snapped. “Face forward. Eyes on your own work.”

  Tessa had stopped writing and now stood staring at the board as though willing it to divulge its secrets.

  The gods must have been listening. The intercom over the door came on with a chink! Sally, the office secretary sounded a little breathless even over the bad sound system.

  “Attention students and faculty. The assembly scheduled for this afternoon has been moved. We will be meeting in the gymnasium after your first period class. Teachers, please make sure that all students make their way to the gymnasium after the bell.”

  Miss Tolstad sighed. The bell would be sounding in five minutes.

  “All right, everyone,” she said in her best authority figure voice. “Homework for tonight. Even problems on pages thirty-five, thirty-six and thirty-seven. Make sure you show your work.”

  They put their things away and Miss Tolstad stood in the hallway while they all put their notebooks and backpacks in their lockers. All but Corey, who held onto his, slung over his shoulder, clutching the handle like it was a security blanket.

  Molina wanted to say something to him but she didn’t know what and before she could figure it out, he moved by her into the flow of people going toward the gym.

  It took awhile for everyone to get there, then for everyone to find their friends and figure out how seating arrangements were going to work. The teachers did their best to minimize the chaos, but nothing could disrupt the rising tide of voices in clashing conversation all over the bleachers. The assembly was only for the high school students and faculty, but that was still hundreds of people. Molina sat by herself on the first step close to the door. She was a little surprised when Corey Rollins sat down near her.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hey,” he said. His backpack was on the floor between his feet.

  “Is it stupid to ask if you’re all right?”

  He smiled and watched people filing into the gym. “Nah. I’m… better.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Well, that’s…”

  She trailed off, watching the last people who had entered the gym behind Dr. Hunter, Mr. McGuinn and Robby Whitaker. There were three of them. They were wearing knitted ski masks and carrying backpacks of their own. One of them, the tallest one, had something in his hands.r />
  Oh my god, is that a gun? Molina started to say. She got no further than “Oh my g—”

  “Be quiet,” Corey said, standing up. “And don’t scream.”

  Corey opened his backpack and went over to the door where the three masked people were. They were locking the doors together with big, heavy horseshoe shaped bike locks. Corey took his backpack to the other side of the gym, ignoring a command by Mr. Seaver to sit down, and locked the doors in the back that led out to the track and field.

  There were also doors inside the locker rooms at the very back that led out there, but one of the masked people disappeared into the girls’ locker room and seemed to be taking care of that. Corey dropped his backpack on the steps that led to where Coach Kapinski and Mrs. Woodell had their offices, then he took out a handgun and calmly sat down, watching the others. He had a great view of the entire gym from there.

  Someone finally noticed that something was wrong, though it was impossible to tell who because the first scream set off a chain-reaction of high-pitched shrieks. Not everyone screamed. Most people just stared, turned a little white and became very still. After about a minute, the screaming stopped and became slightly hysterical, but nonetheless quieter, sobbing. Even though they lived in a small, quiet, conservative town where such things didn’t happen, they were all familiar with school shootings from the news and websites and all the hype that surrounded them. All they had to do was look at the guns and the people carrying them and they knew.

  Dr. Hunter, Mr. McGuinn and Robby Whitaker were walked over to the step where Molina sat and pushed down beside her. Their hands were behind their backs, held with thick white zip ties.

  “What’s going on here?” Miss Tolstad demanded, standing up with every intention of confronting the masked people.

  A gun turned instantly toward her and she froze.

  “Sit down, Miss Tolstad.”

  Miss Tolstad sat down.

  A boy named Brian something, a meek, twitchy little freshman Molina didn’t know, suddenly jumped up and made a run for the doors. The tall one with the big rifle swung and hit him with the butt end. Brian sat down hard on the floor, his bottom lip split and his nose bleeding, and started to cry.

  “Are you going to shoot us?” a girl asked in a quavering voice.

  “I don’t know yet,” said the one who had told Miss Tolstad to sit down.

  It was a girl, Molina realized, and she was pretty sure she knew that voice. “Mercy?” She said. It was a whisper, but the sound of her voice carried.

  Mercy pulled the ski mask off her face and tossed it aside. “Hey, Lina.”

  “What are you doing?” Molina asked.

  “What’s it look like?” Mercy said. She smiled savagely. “We’re having an assembly.”

  The other two in masks followed her example and took them off. Molina wasn’t at all surprised to see that it was Ezra and Isaac Banks. Isaac and Mercy were both holding handguns and Mercy took another one out of the duffle bag she was carrying and walked toward Molina.

  Around her, people shrank back as Mercy drew closer, but Molina looked into her friend’s face and stayed where she was. Her heart raced, but she didn’t really believe Mercy would hurt her. They weren’t there for her. This wasn’t about her.

  Mercy held the second gun out to her, butt first; offering it.

  Molina stared at it. A million things raced through her mind at once until her brain was like snow on a radio turned all the way up to maximum volume. A hive of bees humming.

  She always was a wild one anyway, she heard her mother say.

  Except she wasn’t. She was a good girl, always had been.

  She wondered if Emily Dunkirk had been a good girl. Did good girls get raped, murdered and left to rot in ditches along I-90?

  Sometimes.

  Molina took the gun. It felt powerful in her hand.

  Isaac

  Whiskers on Kittens

  Isaac was thinking about kittens.

  Mercy and Corey were hooking up the microphone that had been left out in preparation for the scheduled anti-bullying assembly. Ezra was standing in the middle of the gym with the AR-15, but other than Brian Vanden, who had stopped crying but still sat on the floor where he had fallen, no one had tried to get away.

  A lot of people were trying to use their cell phones, but they weren’t getting any service. They wouldn’t either. Mercy had a cell phone jammer in her duffel bag. They could still record with their phones, but they couldn’t dial out or post any photographs or videos to the internet. They kept right on trying though.

  Isaac remembered some of the news coverage he had seen after school shootings in the past; interviews with kids who talked about being shocked and afraid, yet still smiled for the cameras and looked like they were having the time of their lives. They liked the attention. Being the survivor of a school rampage shooting had turned into a perverse kind of social capital. Because even when it happened to them, even when it was done by someone they knew or had liked, even when people died, it wasn’t real to them. That was why the first thing nearly every person in the gym had done when the doors were locked was take out their cell phones and try to tweet about it.

  This wasn’t real yet and Isaac was thinking about it, about how they were going to have to do something about the goddamn cell phones, but mostly he was thinking about kittens. There was a stray Siamese looking cat that he had been feeding for a few months living under their trailer with a litter of new kittens. Isaac called her Dragon Lady and she was probably his cat because he fed her. Thinking about her kittens, wondering if their eyes would be blue like hers when they opened, calmed him.

  There were little windows about a foot high and a foot wide in all of the doors looking out of the gym into the hallway and Isaac went to each one and spray painted it black. Ezra had used the principal’s keys to lock the fire doors and the exits on this side of the building, which might make maneuvering around out there a little difficult for a while when the cops showed up, but they could really only count on it being inconvenient for them. The janitor had a set of keys, too, which he would undoubtedly give to the cops. It would slow them down, but it wouldn’t stop them. The bike locks would stop them, that and the fact that they were armed and had taken about three hundred hostages, most of them under the age of eighteen. Blacking out the windows meant Mercy, Ezra, Corey and Isaac couldn’t see out, but it also meant no one could see in.

  High up on the bleachers toward the very back, Joan Freeman began to loudly sob. She was a short girl with bad skin and oily blond hair, the kind of girl who still wore the sweaters her grandmother made her and barrettes in her hair, the kind of girl who got good grades but didn’t have very many friends. She was sobbing the way people did when they really meant it, when they couldn’t help it, her face red and pinched, doubled over her knees, sniffing back snot. Everyone around her stared. A couple girls put their heads together, whispering and giggling. Joan didn’t even notice.

  Isaac stood by the locked doors, paint can still in one hand and watched it all for a minute with his head slightly tilted to one side.

  Joan understood what was happening. Joan knew it was real because she was really afraid and those were real tears and real snot bubbles and her arms were swampy with the real sweat of real fear.

  “Jesus, knock it off, will you?” Freddy Rehmke said. He rolled his eyes and there was a burst of jeering laughter from his friends and several others. “You sound like a donkey.”

  “Yeah, hey Joanie, why don’t you—?”

  Mercy tapped the microphone sharply and the gymnasium echoed with a scream of feedback. “Leave her alone,” she said, her voice amplified. “So far, she’s the only one of you who seems to really get it.”

  “Get what?”

  That was Jesse Gleason.

  When he spoke up, everyone else fell completely silent. They might not get it yet, but what had happened to Corey and the person who had been responsible for the sex tape and the fliers all over
the school was far from secret.

  Jesse probably should have shut up then, but he didn’t. “What’s there to get?” he asked, his voice dripping with contempt. “You’re all fucking crazy. What do you think’s gonna happen? You’re gonna what? Shoot us all or something?”

  Mercy didn’t say anything. She held the microphone in her hand and gave Jesse her full attention, but when he paused for breath, she didn’t try to fill the brief silence. Corey had gone to sit down on the riser stairs outside of the coach and the P.E. teacher’s offices with his gun. He watched, but he didn’t say anything either. There was something out of focus about his expression that made Isaac wonder what he was thinking about.

  “You’re not gonna get away with this, you know that, right?” Jesse said. He stood up; he had the floor. “So what if your dad’s the sheriff? You know what happens to all those psycho fucking shooter kids when—”

  “Dude, shut the fuck up,” said someone on Jesse’s left.

  It was Henry Hutton. Jesse’s head jerked that way and he glared at him, but he shut up. Jesse was more popular than Henry, he had more friends these days, but Henry had been cool for a long time and some of Jesse’s new friends were some of his old ones. Jesse was too aware of that to really challenge him.

  It was quiet for a while and everyone watched Mercy attentively like they were waiting for her to make some sort of official statement. A great big thing was happening and it had knocked a hole in the safe world they had taken for granted. While they were coming to terms with it, most of them froze.

  Isaac capped his spray can and returned it to his bag. He crossed the gym, set his backpack down beside Corey and went into the equipment room. There was a custodian’s closet in there, but on his way to it, he paused to look at the baseball bats and consider.

  One of Dragon Lady’s kittens was all black. Isaac thought he might name it Bruce Lee. He might name it that even if it turned out to be female.