by Deb Caletti
“Sister,” Annabelle says to Kat, and flings her arm around Kat’s shoulder. They have to shout a little over the music. Kat kisses her cheek.
“Oh my God, you guys are too much,” Sierra says. “Did you plan that? You look like twins.”
She’s right. Annabelle and Kat are dressed alike. They both have on their jeans and orange T-shirts.
“Best friend mind meld,” Kat says. “We don’t have to plan, we just know. Is Will working?”
“He should be here any minute.”
“Aww. Young love. I miss being in love.”
“Poor Kit-Kat.” Annabelle makes an exaggerated frown.
“Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever really been in love.”
Kat’s at the end of her beer, maybe a second one, who knows. She’s a tiny bit goofy and sloppy. But when Annabelle looks over at her, she realizes that Kat’s serious.
“What?” Annabelle says. “What about Noah? You were crazy about him.”
“Nah. I don’t think so. It hasn’t happened yet.”
“That makes me sad!”
“Don’t be sad, be glad. It’s still coming.”
“Yeah. That is good.” Annabelle smiles. “God, I can’t drink beer. I’ve got to go pee.”
“We’ll save your place,” Sierra says.
Annabelle goes upstairs. She passes Trevor Jackson coming down. Two girls from band, Desiree and Hannah Kelly, wait in line by the door. “A line, really?”
“Josie’s been in the parents’ bathroom forever,” one of the girls answers.
Annabelle waits. Finally, it’s her turn. She’s fussing with her makeup. She’s putting on lip gloss. She wants to look good for Will. Her beer is on the bathroom counter. She washes her hands. She’s about to grab the bottle, when she hears it.
Downstairs, someone screams.
Someone screams, and at first Annabelle thinks it’s a play scream, but it doesn’t sound like a play scream. It sounds like a terrified scream. And now, someone else screams, a guy, and people are shouting. These are the sounds of something awful happening, and so Annabelle thinks, I’ve got to leave. She wrongly thinks she must get out of this bathroom and this house, and she is at the top of the stairs when she hears a pop-pop-pop. It is a horrible pop-pop-pop and then lots of people are screaming, and there is the sound of something large falling, a sickening thud, and Annabelle is terrified because she knows, she knows that whatever just happened is bad, bad, bad, but she goes down those stairs anyway. It is the wrong direction, but she goes down and the front door is open and she can see the back of him. She sees The Taker, it’s him, and she doesn’t understand because in her mind he is not going to be here tonight, but that is his coat.
That is his coat, and he is fleeing, running from the house and down the sidewalk, and he is carrying a rifle. He is carrying a rifle, and Geoff Graham is yelling and sobbing, and when Annabelle gets to the bottom of the stairs, she sees something unreal, so unreal. People are crying and in shock, crouched down and covering their heads, and nothing is making sense. Sierra has wedged herself into the far corner of the room, her face in her hands, her shoulders heaving, and one of Geoff’s friends from band is half hanging out a window attempting escape, and she sees Zach and Olivia hunched behind a chair, holding each other. There is blood everywhere, blood everywhere, and pieces . . . and pieces of—
She sees Kat on the ground. Kat is on the ground! Her face is to the floor but that is her orange T-shirt, and blood is flowing down her back into her jeans, and beside her, lying beside her—Jesus, no, Jesus, God—it’s Will. It’s Will! He’s here, and he is on the ground, and he’s in his jeans and his favorite hoodie, but he is crumpled and folded strangely, and some of his face is like . . . It looks like . . . It’s just raw flesh and blood, it’s gone, and his eyes are flat, just flat, and his chest . . . There is blood and blood just flowing and flowing from him.
Annabelle is screaming now, too; it’s coming from her unbidden, and she goes to Will and Kat, the people she loves. She goes to them, but they terrify her. Their bodies terrify her, and someone grabs her. She feels the tight squeeze on both her arms, but she screams and screams and wrenches away and runs outside, into the street. People are in the street, too, kids from the party, kids trembling in their swimsuits wet from the hot tub, neighbors coming from their houses. The music is still going. The bamp, thump, ba-bamp goes sickeningly on and on in the background of the sobs and the crying, and now, the sound of a siren.
Annabelle crouches on the pavement, just crouches, because she was in the bathroom and then she heard a pop-pop-pop and then she came down the stairs and then there was Will and Kat and blood was flowing down the back of Kat’s orange shirt, and Will’s face—Annabelle shuts her eyes and puts her hands over her ears and she rocks and rocks back and forth because nothing is real. There are cars coming already, more sirens, lights. They’ve arrived so fast, but who knows how much time has passed. She is out in the street rocking and she throws up right there, and hands are on her, lifting her from the ground. Are you all right? Are you injured? Are you all right? Are you injured? they keep asking and asking. She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know, she doesn’t know. Nothing is real. None of it can possibly be real, but it is real. It is.
She is crying now. She is sobbing and crying in her bunk of the RV. Grandpa Ed is awake. He’s there with her. His arms are around her.
“Sweetheart,” he says.
“I saw, I saw, I saw, I saw, I saw,” she says.
32
1. In the cold of winter, the wood frog’s heart freezes and stops, waiting until spring until it thaws and beats again.
2. Sometimes, humans must also attempt to come back to life.
She can’t do it. Annabelle is backstage. She is trembling. Grandpa Ed has his hand on her shoulder. A woman, Ilene Chen, head of the Carnegie Mellon Gender Studies program, stands at a microphone and speaks to the audience.
There are a lot of people out there. Way, way more than the small groups of students Annabelle’s spoken to before now. Ilene is introducing her. It’s strange to hear her own name reverberating in the auditorium. Annabelle feels sick with anxiety. She tries not to listen to what Ilene is saying about her run and the tragedy. Instead, she concentrates on the tap, tap, tap of her thumb to her fingers, and on the weight of the Saint Christopher medal in her pocket. She concentrates on what her mom has said, and on what Dr. Mann and Malc and Zach and Olivia and Dawn Celeste and Luke have said: Just be honest. Luke said this to her only ten minutes ago, right before he and Dawn Celeste took their seats in the audience. She can do that. She can be honest. But honesty seems so small and quiet and insubstantial with all those people out there.
The microphone scares her. She’s never spoken into a microphone before.
“I can’t,” she says to Grandpa Ed.
“Yeah, you can.” He is sweating, though. His forehead is shiny, and he’s so pale, he looks like he might throw up.
Now, the audience applauds. Jesus, they’re clapping for her.
It is so wrong. After all she’s done, after all she didn’t do, they shouldn’t be clapping.
“I can’t.”
Like a mother bird, Grandpa Ed gives her a little push.
And, oh my God, she’s out here. Wow, there are a lot of people sitting in those red velvet seats. She might be sick right here onstage. Carly Cox did that during the second-grade play and never lived it down. Annabelle is going to do that now at Carnegie Mellon.
The microphone is up too high. She has to stand on her toes. Ilene comes back out and lowers it. Luke and Dawn Celeste are out there somewhere, but she can’t see where. This calms her and makes her crazy-nervous both. Her throat is tight.
She clears it. It is a bad scene in a movie, because the microphone makes the throat-clearing sound like a rocket lifting off.
“I . . .”
Oh my God. It’s quiet out there, except for the little shuffling sounds of waiting. It is a room of mostly young wom
en, she sees. They look friendly. They smile at her and look up at her with kind eyes. But there are so many of them.
“I—the first thing I want to say is . . .”
They wait. She’s had a long time to think about what she wants to say, but it’s still hard to articulate. How is it possible to have words for this?
“The first thing I want to say is that that he, he . . . I can’t say his name. But, the shooter . . . He sat in his car before coming into the party, and he read the instructions on how to work the gun he bought the day before.”
The audience murmurs. There are exhales of outrage. It reminds her that those people out there want to hear what she has to say. Plenty of others won’t, but these people do. She tries to breathe. She will just be honest, like those who love her have advised.
“I don’t know why I feel like I have to start with that. There are so many things to say about what happened. But this just seems particularly horrifying, you know. That you can have a thought to destroy people, and within hours, hours, you can be doing it. I just can’t get that out of my head.
“The shooter . . . He was eighteen.” She turns away from the microphone. She has to clear her throat again. “I knew him, of course. I knew him pretty well. Sometimes he was funny and sweet, but he was also depressed and moody and vindictive. Clearly, he was vindictive. But, I mean, he couldn’t take criticism. He’d get furious if someone teased him about what he was eating for lunch. And this boy, who just had his eighteenth birthday, who could get furious if someone teased him about what he was eating for lunch—all he needed to buy a gun was enough money and a pen to fill out a background check. He was born here, and he never committed a crime before, so just like that, he walked out of the store with a rifle. Buying a car takes a lot longer. Buying dinner in a restaurant does.
“This boy, he took his new gun and he shot my best friend, Kat Klein, because he thought she was me. He thought she was me. Her back was turned. We look alike. He shot the boy I loved, Will MacEvans, through the heart. And then, to make sure the job was done, he shot off part of Will’s face. Her, Kat, my friend’s last words were . . .”
Annabelle doesn’t know if she can do this. Her throat squeezes with tears. It is so tight, she can barely speak. “Her last words to me were about how she hadn’t fallen in love yet.” She can’t do this. She can’t, and now she’s crying. “How that was still coming. His were . . .” She swallows. She tries to hold it together. “His were ‘See you soon.’ Their futures . . . held things. They were kind and funny and cherished people with futures that held things. I loved them both so much. I love them both so much right this minute.”
It is hard to talk now. She is crying. She has to stop and get herself together. She wipes her eyes. “Kat was murdered. Will was murdered. I was. The girl he thought I was, but also, the girl who truly was and will never be again.
“Mostly, I have a lot to say about what I don’t have. I don’t have Kat or Will or my old life. I don’t have answers. I don’t have big bunches of wisdom or statistics or facts to share with you, either. I don’t have a slide show or charts. I’m scared to look at all the numbers. I peeked one day, so that I would have those things to give to you, honestly, but I had to stop when I saw the photos again of the kindergartners and first graders who were gunned down in 2012. I can’t believe I even just said kindergartners and first graders who were gunned down.
“I don’t have a great plan about the laws or regulations needed to decrease gun violence. I’m only eighteen. I don’t have the knowledge required to devise those laws. But I’m old enough to know that even those words decrease gun violence are crazy. Decrease sounds insane, when we’re talking about kindergartners. When Will and Kat were just at a party because it was almost summer. And the most insane thing of all is that it doesn’t even have to be this way. In Japan, maybe two people a year are killed with guns. But not us, and this makes no sense.”
Annabelle shakes her head, and looks out to the dark sky of the auditorium. Her tears have turned to anger, the kind of rant she and Kat might have gone on after watching some documentary. It’s not a documentary, though. For the first time, she thinks about how pissed Kat would be about this if she were here. She thinks about Kat standing at a podium instead of her.
“When he . . . When the shooter was . . . unraveling after I rejected him, when I was scared that he might harm himself or me or someone else, I thought ‘people’ would handle it. ‘People’—adults, people bigger than me, older, smarter, with more ability to do something, I thought they’d keep us all safe. That didn’t happen. That still isn’t happening.
“Most of all, I don’t have a clear idea what I, my own self, can do about any of this. Any of this is big, too. Any of this is way larger than guns. What the shooter really wanted to do was control me. I understand that. He wanted to shut me up. He told the police that I was, um, his dream girl. He didn’t want me to be with someone else. He made sure he got his own way. When I think about it in the simplest way I can, I see that his violence was just a show of power by a bully. Maybe all violence is. But it works. It sure does. Violence shuts you up, all right. A gun always gets the last word.
“I live in this system, you know, you do, we do, where the control and the shutting up is such a regular thing that we sometimes don’t even see it. Where there are rules and rights for him and rules and rights for her and they are different rules and rights. The system says who gets to control who, and who is entitled to power and protection and who isn’t, and every day I run because I just don’t know what to do about it or how to change it.”
Annabelle pauses to catch her breath. Her words have poured out. Her truth has risen and keeps rising like lava from a once-dormant volcano. I am still here, she thinks. And this is what I’m made of, too.
“When I am on a mountain road, say, and the wind is pressing me . . . I am pressing back. I am shoving against my helplessness. I put on those shoes day after day to fight and fight and fight the powerlessness I feel after what the shooter did to Kat and Will and me. I just keep running on those hot roads because I don’t know if my country will protect me and my rights, as a female, as a person who wants to be safe from violence. It has not shown me that it will protect me, from males more powerful than me, from people who hate and intend to do harm. It has shown me that I am less than, that I am not worth being protected. It has shown recklessness with my well-being. So I run in the heat and I sweat and I push myself to persevere.
“And I run and run because I am filled with grief and sorrow, too. My running is crying and praying and screaming. It is saying that I don’t know what to do but that I must do something. That I must use my voice, because it’s the only thing you have sometimes when someone or something is larger and more powerful than you. My voice is here now, but it is mostly there in my running body. With every step, it is saying please and it is saying must. Please see my grief and sorrow. Must end this grief and sorrow.”
She stops. She is exhausted and spent, in the same way she is after her day’s work is done, her sixteen miles on the road. She is empty.
The audience begins to applaud then. The applause surprises her. She almost forgot about them out there, those mostly female students of Carnegie Mellon. She just stands in front of them. And then they stand. They are still clapping, but she looks at them and they look at her. They all look at each other. Standing—still standing. She is guessing that many of them out there, too, have felt her grief and confusion and powerlessness.
She is empty.
She is full.
33
On the banks of Shawnee State Park in Pennsylvania, just a few miles north of Buchanan State Forest, and 111 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, an RV with a CAPTAIN ED license plate and a HOME OF THE REDWOODS bumper sticker is parked next to a rented camper that smells of just-baked cinnamon rolls.
One old man grills sausages with the help of one young man with wild hair. One old woman, in a gauzy sundress, sits in a camp chair next to
one young one, in a sundress splashed with sunflowers. They are not terrified astronauts floating in an endless atmosphere—they are just four ordinary explorers here on earth. And there are no great and dangerous slabs of ice that they must cross in spite of blizzards and starvation. There is just drying grass with a few dandelions poking up on a summer evening.
The sun is setting. The sky is pink, and it has turned the sweet ripples of the lake pink, too. Crickets are starting their evening chirp. There is not much of the trip left, and so Dawn Celeste and Luke Messenger are now trekking alongside Grandpa Ed and Annabelle to the end. It is hard for Annabelle to believe that there is such thing as The End. She feels like she will run and run forever.
This is what she says to the old hippie sitting beside her.
“I feel like I am going to run and run forever.”
“It’s scary, isn’t it, to think about stopping?”
She gets right to the heart of things, that Dawn Celeste. Annabelle wonders if her grandmother was the same. Tough but tender grandpas need someone like that.
“It is. I’m scared. Of Seth Greggory.”
“He’s on your side. He’s there to help you and prepare you. You’ll rehearse what’s going to happen, so it isn’t so frightening. I know about this. Do you know how I know? When I was twenty-three, in college, I was assaulted.”
“Oh my God. I’m so sorry.”
“It seems like a long, long time ago, except on some nights, when I am alone in my house and I think I hear something. Then it all comes back. The man broke into my apartment. He stood over my bed. He puts his hands on me. He fled when I screamed.”
“That is so terrifying.”
“It was. Like I said, it sometimes still is. Those assholes give you a permanent life sentence. Almost more terrifying than that night was facing him in court, like you’re going to do in September. Being in the same room again with someone when you know what they’re capable of . . . I’m not comparing what happened to me to what happened to you. But you know what? When I was done, after I saw him in court, I felt a little better. I’d done it—the thing I so feared. The thing you fear. I faced him. I used my voice to stand up to him. And he was the one in shackles, and I was the one who was free.”