by Bryan Bliss
Dedication
For everybody who continues to fight.
You give me hope.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Part One: The Monster
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Part Two: The Face
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Part Three: The Warrior
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Books by Bryan Bliss
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Copyright
About the Publisher
We are still here. Everywhere. All around you.
Some of us are children and some
are older, but we all pretend to be okay.
We survive.
No matter what,
we stand beside every one of you.
The next ones, too. There will always be next ones.
We cry.
We scream.
And when it feels as if our skin is on fire and
the only thing we can do is burn—
well then, we’ll burn.
Bright, hot, forever.
Until something changes.
Because every single one of us should’ve been a reason.
Should have been enough.
Part One
The Monster
Chapter One
BEFORE SHE MOVED TO MINNESOTA, CLAIRE DIDN’T KNOW the inside of your nose could freeze, that cold like this even existed. It started at your feet and climbed up your legs, seizing your chest, until every part of your body was completely frozen.
Before, she didn’t take the bus, which appeared at the corner, its headlights cutting through the haze of the morning snow falling in silent clumps.
She used to love the snow.
Waking up, finding the world covered. Refreshing the browser on her laptop and jumping when the phone finally rang, the automated voice saying those sweet words of freedom—Catawba County schools have been cancelled. . . .
Nothing short of a miracle, nothing better. Not even Christmas.
But that was before, and now the snow was just another thing that disappeared.
The bus stopped on the corner and Claire turned up her music, loud enough that the other students at her stop—laughing like they’d never had as much as a paper cut—wouldn’t talk to her.
The doors shushed open, just like always. And just like always, the slow march toward the yellow bus started. Claire tried to join them. Tried to make her body move, but it was as if the snow had gone solid, seizing her feet.
She looked into her bag, letting person after person pass (breathing, breathing), trying to ignore the panic as it began to swirl, rushing into her ears like storm water.
She looked up, realizing she was alone.
The whole bus was a choir of stares and whispers, and the driver was giving her a look like, I’ll leave you, I swear, so instead of making him choose, she shook her head (breathing, breathing) and started to back away. She expected that first step to require a Herculean effort, something to crack concrete. But it didn’t and the force—the snow, the ice, all that cold—brought her down hard on the sidewalk.
The stares and whispers turned to laughter.
Before those kids would’ve been her friends. Before it wouldn’t have been impossible to get on the bus. Before she had friends and she would’ve laughed as she sat in the cold, the snow, rubbing the pain out of her ass and barking for everybody to shut the hell up, or else.
Her brother found the carriage house online and rented it sight unseen before they’d even arrived in Minnesota. They were still in North Carolina then, only days after, the panic swallowing them both. It was as if everything familiar had suddenly sprouted a fuse, already burning.
So, they left.
They left nearly everything, save a few boxes of clothing and pictures—their entire life crammed into Derrick’s small hatchback. They didn’t stop until the ground was flat and white, and when they pulled up to the carriage house, behind a legitimate mansion in the heart of St. Paul’s old-money neighborhood, Claire was sure it was a dream.
Mark-O, one of Derrick’s best friends from his skating days—and the owner of the Lair, a local skate park—had promised a job and enough money to cover the carriage house, which was bigger and nicer than any place they’d rented in North Carolina.
She had her own bedroom, her own bathroom; the entire place was heated by an antique woodstove that wrapped her in a warm embrace every time she came in from the cold. At first glance, the house was perfect, just like the job at the Lair was perfect—a chance for Derrick to focus on skating again finally. And, maybe, if you weren’t looking closely, you’d even think their life had snapped back to the way it had always been before. Perfect? Well, no. But safe. And when was the last time she’d actually felt safe?
She knew the exact minute of the exact day.
Claire kicked the snow from her shoes and opened the door. Her brother was staring at a table full of opened bills. As if he was summoning the courage to begin paying them. At first, he didn’t look up, and when he did, it took a second for the usual concern to flip onto his face.
Derrick was older by eight years, enough that he was already out of the house and living in Los Angeles when their parents were killed in a freak car accident. He ditched LA, a skating career that was about to take off, to make sure Claire didn’t end up in foster care or, worse, with one of their backwoods extended relatives who dotted the hills and hollers of West Virginia. Sometimes Claire wondered if it would’ve been easier if their parents were still around. If she and Derrick hadn’t run away as hard and fast as they could.
“What happened?”
To Derrick’s credit, he didn’t sound angry or even tired. At this point, either would’ve been justified. But his tone was patient and kind—as always.
“I couldn’t get on the bus and then—” She motioned to her pants, the damp circles at her knees.
Derrick stood up and ran his hands through his long, brown hair, not looking at her, which was a good thing because Claire couldn’t look at him, either. It had been a year and she was still sabotaged by the simplest things. Walking through the hallways at school. Ordering food at the mall. Getting on the bus. She wasn’t okay, she wasn’t better, and the weight of it had pulled Derrick underwater with her.
Claire stared down at her jeans. She’d had them for years, rescued from the rack of a thrift store in Chapel Hill. A one-day adventure Derrick let her tag along on. There was a fray on one of the pockets, small enough that you’d never notice it. Been there from the start. Claire would mindlessly pick at it during class, at lunch, while watching television. But now, as she stared at it, she realized it was just the start of something bigger.
“Hey,” Derrick said. “It’s good. We’re good.
Okay?”
Claire forced herself to look up. To say, “Okay.”
Chapter Two
CLAIRE HELD HER BOARD ON HER LAP AS DERRICK DROVE. The Lair was on the other side of the Cities, tucked between steel-sided buildings that housed manufacturing companies and office-supply distributors. When they pulled up to the entrance, there wasn’t another car on the street. Derrick shot her a smile.
“The benefits of skating at eight a.m.”
Claire didn’t mention how many other random times they’d shown up here. Before sunrise, after midnight—the benefits of having a key to the building. And she didn’t mention how skating had become their way to escape, to momentarily forget, to never actually talk about why they were at the Lair at two a.m. on a school night.
Because skating worked.
It didn’t matter if she couldn’t get on the bus or off the light rail, if somebody’s puffy jacket froze her to the carpeted hallways at Central High School, or she simply woke up and found herself unable to function. If she needed it, they skated. For as long as it took to empty everything out of her.
Before they got out of the car, Derrick hesitated as if he wanted to say something. Claire braced herself, staring at her board, which had been left behind by some long ago LA girlfriend. Before, Claire would’ve asked Derrick why he still had it—needled him until he smiled and told her to give him a break.
But he didn’t say anything, just cracked the car door and sat there for another second as Claire felt the cold wind kick through the car, a rogue snowflake floating in and disappearing almost immediately.
The Lair didn’t have hours, not really. Instead, Mark-O would open the doors as early as he got there and close them whenever he finally tapped out, which usually was hours past midnight. Mark-O liked to say that a skate park with its doors closed was useless, especially in a place like Minnesota.
“Look at this degenerate,” Mark-O said, looking up from the tattered paperback he was reading only to reach across the counter and punch Derrick in the dead center of his chest.
“At least I haven’t made a career of it,” Derrick said, which made Mark-O smirk.
Claire left them to their macho ritual and disappeared into the skate park—a cathedral of wood, concrete, and iron, every inch of it tagged by spray paint and stickers. It was her chance to have a space to herself for a few moments. To know that she was completely alone, completely safe.
Soon enough, of course, Derrick would come in and kick his board to the ground. And while he rarely talked to Claire when they skated, getting lost in his own past—in the joy she knew he felt every time the board was under him—a small part of her heart dropped every time he came into the room and that rare seclusion ended.
Depending on the day, other skaters would trickle in, some of them skipping school just like Claire. Eventually the entire room echoed with the metallic grind of trucks against rails, the wooden slap of boards, and the laughter, the laughter, the laughter—always rising up above the music, no matter how loud.
Claire put her board down and stared into the empty skate park, trying to visualize her path, her “line” as Derrick called it. When she first started skating, she’d get stuck in one spot for five, ten minutes, trying to figure out which direction to go—which path wouldn’t lead to a collision. Derrick always said skating meant claiming your place in the room, claiming your line, whether you were good or not.
She put a foot on the board, took a deep breath, and pushed off.
When she heard other people talk about the important things in their lives, the big things like family and friendship and love, they always described it as a feeling. Something electric and pulsing with life. You felt it in your ears, your heart. And maybe she had felt that before, when she played basketball. The thrill of a made shot. A last-second victory.
But skating was different. It emptied her and made the world quiet. Manageable, if only for a few moments at a time. When she inevitably fell, everything came back so powerfully, Claire was unsure if it was the rush of sound or the impact of the fall that took her breath away.
This time, she was up for only a half a minute before she fell, harder than usual, her helmet smacking against the concrete floor with a hollow pop that echoed across the cavernous space. She laid there for a second, watching her board continue dutifully on its original line when a voice said, “Oh, shit. Are you okay?”
No moment in her life passed without Claire being hyperaware of anyone and everyone who entered into an enclosed space. She sat with her back to the wall at restaurants, got on the bus or train last. If someone moved or reached into their jacket to pull out gloves, a book, anything, she would jump like the planet had lurched off its axis.
So, she knew Derrick was still talking to Mark-O. This room should be empty.
The voice called out again (breathing, breathing), but she could barely hear it now. The storm shot toward her like a missile. When a tall, rangy boy with long hair appeared at the top of one of the vert ramps, everything just stopped.
He slid down the ramp on his knees, picking up her board in one fluid movement as he stood up and walked toward her. She tried to yell for Derrick, but her voice stuck in her throat like a ball of ice.
The boy—he must’ve been close to her age—smiled nervously, holding the board out toward her. But Claire was essentially cowering below him (breathing, breathing), unable to move except her eyes, which darted around the room, up and down his body, looking for an escape, a threat, anything.
“Whoa—are you . . . guys! Guys.”
The boy looked back to his two friends, who were now standing at the top of the ramp, watching. One by one they slid down the smooth plywood, laughing as they walked toward Claire. The first boy seemed trapped now, too, as if her fear was a live wire that conducted through her body, paralyzing anyone who dared to get close.
The three boys looked no different than the countless skater boys Derrick had always called friends—no different than the ones who gave her casual glances when she managed to make it across the park without falling. The same boys who laughed at stupid jokes, using their sarcastic shorthand against each other like a straight razor.
The first one said, “I think she’s—I think there’s something wrong with her.”
This made the other two laugh.
“Don’t listen to what anybody says, Dark. This is exactly how you get a girl to go out with you.”
The kid—Dark?—knelt down in front of Claire slowly, hands out like you’d approach a cornered animal. “Are you here alone?”
This only made his friends howl with more laughter, but he ignored them. His eyes—deep blue and a striking contrast to his dyed-black hair and equally black clothes—were fixed on her. Claire tried to swallow, to push against the storm, but it was rising higher and higher and higher until it was just her nose and mouth above the water, barely pulling in air.
(Breathing, breathing.)
“Whoa. Hey . . .”
One of them went running to the lobby.
The other knelt down next to Dark. It might’ve been thirty seconds, maybe thirty minutes before Derrick and Mark-O came sprinting toward her. The five of them stood around her, asking questions, saying her name.
Looking like they’d seen a monster. Something worse.
Chapter Three
CLAIRE SIPPED WATER AS DERRICK TALKED TO THE BOYS. She could hear him telling them the basics. The broad strokes. He whispered, but it didn’t matter. She knew the story better than anyone.
It was right at the beginning of the day and it sounded like popcorn. She was pressed against two other students—Eleanor, her teammate for nearly ten years, and a freshman she didn’t know—under one of the giant metal staircases that had only been installed at Ford High School in the last five years.
She huddled beneath the metal as the popcorn (pop-pop-pop) went off around her, the sound slowly being overthrown by something new—a storm rushing into her ears. A silence that was neither quiet nor
peaceful.
The next thing she remembered was screaming, throwing fists and kicking feet—they’d always told them to fight back—as the police tried to pull her out. Adrenaline rushed back into her body in one sudden jolt. Almost a year later, she could still feel the pain of that exact moment. The moment she became something different, something outside the rest of the world.
Of course, Derrick wasn’t saying that.
He’d use words like processing and healing and the event. She didn’t know if he dodged the real words—four dead, broken, school shooting—as a way to protect her or to protect himself. Either way, the three boys looked like they’d seen a ghost. And maybe they had. Maybe she wasn’t real anymore, and all of the past year was nothing more than a kind of residual energy, electric impulses. Leftover brain activity.
Derrick gave one of the kids a fist bump, which probably seemed cool to him in the moment, but made all the boys laugh under their breath when he turned toward Claire. He came over and picked up her board, fiddling with the trucks and checking the grip tape. When he was satisfied with it, he put the board back down and looked at his hands for a moment, as if he didn’t know how to fix them.
“We can go whenever you’re ready.”
Claire nodded. Sipped more water.
Derrick started packing up her board, the tattered elbow and kneepads, when Dark came rushing over. No, rushing wasn’t the right word. He walked like somebody was chasing him, but also like he was acutely aware that everybody was paying attention to how he moved. The result was almost bashful, incongruous with his lanky frame.
“Are you leaving?”
“Yeah, bud. Claire’s probably had enough for today.”
As he was talking, one of the other boys came up. “But you only got in one run.”
Behind them, the final boy yelled out, “Half a run, technically!”
When they laughed, it was different from the kids on the bus. The kids in her classes. This was familiar, bringing her in instead of pushing her out. For the briefest moment, it was a ray of warm, thawing light.
“A run’s a run,” the second kid said, reaching a hand toward Claire. “They call me Leg. That’s God. And you know Dark. But one run? That’s not a day. Especially if you’re skipping to hit up the Lair.”