by Bryan Bliss
“Are you sure everything is okay?”
Claire almost started crying. She wanted to tell Dr. Palmer everything—but where did the story start? Saturday? When she first saw the notebook? Or months—a year—before now, when everything in her life got jigsawed apart, leaving her with no way to find the corner pieces. No way to figure out the rules of the game.
“Do you want to go out into the hallway? Talk about it?”
Claire could already feel the stares of the other kids, could practically hear their laughter. Another freak-out from the freak from North Carolina. She shook her head, not trusting herself to say even the simplest word for fear that she would lose it and confess that she was worried and scared and perhaps most importantly of all, still not sure that anything she was feeling was actually real.
Dr. Palmer didn’t say anything for a long time, barely moved, as if she thought Claire might just need somebody to be close, another person she could trust, for the last few minutes of class. And just before the bell rang, Dr. Palmer reached out and touched the copy of Frankenstein Claire had sitting on the desk.
“If you need something—anything—just come by my class. No matter if there are students in here or not. Okay?”
Claire didn’t make it to her next class.
Leg and God stopped her in the hallway, neither of them carrying bags or books—only their skateboards. Normally, this would be a marvel. She understood that some kids didn’t care about grades, or didn’t know how to care, but these two seem a different breed entirely. They took not caring to an elite level.
“Hey—how are you?” God asked.
Her mind shot back to Saturday night, lying in the snow and unable to move. They must’ve been the ones that had called Derrick, unless she’d truly blacked out and done it herself. All of this, now, seemed dramatic, at best, so she deflected the question.
“Have you seen Dark?” she asked.
Leg grimaced and shook his head. “No. And I guess that’s not that abnormal. The dude was just suspended. But still. I was hoping to see his dumb ass this morning.”
“That’s the other reason we came to find you,” God said. “He didn’t, like, reach out to you this weekend? Anything?”
Claire shook her head and Leg swore loudly, making one of the custodians shake her head. Leg either didn’t see or didn’t care because he just kept talking.
“We need to find him, man. Like, right now.”
God leaned against a locker and picked at a piece of dead skin on his thumb. He was trying to hide his concern, but his face, his entire body, betrayed him.
“Do you think he’s okay?”
God sighed, pushing up from the locker when the late bell rang and the other students in the hallway started rushing for their classes. God and Leg didn’t move.
“I haven’t seen him that pissed in a long time.”
“Where do you think he went?” Claire asked.
“Who knows, but we can’t let him just roam the Cities,” Leg said, talking to God. “Let’s just ditch and go check all the usual spots. He has to be somewhere.”
They looked at Claire, expecting her to join them. When she took a step toward her next class instead, God’s face dropped.
“If you see him, let us know. Okay?”
Claire didn’t see Dark—or God and Leg, for that matter—when she walked into the cafeteria. The room was chaotic, more so than usual. A line for the hot lunch extended out the door and into the hallway. Two girls shrieked, pointing at their phones. The entire room seemed alive.
She sat down at the table, where all of God and Leg’s friends were watching Dr. Palmer’s new video, which not only included the part she’d seen—they hadn’t cut out Leg’s desperate attempt at a prom date after all—but also the aftermath where her husband continued filming the entire police encounter, including the moment they wrapped yellow police tape around the trebuchet to wild boos from the crowd.
The only thing that could’ve pulled the group’s attention away from the latest Storming the Castle video was the screaming.
Claire dove to the ground immediately, an action that, under normal circumstances, would’ve put every set of eyes on her. Instead, everybody was looking at the twenty students—younger, probably freshman—raising their fists. Yelling. Holding signs. Wearing shirts with one simple message.
FUCK GUNS.
It wasn’t the same shirt Eleanor had worn, not exactly.
Since then, a savvy person had trademarked the phrase and turned it into product. And whenever another shooting happened, the slogan would pop up on T-shirts or buttons or, once, a banner ad on a website for reading television spoilers—a site she’d deemed safe before then. And every time since then, she’d been able to click the page closed or turn her head. She’d been able to escape.
A girl with a nose ring was screaming now.
“Shut Right-Wing Report down!”
Another girl yelled, “Fuck guns, fuck Right-Wing Report, save us!”
The whole room grew louder and louder as the rest of the cafeteria began to join in—“FUCK GUNS, FUCK GUNS.”
Claire tried to crawl under the table (breathing, breathing), the same survival instincts at work a year later, but all she could do was wedge herself against the hard legs of the table. And even there, she couldn’t escape the raw sound of the protest.
Run.
It came from deep inside her, cutting through the panic like a knife.
She crawled from under the table (breathing, breathing), across the floor of the cafeteria until she could stand up and start running—ignoring the security guard who told her to stop, because his words were nothing but mud in her ears.
She turned blindly into the stairwell and froze.
There was room to hide under that staircase, too.
(breathing, breathing)
But she didn’t need to hide. There wasn’t anyone here. Nothing was happening.
Her body screamed—move or hide. Now.
She took the stairs two by two, running as fast as she could, going up floor after floor, not because she had a plan, but because it was the only way she could think to avoid the storm, the Monster—whatever was behind her.
When there were no more stairs to climb and she burst out of the stairwell, she almost flattened Dr. Palmer. Claire hit the ground hard and started scrabbling across the floor, just to keep moving.
“Claire—Claire.”
Dr. Palmer held her firmly by her shoulders, not letting her move. And instead of feeling caught, she slumped down, finally letting the tears come—tears that she’d been holding for weeks, months.
So long that she couldn’t even remember all the times she’d stopped herself or why.
Chapter Twelve
CLAIRE SAT IN DR. PALMER’S CLASSROOM, LISTENING AS she talked in a hushed tone on her desk phone. Claire assumed Derrick would be here soon enough and maybe the school counselor. She was still frozen by the fear of—what?
It was irrational. She knew it was irrational. Why couldn’t she just see a T-shirt that said fuck guns and, you know, laugh with the rest of the cafeteria? Stand up and raise her fist high in the air because, yes, fuck guns. She had no problem with the sentiment or the words, because what else was there to say at this point?
And yet, she couldn’t move. She could barely speak, which is what really made Dr. Palmer transition from “typical teenage drama” to “she is in trouble.” And when she wouldn’t say why, Dr. Palmer brought her to her classroom and sat her in a desk with a cup of water.
“Okay. Okay. Yes.” She glanced at Claire. “I think so. Let me ask.”
“Claire, is there an immediate threat to you?”
Claire didn’t know how to answer. She shook her head. There wasn’t an immediate threat. But just as quickly, her brain shot back—how do you know? Because wasn’t that the case? They could be sitting here, just another day, and all of a sudden, the entire world might start deconstructing with the rapid sound of gunfire. Nothing was
really ever safe.
It wasn’t long before Derrick came rushing into the room, bending down to peer into her face. A few seconds later, both the principal of the school and the counselor were standing in the room, all of them asking the same question—are you okay?
When she didn’t answer, the counselor asked her a different question.
“Claire, can you wiggle your toes for me?”
It seemed like a ridiculous request, one for a baby. Wiggle those toes for Mommy, darling! And yet, she did it. And her toes moved on command, which felt like a win given everything.
“Great. Now, rub your hands together for me.”
She did, another success. And then the counselor asked Claire her favorite color and she answered, “Blue” without thinking. It just spilled out, which burst the tension in the room, and everybody seemed to be able to take a step back for a moment.
“Can you identify three blue things in this room?”
One, two, three—Claire pointed them out. She could already feel the storm receding and becoming a memory. Not a real, living thing.
So when the counselor asked one more time if she was okay, Claire could finally answer.
“Yes.”
The next class was beginning, so they moved the entire group, save Dr. Palmer, who gave Claire a weak smile as she was leaving, down to the social worker’s office. Claire tried not to look at any of the other students as she walked out of the classroom. Of course, all of them knew something was going on—knew all about her—which only got worse when Derrick, the principal, and the counselor essentially surrounded and escorted her down the three flights of stairs like some kind of foreign dignitary.
Once they were in the office, Claire wasn’t sure she could explain what had happened. Now that she was outside of the event, she could tell that she was never in any real danger. But in the moment, it felt more real than the chair she was sitting in.
“Claire, the first thing we need to do is make sure that you feel safe,” the principal said. “When you started here, I was serious when I said we’d do whatever was necessary to make sure you not only got the help you might need but could also become a vital part of the Central community.”
Every word was careful. She turned to Derrick, who was busy twisting his wool stocking hat in his hands and nodding slowly.
“It was the kids in the cafeteria,” Claire said suddenly. “The protest.”
She didn’t want to say anything else, wanted to pretend the FUCK GUNS shirts would never show up in this school, anywhere near her again, and they could forget this had happened. But she knew it was bigger than just the T-shirt, and that made the tears come even harder.
The counselor handed her a box of tissues. Claire took one and said, “I’m sorry.”
“You have nothing to be sorry about,” the woman said, patting her on the knee.
“She’s been . . . better,” Derrick said. “Like, going out with friends. Going to the skate park without me. Just better.”
Claire looked up when the counselor handed her a small package of almonds and a tiny bottle of water. Claire took both and held them on her lap as she thought about what Derrick had said. Had she been better? Or was it just a Band-Aid over a bigger wound, something they used to forget what was actually underneath? She honestly didn’t know.
“Tell me about your friends,” the social worker said. “Did you meet them here?”
“No,” Claire said. “At the skate park.”
“Where do they go to school?”
“Central.”
The social worker and principal looked at Derrick, confused.
“She didn’t know they went to school here,” Derrick explained. “And then she came to school and the degenerates were standing at the top of the stairs and—”
Derrick looked suddenly troubled, perhaps by the perplexed looks on the faces of the other two adults in the room. He coughed and tried to explain.
“Sorry. They’re not really degenerates. I just like calling them that because, you know . . .”
They did not, obviously.
“God and Leg are good kids,” Derrick said. Claire could tell he was trying to summon every bit of “adult” he had in his voice. At first Claire thought it had worked. When they heard the boys’ names, the principal and counselor had sat up straight as boards.
“God and Leg . . .” The principal repeated their names slowly, looking to the counselor. “So I’m going to assume that Peter is also a part of this new group of friends.”
“Dark?” Derrick said. “Yeah. He’s always lurking somewhere.”
The image made Derrick smile, which made Claire feel momentarily better. But then she saw the principal and counselor and her stomach dropped.
“Peter has a lot of trouble in his life. And that trouble sometimes spreads to other places,” the principal said. “I have no doubt that he is a good friend. The devotion of Francis and William attest to as much. But the fact remains that he is also working through a lot of things and, well, we’ve had concerns recently.”
This time Claire sat up a little straighter. Concerns. A coded word, the kind she learned to parse out years ago when adults would try to speak over her. And concerns was exactly the sort of word a principal would use to express an opinion without crossing any sort of legal or privacy boundaries.
“Are you saying Dark is dangerous?” Claire asked.
Both the principal and the counselor shook their heads so fast, she was surprised they stayed attached to their bodies.
“Peter is . . . we’ve had a lot of discussions with him. And while we have concerns, we would never endanger the students of this school.”
That was bullshit. Claire had heard it a million times, how the kid who came into their school had never been seen as a threat. They, too, may have had concerns about the pictures of automatic weapons he’d posted online constantly. The lyrics, thinly veiled at best, that painted pictures of destruction, pain—horror. And after it was over, after three of Claire’s schoolmates and one teacher were dead in the hallway of a school that had promised to keep them safe, the concerns became another piece of a puzzle that should’ve been solved months or maybe years before.
It was blood on their hands, even if they washed it off with every saccharine wish for unity and community strength. Claire wouldn’t have it, not again. She reached down into her backpack and pulled out the two journals, holding them out to the principal and the school counselor. At first, neither of them reached for the books.
“These are Dark’s—I mean, Peter’s. I think you should look at them.”
The school counselor took the notebooks, holding them carefully as if they might combust in her hands. She opened one, handing the other to the principal, who looked at Claire for a second before she opened hers, too.
Claire spent the next day at home, wrapped in blankets. Derrick hovered constantly, eventually giving up on trying to assuage his own guilt—I should’ve known, all that—in the form of more hot chocolate. Another batch of cookies. Now he just glanced her way every ten to fifteen minutes.
When he saw the journals, his face had gone dead white. And that was only the Monster. When they got to the more graphic ones, which turned out to bear a striking resemblance to a biology teacher who had confronted Dark only a week earlier, the entire office went into a red alert of sorts. The principal was on the phone. The counselor tried her best to smile as she encouraged Derrick to take Claire home.
And so they’d been home since then, a kind of watered-down version of those first days after the shooting, when they were too scared to leave the house, if only because the sense of normalcy and safety that had once ruled the world was now gone.
They fell back into the routine seamlessly. And this time, Claire couldn’t shake the feeling that they weren’t protecting themselves but were just avoiding the real problem.
Could she go through the rest of her life simply waiting for the next surprise? The next moment that would unravel everything. S
he didn’t know if there was another way, so she sat there with her hot chocolate and her streaming baking show, hoping for the millionth time that everything would magically fix itself.
Claire must’ve fallen asleep because the knock on the door jolted her awake. Before she could get out of bed, she heard Derrick answer the door—and then God’s voice.
By the time she got to the living room, Derrick was leading him back to the front door. And while God wasn’t being forced, Claire could tell he wasn’t ready to leave. They both saw her at the same time, but God spoke first.
“Are you kidding me?”
“Man, I told you—not now,” Derrick said, but God shook away from Derrick’s grip and walked toward Claire.
“You know he got expelled, right? Fucking miracle that he didn’t get arrested, too. But expelled. That’s sure to set your life on the right track, isn’t it?”
Claire was trying to figure out what to say, how to explain, but God shook his head.
“I told you. I told you.”
“Okay, enough.” Derrick grabbed God by the shoulders and pushed him out the door. Before he could close it, God yelled out one last thing.
“He didn’t fucking deserve that, and you know it.”
Once he was gone, the room still felt charged. As if somebody had turned on every light in the small carriage house. When Derrick spoke, it was in his most calming voice.
“They’re just mad,” he said. “They’ll get over it.”
“Will they?” Claire asked.
Derrick rubbed the back of his neck, choosing his words. “Those pictures, Claire. They’re not good. And that one with the severed head? That’s a teacher. You did the right thing.”
Claire didn’t need him to say any more. Didn’t want him to say anymore. He was right: the pictures had frightened her from the very moment she saw the Monster. And when she saw the others, drawn only a week before, something else clicked into place. It might’ve been that one moment that nobody acts on, the see something, say something opportunity so many people miss because they’re either too oblivious or too scared.