by Bryan Bliss
Dr. Palmer was watching them and said, “Okay, I can’t afford to lose my job, so we need to leave before any of you die from hypothermia.”
“I, for one, think it would be worth it, Dr. Palmer,” Leg said, his teeth chattering unintentionally.
“Thank you for that, Francis.”
“Here for you, Dr. P. Storm Mob!”
God and Leg joined her and Dark; all of them were freezing. Huddled close, trying not to catch their death—something her grandmother would say. Something Claire hadn’t thought about in years.
But maybe if they stood just like this, they could protect one another. Maybe they could keep just warm enough, just safe enough, to fight off whatever might come.
“Are we ready?” Greg asked.
Dr. Palmer clapped her hands and then, slowly, so did Claire—getting louder and happier than was probably warranted. And when Greg pulled the lever—when the trebuchet fired the snowball into the air—Claire took in a breath so quick, so sharp, she thought she might need to sit down.
But she didn’t. She watched as the snowball launched into the air. Watched it rise up, slowly at first, and then in one rapid moment, rocket into the sky at an incredible speed.
It disappeared almost immediately. Maybe it was the snow. Or maybe it disintegrated as soon as it left the ground. But Claire wanted to believe that it was still flying, climbing higher and higher, never landing.
If we could, we would protect you.
If we could, we’d reach out
to all of you.
To the entire world with arms
that stretch and stretch and stretch
like shadows at the end of a long afternoon.
A reminder.
After the news trucks have disappeared and all that’s left is
flat grass and flat words,
what do you hear except the start of engines, the screech of tires
pulling away to the next story?
Part Two
The Face
Chapter One
MRS. HOFFMAN, ONE OF THE TWO ORIGINAL TEACHERS Noah brought over on the ark, is carrying on about sentence structure and why “the teens” in her classroom have pretty much made a deal with the devil with all their texting and social media because now nobody cares about grammar or pretty much anything and that’s when she literally, like, seriously, clutches at the pearl necklace she always wears, ready to stroke out right there in front of us.
I’ve seen it all before, of course, but the pure theatrics of it is always surprising.
Tyler whispers to Ben something like, This lady could make sex boring and a few people laugh, but not me because Hoffman is looking for any reason to pounce these days.
She pauses, and I feel Tyler tense up behind me, but Hoffman just stands there gathering herself, looking like she’s one step away from raising a faltering hand to her forehead, trying to ward off a case of the vapors, just like in those Victorian novels she loves so desperately.
Nothing against the Victorians, mind you, but you get what I’m saying.
Anyway, seeing her react—that pained look on her face—reminds me of the T-shirts, and I promised myself I wouldn’t think about that anymore, but it’s damn near impossible as I sit there watching her get all worked up about nothing when she sure as hell didn’t give a shit when the entire world blew up for all of us, her included.
Anyway, nobody much likes Hoffman.
And not even because she’s the sort of teacher who goes to school council meetings to push Creation curriculums, even though she teaches English, because she felt it was her duty as both a Christian and a prayer warrior, to make sure all the kids who cross through Ford High School are nice and safe and, you know, saved.
Maybe Tyler can read my mind, because he repeats his winner a little louder—She could make sex boring—this time getting some chuckles from the people sitting around us. Loud enough to make Hoffman peer over her glasses and open her mouth to ask what was so funny. But then the bell rings and we all push out of our desks like our lives depend on getting out of that classroom as fast as possible.
When I walk past Hoffman’s desk, she gives me a cursory glance, her eyes boring through the cardigan I’m wearing, not in a creepy way, but more like she’s trying to access some kind of chaste superpower, an X-ray vision that would confirm everything she already thinks about me.
Nothing but trouble.
Tyler is waiting for me in the hallway, and a big smile comes across his face as he reaches to pull me close. I met him at the start of sixth grade, in PE class, when we played one on one. I was taller than him then and I’d been playing travel ball for years, so he never had a chance. Not when he checked me the ball or when he smiled at his friends, like, look at this girl, or when I hit that first shot—nothing but net—not to mention the next ten. Still, to hear him tell it, you’d think it went down to the final point. But all you have to do is ask his friends about that day. They are more than happy to remind him.
That was before I made the varsity basketball team as a freshman. Before I went All-Conference my sophomore year and All-State as a junior. Before a couple of colleges started sniffing around, talking scholarships. Before he and I got pretty serious.
“God. That lady should’ve retired fifty years ago,” Tyler says, pausing only to kiss me on the side of my head. A mouthful of hair, mostly.
“I think she’s actually been dead for the last two years,” Ben confirms. “They just roll her out when school starts back every year.”
They start riffing on how many other teachers might actually be dead as I watch Hoffman organize her desk until it is just so. The woman is psychotic about order, from the way she plans her lessons to the exacting way she speaks, as if every word takes a substantial effort to call forth. She believes in a world that is proper and respectful. A world that is black and white. Where there are good kids and bad kids. And I will forever be a bad kid to her now.
I made the shirt with a marker and one of Dad’s old work T-shirts. Terrified and so, so angry. When I wore it to school that first day back, I didn’t know the reporters would take my picture. I didn’t know they’d use those tall antennas that reached from the news vans to send the picture all around the world. To make me iconic. The face of a movement.
You’ve seen it, of course.
Me, screaming—or was I crying?—outside the school. How just behind me, the front doors were open, but nobody was going inside. And of course, scrawled across my chest in a furious gospel, two words that all of us believed in that one moment.
FUCK GUNS.
Icon or not, once Hoffman and the rest of the teachers caught a whiff of that shirt, they lost their damn minds. The first day, they tried to confiscate it, but all I was wearing underneath it was my bra, so they found a smelly sweatshirt from the PE lost and found and made me wear that.
It didn’t stop me.
I kept making and wearing a new one every day. Pretty soon they were waiting for me at the school doors—forcing me to change before I ever stepped inside. So I started hiding shirts in my bag, pulling one out at lunch or when we dressed for gym. Sometimes putting it on right before Hoffman’s class, just to make the old bird sweat and call out an anguished prayer when she caught a glimpse of the big FUCK peeking out from the top of my cardigan.
They started searching my bags—which wasn’t legal and, once the ACLU got wind of it, stopped immediately. But every time I opened my backpack, a teacher would appear, glancing in. The courts weren’t sure if glancing violated my civil rights, but it didn’t really matter. FUCK GUNS had become a full-on phenomenon. Suddenly the message was everywhere. If an administrator pulled one off me, another appeared in my locker or at my seat in the cafeteria. And it wasn’t just at Ford. They called it a movement, and it spread across the state, across the country.
And then one day, that movement—all the screaming and crying and raging—jumped on my back like a three-hundred-pound gorilla, and it was all I could do to get
out of bed in the morning, to keep moving, let alone be the face of a new generation of teenagers who would save the world, even though it was obvious that most of the adults didn’t care about saving anything.
Part of it was my family. Dad hadn’t gotten a construction job since I’d started wearing the shirts. He never asked me to stop, but I could hear him and Mom talking in the kitchen after I went to bed. Trying to make ends meet. To shield me from the harassment, which came from pundits and pastors and anonymous people I’d never met on websites I would soon know all too well. I became their personal devil, and they had the picture to prove it.
Part of it was Tyler and my friends, who had all healed. Ready to get back to basketball games and prom and normalcy. I could see the way they sighed when I pulled out a new T-shirt. At first, it was cathartic for me to be the lightning rod. To be the physical manifestation of our collective rage. But when they no longer needed it, when I was left standing all alone?
I stopped. Wearing the shirts. Doing interviews. All of it.
I pretended I was okay. That I wasn’t always seconds away from letting loose another primal scream—from the realization that none of the people who say they care about us really do, not one bit.
“Eleanor?”
Tyler and Ben are both staring at me, the hallway nearly empty. I play it off like, “You know who else is probably dead? Mr. Young.”
Ben cracks a smile and runs with it. Tyler stares at me like he doesn’t believe a word I’m saying, which is probably the truth. We’ve known each other for too long, have learned all of the other’s tells. It doesn’t help that I’ve recently made the mistake of wondering aloud whether wearing the T-shirt made any difference whatsoever.
The bell rings and Ben cusses once and then takes off down the hallway, not waiting for Tyler even though they have the same class. Tyler reaches out to touch my arm, like I’m about to vanish right in front of him, so I give him a big smile, the one I know he likes—the one that, in my lesser moments, gets me whatever I want. Of course, it works.
“You good?” Tyler asks, his voice gentle.
Before I can say anything, Hoffman is out in the hall.
“Miss Boone? Mr. Castigan? Do you need assistance getting to your next class?”
I muster up every bit of energy, every bit of good upbringing I have inside me, to look the old bat in the eye, to smile like a good kid—hoping she believes me, hoping I can go back to the way I used to be—and say, “No ma’am.”
The game was the kickoff for a week of activities meant to honor and memorialize the three students and one teacher who were killed. The girls basketball team—by far the best team in the school and maybe the whole county—would be the ambassadors, Coach Harris tells us. There will be a moment of silence and a slideshow and maybe a speaker—Coach Harris can’t say for sure, but one thing is certain. We need to be ready.
“Because the game still has to be played,” she says. “We still need to go out there and make our shots. Get our rebounds. Play as a team—not as individuals.”
Normally I would be nodding my head along with everybody else, especially because this wasn’t just any game. I’ve had this one circled on my calendar since last year when Maiden beat us, even though I’d dropped thirty-two points on them in the first three quarters, a record at the time. And I would’ve put another three on the board in the final seconds if I hadn’t been fouled—and I was fouled, no matter what that ref had to say.
This year—my entire senior season—is supposed to be about redeeming that loss. About my plan to push, pull, or drag this team through Maiden, the whole state tournament, not stopping until a scholarship is in my hands and a banner is on these walls.
Of course, then everything changed. Which nobody wants to talk about now. Instead, we’re supposed to be Ford Strong, a slogan the brain trusts on the school board nicked from at least two other schools. It’s not that I don’t believe our community is strong—it certainly is. But it speaks to a bigger problem, the idea that we are no different than the countless other schools that are having assemblies just like this one.
Ford Strong.
Kennedy Strong.
Everybody Strong, eventually.
Anyway, I’m not nodding, and Harris is giving me the laser eyes as she breaks us down.
“Okay, Ford Strong on me, on three.”
Coach raises her hand and we all put our hands together and everybody yells “FORD STRONG” except me, because they still seem like replacement words. Words lacking conviction. Once our hands drop, I feel Coach Harris staring at me like I just kneeled during the national anthem or crossed my fingers on the Lord’s Prayer—and it’s a toss-up which one is worse in Hickory, North Carolina, these days.
Not that her giving me the eye was unusual. Coach Harris has been on my ass for one thing or another since I came onto varsity, which is either a great coaching strategy or a deep character flaw. Dad once said that Coach Harris could’ve been two things in life, and basketball coach was the one that wouldn’t have gotten her a life sentence.
So, with that in my head, I try to walk off the court all casual.
“Eleanor, a word.”
Coach waits for the rest of the team to file into the locker room, every single one of them laughing and whooping it up like we’ve already won the game. I watch them disappear one by one—Melissa Jung is the last one through the light-blue locker room door. Then I turn to face Coach Harris, girding myself with a smile she can only read as positive.
“I don’t think I have to say this to you,” she starts, reaching down to pick up a stray basketball. She holds it with both hands, a God controlling that small world. “But you understand that we can’t have any distractions. Right?”
I nod, because I don’t want to be a distraction. I want to win this game. And because I’ve gotten pretty damn good at pretending. But somewhere just below the surface, below this varsity smile I’m forced to trot out every single day, there’s something different, a primal voice telling me to take that basketball and . . . what? Kick it across the gym? Slam it into the floor? Deflate it with the sheer power of my voice?
Because it has been an entire year and nobody has done a damn thing.
Ford Strong, indeed.
So, I smile. There will be no distractions. Nobody would even notice if there were.
“Just here to win, Coach.”
God, is that true. Before I would’ve done anything it took to win. I would’ve sacrificed my body for the team, something I’ve heard the football coach say to his players countless times and—I have no idea what this says about me—but it just sounds right. Badass, yes. But more than anything, it’s how I want to play the game. Living my life with skinned knees and busted elbows, a visible reminder that I will do whatever it takes, no matter what.
That’s what got me up every morning to run mile after mile.
To shoot shot after shot in our dusty driveway.
To live my life with a singular focus.
And then everything splintered.
Coach Harris studies me for a long time before finally handing me the ball.
“Twenty free throws, then get out of here.”
Chapter Two
THE DRIVEWAY TO OUR HOUSE IS LONG AND GRAVEL, which was an upgrade—or so Dad claims—from the dirt path I spent a lifetime riding my bike up and down, weaving around the potholes. Back then, the end of the road could’ve been the end of the world for all I knew or cared. If it were up to me, I’d never leave the ten acres that had been passed down to my father from his, the sole legacy of a family of tobacco farmers.
Thank God Dad can’t grow a beard, let alone a patch of tobacco, because I’m not sure I’m cut out to be a farmer, either. But Dad can swing a hammer, can fix or build just about anything. Over the past twenty years, he’s cobbled together a business and a reputation, ending every piece of communication—e-mail, text, sometimes a conversation at Mt. View Bar-B-Q—with a simple reminder of “no job too small.” If
he believed in business cards, it would be on there, too.
Until last year he’d always worked enough in the warm months to take most of the basketball season off. He’d stand at the top of the bleachers—always stood, no matter what—and watch me play. This year he still comes to the games, but even from the court I can tell that his pacing is about more than the game.
Of course, he and Mom don’t want me to worry or even know we’re struggling. But I hear them whispering. I notice the way they stop talking and smile the same way I do—Everything is fine!—whenever I walk into the room. And of course, I noticed that Dad didn’t get a call for work all summer. The traitorous looks every single person gives him, me, our entire family, whenever we leave our long gravel driveway.
When I pull up to the house, I can see them through the large bay window that Dad put in for Mom on her birthday two years ago. They’re at the table, holding hands and talking. Two people who have been through a lot and still believe “no problem too big.”
I walk in and they immediately turn their attention to me, not letting go of each other, which is sweet and, at times, the sort of thing that embarrasses the hell out of me at Food Lion. How they need to constantly be in contact. As if their bodies would stop functioning otherwise.
“How was practice?” Dad asks. “Harris still a psychopath?”
“Ronnie, please,” Mom says, trying to pretend she doesn’t find every word out of his mouth utterly charming. “Eleanor, I left you a plate in the fridge. Want me to heat it up?”
“Yes,” I say, and fall into the chair next to Dad, leaning my head on his shoulder and closing my eyes as the smell of taco meat slowly fills the small kitchen. When the microwave dings, I open my eyes and see both Mom and Dad watching me.
“What?”
“Nothing,” Dad says. “Y’all going to be ready for Maiden?”