The Kind Worth Saving (Henry Kimball/Lily Kintner, #2)(8)

There was one odd incident with Joan, right before the Easter break. I had handed back a pop quiz so, unsurprisingly, Joan came up to me after the class had ended. I was sitting at my desk chair and she was standing, but even so, her head was only a little higher than mine as she argued that the quiz wasn’t entirely fair because I hadn’t been clear that they were supposed to read all the Anne Sexton poems I’d assigned them.

As she was talking, there was one other student still gathering her things in the classroom. Madison Brown was also a gymnast, plus a close friend of Joan’s, and I assumed she was taking her time in order to wait for Joan to plead her case. But once Madison’s giant backpack was zippered up, she slung it over her shoulder and headed for the door. Just before she exited, she turned and said, “Better look out, Mr. K, Joan told me she has the hots for you.”

I rolled my eyes dismissively, hoping to alleviate the embarrassment of the moment, but when I looked at Joan her face had gone red. I thought at first it was embarrassment, but her eyes were on the door that had just swung shut, and I remember thinking it was closer to rage that I was seeing. Still, I got up to prop open the door, hearing Maureen Block’s voice in my head—Never be alone with a student behind a closed door—and when I came back, Joan’s face had returned to a more normal color.

“You don’t need to worry, Mr. Kimball,” she said. “Madison is just being a bitch, pardon my French.”

“I thought you two were close.”

“Who? Madison and me? I mean, she’s on the team, too, but we’re not exactly close. And what she said about me . . . I mean you’re good-looking for a teacher, but you’re not my type.”

I laughed. “Don’t worry about it,” I said, wanting this particular strain of conversation to end. “And just because this has turned awkward, I’ll cut you a deal. Write a few sentences tonight about the meaning behind ‘The Room of My Life’ and I’ll up your grade on the pop quiz.”

“Thank you, thank you.” She bounced a little on her sneakers and left the room.

Two weeks later Madison Brown bled out on the floor of that same classroom while James Pursall stood over her with a gun in his hand. I stood staring at the tableau, about three feet away, and my bones had turned to rubber, and then James lifted the gun, angling it toward his own chest, toward that bulky winter parka, and pulled the trigger.

I think the entire incident—from the moment James pulled the gun from the depths of that coat to the moment he lay next to Madison on the floor—took all of two minutes, maybe even less, but time in those two minutes moved at its own sickening pace. It was hours from the moment the gun emerged to the moment when the entire class, including me, became aware of it. I’d been talking about their upcoming public speaking assignment, where they each had to give a mock valedictorian speech for graduation. I’d been telling them that they should be creative, that I was not interested in hearing the exact same speech twenty-four times. And then James had yelled, “On the ground, everyone,” and no one moved. I thought it was some kind of joke, maybe he was demonstrating a very untraditional valedictorian speech, but then he was standing on his desk chair, the gun in his hand, and half the students dropped down below their desks, and a girl named Missy Robertson—I remember it because she’s a local weatherperson now—began to loudly sob.

“Everyone,” he said, louder this time, and the rest of the students got down on the floor.

I was leaning up against the front of my desk, my usual position when I was teaching, and I remember my hands were out in front of me, and I said something like, “James, let’s talk.”

It made him look at me from across the room, his eyes wide beneath the shock of greasy, inky hair. I opened my mouth to speak again but didn’t. I wanted to live and somehow I knew if I made another attempt to defuse the situation he was going to shoot me. That decision, to not speak, to keep quiet like the students on the floor, altered my body chemistry. I can’t think of a better way to describe it. My bones hollowed out, my organs liquefied. My chest was empty, as though I’d pulled my heart out of it and handed it across to James Pursall. I was frozen in place.

He came down off his desk, and walked between the cowering students, swiveling his gun, and saying, “Eenie, meenie, miney, moe,” in a shaky, unreal voice, and even at the time, from back within the dusty cave where I was cowering, I remember thinking his heart wasn’t in it, that he’d decided in advance to try to terrorize the other students, but that he just wanted to get the whole thing over with.

At the front of the room, when he was only a few feet from me, he turned around and took a few small steps, so that he was standing above Madison Brown, curled into a ball around the bulk of her backpack. He aimed the gun at her, then braced his trembling right hand with his left, and I knew he was about to shoot. I pictured myself springing from the desk I was still leaning against, grabbing him around the chest so his arms would point upward, shaking that gun loose, dropping him to the hard linoleum floor.

Instead, I watched as he put two bullets into Madison Brown. She didn’t even move when he did it, like she was already dead.

Then I watched James Pursall make like he was returning the gun into his coat, but he pulled the trigger instead, and dropped to the floor next to Madison.

I’ve gone over those memories a thousand times since that day, and I no longer entirely trust the details. I realize it might have been worse had I tried to do more, but that doesn’t stop me from knowing, deep down, I failed in that particular situation. Yes, it could have been worse. But as it was, it was pretty bad.