Once and for All(66)

By the time I’d finished the quiz as best I could, it was eight forty-five and I was one of the last ones to hand in my paper. As I did, I glanced outside for Jilly. A half hour was late, even for her. A few moments later, Se?or Richards got to his feet, coming around to lean against the desk, and told us in Spanish to open our books to page 176. THE SUBJUNCTIVE, the title heading said in English. The upshot seemed to be that you used it when you weren’t certain. Well, I thought, that would come in handy for me.

Just then, outside the half-open door, I heard someone running down the hallway. For a minute I thought it was Jilly, but then they passed by, a blur in my side vision as Se?or Richards directed our attention to the board, where he was busy writing something in his boxy print.

At 9:05, when the bell rang signaling the end of the period, I immediately pulled out my phone, expecting to see a string of increasingly panicked texts from her over the last fifty minutes. But there was nothing except a bunch of news alerts, which I didn’t bother to read. I had a long way to go in the five minutes we were given between classes if I wasn’t going to be late myself, to Art History.

As usual, everyone seemed to be moving super slowly when I was in a rush. The hallway was packed with people on their phones or talking loudly to each other as I wound through bodies and backpacks, trying to get to the one staircase that was usually less crowded than the others. By the time I got downstairs, I only had two and a half minutes until the bell. I did notice a lot of people standing around the TV in the main office, looking at something, but it didn’t occur to me to see what it was.

Once outside, I passed a couple making out and two guys walking super slowly with instrument cases as I headed for the steps that led to the Art and Theatre building. I pulled my backpack closer and started up them, taking the last couple two at a time, then popped out right by my classroom’s back door, which Ms. DiMarcello, bless her, kept propped open because she knew it was a valued shortcut.

“Louna!”

When I heard Jilly’s voice, some aspect of it—tone, volume, a trembling—made me stop where I was. I turned around to see her coming toward me across the grass, where you weren’t allowed to walk, her footsteps leaving prints in the dew. She had one hand to her mouth, and her eyes were wide. Without even knowing why, I suddenly felt cold.

“Oh, my God,” I said, rushing over to meet her. “What happened? Are you okay? Is it one of the kids?”

The bell rang then, loud and piercing. She reached out, her fingers clamping my upper left arm. “No, it’s not . . . Louna, there’s been a shooting.”

“A what?” I said. Just behind me, I could hear my teacher rapping her hand on the wooden desk to quiet everyone down, just like she always did. “I don’t understand.”

In response, she pulled out her phone. BREAKING, it said in yellow block letters on the screen, above an image of a flat, cinderblock building with a flagpole out front, a tiger painted on its side. SHOOTER CONFIRMED AT HIGH SCHOOL, BROWNWOOD, NEW JERSEY.

I just looked at the words, trying to make sense of them. “Oh, my God,” I said, immediately pulling out my own phone, fingers shaking as I selected Ethan’s number. It went straight to voicemail, but that wasn’t unusual: he wasn’t allowed to have his phone out in class. Still, I fired off a text—YOU OK???—for when he would see it. Because Ethan was fine. He had to be. What were the chances?

“I was late, with Crawford’s stupid lunchbox thing, and I heard them break in on the radio,” she said. She was still holding my arm. “It was in the gym, at least that’s what they were saying.”

Ethan’s first class was English: I knew this as well as, if not better than, the fact that Spanish was my own. “He wouldn’t have been in the gym,” I said. “He starts in the main building.”

“Oh, good,” she said. She eased her grip, finally, letting her hand drop. “I just, when I heard Brownwood, and they said there were fatalities—”

I looked back at my screen and the two words I’d sent, willing the dots to appear beneath them that would signal he was typing a response. Nothing.

“Louna?” I heard Ms. DiMarcello call from the door behind me. “Time to come in. We’re starting.”

“One second,” I called over my shoulder. I looked at Jilly. “He’s fine, right? It’s a huge school, he always says so.”

“I’m sure he is,” she said. “And it sounds like he wasn’t even near there.”

“Yeah.” I swallowed, looking at my phone again. “I should . . . I guess I’ll go in to class?”

“Okay,” she said. Neither of us moved. “I’m sure he’ll text you any minute.”

I heard footsteps and looked behind her to see a school resource officer coming toward us. There were two: one was wide and muscular, built like a fireplug, the other skinny and tall. This was the skinny one. “Ladies, it’s past late bell. Move along to your second periods.”

“I’m going,” Jilly told him, then looked at me again. “Text me. The minute you hear.”

“I will,” I said. He was still standing there, watching us. I slipped my phone in my pocket and went inside.

For the next fifty minutes, Ms. DiMarcello stood in front of the board, lecturing about the Surrealists. Not that I could have told you then, or now, what she said: I wrote not one word on the empty white page of the notebook in front of me, my eyes instead on my phone’s screen, which I had hidden under my coat in my lap. Our school, like Ethan’s and most others, had a strict in-class no-screen policy that I usually followed. But that day, I would have fought someone to keep it close and on. By the time the bell rang, there was still no word.