If We Had Known

by Elise Juska

  “People are just reading it,” Luke said. “I can’t help it.”

  “Well, you shouldn’t have written it in the first place,” his father said. He set his cup down and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He looked angry; a single wrinkle, like a backslash, had appeared between his eyes. Luke wanted to tell him he should consider being happy: His antisocial son—a loner, as he’d once memorably called him—was finally getting some attention from the world. But he said nothing, scraping his chair back and heading to the door, the dogs on his heels.

  “What time do you go in?” his father asked him.

  “Noon,” Luke said, then let the screen door shut with a bang. He knew his father was well aware of his schedule. It was like he didn’t trust Luke would show up at fucking Dunkin’ Donuts unless he asked him, when it was Brent who was the actual slacker, getting stoned in his room, working a few nights a week at the pizza place—not that it mattered. Luke didn’t care. Soon enough, he’d be out of there.

  He decided to walk the dogs the long way, across the road and down the path that wound around the river. His dad would have left by the time he got home. When he crossed the street, the dogs ran ahead, scrambling down the bank and nosing around in the rocks. As Luke hit the path, he inhaled and began running. The air was crisp and clean and smelled like just-turned leaves. There was a hint of sadness in it too—the end of August. He swore he could name the month of the year, almost the exact week, by the feeling in the air. That morning, the air reminded him of the start of fall semester, the season he’d grown accustomed to heading back to school. Next week, the new semester would start without him. He’d never have predicted he would miss it but now the thought of those six-hour labs, the permanent red dents around his eyes from the goggles, awoke an ache inside him. It was lonely, being home. Worse, it was embarrassing. Some people from high school had been around over the summer but now most of them had gone, and the few still left were working dumb jobs like his. Once he had enough money saved, he’d buy a used truck and head down to Portland. Maybe crash at the apartment Matt had gotten with his USM friends. He ran hard, harder. His breath scraped his throat. The tops of the oaks were bright red and yellow against the hard blue sky. He ran as far as the bridge, sucking air, breathing in the sweetness of the river water. It was like the air was crying, he thought—a weird thought.

  When the phone call came, almost a week later, it took Luke by surprise. It was early on a Thursday morning, and life was back to something like normal. The Facebook post had quieted down, as he’d known it would eventually; strangers still left comments, but they were more sporadic, and often from the same few people. It was kind of disappointing to see it end, but mostly it was a relief.

  That morning, Luke had the eight a.m. shift at Dunkin’, and his father was leaving for the auto body, and they were both kind of silently maneuvering around the kitchen the way they did on Thursdays, coffee brewing and spoons tapping cereal bowls. His dad was just bagging up his lunch when the phone rang.

  “Who?” He listened for a minute, then handed the phone to Luke. “For you,” he said. “A newspaper.” He raised his eyebrows, as if Luke had rigged the call himself.

  “Hello?”

  “Luke Finch?” It was a girl on the line, sounding chipper for not even eight in the morning.

  “Yeah?”

  “My name is Julie Brody,” she said. “I’m calling from the Maine State Sentinel.”

  Oh: a newspaper, but not a real one. The Sentinel was the student paper back at school. Luke had never really read it but remembered piles of it appearing every other week in the student union. Occasionally he’d thumbed through a copy in April’s room.

  “Is now a good time?” Julie said.

  “For what?” Luke glanced at his dad, standing in the middle of the room, halfway between phone and door. He usually gave Luke a ride to work on Thursdays.

  “I was hoping I could ask you a few questions for an article I’m writing about the aftermath of the shooting at the Millview Mall,” she said. “I promise it won’t take more than a few minutes of your time.”

  His father tapped an imaginary watch with his index finger. Luke checked the square white numbers on the oven: 7:43.

  “I apologize for calling so early,” Julie was saying, “but I tried this number several times in the past week and there was no answer. I just have a few questions about your Facebook post.”

  Luke pictured Julie Brody: an upperclassman, judging from her tone, which was clipped and confident, almost like she was acting the part of a reporter. At this hour, she must be calling from her dorm room, probably having set her alarm. No one woke up this early back at school.

  “I saw it online,” she continued. “A few days after the shooting. And I have to tell you, I found it very moving. What you wrote, it really made me think. And then the response you got—it occurred to me this would make a fascinating article. There are so many compelling angles here.”

  “Angles?”

  His father frowned, as if the word had confirmed his deepest suspicions.

  “Like what?” Luke said, shifting slightly toward the wall.

  “I mean, there are so many,” she said. “Your memories of Nathan Dugan, of course. And what it’s like to be sitting in class with a person like this, and then all the attention online—the reaction was kind of tremendous, don’t you think?”

  It was a quarter to eight. His father was never late. Luke waved at his dad to go without him—he could ride his bike, like he did most days anyway—and his dad gave him a look, a long hard eyeful, then picked up his lunch from the counter and started slowly toward the door.

  “Luke?” Julie was saying. “Are you there?”

  “Yeah,” he said as the door slammed on his father’s back. “Sorry. I’m here.”

  “I was just saying, the online response was pretty remarkable,” she said. “Why do you think people responded so deeply to what you wrote?”

  Luke listened until he heard the crunch of his father’s boot soles on the driveway, the point where the gravel met the grass. “I don’t know,” he said as the truck door cringed open. “People just want to know what he was like, I guess.”

  “Your post was shared over ten thousand times, right?”

  “Yeah,” Luke said. When he heard the engine start, something relaxed in his chest. “Something like that, anyway.” Though in the past twenty-four hours there had been almost no new activity, the overall totals were still out of control. Now that it was over, sometimes Luke found himself just combing through all of it, reading here and there, almost nostalgically.

  “It was closer to twelve thousand, actually, I think,” he said. Then, worried it might sound like he was bragging, he added, “It’s been pretty crazy.”

  “It’s not crazy in the least,” Julie Brody said. “It goes to show how much what you wrote affected people.”

  Luke let out a small, awkward-sounding laugh. “I don’t know about that.”

  “Well, I do,” she said. “You were honest about your feelings, and people respond to honesty. What I want to know is, what first compelled you to sit down and write it?”

  Then she fell silent, and Luke felt her waiting, wanting him to say something good. “I don’t know,” he said, adding, “It was just one of those things.” Still Julie said nothing, because clearly this was a terrible answer but he didn’t know what else to say. He couldn’t admit his real reasons for writing it—that he felt guilty for once being a jerk to Nathan Dugan, that he was hoping to connect with a girl he’d had a crush on freshman year. He thought back to that afternoon, the crippling pain in his stomach, and tried to offer something better. “It was just upsetting to hear,” he said. “Somebody you knew.”

  “Well, of course,” Julie said. He could feel her nodding through the line. “Your original post was written the same day as the shooting, wasn’t it? You must have written it basically just as soon as you heard—”

  “Pretty much, yeah.”r />
  “So the news hit you really hard.”

  “Sure.” Luke laughed again, then wished that he hadn’t. He hoped it didn’t sound callous, but the question was just dumb. “I mean, it was pretty horrible—”

  “Oh, of course it was. But I meant the identity of the shooter, specifically. When you heard it was your old classmate, Nathan Dugan,” she said, quoting, “‘I didn’t really know him but I still remember him,’” and something about the way she delivered this line—with a tragic sort of emphasis, like his Facebook post was a piece of literature or something—made him queasy. “What do you think it was about Nathan that made such a lasting impression on you?” Julie said, and Luke felt a sliver of worry: Did it seem abnormal, how well he remembered Nathan? Did it imply that he’d been watching him in class or obsessed with him or something? Luke, honey, you’re staring.

  “I mean, he was pretty hard to miss,” Luke said.

  “Still,” Julie pressed. “You paint such a vivid picture. Four years later, he really stayed with you—”

  “Well, yeah,” he interrupted. “But it wasn’t just me who noticed him, though.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Stayed with you—this bugged him too.

  “I mean, there were a lot of us who felt that way.”

  “What way?”

  “Just, that, you know, he was kind of disturbing.”

  “By us, you mean other students—”

  “Yeah,” Luke said. “Kids in the class.”

  Julie paused. “You’re saying you talked about him at the time? About how disturbing he was? With your classmates?”

  “I don’t know if we talked about it. You could tell, though.”

  “How could you tell?”

  “You know—people whispering, making faces, that kind of thing.” He pictured Meredith, cringing as she squeezed behind Nathan and out the classroom door. Then he looked at the clock: 7:54. “Look, I’m going to be late for work—”

  “Oh, no! Just ten more seconds!” Julie said. “You mentioned this paper. In your post, you mentioned a paper that Nathan wrote—can you tell me what it was about?”

  She fell silent again, waiting, but this time Luke didn’t rush to answer. Her thirstiness was putting him on edge. It wasn’t like he was some official authority on Nathan Dugan—in truth, he barely remembered Nathan Dugan, and what he thought he remembered he was now starting to second-guess. Was it true that Nathan had worn that big coat year-round? That he’d sat with his fingers pointed—gunlike, one of the comments had described it—or had Luke’s brain just conjured that up because it seemed right?

  He looked at the kitchen wallpaper, a pattern of different fruits in vertical stripes. “I think it was about hunting,” he said. “The paper. But honestly, I’m not sure.”

  “Hunting?” Julie repeated, and Luke detected a new note of eagerness in her voice. “Really? That’s a pretty frightening coincidence, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, but like I said, I’m not positive. You should look at the comments. A couple other kids mentioned it. They remember it too. Some of them said they thought it was about guns, or war, or one guy thought it was about zombies. Kevin McAllister. He might remember more than I do.”

  “Well,” Julie said. “No matter what, it sounds like lots of students were aware there was a problem.”

  “Yeah.” Luke nodded into the phone. “Right. It definitely wasn’t just me.”

  “Doesn’t that make it even more mystifying that other people missed it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The professor, for instance,” Julie said. “This was Maggie Daley, right?”

  That was what they’d called her, Luke thought. Maggie. He had forgotten her first name. He hadn’t been one of her favorites, like Katie Sutton, but he’d liked her well enough. She seemed to get that he was shy; she left him basically alone. The thought of her now was kind of comforting, like being alone in a room with troublemakers and suddenly having an adult open the door.

  “Did she ever address Nathan’s behavior?” Julie asked him.

  “Address his behavior?” Luke said. “Like how?”

  “Anything, really—did she mention it in class?”

  “No,” he said. “Not that I remember.”

  “What about this weird paper?”

  “I don’t think so—”

  “Did she talk to him about it?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, and paused. “I mean, how would I know that?”

  “Well, do you think she should have?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “Yeah, probably.”

  “If he was writing about guns, after all.”

  “Well, yeah,” Luke said, his eyes on the clock as it slid to 8:01.

  Eight

  In the days following the shooting, Maggie checked the Internet multiple times a day. She had never been bothered before by her slow connection; if anything, her technological inefficiency was a point of certain pride. But those endless minutes, waiting for the screen to load, felt torturous, as she worried what she might find. She tried to distract herself with thoughts of the upcoming semester, the new students whose names and majors she’d received by email—one of them had already contacted her, wanting to get a jump on buying books—then, suddenly, the little wheel stopped spinning, the screen was awash with words, and she scrolled into the depths.

  It was her first exposure to a Facebook post, and she was amazed by how it unfurled and expanded, shoots from a vine. Sunday night, when she got home from Boston, there were over 350 comments. By Monday morning, nearly 100 more. Luke’s reflections had sprouted conversations, and those conversations sprouted conversations, tangents and sidebars, unruly and unstructured, one long thought unraveling in many directions—threads, the surprisingly perfect term. Many of these remarks were insensitive, if not outright ignorant, confirming one of Maggie’s objections to the Internet: Anyone could publish anything here. Nonetheless, she would follow a thread as it gained momentum, attracting other voices, an irate and righteous chorus, like a rock hurtling down a hill.

  Over the weekend, new information had emerged about Nathan’s online presence. A search of the laptop from his bedroom turned up frequent visits to websites dedicated to guns and weaponry and other high-profile shootings, where he’d posted hundreds of long critical rants under an alias—a handle—traced back to his email address. Maggie shuddered, remembering Nathan’s critique of Meredith’s essay: Had that been the seedling of this impulse, now full-blown? His alias was SergeantX. Did he think he was some kind of military supervillain? the commenters weighed in, denouncing him as fake, a wannabe, delusional. Maggie’s mind turned to the paper still smoldering in the pocket of her bag—if Nathan’s essay had felt ambiguous, his online writings sounded like a clear barometer of his instability. On the Internet, though, she supposed such things could simply go unnoticed, or be mistaken for any other furious screed. Anybody was reading them, yet nobody was.

  About Marielle Dugan, new details had also surfaced. Not only had she been living with her son, renting a house near the college; she had sold her house in New Hampshire to move there with him before his freshman year. She maintained that she’d had no idea what her son was planning, that he was capable of such violence, sparking another avalanche of blame. Obviously, people wrote, she knew something was wrong with him. Why else would she have moved with him? She must have known that he was dangerous. That he needed to be helped, to be watched. If the mother had any doubts about his mental health she had a responsibility to get help for him. Either she’s an enabler or she’s a moron. Or both!!!

  Maggie read these comments with a quick heart. She too felt guilty about Nathan, about what she might have done differently, what warning signs might have escaped her notice. And she was just the teacher, a college professor. For a mother to not recognize something was so deeply wrong with her child—it was a sickening thought. Maggie had known that guilt herself, though on a far lesser scale. Yet she struggled to s
quare her instinct for empathy toward this mother with her memory of speaking to Marielle Dugan the day after the shooting. The entire encounter—the sagging porch, the half-painted house, the blast of bitterness as Maggie left—were details so surreal they felt like something she had dreamed. She hadn’t told anyone she’d gone there, not even Robert. Very early Sunday morning, he’d texted her, asking about the call she’d made the night before, but Anna was waiting in the driveway—there wasn’t time to explain. She managed to type a short but painstaking text back, telling him she’d fill him in when she returned. But the next day, when finally they managed a proper conversation, the urgency of her call outside Tilghman had faded; she was wrung out from dropping Anna off at school. When Robert asked about her meeting, she didn’t mention Nathan’s essay; if she hadn’t told Bill, she decided, she needn’t tell anyone. And Robert didn’t have the time anyway. Suzanne, he said, had been taking the news of the victims badly. But the new semester was starting next week; they would be seeing much more of each other soon.

  For now, Maggie remained alone at her computer, wading through the stew of threads and headlines and, occasionally, bumping into herself: What I still don’t get is why that idiot Professor Daley didn’t do anything. It was a shock each time: to see her name invoked by strangers, floating on the waves of the Internet, visible to billions and available to be wielded in whatever way they wished. Obviously it’s the fault of the killer but anybody who knew he was dangerous is partially responsible too imho. The comments shook her in their ire, their casual certainty. What unnerved her even more, though, were the ones that began appearing from her former students, all members of that same comp class. Katie Sutton, Kevin McAllister, Ashley Shay. They were the same students whose sweet, vulnerable essays now sat in her barn, growing soft with mildew. To read their comments felt like eavesdropping on a party, hearing what the students really thought and how they spoke.