by Elise Juska
The car jounced hard over the potholes, but she was too distracted to avoid them. She wished she could talk to Robert but of course she couldn’t—not ever, but especially not now. She pictured him at home with his wife, who would be eyeing his phone. His wife from whom he was not separated, from whom he never had been, who had been sick while— A truck approached, flashing its headlights. Maggie hadn’t dimmed her high beams. The truck passed with a hard shudder. The car swayed slightly, and she gripped the wheel. When she reached her mailbox, she didn’t bother stopping but drove straight up the long rutted driveway. It was fully dark now, the trees soaked into the sky. Inside, the first thing she did was check the machine: a message from Anna, left hours earlier. Maggie had already tried her twice.
She considered food but couldn’t imagine eating. Instead, she locked the doors, something she never felt the need to do, and retreated to the old computer upstairs. She watched as the screen woke, excruciatingly slowly. Wished she’d taken Anna’s advice and gotten something faster, or upgraded her Wi-Fi—to be behind the times, she understood now, was to be punished. She bit her nails and watched and waited as the Internet connected, the little wheel spinning. She would read the article again, try to see what Bill was seeing, prepare to defend herself if needed. She watched as the article loaded one line at a time, like an unfolding paper doll. Just one month ago, 21-year-old Arlen Mackey— The screen froze. Then the page wobbled as the article was peppered with links to other things: the story in the Sentinel, an interview with Arlen Mackey, the headline TRIGGER WARNINGS: ANATOMY OF A TEENAGE SHOOTER.
Maggie’s cursor hovered above the link. Unsteadily, she clicked, and watched the page start filling. In some teenage males, the line between unusual behavior and potentially violent behavior can be murky, but there are often signs. She waited as the screen froze, unfroze again. The little wheel was like a blueprint of her brain, a pirouette of her nerves. Many times these young men have mental health disorders, such as chronic depression, which can cause them to isolate themselves. Maggie raked swiftly through her memory, rifling through hundreds of students. Any number of them had seemed isolated, for any number of reasons—sadness, shyness, emptiness. Luke Finch, for that matter, had seemed isolated too. And yet. These teens may also exhibit aggressive and antisocial behaviors, such as inappropriate outbursts or angry rants online. She remembered the way Nathan had talked over his classmates, the way he’d reacted to Meredith Kenney. In some cases these isolated individuals find a sense of belonging in online communities devoted to the glorification of high-profile shootings. This identification with antiheroes can stem from feelings of inadequacy or rejection and lead them to emulate these figures to gain attention and respect. Her mind raced. She thought again about the swagger in Nathan’s paper, about her mild, insufficient notes in the margins. About her attempts to minimize him, make the other students comfortable around him—could she have contributed to his feeling left out, depressed, unseen, the very feelings that eventually drove him to such a desperate act? Could she have fed his rage, his desire to leave a mark? These shootings, however, are not impulsive. They are planned, months or sometimes years in advance. Almost always, intentionally or unintentionally, information is leaked. Her eyes burned with tears. Was it actually possible that the essay Nathan submitted for her class had been a part of his long-term planning, his compendium of research, just waiting for a moment to light the match? That the particular strangeness that was Nathan Dugan had, in fact, been a laundry list of distinct red flags? You’re not the only one who knew him, Robert had once assured her, but maybe the truth was that she was the one who’d gotten the most telling glimpse, been shown the window no one else had seen, and not only had she not helped the situation, she had inflamed it.
When her phone rang, she jumped at it. “Anna?”
“Mom?” she said. “You’ve seen this, right?”
Anna’s voice sounded small. “I have,” Maggie told her, swallowing her tears.
“You’re not the one who sent it, are you?”
“No. No, of course not.”
“Then who did?”
Maggie blinked at the screen. She didn’t want to lie to Anna, but saw no other choice. “I’m not quite sure.”
To her surprise, Anna replied, “But it was the one you found that day, right? In the barn?”
Maggie’s mind traveled back to that shocked morning, the day after the shooting—the barn filled with dusty boxes and reams of papers, the stifling heat—then the memory realigned, expanded and reassembled itself: Anna had been there.
“Yes,” she admitted. “Yes, it was.”
“You said it was about his father,” Anna said. “But you said it was about a day trip. You didn’t say it was all about guns.”
Maggie didn’t recall saying any of this, but trusted that Anna would remember. Surely her own instinct then, as always, had been to downplay the situation, redirect the conversation. “I’m sure I just didn’t want you worrying,” Maggie said.
Anna made a scornful sound, but she stayed on the phone. “Then how did it get out?” she said. “Did someone come in our barn? Did someone steal it?”
“I doubt that.” Maggie forced a light laugh. “There’s probably no use speculating. It could be anything.”
“Maybe it was one of your students,” Anna pressed. “Maybe it was that guy on Facebook—”
“We may never know,” Maggie said. “Try not to worry,” she repeated, needing to stanch this train of thought. For there was a shake in Anna’s voice—it was slight, but there—and Maggie blurted, “Are you eating?”
“Mom,” Anna said. “Oh my God.”
Helplessly, Maggie closed her eyes.
“I’m eating, yes, I’m eating. Constantly, in fact.” Anna paused. “Alexis just came in. I better go. I’ll talk to you later.”
“Tomorrow,” Maggie said quickly. “Call me tomorrow.” A click, and she was gone. Maggie returned the phone to the cradle. She pressed her wrists to her temples, pictured her daughter in her dorm room four hours away. Reminded herself that it was understandable, tonight, that Anna might sound rattled—how could she not? Still, she would call Tom, ask him to go check on her. Drive down to Boston and take her to lunch. It would be good for him to see Anna, good for her to be seen. A comfort, right now, to hear Tom’s voice. But it was getting late—she would call him in the morning. Maggie faced the jumble of words crowding the screen. The original article was now cluttered with videos, ads, and sidebars, a newly trending headline, the link pulsing like a live wire: HOW CAN YOU HELP YOUR TROUBLED TEEN?
Fifteen
A week ago, when the Sentinel came out, Luke had read the article once, then immediately tried to erase it from his mind. But certain details still clung to him like burrs. Certain words. Humbly. Incredible sensitivity. He hated his high school picture, that stupid sweater, side by side with Nathan’s picture. He felt guilty about his teacher. In the article, Julie Brody had made it seem like Luke thought Maggie had been irresponsible. Asked if he thought his professor had been negligent, Luke admitted, “Probably, yes”—had she even asked him this? If she had, Luke didn’t remember it, but he knew he never would have answered so confidently. Never would have said Probably, yes. Never would have used the word yes, period. Yet somehow, at the end of the article, that line came out sounding like the entire point.
He tried to undo it, to make amends, returning to Facebook and posting a new status update. The reason I wrote about Nathan Dugan in the first place is because one time he asked me to hang out with him and I said no and I felt bad about it.
He couldn’t bring himself to admit the rest—that if only he’d been nicer, Nathan might not have felt so desperate and lonely and the people he killed might still be alive.
Still, when the new post appeared on-screen, he waited for some kind of swift karmic reprimand, but this one generated only a few responses, smiley faces and likes. Good that you didn’t hang out with someone like that, wrote Aunt Millie, an
d Katie Sutton chimed in: CLEARLY you did the right thing!
The messages from the reporter arrived three days later, and Luke was too freaked out to reply. It didn’t matter. Four days after that, when the article appeared—a different newspaper, a real newspaper—there he was. Someone had mailed Nathan’s essay, the original copy, to Arlen Mackey. Mackey went on to speculate that one of his classmates might have sent the essay, perhaps Luke Finch himself. Luke stared at the line, stunned. Would people actually think he’d done this? Kept Nathan’s paper all these years? He considered contacting the reporter and asking him to print a follow-up, to clarify that Luke hadn’t sent it, had nothing to do with it—but that, he had learned, could backfire too. You could say one thing, mean one thing, and they could make it sound like something completely different.
With the release of Nathan’s essay, Luke’s original Facebook post saw a renewed surge of activity.
You were right about that guy’s paper!
“really weird”—an understatement...
job well done
The praise felt upsetting, unearned. Luke wanted to correct them but was now afraid to write anything. He’d already tried explaining himself and gotten only a dribble of comments; it was like everything was backward, everyone reacting to the wrong things.
He received an email from one of his old ES professors. From April Peale, who was now working for some online entertainment magazine in New York. Hey there, she said. I hear you’re an Internet celebrity now?!
Even his dad had heard about it. “Looks like you were onto something with that teacher,” he said—ironically, for this, his father seemed to respect him. His father had always had a clear sense of yes and no, right and wrong, weird and not weird. It seemed that Luke had fallen, for once, on the right side of things.
When a friend request popped up from a Meredith Johnson, he almost ignored it until he glanced at the message: Hi Luke! Remember me?
It took him a minute. Johnson—that was why she’d been so hard to find.
Hey Meredith! he wrote back. The sight of her new last name was disappointing, but he was still happy to have found her. Of course!
When he asked how she was, Meredith told him that the wedding had been last summer, in her hometown near Boston, right after graduation. She worked as an assistant in a doctor’s office. Her husband, Jason, was a structural engineer. Then she asked what Luke had been up to and he couldn’t bring himself to admit the most basic facts about himself: that he’d been living at home, working at Dunkin’ Donuts. Instead he wrote, Moving to Portland soon. She replied, Cool! Glad to hear you’re doing so well!, and just like that, it was over. Luke reread the exchange twice, but its power ebbed each time, the magic of her name on his screen fading away.
The next morning, when Luke woke up, his stomach was hurting. He texted Heather from Dunkin’ and asked her to cover his shift. No prob—feel better!! He heard his dad leave for work, then spent the day in his room. He returned to the Facebook post, wading through new comments about Nathan’s paper. The guns were the main thing people were reacting to and, given what had happened, Luke supposed that made sense. The surprising thing was, the paper itself wasn’t actually as bad as he’d remembered. It was about hunting, but that didn’t mean anything. Luke hunted. So did his dad, his brother. So did basically everyone he knew. To him, the paper’s peculiarity was more about the way that it was written. Reading it was sort of like watching a game of Grand Theft Auto, violent and impersonal at the same time. He recognized this feeling, or something like it—mindless, noisy, numbing—from spending hours online in his room.
Now, though, these people were saying Nathan was a robot, a sociopath—this upset Luke more than he understood. When the dogs scratched at his door, he took them outside, but instead of going on a proper walk, he just let them roam around the yard. His stomach was pulsing. Overhead, the sky looked like a thick gray pancake with a single stripe of watery blue at the horizon. As if the clouds were a skin that could be peeled back to expose a whole different sky. As he stood there, Luke was seized with the knowledge that he needed to get out—out of the house, out of Paxton—then he rounded up the dogs and went back inside. “What are you doing home?” his brother muttered. Luke didn’t answer. Back to his room, back on the computer. He leaned forward, cushioning his stomach with his knees. Did a quick search of Craigslist, cheap trucks/cars within fifty miles. A page of ads appeared: the same truck over and over, a rusty Ford Bronco or Dodge Ram parked on a melting patch of snow. Then he returned again to Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook. There was Meredith Kenney, at happy hour with her co-workers. Five smiling faces pressed together. A photo of the margaritas, the heaping pile of nachos. Grateful for good friends! After hoping so much to connect with her, he wished he’d never found her. Her office, her husband, her cheesy sayings. She wasn’t how he’d remembered her. It was just as possible he’d been wrong about Nathan. There are almost always signs, if people are looking closely, the psychologist in the article had said—the line haunted him. People, in this case, being him.
Over the next few days, Luke went into work but his stomach hurt so much he clocked out early and biked home. He roamed the Facebook post, not because he wanted to, but because he had nowhere else to go.
Kaitlyn Sutton: once I read the paper it totally came back to me
Hannah Chaffee: it feels so angry…
Kevin McAllister: I still say there were zombies involved
Kaitlyn Sutton: it’s scarier than zombies imo!!!
Luke let the comments wash over him without responding.
Meredith Johnson: to be honest guys I don’t even remember it
Kaitlyn Sutton: prob b/c you weren’t in his group??
Hannah Chaffee: or because you were grieving sweetie
Hannah Chaffee: it was right after your brother…
Meredith Johnson: thats true
Kaitlyn Sutton: omg mer do you remember when you read this incredibly moving thing in class and he was so amazingly rude to you??
Meredith Johnson: was he? no!!
Kevin McAllister: jesus that’s RIGHT
Hannah Chaffee: oh I remember that too…
Luke remembered Meredith reading, and it being moving. But the rest of it, the part about Nathan, he had barely retained. Meredith had been in shock—what was his excuse? How had he become the person whose memories had triggered this entire conversation? It was clear he shouldn’t be trusted. There might be something wrong with his brain.
Kaitlyn Sutton: I remember even maggie was pissed off at him
Hannah Chaffee: I felt bad for her honestly
Meredith Johnson: me too!
Hannah Chaffee: he created such negative energy
Kaitlyn Sutton: but don’t you think that’s why she should have seen how messed up he was???
Mindy Reddy: fyi I went to high school with her daughter anna and she was pretty messed up too!
Luke stiffened, staring at the screen.
Kaitlyn Sutton: really? messed up how?
Mindy Reddy: eating disorder
Mindy Reddy: pretty serious I think
Kaitlyn Sutton: yikes
Mindy Reddy: yeah it was really sad to watch
Kaitlyn Sutton: def sad
Meredith Johnson: now I feel bad for the daughter
Luke’s stomach was an alert dot of pain. His first thought was: This was his fault. He had done this. Here were the facts, incredible but true: He had written a stupid post on Facebook and his professor had been trashed because of it, and now it was spreading to her daughter while Luke hid like a coward, doubled over in his room. He hadn’t even realized Professor Daley was a mother. And her daughter—she didn’t deserve this. It wasn’t fair, wasn’t right. And he was to blame. With one numb click, he deleted the thread. Blinked at the screen. He clicked again and deleted the entire post—1044 comments, gone. It was freeing, but not enough. He typed anna daley into the Facebook search bar and swept through the results but couldn’t find he
r. There were plenty of Anna Daleys, but none who was the right age and hometown. There was an Anna Daley-Briggs, though. She was from Stafford, the town right next to campus. Before he could talk himself out of it, Luke opened the message box and stared at the cursor, palms damp, wondering if he had the courage to write what he needed to say.
Sixteen
Worst-case scenario: Student writes troubling essay, teacher misses it, student later kills four people.
On a Saturday morning in October my dad and me decided to go hunting. As soon as Anna started reading, she didn’t want to keep going but couldn’t stop. She sat on the edge of her bed, twisting her lip, hunched over her phone. She pictured Nathan Dugan typing at a desk next to a closet full of guns. Pictured Laura Mack in the Gap dressing room, face in mirror, sounds of gunshots, unable to breathe.
When Alexis came home, she slung her backpack on the floor and announced: “Lunch! Don’t tell me you’re not hungry, roomie.” Then she looked at her another beat, and Anna worried she had seen the article, heard about it, could read it across her face. Alexis frowned. “And stop doing that thing with your lip,” she said.
Worst-case scenario: Student writes troubling essay, teacher misses it, student later kills four people, troubling essay is sent to local paper which reprints essay in full.
Text Message James: So? Did you read???
