Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down

by Anne Valente

  Zola found the chemistry room, a basement class retrofitted into a laboratory. No windows. Beakers lining makeshift counters along the walls. Desks arranged in pairs, a system of lab partners that remained intact between schools. Mr. Albertson stood to the side of the room setting up flasks of fluid color. Test tubes. Eyedroppers. A cluster of safety goggles on the counter. He looked at Zola when she walked in, the most awkward of all of her teachers, a man who she sensed cared deeply for his students but lacked every social skill to connect or make conversation. He motioned to the seating chart he’d placed on the front desk. She found her seat near the back of the classroom and waited for her lab partner, Sejal Chaudry, another junior who was in nearly all of Zola’s classes on Lewis and Clark’s honors track. A girl Zola appreciated for her sense of humor and eternal good mood. A girl who shared snack bags of Cheez-Its and Fritos beneath the desk when Mr. Albertson looked away. But when Sejal walked in her expression was sober. She avoided Zola’s eyes and it was then that Zola remembered: Justin Banks. Sejal’s boyfriend. A name on the list. A boy Sejal had just begun dating, a boy who’d asked her to Homecoming only days before Caleb Raynor rampaged through the halls.

  Nick walked into the chemistry classroom two minutes after the buzzer sounded, a temporary bell for a new school that was nothing like their former signal. A digital sound, only one of so many things that felt foreign. Nick took a seat in the back of the room beside his lab partner, Dennis Carroll, and didn’t think to look for Zola. The only class they shared. It’s just the first day, Mr. Albertson said to the room. All of this is new. It will take everyone time to know where we are. Dennis leaned in close, his hair unwashed. The room’s harsh light bore down upon them. Nick closed his eyes and saw only the artificiality of a computer screen, the sheer frustration of finding nothing. He’d kept looking across the weekend. He couldn’t help it. The classroom’s PA system buzzed above them. Attention, students and teachers. The intercom crackled. In lieu of first-period classes, a school-wide assembly will be held in five minutes. Teachers, please lead your classes now to the gymnasium on the ground level. Nick looked up at Mr. Albertson, who stared back at the class, a Bunsen burner in his hands. He set down the coil and waved the room toward the door.

  Pack up your things, he said. We’ll start this experiment tomorrow.

  Nick fell in line down the hallway beside Zola. She acknowledged him with a nod. They moved with the stream of students pouring from other classrooms into the hallway, a flood that made clear, everyone together, how much smaller a building Timber Creek was than Lewis and Clark. An improvised space: for how long, the administration wouldn’t say. As long as investigation and cleanup and bagging evidence would take. And beyond that, the possibility that no one would want to return, that even with replaced carpets and windows and so many bulleted walls the entire building would have to be razed, a memory no one could keep.

  Nick followed Zola to the gymnasium that had housed state tournament basketball matches, games Nick had attended with his family before he ever entered high school. Bleachers stretched toward the rafters on all four sides of the court, seating filling with students and the metallic clang of their shoes. Nick took a seat beside Zola. He scanned the gym for Sarah, knew she’d be coming from art class. Knew mornings were once her favorite, drawing followed by choir. Knew she’d surely imagined again and again what it would have meant for Caleb Raynor to breach the school during first period instead, the art classroom his first aim after gunning down Principal Jeffries and her assistant. Nick hadn’t seen Sarah through the weekend, a strange distance given the weight of what they’d done. They’d talked on the phone. They’d spoken in code of their secret, sex and making love still extraordinary in their mouths. But they’d remained within the cocoon of their own homes, Sarah sounding better but still anxious, as if an interlude of lost virginity was only a brief distraction from the rising gravity of returning to school.

  A hush fell across the gym. Echoing coughs. The scuffle of sneakers against metal risers. We watched as Vice Principal Sykes rose and took his place behind a microphoned podium and then his voice boomed across the gym, the volume too loud, Good morning, everyone followed by the screech of feedback. He adjusted the microphone. Someone shuffled behind him and checked the sound levels. We regarded him in his suit and straightened tie. We’d seen him at Principal Jeffries’s funeral, head bowed in sorrow and surely imagining the duties he’d take over when school resumed. We waited for him to address us, a speech we wondered if he dreaded. A role impossible to take. He began again: Good morning, Lewis and Clark. And welcome to your new home, Timber Creek.

  We were welcomed in iterations, so many variations of the same words. We were told that despite hardship, we would persevere in collective strength toward a better year, a bright future. We were told that counselors were on hand, this week and throughout the year, for those of us who needed them. We were reminded of available supplies, extra textbooks, copies of everything we left inside other hallways. We were told that the Homecoming game would take place at Highland Trails this Saturday, a rival school, and that the dance was still scheduled for Friday night in this gymnasium.

  We sat as the lights dimmed. We watched Vice Principal Sykes light a single candle. We heard his voice break as he held its light in his hands, as he told us his job would be impossible in replacing Principal Jeffries but that he would do his best for us. We watched as a projection screen lowered, as her face appeared on-screen behind him. We watched a slide show scroll through the faces of twenty-eight students, our peers. Three teachers. Four staff and administrators. A procession without music and without the face of Caleb Raynor, his memorial absent. We heard the shuffle of clothing throughout the gymnasium, the wiping of shirtsleeves and jackets. We heard sniffling. No sobbing. A lack of open sorrow. We listened until the lights came back on and the screen retracted and Vice Principal Sykes stood blinking back at all of us.

  I know there is uncertainty, he said. I know there’s still so much we don’t know. But we are here for you. All of us. Every single person in this administration and school. We’re here to get you through this.

  And though we knew by uncertainty he meant the fires, a threat still licking through our streets, a portent his words could do nothing to extinguish, for a moment we believed him. All together. For a moment, the gymnasium our shelter.

  WE FOUND OUR second-period classrooms after the assembly. The class we’d dreaded across the entirety of a week, the same peers and the same period Caleb Raynor had interrupted and destroyed. What spun as a planet, a spiderweb, the tight threading of a loom through our brains. Threads that caught our thoughts like netting, that pulled us back in looped waves to a Lewis and Clark room where our lives divided into before and after, where we hid or trembled or quietly lost the core of ourselves.

  Christina found her classroom quickly, a small second-floor room fitted to the size of her French class. She sat with Henry Park, her speaking partner, and tried not to think of watching his face as they hid beneath their desks. Mr. Broussard said nothing other than that class would reconvene with the continuation of learning to order from a menu. He wrote several phrases on the blackboard: Je vais prendre. Des not les. Merci, garçon. Christina imagined her brother in physical science class, somewhere downstairs, somewhere safe and immersed in the study of planets. Henry began to ask her questions from across their pushed-together desks: Avez-vous choisi? Voulez-vous voir les plats du jour? She could think of nothing to say in response, nothing related to ordering food. Henry continued: J’aime toujours le plat du jour. Quelle surprise! She understood him. She hadn’t seen him at the pool. She wondered if he’d swum at all during the past week, if the water polo team had also postponed its practices. She thought to respond but her brain caught on the word: toujours. Always. That humans did this. That they made words. Always. Ryan at home. Elise Nguyen in the ground, a funeral Christina had been unable to make herself attend. The great madness of the human race. That we created terms f
or impossibilities.

  Zola found herself with relief in a drab classroom for academic lab, the new library still in transition, a library that was at present no more than a room full of donated computers until books could be reconstituted. A notebook of graph paper rested on her desk beside a pad of notes she couldn’t bring herself to open. Her trigonometry test had been postponed until next Monday, a third-period exam she had a week to study for. She didn’t know if she would. If she could look at the lines and boxes of mathematical paper ever again. If she could graph a y-axis and the plot of its points without calling back from memory the leaving of a library desk for the cover of aisles, for the vellum of an oceanography book. Her remaining peers congregated in desks beside her, the room too large for them and spotlighting what they were missing, who was gone. Twelve casualties in the library. Three of whom had been peers in her own lab. Empty desks. Connor Distler. Jessica Wendling. Alexander Chen, sitting right across from her at the wooden table in the library. She glanced around the room. Soma Chatterjee sat on the far side of the room bent over his desk, his hair falling over his eyes. Alissa Jankowski sat beside him, ears encased in headphones, eyes narrowed to slits as her pencil oscillated in quick strokes across a blank pad of white paper, surely an assignment for drawing class though who would teach it now? Who would replace Mr. Nolan? Zola’s gaze landed on Derek Wilson sitting still with nothing on his desk. The Trailblazers’ punter. His hands lay flat and Zola noticed them shaking. She wondered if he was imagining the Homecoming game, anticipating the pressure. If he was thinking only of the library.

  Nick placed Crime and Punishment on his desk in English class, a book he’d finished across the gaping stretch of the weekend. They’d left Moby-Dick behind. Too massive. A book Mrs. Menda conceded they could leave in the past, half-finished and stained with a barricade of desks. She stood at the front of the classroom and led them through a discussion of the first chapters, of Raskolnikov’s moral compass and his plan to kill. Mid-speech, her voice halted. Nick glanced up as she pulled her glasses from her face. I’m sorry, she said. Perhaps this book isn’t the most appropriate. Nick couldn’t imagine what she meant until he looked around the room, saw the pinched faces of his peers. Raskolnikov’s motives, a plot devised from the cramped isolation of his apartment. Not unlike another home only two miles away from Lewis and Clark, a plan devised within the quiet desperation of a teenage bedroom filled with guns and ammunition.

  John Sommers spoke up: It’s the canon. It’s a book we should read. Nick glanced at the bulk of him, biceps and quads that had pushed desks and the tower of a bookcase against a classroom door. Mrs. Menda looked from John’s face to the faces of every other student in the room. Is this okay? she asked, and everyone nodded, some reluctantly. Nick felt his heart flash. A different classroom. Caleb Raynor all the same passing by the window of the doorway. As Mrs. Menda resumed class discussion Nick imagined the steady pulse of his own chest, strong and ordered but jolted by the terror of memory, out of synch for a moment from the cadenced clockwork he’d known across an entire lifetime.

  Matt sat in world history, the class he’d skipped the week before for the cool tiles of a bathroom, a cleaned slate with no stain or attached memory of violence. His eyes swam across his textbook, a chapter on the Ming Dynasty, an era he knew nothing about except that it had been considered great. He closed his eyes. Imagined Tyler’s body. Imagined the ripple of his abdomen, the muscles beneath his shirt that his hands had pressed against inside the bathroom. The cool of the tile, the heat of his skin. The gun and the blast and his feet balanced on the edges of a cracked toilet and Caroline Black disappearing to the carpet and Tyler to the hallway. Tyler was here somewhere within the walls of Timber Creek, a second-period class he didn’t even know, he realized. He never even knew what class Tyler so often skipped for the refuge of the library bathroom. Mrs. Albers asked Brian Meismer to discuss the expansion of European trade in the sixteenth century and Matt sank back into his seat, Brian a star pupil who would talk for the remainder of the class. Matt glanced out the window to the same browning zoysia grass that populated his own backyard. He’d sat with his father at the kitchen table through the weekend when he wasn’t at the police station working overtime. He’d sat beside him in the home office, a chair at the corner of the room while his father sifted through reports, photographs, so many documents Matt couldn’t name. He’d finished Slaughterhouse-Five. He’d wanted to be in his father’s company, in the presence of something being solved even if his father couldn’t tell him. He’d wanted to sit beside progress. He’d wanted to know something was happening, that something was under control. His father could only tell him what would give away nothing to confidentiality. His father and a team of investigators hadn’t ruled out arson but had no suspects. They continued to retrace Caleb’s path though Matt knew nothing of why this mattered, what a path of gunfire could reveal about an outbreak of house fires. But he sat beside his father anyway as he worked and pretended to complete his homework.

  Brian Meismer prattled on about the expansion of European trade and the Columbian Exchange, which brought crops and plants to China, a digression Matt prayed would at once end and go on forever. He didn’t want to talk. He had no reading response. He’d done virtually no homework across the weekend, only finished one book. He glanced at Jodi Hernandez beside him picking her cuticles, then to his other side at Greg Sheth, his eyes fixed out the window. Matt wondered what the past week had been like for them, how they’d filled their time at home without school. If they’d watched the walls or lain in bed, if they’d numbed themselves with hours of television and movies and newscasts. He wondered if the weekend had held fear for them: if they’d woken up each morning expecting a new fire. If they’d exhaled relief that nothing happened, that they could awake Saturday and Sunday to a cloudless sky without smoke.

  Matt sank down into his seat. His mother at home, alone for the first full day since she’d first heard the news. He imagined her running errands, hands gripping the steering wheel, putting away tomatoes and lettuce and sliced cheese in the kitchen. He imagined her at the animal shelter, replacing the guinea pigs’ water filters with gentle hands. He imagined his father in his office at the police station bent over so many photographs and lab reports. He’d learned only one new thing across the weekend, sitting in his father’s office all of those long hours: the Ndolo house. Same as the others. Nothing left. His father in his office flipping through blank autopsy reports filled with nothing but ghosts.

  WE HAD NO intention to meet. We’d planned nothing, hadn’t even spoken to one another across the weekend. But we gravitated toward one another regardless during lunch, every junior eating together, the lunch hour broken down by class in a cafeteria too small to accommodate nearly 1,200 students.

  Christina found Zola sitting in a corner of the cafeteria at a table near a large window, light streaming in through the glass and highlighting flyaway strands of her hair. A thermos sat upon the table in front of her, black bean soup poured into a small cup that Zola sipped. Christina had packed nothing and wasn’t hungry but slipped quarters into the soda machine for a Hawaiian Punch that would busy her hands. She sat beside Zola and popped the can’s tab, the punch flat and thick and too sweet.

  How was class? Christina asked. Peers found seats around them, a muted chaos.

  Fine. I just had chemistry, then academic lab and trigonometry and history. Nothing exciting. We barely talked about anything. You?

  Same. The assembly, then French. Then English, academic lab. Honestly, I’m ready to go home.

  Zola poured more soup into her cup. She didn’t know what else to say. She glanced around a cafeteria that wasn’t theirs, people moving through the food line and the salad bar with trays and cartons of milk.

  Did you call him? Zola asked, tired of small talk. Did he call you?

  What, Ryan? I told you, I’m done.

  Just checking in.

  You don’t have to check up on me. I’m fine.r />
  Are you? Zola asked, a conversation she wanted to force, to break something open between them until she saw Nick and Matt across the cafeteria making their way toward the table. She glanced at Christina, whispered quickly, Are you sure you’re okay? Christina only nodded before Nick and Matt were upon them, their trays on the table.

  Hey, Matt said, his voice lost to the clatter of the room. He speared a fork into his lunch, a thin slab of turkey covered in translucent sauce. No one spoke. Nick ate his salad, a mound of lettuce he’d piled with diced ham and small squares of hard-boiled egg.

  How was everyone’s morning? Matt asked, trying again.

  Really? Zola said.

  If you have something to say, Matt said, then go ahead and say it.

  I don’t have anything to say. I don’t want to be here at all. Do you?

  Look, let’s not do this, Nick said. Let’s just sit. Please.

  Fine, Zola said. Speak, Nick. Go.

  I don’t want to talk about anything, either. I don’t want to talk at all. I just want to sit and eat and forget that we’re even here.

  Come on, guys. Stop. Christina set down her punch, its aluminum clanging against the table. She reached toward Nick. How was your weekend?

  Nick looked away. This is stupid.

  How was your weekend, Nick? she said again. Her voice insistent. She pressed her fingers into the skin between his knuckles, pushed against the bone.

  He pulled his hand away. He refused to look at Christina but his shoulders lost their tension.

  It was fine, he said.

  What did you do?

  I watched a lot of television. I spent time with my parents and my brother. We went to the movies. We saw School of Rock. We went to get out of the house.

  Were you working? Christina asked Matt.

  I wasn’t there. I already offered him a free ticket last week that he didn’t take.