Luckiest Girl Alive

by Jessica Knoll

  “Ben,” the Shark whispered. “Please.” I felt her fingers dig into my skin, her armpit sweaty on my shoulder, and I remembered the name Ben.

  “Fuck you.” It wasn’t aimed at any of us. There was a long moment where he wore us down. Then his expression softened like the flame of a candle descending on wax. “Oh, goody. It’s Peyton.”

  “Ben”—Peyton was shaking so hard the floor picked up the tremor—“man, you don’t have to—” Peyton never said anything after “to.” What a stupid little word to be your last. His beautiful face took the brunt. One Peyton tooth skittered right in front of me, white and perfectly shaped as a piece of Chiclets gum.

  This time the gun had been low and close. The sound sent Liam behind the Shark and me, as far away as he could get from Peyton without abandoning the hood of the table. Teddy was all the way at the other end, holding on to a chair leg like it was his mother’s and he was begging her not to go out on a Saturday night. My ears felt like they were turning in on my skull. I brought a finger to one and felt the wet. A drop of blood hit the carpet, spread red in the fibers like a sonic boom. It was the only drop that was mine.

  Ben rested on his haunches a little longer, admiring his work. The chairs had caught Peyton, and they held his body upright, arms flung wide scarecrow-like. There was nothing left of his face below the nose. A great gust of steam billowed all around him, like laughter on a freezing cold night.

  Liam was burrowed in my back, his mouth a humid kiss on my shoulder, so he didn’t see the miraculous thing that happened next. But the rest of us watched in disbelief as Ben stretched out, and then all that was visible of him were his smooth white calves moving further and further away from us, turning left, in the direction of the back stairwell that led to the ground floor, where the Language wing was located. Above it were the abandoned dorm rooms left over from Bradley’s boarding school days. They only used them for in-school suspensions now.

  I didn’t even realize I’d been holding my breath until I was gasping like it was the finish line at a cross-country race. “Who is he?” I heaved into the Shark’s chest. “Who was that?” I asked again, even though I knew.

  “Is Ansilee okay?” Liam whimpered, his voice high and pathetically foreign, this abrupt shift in power stripping him of all his cool new-guy bravado. All he had to do was look behind him to answer his own question. Because I did, and Ansilee’s head was open like a casket.

  “This is like fucking Columbine,” Teddy mumbled from the other end of the table. We’d all been in middle school when that happened. I don’t know about Bradley, but at Mt. St. Theresa’s, we stood around the lone, crackly TV in the library, watching the coverage, until Sister Dennis unplugged it and threatened all of us with demerits if we didn’t go back to class immediately.

  Smoke was slithering in from the cafeteria. I was aware that we had to leave, but also that the only way out was to follow His path.

  “Does anyone have their cell phone?” Not every teenager owned a cell phone back then, but everyone in that room did. It didn’t matter, because no one had had time to grab their book bags before they fled.

  “What do we do?” I looked at the Shark, certain she would have the answer. When she didn’t speak, I said, “We have to get out of here.”

  None of us wanted to crawl out from underneath the table. But the smoke was wafting in, putrid with human hair and melting man-made materials: polyester book bags, plastic lunch trays, rayon purchases from Abercrombie & Fitch. I pushed out the chair to our right and Teddy did the same at his end, and the four of us scrambled to our feet. There was a heroic-looking buffet in the corner, and it became the place where we met. Its body blocking us from the waist down felt like some small measure of protection.

  We argued. Liam wanted to stay put and wait for the police, who surely had to be on their way. Teddy wanted to leave. The fire was too fast. There was a large window high on the wall, beaming sunlight onto the table, beneath which Peyton and Ansilee waited. That was a compromise for a bit. Teddy stood on a chair, bumping Ansilee’s shoulder as he positioned it beneath our maybe escape. Teddy pushed and grunted, but he couldn’t get the window open, and he was the strongest one left in the room.

  “We have to get out of here!” Teddy insisted.

  “He could be waiting out there for us!” Liam said. “That’s what those Columbine kids did!” He slammed his hand down on the buffet. “Faggot! Fucking faggot!”

  “Shut up!” I yelled. You had to yell to hear over the fire alarm, sizzling in our ears. “That’s why he’s doing it!” Liam looked at me like he was afraid of me. I didn’t understand how important that was at the time.

  “He won’t hurt us if we’re with her.” Teddy pointed to the Shark.

  Liam laughed viciously. “He won’t hurt you either! That’s why you’re willing to leave.”

  “No”—Teddy shook his head—“Ben and I were never friends. He loved Beth though.” It had been so long since I’d heard the Shark’s real name that I didn’t even know who Teddy was talking about at first.

  “I haven’t seen Ben in a long time.” The Shark sniffled, dragging her forearm across her nose. “And that . . . that was not Ben.”

  A chair toppled over, and the ruckus brought all four of us together in a nervous clamor of bodies. It was the moan that broke us apart.

  “Oh my God,” the Shark said. “Peyton.”

  The air sounded wet as he tried to breathe it. The Shark and I crept around the buffet and crouched by Peyton’s side. He’d managed to drag half his body out from underneath the table, and he was clawing at the air, his fingers so set in their gnarl it was as though he’d sunk them into plaster before it dried. He tried to speak, but only blood gurgled up where his lips should have been.

  “Get a towel or something!” the Shark shrieked at Teddy and Liam, both still as photographs in the corner.

  They started into action. I heard silverware jangling as they raided the buffet, finally coming up with linens emblazoned spring green with THE BRADLEY SCHOOL. They tossed them at us.

  The Shark and I pressed a napkin on either side of Peyton’s beautiful, ravaged face. Blood and sticky muscle tissue sealed the cloth to where his jaw had been, turned it red as completely and quickly as a magic trick. It was a horrifying thing to look at, his face shred of features and skin, but it was like saying the word “the” over and over until you don’t even recognize it, the power of repetition to transform the ordinary to the exotic. Semantic satiation, is it? With Peyton, it was the converse: Look at his face long enough and it was less grotesque than if you’d never seen it at all, if you’d only imagined how bad it could be.

  Peyton managed a moan. I took his hand, still signaling madly, and guided it to the floor, squeezing his fingers gently.

  “It’s okay,” the Shark said. “You have that big game next week.” She started to cry harder. “You’re going to win that big game next week.”

  Everyone knew Bradley didn’t stand a chance. Peyton sobbed and squeezed my hand back.

  I don’t know how long we sat there. Talking to Peyton. Telling him that his parents loved him and they needed him to come home, so just fight. Keep fighting, you’re doing great, you’re so strong, we told him, even as his hand chilled in my own, even as it stopped being so laborious for him to breathe, because soon he was barely breathing at all.

  And all the while, the flames in the cafeteria bounced up the stairs, until we could make out their sharp peaks, threatening to dance down the hallway, trap us in the Brenner Baulkin Room and never let us out.

  “Where the fuck are the police?” Liam wailed. We’d all cried with relief when we heard their sirens at least ten minutes ago.

  “We have to go,” Teddy said. He looked at Peyton and immediately looked away, digging the heels of his hands into his swollen eyes. “I’m sorry, you guys, but we have to go.”

  “But he’s still breathing.” I looked down at Peyton. I’d eased his head into my lap when he started to gag o
n his own blood. My crotch was soaked and sticky, and some wild, grisly corner of my mind turned on the memory of the last time his head had been between my legs, like a sudden, jarring flick of a light switch in the middle of the night, shocking you out of the thickest stage of sleep. At least in that vision, Peyton’s eyes were open, crystal and ignorantly kind, thinking he was doing something good.

  “TifAni, we are going to die in here if we don’t go now!” Teddy said.

  The Shark pleaded, “Can you carry him or something?”

  Teddy tried, and all of us tried to help him, even Liam, but Peyton was as final and as heavy as a block of cement.

  The room smelled hot and sick. Teddy begged us one last time.

  Before we slunk into the hallway, holding the hands of the person ahead of us and behind us, four tough teenagers linked together like kindergartners crossing the street, Liam pillaged the buffet. He was looking for something, anything, to protect us. The best he could do was to offer each of us a steak knife.

  “My mom told me to never fight off a rapist with a knife,” I said, so woozy from the heat it didn’t even occur to me the morbid hilarity of saying that to Liam. “Because he can overpower you and turn it on you.”

  “He’s not a rapist,” the Shark said, softly.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Liam said. “Should she have said ‘psycho faggot murderer’?”

  We also took the fine linen napkins, what was left of the ones we’d piled onto Peyton’s face, tying them around our mouths like bandits.

  I looked at Peyton one last time before we left. His chest sighed a good-bye, a final plea: I’m still alive. I felt the agony of leaving him alone and alive like a pregnancy, so full and all encompassing it had the power to change my entire life.

  The fastest we moved was down the hallway, to the left, until we got into the stairwell. We burst through the door, our neat little line breaking as we became a whirlwind of arms and legs clutching at each other in a tight circle—no one knew what we would find in there, no one wanted to be at the front of the line.

  To our immense relief, the stairwell appeared empty. We tore off our face masks, gratefully.

  “What do you think?” the Shark asked. “Up or down?”

  “I say up,” Teddy said. “He wouldn’t have gone up.” The old boarding rooms bled out to another stairwell, which would loop us down to the Mathematics wing. There was an exit in the Mathematics wing.

  “Good call,” Liam said, and Teddy smiled. He was still smiling as the bullet dovetailed into his collarbone, blood splashing the wall behind him like the Jackson Pollock paintings we were learning about in Contemporary Art.

  I only knew that the bullet had come from up. And I was running down the stairs, skidding around the turns, bumping into the Shark and Liam as bullets met the railing, the sharp clang of metal on metal unlike anything I’d ever heard.

  The door on the first floor led to the Language wing, and the longest moment of my life was the time it took for the Shark to turn the handle and swing it open, those seconds enough for Ben to close in on us. The door was old and slow, and it remained open behind us after we dashed through. Ben didn’t have to slow down to open it again, he simply ducked through right after us. He was skinny and quick, would have been a great cross-country runner.

  Liam hooked right, mistaking an empty classroom for cover. It was an inadvertently noble, intentionally self-preserving turn (not that I blame him for that), and it saved me.

  “Why didn’t you follow him?” I’m usually asked, at this point in the story.

  “Because,” I say, irritated that I’ve been interrupted, that whatever moron interrupted me couldn’t understand that Ben was so close I could hear that his breathing was different than our breathing. Sharp and quick, like that of an animal whose lungs have evolved to chase. “He was right behind us. I knew he would have seen and followed us, and then we’d have been cornered, which is what happened.”

  “To Liam?” Aaron asked.

  “To Liam.”

  “Let’s get back to what happened next.”

  The Shark and I tore through the Language wing. We pounded up the stairs, and when we cleared the last step, there was the door to the cafeteria. Shut tight, it should have created the fire hazard Mr. Harold was always warning us about, only it hadn’t. It had contained the fire in the old part of the cafeteria, tucked it deeper in, so that it had advanced on the Brenner Baulkin Room where we had just been, where Peyton and Ansilee remained. There was a clear path from the door, through the new addition, where the overhead sprinklers had gone on, drenched the fire into submission. There was an exit to the quad there. The Shark and I never broke our stride, just plunged in.

  But it was in the spot where the Hairy Legs and the HOs used to sit where we both stopped, water up to our ankles and still coming down, plastering our hair to the sides of our faces. Where I thought I would vomit up my own heart when I saw Arthur.

  Arthur, blocking our exit, standing in the rubble of building and bodies, his face pebbled with water and holding his father’s hunting rifle across his body like the bar a tightrope walker uses to keep his balance. Dean was slumped against an overturned cash register, his right arm, the arm that had been closest to the blast, marbled with white muscle and blood that had come from a place so deep it could have been tar.

  “There you are,” Arthur said to me. His smile scared me most of all.

  The Shark said, “Arthur,” and began to cry.

  Arthur looked at her, disapprovingly. “Get out of here, Beth.” He pointed the rifle at her and waved it behind him, at the quad. Her freedom.

  The Shark didn’t move, and Arthur hunched down, so he was level with her peculiar eyes. “I mean it, Beth. I like you.”

  The Shark turned to me and sobbed, “I’m sorry.” Then she tiptoed cautiously around Arthur, broke into a run when he screamed at her, “Don’t you fucking apologize to her!” I watched her feel the dry grass beneath her feet. She went left, one final sprint toward the middle school parking lot. Then I couldn’t see her anymore, just heard her rabid scream when she realized she was still alive.

  “Come here.” Arthur used the gun to beckon me like a long, witchy finger.

  “Why?” I was ashamed that I was crying. I hate that I know how I will react when it’s all over. That I know I won’t be brave.

  Arthur pointed the rifle at the ceiling and shot, and both Dean and I screamed in alliance with the fire alarm, still wailing, furious it hadn’t been attended to yet. “Come here!” Arthur snarled.

  I did what I was told.

  Arthur pointed the rifle at me, and I begged. I was so sorry I took that picture of his dad, I said. I would give it back. I had it in my locker. (I didn’t.) We could go. It was his. Anything to delay what I knew he was about to do.

  Arthur glared at me, his wet hair hanging in his eyes, not even bothering to push it away. “Take it,” he said. At first I thought he meant “take it,” like just take what’s about to happen to you, a call for me to man up. But then I realized Arthur wasn’t pointing the gun at me, he was handing it to me.

  “Don’t you want to be the one to do it?” He looked to Dean. Fear had misshapen his ape-like features into someone new, someone I’d never met before and who had never hurt me. “Don’t you just want to blow this cocksucker’s cock off?” Closer to Arthur now, I saw that a white crust had hardened in the corners of his mouth.

  I made the mistake of taking the bait, of reaching out and trying to take the gun. “Nah-uh.” Arthur pulled it back. “Changed my mind.”

  Then he pivoted, surprisingly graceful, and shot Dean between his legs. Dean made an inhuman noise as blood and water shot straight up in front of his face like a fountain at Epcot Center.

  The steak knife slipped underneath Arthur’s shoulder blade. But it was a shallow puncture, a sideways slice, the way you’d run a letter opener underneath the flap of an envelope. It came out the same way it went in with almost no effort at all. Arthur turned t
oward me, arched his lip, and actually said, “Huh?” I shifted my weight back, the way my dad taught me to do before I threw a ball, the only useful thing the man has ever taught me in my life. I slammed the knife into the side of his neck, and Arthur stumbled sideways, making a noise like he was trying to clear out phlegm in his chest. I went with him, pulled the knife out again, and lunged once more. I knew I’d hit sternum, heard the crunch as I submerged the blade in his chest, and this time I wasn’t able to pull it back out. But that was okay, because I didn’t need to. Arthur managed to gargle something like “I was only trying to help,” and the bright blood spilling over his lips rushed faster.

  That’s where I always end the story, and it’s where I ended it for Aaron.

  But there’s one more thing, the part I never tell anyone. Which is that I actually thought, They have to forgive me now, as Arthur landed on his knees, the weight of his upper half propelling him forward. At the last second survival instinct kicked in, some flickering circuit in the brain realizing that if he landed on his chest it would only drive the handle deeper into its resting place. He tipped backward, but the tight muscles in his thighs caught him, and he ended up on his side with a large splash, one arm stretched out underneath his head, one leg stacked over the other, a soft bend at his knees. I always think of Arthur when I get to the thigh work portion of barre class, when I assume that exact same position to tighten my saddlebags. “Give me ten more!” the instructor demands, perkily, as I lift my leg, the muscle failing me and the desire to give up so great. “You can do anything—anything!—for ten seconds!”

  CHAPTER 13

  * * *

  Incredible.” Aaron clapped his hands and broke the room’s still spell. Crew members stretched and roamed. I heard “Grab a drink?” and wiped my face.

  Aaron came at me, his hands steepled together. “Thank you for being so open and vulnerable with us.”

  I hurried to erase the story written all over my face. “Sure,” I mumbled.