Violent Ends

by Neal Shusterman

  The gifts came at the end, when the dishes were cleared and the table was wiped down and Dad had carried Susanna like a queen from her seat at the table to the very middle of the deep pillows of the living room couch. Byron’s was first: a hardcover copy of Anne of Green Gables, her favorite book, which she only had in paperback.

  “Thank you,” she said after a squeal for the book. It had to have been Mom’s idea, because the gift was much too thoughtful for Byron alone.

  Mom and Dad each got her a gift of their own choosing in addition to the big gift that leaned against the coffee table in its awkward wrapping, about as clearly a scooter as a scooter could be. First, though, from Mom, was a helmet in golden yellow with a smiling bee on each side, and from Dad, an electric rainbow to shine in her room.

  She thanked them both and then grabbed the big present. Byron rolled his eyes, but Mom and Dad laughed as she tore off the paper and there it sat: her scooter, all put together, shiny metal without a speck of color, just like she asked for.

  “Do I have to wear the helmet every time?” she said, knowing full well the answer.

  “You still have a little light,” Dad said as he dropped the helmet down on her head and fiddled with the straps.

  “Be back in fifteen minutes,” Mom added.

  Dad clicked the clasp under her chin.

  “Fifteen minutes,” she said, and she dragged the thing behind her toward the front door.

  Flies are in the meadow

  Bees are in the park.

  Birdland was blessed with gentle slopes and curves and streets almost entirely devoid of traffic. Cars that passed—when they did, which was rare—rolled slowly, the drivers smiling and waving, their faces as familiar as the fronts of their homes.

  Susanna rode her scooter like she’d done it a thousand times before, but she hadn’t. She’d ridden Ella Stone’s three times, only for a few moments each time because Ella wasn’t fond of sharing. Susanna wondered briefly who would get Ella’s scooter when she died, if she really was dying.

  Evening crept in, and the sun was low over the park at the bottom of Cassowary Lane. From the top of the hill, Susanna could see ten or more kids in the park, standing in little clusters or running across the ball field or climbing on the monkey bars. She pushed off lightly and let gravity pull her to the park. If Henrietta was there, she’d show off her birthday scooter. If not, all the better.

  “O! Susanna!” sang a boy’s voice as she got close to the park. “O! Don’t you cry for me!”

  Miss Susie and her boyfriend

  Are kissing in the—

  She tried to find the voice and the pair of laughs that followed, but the light was dim and she was moving faster now. She hit the curb and tumbled from the scooter onto the grass. She heard the three boys’ collective teeth-suck and, when she sat up and made it clear she wasn’t seriously hurt, their laughter again.

  “Shut up,” she said as she stood. She went to her scooter, which lay in the gutter, and dragged it up onto the grass and into the park, where the clusters of kids had all stopped, had all froze to watch her recuperate from her crash.

  “Yeah, guys,” said the middle boy, the gun boy, the boy with thick hair and eyes like black marshmallows. “Shut up. She probably broke her scooter.”

  “I didn’t.” She turned her back on them and pushed it farther along, deeper into the park, where she hoped she might find Ella if she was still alive, or Henrietta if she’d forgiven her for her mean thoughts about her. They were her friends, after all. She could sit with them or stand with them or climb with them and then the gun boys would leave her alone.

  She reached the sand of the playground and the scooter’s wheels became useless, so she let it fall and sat on the rim of the playground, her helmet in her lap, watching the kids on the monkey bars, all younger than her, and all boys. She felt the gun boys behind her before they spoke. They seemed to heat the air around her.

  “She’s still crying about the crow you shot.”

  Susanna wasn’t crying.

  “She’s a baby.”

  “Babies can’t ride scooters.”

  “She can’t ride a scooter. She crashed, remember?”

  Susanna sniffed and wished she hadn’t. “Go away,” she said, and she lifted her chin in time to see Kirby Matheson on the far side of the playground walking slowly, and stopping to watch her and the gun boys.

  “No, no,” said the middle boy as he crouched beside her. “Because we can’t just let a baby be alone with a scooter. It’s a safety issue.”

  He took it by the handles out of the sand and before she could grab for him—the other gun boys held her wrists anyway—he was off on a joyride.

  “Give it back!” she shouted, but he kicked and kicked, and he circled around the playground in a wide loop, even passing right by Kirby Matheson.

  He said something then, that boy who looked like a crow, but Susanna didn’t hear what. She only heard the laughter of the tall gun boy and the short gun boy and she only felt their hands on her arms. She did hear the middle boy—the boy who’d stolen her scooter—snap back at Kirby, “Shut up, Matheson. Don’t be such a baby.”

  Then he rode that scooter at top speed toward her, shouting to his friends, “Hold her there. Hold her right there.”

  They did—they stretched her out by the arms as the boy sped toward them, and now Susanna cried. She cried because she couldn’t break free. She cried because her wrists hurt. She cried because this was her birthday. She cried because the gun boy was going to kill her.

  “Oh my God,” whispered the boy on her left wrist, scared.

  “He’s going to do it,” said the boy on her right, afraid.

  And like that, they let go, and Susanna dove onto the sand, and the middle gun boy zipped by, shouting at his friends, “What the hell?”

  He stopped and stepped off the scooter and picked it up by the post. “Why am I surrounded by a bunch of frightened babies?”

  Susanna sat up on the sand. The boys who’d been playing on the monkey bars were gone now. The sky was dark. It had been fifteen minutes. Dad would probably come marching down Cassowary Lane any minute. She squinted into the early evening, praying for his ambling figure at the top of the hill, but all she saw were amber streetlamps and parked cars and the darkest bit of sky close to the horizon.

  “You want your scooter back, baby?”

  Susanna didn’t answer. Why should she? He knew she did. She wouldn’t say it to please him. And she was no baby. Especially not today.

  “Fine.” He held the scooter off the ground by its post, like a stiff corpse by its throat, but he didn’t drop it at her feet. He didn’t even roughly toss it into her lap, which would probably hurt. He strode right past her, raised the scooter like a baseball bat, and swung it into the steel frame of the monkey bars. It clanged and echoed, and he cursed and did it again. And again. And again.

  Susanna shrieked at him to stop. She shrieked and cried and pleaded, but he didn’t stop till the post bent and a wheel fell off and the footboard cracked. Then he tossed it into the sand at her feet, his face as red as hers, and stomped out of the playground while his two friends stood there gaping at her till she screamed at them. “Go away!”

  They did. Slowly and casually they turned around and followed their huffing friend away from the playground and into the amber light of the street.

  “Are you okay?”

  Kirby Matheson stood ten feet away, his hands in his pockets and his chin down and his face as flat and bored-looking as Tall’s and Short’s had been.

  Darker than the ocean

  Darker than the sea

  “What do you think?” She stood up and kicked her helmet and carried the scooter to the big plastic garbage can colored green and lifted the lid and dropped it in.

  Kirby followed her.

  “Leave me alone.”

  “Those guys do stuff like that to me all the time,” he said.

  “I don’t care.”

  “I
’m just saying you shouldn’t feel bad about it,” Kirby went on, walking beside her out of the park. “They’re jerks. They deserve to die.”

  “I don’t feel bad,” she said, talking over him. “I feel mad. And you’re not helping.”

  Kirby sniffed and stayed beside her, but he didn’t say anything more, so Susanna did.

  “You are like that dumb crow.” She stopped and he stopped and she clenched her teeth hard and went on. “I’m nothing like you, because you’re a loser and that’s why those boys pick on you.”

  Kirby stared back at her, his black eyes shining and his flopping black hair catching the wind.

  “I wish you’d stay away from me,” Susanna said, her chest getting hot and her eyes stinging and her temples hurting from clenching her jaw so hard and so long. “They probably did that because they saw me with you.”

  “Stop.”

  “Make me,” Susanna said. “Loser. Make me stop. I bet you can’t. I bet you can’t make me stop. You didn’t stop those boys”—screaming now, screaming as loud and violently as she could—“from torturing me and breaking my birthday present.”

  “Stop.”

  She closed her fists at her side and stomped at him, raised her fists like hammers, and brought them down on his chest, and with the pound of each fist she snapped, like two gunshots, “Make! Me!”

  So he did. He shoved her once, hard, and she fell on her butt to the pavement. She looked up through her tears at him, bending over her and blurry and reaching for her, so she kicked his ankle and scrambled to her feet and ran up Cassowary Lane. Kirby’s sneakers slapped the street behind her. He chased her because she’d said awful things to him. Stupid things. So she prayed again in a whisper and found her father at the top of the hill.

  Darker than the boy in black

  Who’s chasing after me.

  VIOLENT BEGINNINGS

  Despite speeding on the bypass and cutting through the middle school parking lot, Teddy is still almost late to his first-period class at East Monroe High School. He slides into the art room seconds after the bell. His English teacher, Ms. Reaver, would have counted him tardy, but Ms. Albans doesn’t care.

  The art room is one of Teddy’s favorite places in school. It’s not like he’s any good at art. He can do the assignments, but he’s really just . . . passable. It’s obvious that Charlotte and Bucky have all the art skills—they always find a way to make whatever the assignment is into something else. Something wonderful. Like when Teddy did his self-portrait last month, he just looked at a mirror and drew himself. And it was kind of okay. You could tell it was a picture of him, at least. But Bucky drew himself as an animal, sort of, a weird mythological chimera mishmash—and it didn’t really look like him, but if you squinted, you could totally tell it was him, on a different level; it showed who he was. And Charlotte did a sculpture that was so lifelike it looked real. It was good enough to be in a museum. It’s obvious that Charlotte has true talent, and it’s sort of ridiculous that she’s still in high school.

  Teddy’s nowhere near as good as either of them, but he still likes art. It’s a nice contrast to math and science and all the other classes where he has to bust his balls to get straight As. His only real shot at college is a scholarship, and his only real chance to get one is through his grades. At least in art he can relax.

  Teddy throws his backpack down by his table. In the art room, there aren’t desks. There are mismatched paint-splattered tables with random chairs culled from various different eras of the school. Some of them are wooden from way back, some are blue plastic, and some are green from when the school changed its official colors. Teddy has a wooden one, so carved with different names and hearts and daggers from years past that Teddy thinks he could tell his chair apart from any other just by the way those engravings feel on his butt.

  Every morning, each class is required to watch some stupid news show that’s supposed to make current events look cool by having teenagers report them, but thankfully Ms. Albans always turns it off. Today she claps her hands and moves to the front of the room.

  “The assignments I have given you previously have been rather specific,” Ms. Albans says, a gleam in her eye. “Art is not about assignments, though. For the next two weeks—and note that I’m giving you two weeks, so you’d better create something worthwhile—you have free rein. You may use any of the materials in the class, or let me know if you want to work with alternate materials. You may paint or sculpt or make collages or mixed media or anything at all.” Ms. Albans stops speaking abruptly, then nods to herself, as if satisfied that she’s said all that needed saying.

  Madison, a preppy girl who is always complaining when she doesn’t get high marks on her art despite the fact that she can barely color, raises her hand, her fingers stretching toward the ceiling. Ms. Albans nods at her. “But what are we supposed to make art of?” Madison asks.

  “Anything.” Ms. Albans sits back down at her desk.

  Madison looks around the room, confused. Several of the other students look eager at the prospect, but quite a few are as bewildered as Madison to be given such an open-ended assignment.

  “You have two weeks,” Ms. Albans adds as an afterthought. “You don’t have to start now. You can just spend today thinking.”

  If anything, this confuses Madison even more.

  If another teacher had given an assignment to just create something in two weeks, it would have been the perfect excuse to spend half a month goofing off and slapping together some shit at the last minute. But Ms. Albans holds everyone to a higher standard, and that should make the students much more willing to actually do something with the time and materials she’s given them.

  But no one really knows how to begin either.

  Teddy spends the rest of the morning doodling in his art notepad, vaguely trying out ideas on paper. He draws a car, and considers trying to make an actual model of it, maybe out of old soda cans. He sketches some ideas he’d considered turning into a tattoo. He tries to do something like M.C. Escher, but it looks like shit.

  Just before the bell rings, an announcement blares over the loudspeaker, instructing all teachers to read their e-mail. Ms. Albans was listening to Madison run ideas past her, and looks relieved at the possible escape.

  Teddy closes his notebook with a sigh. None of his ideas were bad, but none of them were good, either.

  The bell rings. Everyone moves to pack their things and leave, but Ms. Albans rushes to the door, standing in front of it. “We’re staying in first period for now,” she says gravely. “Everyone, stay in your seats.”

  “Why?” Bucky asks.

  “Just stay in your seats.” Ms. Albans looks sick, like she’s about to throw up.

  The room erupts in whispers and conjecture, but Ms. Albans stays silent. Teddy has never seen her so serious before.

  Outside, the halls are supposed to be filled with the sounds of students rushing to their next classes, of locker doors slamming and people talking. But now they hear nothing but silence.

  After a moment, the principal’s solemn voice fills the loudspeaker. “Attention, all students and staff of East Monroe High School. A terrible tragedy has occurred at our neighboring school, Middleborough High. All students should be held in their first-period classes. Teachers: We are in Code Yellow. Repeat: We are in Code Yellow.”

  Ms. Albans tests the knob at the door, ensuring that it’s locked, and places a laminated green placard over the little glass window in the door. She takes more green placards and puts them in the windows of the classroom, checking each one to ensure that it’s locked; then she lowers all the blinds.

  “What’s going on?” Madison whispers loudly.

  “Oh my God.” It’s Charlotte. She has her phone out.

  “What? What is it?” Madison asks, craning her neck around.

  “Holy shit,” Bucky says.

  Teddy pulls his own phone out of his pocket.

  “Everyone, stay calm,” Ms. Albans says in a serious
voice. Her voice breaks over the last word.

  Teddy’s phone buzzes before he can bring a web browser up. It’s his mom. Are you okay??? she’s texted.

  Yeah, Teddy texts back. Another buzz. His father. Then his best friend, Saul. Did u see?

  Finally the headline loads on his screen.

  SEVEN DEAD, FIVE WOUNDED IN LOCAL SCHOOL SHOOTING

  Ms. Albans turns the class television to the news. Cameras are already all over Middleborough High, less than ten miles away from East Monroe. Madison’s crying. Her cousin goes there. She keeps saying, over and over again, “What if Sydney’s dead?” No one knows what to say to her.

  No one can leave, not even to use the restroom. The school’s in a precautionary lockdown. Bucky says he thinks everyone will be heading home as soon as the lockdown’s lifted, that school will be canceled at least for the day. A couple of the kids are excited about this, but no one’s really feeling like they can say anything in front of Madison.

  The art room is one of the biggest classrooms in the whole school; only orchestra and band are larger. For the first time in his life, Teddy wishes that the room were a little smaller, that they could all be a little closer.

  Saul keeps texting Teddy. He’s stuck in English class, and Ms. Reaver is forcing them all to read silently. Ms. Albans doesn’t bother trying to make the kids work. It’s lockdown, so everyone’s supposed to be quiet, but she keeps the news playing on low.

  She doesn’t have to tell the kids to hush. Aside from hurried whispers and Madison’s silent sobs, nearly everyone’s focused on the news.

  “I was just there for a game,” the girl next to Teddy, Juliana, says in a low undertone. She’s on the basketball team. “I was just there.”

  On the screen, a line of kids rushes from the gym at Middleborough. Men dressed in black SWAT outfits have guns trained on the doors of the school as they hurry the kids to the parking lot and to safety. Teddy scans their faces, looking for someone he knows. From the relieved sighs or the terrified gasps from his fellow classmates, he knows they are all doing the same. He doesn’t have any relatives at Middleborough, but he’s been to some of the games there, and he went to summer camp with kids from that area before.