Boy Shattered

by Eli Easton

  I nodded. He was so protective and careful. It made my heart swell again. God, Landon always understood. How could he always understand? I didn’t deserve him, probably. Whatever. I was too selfish to care.

  He carded his fingers through my hair and kissed me.

  We had a plan, of sorts, for as long as it lasted.

  For as long as the dam held.

  Chapter 19

  Landon

  WE LOUNGED around in bed for a while. But eventually we got up and went downstairs to get some drinks. My mom and dad were watching TV in the living room, and we went through there on the way to the kitchen. My mom looked up and gave me a once-over.

  I knew I probably looked culpable as fuck. Like, hey, parents, we just had sex in my room!

  My mom was superobservant too. Oh well. We got drinks and ran back up the steps, snickering.

  I was so happy. I’d never been so happy before in my life. And why not? I was with the sweetest, most beautiful guy in the world. And he liked me back, had liked me for a while. So go me.

  That poem? I wanted to frame it. I wanted to get it tattooed on my ass. I couldn’t believe Brian wrote that about me. I’ve never been prouder of being, well, out and proud in my life. To know that he’d admired me from afar just for being myself. That was the best validation in the world.

  We settled down on the carpet in my room, backs propped up against the bed, my leg over his, and checked emails and stuff. I looked at the hits and comments on my video. If I ignored the hate posts and only read the good stuff, it was awesome. Like, I could not be any more on top of the world. Being able to reach people and make a difference, see people promising to vote or march because of my video, that was a great feeling.

  It was strange that I could have such amazing things happen in my life so soon after one of the worst days ever. That thought sobered me a little.

  “I should be working on homework,” Brian said as he surfed the web. “But I really don’t want to.”

  “I know. I’ll be so glad when this semester is over. We can study tomorrow.”

  “My grades are pretty much gonna blow this semester anyway. So there’s no point,” Brian said in a resigned voice.

  “I thought you were getting caught up?”

  He shrugged. “I’ve caught up with my homework assignments, but it’s hard to know what’s going on when I spend all my class time watching the alarm, door, and windows.”

  “Really? It’s still that bad?”

  He gave me a duh look.

  I put my computer aside and turned to him. Brian seemed so normal when we were at my house like this. I thought he was doing better everywhere. Of course, I’d noticed he was still nervous in the halls at school, but I didn’t realize he was having trouble in class too.

  “It can’t be healthy for you to get so stressed-out every day like that.”

  He shrugged. “My parents don’t want to move me to a different school, so I don’t have a choice.”

  He had his laptop on his lap and he was looking at the screen, avoiding my gaze. I slipped an arm behind his back and leaned my chin on his shoulder.

  “You can talk to me about stuff, you know. You don’t have to act brave.”

  He huffed a laugh. “Well, I’m not brave, so no worries there.”

  “That’s not true.” Brian didn’t see how brave he really was. How many gunshot victims go back to the site of their shooting day after day? He dealt with his trauma with as little outward evidence as possible. He never complained.

  He tapped a key, but I didn’t think he was really looking at what he was doing. “I had the worst dream last night,” he said hesitantly.

  I faced him, folding my legs. “Yeah? What was it?”

  “I went to meet you in the cafeteria. You wanted to grab lunch from the line and take it outside, so I agreed even though I didn’t want to. I told myself it was no big deal, that I could do it.”

  “You know I’d never do that to you.”

  He gave me a look. “It was a dream. I can’t help it if dream-you makes bad decisions.”

  I laughed. “Okay. I’ll strive for dream-me to do better.”

  “Anyway. So I was standing in line with a tray and I started coughing. I was choking and choking. And then I was on my hands and knees and I was coughing up blood onto the linoleum. There was something in my throat and I knew I had to get it out, so I could breathe.”

  “Aw, Bri.”

  “I finally coughed it up, and it was a bullet.” He bounced his legs nervously, causing the laptop to jiggle.

  “Shit. That’s terrifying. I’m sorry you’re still having nightmares. I thought they were better.”

  He let his head fall back against the bed and rolled it to look at me. He took my free hand. “They are better. But once in a while one kicks me in the balls. I know everyone thinks I should just get over it already.”

  “I don’t think that. It’s only been two months.”

  He shrugged, but he looked so resigned to suffering in silence. And I hated that.

  “How’s it going with the counselor at school?”

  He grimaced. “I haven’t been back in a few weeks. There’s only so many times you can talk about being freaked out about the same old shit. She gave me some breathing exercises and stuff to think about when I start to feel triggered. It helped.”

  “It obviously hasn’t helped enough. Have you talked to her about your nightmares? Or the pain?”

  He gave me a raised eyebrow look I wasn’t sure how to interpret.

  “What? Too pushy?”

  “No. I like that you care about me. It’s like you’re on my team.”

  I smiled. “Like the guy who gives the team massages? Can I be that guy?”

  He laughed. “You already are.”

  We went back to browsing the web. After a few minutes, I looked over. “What is that site you’re on?”

  He hesitated, then turned his laptop to show me the screen. It was a forum. The header was red, white, and blue and had a graphic of a fist in front of a Confederate flag and a US flag. Patriot March was the name. It was obviously an alt-right website. I felt a pang of worry when I saw it.

  “Why are you on that site?”

  He shoved me with his shoulder. “Because I’m secretly a Nazi. Geez, Landon. This forum has a thread on The Wall.”

  “What do they say about it?” I asked, not liking the sound of it.

  Brian rubbed one eye and sighed. His face got his serious-and-intent expression. “Okay. So, you know my dad thinks the shooting was a false-flag event, some deep-state mission?”

  “Yeah, because that’s totally logical,” I quipped. “What would be the point?”

  “I dunno. Like, to make people rise up against guns so they have an excuse to take people’s guns away. I know it’s dumb, but I was curious, so I dug around online. This forum is about 98 percent crap, but I think there’s a poster on here who has an inside source with the police department. I’ve learned a few things the cops haven’t mentioned in their press conferences.”

  I was curious now. “Like what?”

  “Like… do you know why there’s so little video footage of the shooters?”

  I thought about it. I’d seen footage online; the same clip appeared on most news stories. It showed two figures in black, with guns, going out of the doors at the end of D-Wing and heading off to the left. It was only a few seconds long.

  Brian was watching me, and he nodded. “There’s just that one short clip, right? That was taken by a kid with his cell phone. Ever wondered why there’s not more video? There are cameras all over the school and parking lots.”

  “Maybe the police are holding that video back?”

  “Well, according to this guy on Patriot March, it’s because the security camera system was down. It crashed on Monday, September 24. They called the vendor Tuesday and scheduled a repair, but they couldn’t come until Wednesday, October 3rd. The shooting happened Friday the 28th.”

  “W
hy did the system crash?”

  “Good question,” Brian said, getting animated. “There are two possibilities. No, three. First, the system was sabotaged on purpose. Which would mean either that the shooter had direct access to the system or they hacked it remotely. That would play into a much bigger conspiracy theory, like the whole deep-state thing.”

  “Okay.”

  “The second option is that it was pure coincidence that the cameras were down the day of the shooting.”

  I considered that. “Well, there is that one toilet on D-Wing’s second floor that’s been busted since the start of the year.”

  “True. It’s possible it just happened to be out of order. After all, the guys had ski masks on and all that. So they were dressed as if there would be cameras.”

  “Or witnesses.” I leaned my elbows on my knees and put my chin on my hand. This was interesting.

  “The third option is that the security system went down on its own, no sabotage involved. But that the shooters knew it was down, and maybe even when the repair was scheduled, and they took advantage of that window of opportunity.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “I talked to a senior who sometimes helped Ginny Wilcox, the secretary who was killed, with tech stuff. He said the security camera software has been a pain, and it freezes up several times a year. When it went down on September 24th, she called him to the office. He tried to fix it but couldn’t. He said it looked like every other time it’s done that.”

  “So probably not sabotage, then.”

  “Exactly. Which leaves options two or three—either it was a total coincidence, which seems hella lucky, or the shooters had inside info about the scheduled repair. And there’s more.”

  Brian reached over for his backpack, his body stretching out and his T-shirt sliding up. I couldn’t help noticing and admiring the view, even though I was into the conversation. A guy can look.

  “So you’ve been nosing around about stuff at school? Brian Marshall, boy detective.” I said it in a movie-trailer voice.

  He gave me a glare that was partly amused, partly horrified. “I will hurt you.”

  He took a folder from his backpack, sat back, and held it in his lap, hesitating. “Promise you won’t think I’m weird.”

  “You could never be weird to me, hunner,” I joked. God, I sounded just like my dad talking to my mom.

  Brian rolled his eyes. “Okay. You know I’ve been trying to figure out who the shooters are. And I’ve been asking everyone at school where they were and making lists.” He blew out a breath. “There are a few people I still suspect, but I’m not having a lot of luck coming at it from that angle. So I thought maybe a different approach—take a look at what the shooters did and see if that tells us anything about who they are.”

  “Sounds smart.”

  He opened the folder carefully. There were newspaper clippings and printouts inside. Some appeared to be from that forum. The item he removed was a folded piece of shiny newsprint, like from a glossy news magazine.

  He opened it up, smoothing it out on the carpet between us, and I recognized it immediately. Two weeks after the shooting, the New York Times had published an in-depth article titled “Death at the Wall.” I’d been interviewed for it and had a single quote in the article. A lot of other people from the school had been interviewed too, along with first responders, the sheriff, and people from the community. The article included a two-page spread of a cutaway diagram of the school that showed the path of the shooters with the timeline. One of the surprises was that the entire incident had taken only eight minutes.

  In the diagram, the school looked like a spider. The body of the spider was the school’s center, with the administrative offices, the gym, auditorium, and cafeteria. The school’s wings—A, B, C, and D—were the spider’s legs. There were various parking lots around the school, and the football field sat off to the north, off D-Wing.

  There were sketchy figures for the gunmen with a dotted path and time stamps showing where they went. The first time stamp, 11:07, was at the end of B-Wing.

  “Okay, look at this,” Brian said, pointing to the time stamp. “They came in through this door at 11:07.”

  “Right.” I lay down on my stomach, and he scooted around and moved the page so we were both on our stomachs looking at it. He looked uber focused.

  “That door at the end of B-Wing is the least visible place to enter,” Brian said. “There’s nothing around there except the cornfield. And that’s an emergency exit door. It’s supposed to be locked from the outside and set off an alarm when it’s opened from the inside. Only the alarm’s been deactivated for a long time, and there’s usually a bit of cardboard or something stuck at the bottom so it doesn’t lock. Kids use that door to go out and smoke. The shooters must have known that.”

  I gave him a curious look. “Okay.”

  “And coming in that way let them make one long sweep through the school, side to side. B-Wing, the center, D-Wing, and out. Strangers would have come in through the front door or at the D-Wing entrance.”

  “They could have cased the place,” I said. Cased the joint. It sounded dorky, like a crime movie, but I didn’t know what else to call it.

  Brian nodded. “Sure, but there’s more. So they came in that door, two males dressed head to toe in black with ski masks covering their faces. They each had two AR-15s. Both had handguns in their waistbands. We know that from that short cell video.”

  He said it so matter-of-factly, but it gave me a horrible chill. I shivered.

  “They hit the two largest classrooms in B-Wing before anyone knew they were there, and before the lockdown announcement was made. One reason why is that the security monitors were down, so the office staff was blind.” He pointed. “B109, a biology lab class. It’s a big room. Thirty-two students. It was hit by Gunman One. No one knew they were there yet, so he just opened the door and shot from the doorway.”

  I nodded, my stomach clenching. The diagram showed sketchy figures on the floor and the body count—six in red. There was a number four in purple for the injured count.

  “Simultaneously, Gunman Two hits B104 down the hall.” He pointed out the second classroom. “So they got into position, one outside each door, and at the same moment, they both opened the doors and started to shoot. That way, they could hit the two largest classrooms before any alarm was sounded. The people in there had no warning at all.”

  For the first time, I heard an emotional wobble in his voice, but he seemed to steel himself, frowning.

  It was hard to look at the diagram. Really look. When the article had first come out, I’d briefly glanced at it, registering the path the shooters had taken. The room numbers were infamous now, stained with tragedy. “Room B109” was like “Flight 93” or “the clock tower.”

  I hadn’t had it in me to look at the picture for long, not like this. It’s one thing to see a diagram of some event that’s remote, historical. It’s another thing when you were there. When you knew the people represented by the red and purple body-count numbers in each room, had heard survivors tell the story of what had happened in those rooms, in person, crying on your shoulder.

  “B104 was a first-level calculus class, a big one. Thirty-four people were in the room.”

  He tapped the room on the page. I looked at it. One of the people represented by the red “5” in the graphic had been a teacher, Mr. Frasier, who’d only been in his thirties. He’d been a tall guy, very funny. I’d liked him a lot when I took Calculus my sophomore year. He had a wife and two small kids.

  A familiar surge of rage washed through me, but I stayed quiet. Brian had obviously been putting a lot of thought into this, and I wanted to know where he was going with it. “Okay. Two big classrooms,” I said.

  “The thing is,” Brian went on, “they weren’t just big. They were the two biggest classes in B-Wing during fourth period. All the other classrooms were either empty or they had fewer students. So how did they know which two classrooms had the
most targets at precisely that time?”

  “I see what you’re saying. It could be a coincidence?” I was playing devil’s advocate.

  Brian shrugged. “Could be. But there’s more.”

  His finger traced across the page, following the dotted line of the killers’ path toward the center of the school. Their first stop there had been the office.

  I looked up at Brian. His face was pale, and his mouth was set in a line like he was angry. But his voice came out determined and matter-of-fact. “They spent less than thirty seconds shooting into the office through the window, yet they took out the PA system, the two main computers, and the phone on the secretary’s desk that had lines to emergency services… they knew exactly what to hit.”

  His finger traced the line to the cafeteria. Then he pulled his hand back abruptly. Restless, he sat up on his knees. He rubbed his lip with a knuckle. “I think their main target was the cafeteria. They knew it would have the most people and no way to barricade. They wanted to get there fast so that hardly anyone had time to escape.”

  My gaze fixed on the cafeteria. Dead count in red: 21. Injured count in purple: 6. One of those six had been Brian. The time stamps showed the gunmen had spent two and a half minutes firing into the room—by far, the most time they’d spent in any one location.

  Brian blinked a few times, his chest heaving. His hand trembled slightly as he followed another line on the diagram. “Down D-Wing,” he whispered.

  I’d seen them walk that path, for fuck’s sake. The memory of it was seared in my mind: both figures—the big, steady guy and the smaller adrenaline-jacked guy—firing their rifles in a steady rat-tat-tat-tat-tat.

  “Okay, here.” Brian pointed at a large room in D-Wing. “They hit the music room. Again, you wouldn’t necessarily know from looking at the door, but this is a double classroom, twice the size of the other rooms in this hall. And it was choir that period.”

  I nodded mutely.

  “They knew the room would be barricaded by the time they got there, because they shot out the window, and one of them leaned in through it to shoot. They knew that. They planned it.”