I hold his eyes.
It’s the last thing I can do for him, my very favorite human.
And he is steady. He looks at me with the conviction of someone saving the only thing that matters in the world. His sacrifice will mean the survival of everything he holds dear.
He raises his chin, and he smiles a final, beautiful smile. He doesn’t look at Ms. Larson; he only looks at me, and it’s okay, because we’re going together. We’re going to jump into that abyss holding hands, and I will see him through to the other side.
And that matters.
It matters more than anything, and I do not waver. As Ravi delivers the final dose, I go with him. I follow him down, and I don’t even notice the barking or the pounding feet that swell around me or the gun going off. I stay with him, in my mind, even as he collapses to the stage, even as his body twitches, even as I scream until my throat is raw.
I’m still screaming when they cut me free.
They. The police.
Finally.
I barely register it.
All I see is Ravi, sprawled unmoving at the feet of the deer-shaped targets out on the platform.
I don’t register the other body.
I don’t acknowledge the stretchers being brought in, the commands being shouted, or the questions being hurled at me like grenades.
All I can process is the unmoving body of the person I love most in all the world, and eventually, vaguely, incongruously, Henry pressing against my legs like he’s as adrift as I am.
My swollen hand rests in my lap like a thing that isn’t mine. I don’t remember sitting down. Part of me knows I’ll have to surrender to the frantic attention of the uniformed workers, but not yet.
Not until I can set aside some of the raw emotion gnawing at my sanity. But I can’t. Maybe not ever. Especially not with the people swarming the stage, keeping me from him. I want to scream at them to go away, to let me have this space and him for as long as I need, but I’ve gone mute.
The metallic reek of blood and smoke hangs in the air, but I don’t acknowledge that either. I can’t. Not yet.
I drop my uninjured hand onto Henry’s back and dig my fingers into his fur. He lays his head on my knee and whines once before falling silent.
Officers try to coax me up, ask me questions, but I’m gone again. I’m in the abyss.
It’s Mr. Burman, of all people, who brings me back.
The calculations were off.
Ravi hadn’t died as quickly as Ms. Larson promised.
In fact, he hadn’t died at all.
He’d slipped to the ground only unconscious, not dead, just as the police—summoned and flanked by the Burmans—stormed the room after Henry traitorously met them and led them into the bowels of the building.
Ms. Larson had turned the gun on herself the moment she saw the uniformed officers. Her story is finished.
But Ravi’s isn’t.
Ravi is alive.
It’s the only thing that matters in the world.
By the time Ravi is released from the hospital after spending three days in a hypoglycemic coma, Maplefield has gone from a town that people didn’t even notice passing through to the most talked about place in America.
Ms. Larson died instantly when she shot herself in the head, and I can’t help wondering if that had been the plan all along—to get her revenge, then go off to join her brother. Maybe she really was going to let me go when it was all over, but I’ll never know. The not knowing bothers me more than I care to admit.
What I do know is that Ms. Larson gave me more than just her “origin story.” During the rescue, the police dogs had gone into such a frenzy in the basement, digging at the ground near the target platform, that the police had shifted the entire structure. When it was dragged away, the truth about the senior curse was finally uncovered.
It had been real all along.
Seven bodies were uncovered from the basement shooting range. All were identified as seniors who’d supposedly run away, including Madeline Archer, the circus girl. A cache of cell phones, along with a bag of SIM cards, was found in Ms. Larson’s house, and the theory is that she’d used them to gain access to her victims’ email and social media accounts, where she posted just enough to convince everyone, including their parents, that they were alive and well somewhere far away. If practice makes perfect, Ms. Larson proved that she could’ve gotten away with all the murders, including the four that mattered most. That may have been her plan when she started, but after what she said in the basement, I think she wanted to get caught. She wanted credit for avenging her brother’s death.
She might’ve been the curse, but she was cursed too.
The first thing the new principal, Mr. Quinones, does when he takes over is overhaul the school’s security. He makes a big show of it, but it wasn’t a lack of cameras that had led to the horrors we faced. That kind of terror will find its way around the best locks and the loudest alarms if it really wants to. But I let Mr. Quinones think the upgrades make things safe, even though I know it’s the blood that ended the curse for good.
The community loses its collective mind in the aftermath of everything that happened, and Ravi and I are courted by every major news outlet there is. The world doesn’t want answers though; they want gory details. They want the rasp of Ravi’s voice, hoarse from breathing tubes, and the cast encasing my hand. I broke a trio of small bones in the struggle to free myself and am now convinced that the whole dislocate-your-thumb-to-escape-handcuffs thing is a lie.
We surprise everyone by turning down the interviews.
My thumb is completely immobilized by plaster, but my fingers are free, which makes typing awkward but not impossible. That’s important. Before we can do any interviews, I have to tell the story myself.
And I do.
I write like I’m possessed, pages and pages detailing Ms. Larson’s story, our own ordeal, and the curse while Henry sleeps at my feet. I write in-depth profiles on all the victims, including the seven from the basement. Ravi films interviews with the families—not about their children’s deaths, but about their lives. Of course, there are tears, but there’s laughter too. With so many stories to tell, it takes hours of video to get it all, but we do. We sit in living rooms and kitchens, and we bear witness to lives lived and lost and vow to honor them. We caught the killer, and while we can’t bring back the victims, we can do this. We can let the world know who they were.
Jennifer Larson becomes a household name—a rare serial killer in a time when mass murderers rule the headlines, and a female one at that. The notoriety is instant, and I have no doubt she’ll go down in history as one of the country’s worst killers.
We make it our mission to ensure the victims are remembered as well.
Our parents worry that we’re working too hard and think we should try to forget, put the trauma behind us, and focus on healing. But there is no forgetting, and there shouldn’t be. This isn’t something to acknowledge and set aside, no matter how much easier that would be.
It takes days to organize all the parts of the story into a state of coherence. We spend these hours hunched over laptops at The Donut Hole or in each other’s rooms. It’s become physically difficult to part ways at the end of the night, and scenes from the basement plague my dreams, but I remember what Ravi said: I won’t let that experience be our defining moment. We’re more than that one night.
And Maplefield is more than its murders.
We stagger the release of the stories over a week, starting with The Making of a Monster, Ms. Larson’s background in her own words—which is what everyone is clamoring for—and ending with victim profiles. I want those final stories to be the ones that people remember most vividly.
Every single post goes viral.
We grant the interviews after that. We have to.
It’s strange being on the opposite side of a story, as the ones being reported on rather than doing the reporting, but we use the platform to send the stories of t
he victims into even wider spheres. They might not have been perfect people when they were alive, but who is? They should’ve had more time to get it right.
We bring Henry for the TV interviews because he deserves as much credit as anyone for ending the Maplefield curse, and his popularity risks eclipsing the victims when he becomes the internet’s new favorite dog. Sherlock was right: dogs don’t make mistakes.
Mr. Monroe insists that, in addition to the New England Excellence in Emerging Journalism contest, I also assemble and submit a portfolio for the National High School Journalist of the Year award, a two-stage process that requires judging at first the state, then national level. I agree on two conditions: that it can wait until the capstone piece of the project is finished and that I can submit with Ravi as a team. He agrees to the first and balks hard at the second, insisting that it’s a very prestigious individual award and one I have a real chance of winning.
I don’t care. It’s both of us or neither of us.
In the end, he gives in and writes the required recommendation letter, which focuses on the importance of teamwork and how we each make the other a better journalist. And who can guess how it will be received? In an industry where careers are made by pushing boundaries, perhaps our unorthodox application will start a trend.
Either way, we don’t need an award to validate us.
There’s only one more story to complete, and Mr. Quinones is waiting, as promised, when we arrive at school on Sunday afternoon to get started.
It takes hours.
Mr. Quinones offers to help but isn’t offended when we turn him down.
We work late into the night and are the first ones in the door Monday morning. We haven’t told anyone what we were doing, not even Cassidy or Priya, and Mr. Quinones promised to keep it a secret from the staff as well. He might be new to the school, but he understands what we’re trying to do.
The world needs to remember that Maplefield is not synonymous with serial killing. But more importantly, Maplefield needs to remember it.
So, from now on, everyone who walks the halls of Maplefield High will be reminded of that every day, in over six hundred ways.
Every single I Am Maplefield portrait has been printed, framed, and hung at eye level throughout the building. Each hall holds dozens of reminders that Maplefield is more than its murders. The last two pictures, our own, were taken in the days immediately following the attack, when Ravi’s throat was ringed with purple and my own was raw from screaming. We set up a makeshift studio in Ravi’s kitchen, using a sheet for a backdrop, and took turns snapping the photos.
We hung them on either side of the boiler access door, Ravi’s on the left, his sign at chest height, and mine, with my sign balanced on the plaster thumb of my cast, on the right.
Our signs are deliberately linked, a paired statement that we settled on together over late-night donuts, the thesis of the project itself.
His says I Am Not Defined By What Happens To Me.
Mine says I Am Defined By What I Do About It.
I’m pretty sure the organizers of the New England Journalism Awards secretly want to be wedding planners.
Their invitation and tickets arrive in stiff linen envelopes that are sealed with an elaborate wax stamp. The event is being held at Mechanics Hall, a nineteenth-century concert hall in Worcester, and is set to include a keynote address by the president of the association, followed by dinner, awards, and dancing. A business card-sized insert indicates that attire is black tie optional, and a separate RSVP card asks us to disclose any special dietary restrictions.
Between the two of us, Ravi and I have enough tickets to cover parents, siblings, and still have two tickets left over. I offer mine to Bryce, and Ravi’s extra goes to Mr. Monroe.
I let Cassidy talk me into dress shopping, and we spend a day at the mall with Mom, trying on an endless parade of gowns. Cassidy appoints herself director of the trip, and after she settles on a sleek and shimmering purple dress that hugs her athletic frame and flares into a trumpet shape below her knees, she turns her attention to dressing me.
I try to convince myself that I don’t care what I wear, but it’s a lie. I also have to concede that Cassidy has a knack for picking dresses that look good on me, even if they’re not the simple black ones I would have chosen on my own.
In the end, it’s still a black dress I leave with. Though according to Cassidy, there’s nothing simple about it, because the boatneck, lace sleeves, and flared skirt make it something straight out of Meghan Markle’s closet.
I can live with that.
I go with Ravi while he upgrades his funeral suit to something that actually fits, and we make it our mission to find the most ridiculous bow tie available, which still ends up being stylish and formal, all things considered, with small white flamingo skeletons set against a black background.
We drive together, him and I, leaving my parents to chauffeur Cassidy and Bryce and the Burmans with Priya. We park in the garage near the concert hall and follow the flow of formal wear to the entrance. Everyone is decades older than us, but we don’t care. We stop at the New England Journalism Association backdrop and pose for photos like everyone else. We belong here as much as anyone.
Both families and Mr. Monroe are seated at a single table, the ten of us leaving no room for random add-ons. Mr. Burman and Mr. Monroe hit it off, and they even draw my father into easy conversation. The evening passes in a pleasant blur of faces and speeches and a mediocre dinner.
When the host of the evening takes the podium at the end of the program to announce that the final award will be the first of its kind, I reach for Ravi’s hand and find it already seeking mine. Our fingers clasp beneath the table.
“This year,” the MC says, “we are pleased to present a new category for the New England Journalism Awards. The Excellence in Emerging Journalism will be presented each year to a deserving student member of our profession. This year, I am pleased to present the inaugural award to Kennedy Carter and Ravi Burman, a pair of intrepid journalists from Maplefield High who exemplify the commitment, integrity, and professionalism that mark a true journalist.”
On the screen behind him, a series of images from the Monitor plays across the projection screen.
“Since founding their own online newspaper, Ms. Carter and Mr. Burman have proven to be balanced and insightful in their reporting and have become a trusted source of information in their community. These past few months, that community—as many of you have reported on—has been rocked by tragedies, but these two have kept the light of the story shining on what matters most: the people affected.”
The screen shifts from still images of articles to captioned video of the interviews we did with the Larson victims’ families.
“They covered the news that mattered to the community in a way that kept the community first,” the presenter says. “And in the face of overwhelming media coverage, they kept the town from being defined by tragedy.”
The film shifts again, this time to the coverage of the I Am Maplefield reveal. There are scenes of student and faculty reactions—the surprise, the delight, the tears—followed by a narrated tour of the exhibit, where a crew follows Ravi and I and a reporter speaks off camera about the importance of moving forward while the faces of Maplefield fill the screen.
When the clip finishes playing, applause thunders around us, and the announcer has to raise his voice to be heard. “It is with great pleasure that I welcome Kennedy Carter and Ravi Burman to the stage.”
We walk, hand in hand, through the clapping crowd and accept our awards: small granite plaques and stiff white envelopes that contain $5,000 each—money that was meant to fund our quest to find the stories that mattered.
But that plan, along with everything else, changed in the basement.
We don’t have to trek to some far-flung land to find stories worth telling. The stories worth telling were all around us all along. They always will be, no matter where we end up.
It�
�s with that knowledge that I return to the table, high on the applause, and drop my envelope into Cassidy’s lap. She looks up, confusion on her face.
I speak close to her ear, because it isn’t an announcement for everyone—just her. “For Mudd. It’s not enough to buy him outright, but it will help.”
Cassidy claps a hand over her mouth, and I grin.
I turn to Ravi as the music starts and the announcer invites everyone to the dance floor. “Shall we?”
He holds an arm out. “I believe we shall.”
And we walk, arm in arm, straight out of the banquet hall, down four city blocks, and through the door of Noodz, where we order scandalous amounts of ramen and stay for hours, talking and laughing into the night.
Mischa Thrace enjoys writing fiction for young adults and is the author of Bury the Lead (BHC Press) and My Whole Truth (Flux Books). She has worked as an English teacher, a horse trainer, a baker, and a librarian and has amassed enough random skills to survive most apocalypses.
She loves tea, all things geek, and not getting ax-murdered on long walks in the woods. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband and the best one-eyed dog in the world.
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