Looking back, I want to grab that version of myself by the collar and yell at her to shut up. Who was she to lecture Duncan? Who was she to talk about fear? Who was she to dole out life advice?
Something shifted in Duncan’s eyes then. He stood up a little straighter, too. Then he said, “Ask me why I didn’t want to dance with you.”
“What?”
“The other night. At the party. I didn’t want to dance. I said I don’t do it anymore. Ask me why not.”
I hesitated, and I felt my righteous irritation drain away. I suddenly knew he was going to have a hell of an answer to this question. When I did it, my voice was much quieter. “Okay, Duncan,” I said. “Why don’t you dance anymore?”
He nodded, like Right. Here we go. “Because when I got shot, we were right in the middle of having a dance party in class.”
I put my hand over my mouth.
He took a deep breath to continue. Then, without letting himself pause, he told me. “We’d been reviewing for finals all week. It was Friday, which was always Hat Day—so the kids were all wearing top hats, and cowboy hats, and hats that looked like sharks, and traffic cones, and roasted chickens. We were burned out and just needed to laugh like crazy and jump around.
“We heard the gunshots down the hall over the music—so much louder than the music—and silliness shifted to soul-blazing terror in one second. I mean, that sound is unmistakable. Even if you’ve never heard it in real life—even if you’ve only seen it in movies. We all knew in an instant what was happening.
“My classroom was a square—there was no place to hide. I even had a window in my classroom door, but I locked it anyway and got my kids down behind my desk, and then I shoved the bookshelf in front of it. Some of the boys jumped in to help, and I’m telling you, it was like a war zone—we could hear the shots and the screaming—and you think you’ve heard screaming before, but you have never heard anything like that. It ripped my soul in half. I will never forget that sound until the day I die.
“Anyway, I was still piling things—a computer cart, a bunch of student desks—in front of the kids, when a kid named Jackson appeared at my door window, and he started trying to get in. He was rattling the handle and beating on the door and shouting, ‘He’s coming! He’s coming!’ And that’s when a girl who’d been behind the barricade—her last name was Stevenson, so we all called her Stevie—she darted out toward the door, unlocked it, let the kid in, and shoved it closed again. She got it locked in time, and the kid made a break for the barricade, but before Stevie had a chance to get away from the door, the shooter just … got her. Just shot right through the door itself like it wasn’t even there. Just riddled her with bullets, and the force of the impact actually jerked her backward, and when she hit the floor, she just … turned red—like she’d sprung a hundred leaks.”
Duncan was shaking now—his voice, his hands, his breath.
He shook his head. “Stevie, you know? Stevie. She made origami butterflies all the time and gave them to people—out of gum wrappers and notebook paper decorated with highlighters. She was wearing a crown for Hat Day, and she’d forgotten to take it off—but it flew off on impact and dragged a streak of blood across the floor. I started to go to her, but that’s when he shot out the window, and that’s when he got me. I was halfway to her when I felt it like burning acid all up and down my side. And then I just collapsed—facedown on the classroom tiles. Watching my own blood seep out and pool around me, the sound of my own breath swallowing me up. And that’s the last thing I remember before everything went black.”
Oh, God.
“Did Stevie make it?” I finally whispered.
He shook his head.
“What about—” I started, but my voice caught. “What about the kid she saved?”
“He got hit, too, as he dove for the barricade. But he made it.”
“That’s good,” I said—though “good” felt like the wrong word in reference to anything about this.
“He made it … but I don’t know if he’ll make it in the end.”
I shook my head. “What do you mean?”
“He’s tried to kill himself twice since it happened.”
I put my hand over my mouth.
“They were eighth-graders,” Duncan said then. “They were kids. But Stevie … was his girlfriend.” He squeezed his eyes tight, then rubbed them. “First girlfriend. First love. They were always passing notes. Half the teachers thought they’d wind up getting married.”
I didn’t know what to say. I reached out and took Duncan’s hands.
“You said one time that you miss the guy I used to be. But I’m not that guy anymore. I can’t be him. I can’t know what I know now and be who I was then. I can’t go back. Sometimes I really hate that guy—how na?ve he was. How happy he was. How he was filling kiddie pools with Jell-O when he should have been working harder to look after the world.” He took a deep breath. “I’ll never be that guy again, and if you’re waiting for it, you’re going to be disappointed.”
All I could do was nod.
Duncan fell quiet for a second. Then he said, “You keep telling me not to live my life in fear. But I need you to understand that you don’t know what fear is.”
And do you know what? He was right.
I’m not even sure I can identify all the emotions that submerged me right then. I felt sorry, and wrong, and embarrassed and cowed for having been so judgmental. I felt angry at myself, and angry at the world—and angry at Duncan, too.
It was more feelings at once—all at maximum intensity—than I knew how to handle. And I have no way of explaining, or justifying, or even understanding what I did next—other than just to confess that in the moment after I’d realized how stupid I’d been, how I hadn’t even understood him all along or what he’d been through, I felt this overwhelming, truly suffocating feeling like I just needed to do something.
But I had no idea at all what to do. There was nothing to do. So, in a millisecond decision that I’ve never been able to explain or understand or take back—I just turned, right there on the pier, and took off running.
Not back toward the seawall, though. Away from it.
I knew this pier. I knew that there was a break at the far end with a ladder down to the water. I knew there were Polar Bear Clubs that jumped off the end every New Year’s, and Mermaid Clubs that dove off it wearing sparkly costume tails. Like all bad decisions, it didn’t seem too bad at the time. Who was I to tell Duncan to be brave? Who was I to judge anybody at all? I wasn’t a risk-taker! I was a librarian. The scariest thing I’d done in years was the Hustle. But I could change that. I could change that right now.
This might be the worst decision I’d ever made, but it was my decision.
I ran faster.
I heard Duncan behind me. “Sam! Sam! Hey! What are you doing?”
It’s possible that if he hadn’t taken off after me, I might have stopped at the edge. There’s a very good chance I would have come to my senses and rightly chickened out.
But he did take off after me.
I heard his feet behind me on the boardwalk. I felt him gaining on me. And it sparked that feeling I remember from childhood games—what must be an ancient human instinct—of realizing you’re being chased … and running faster. You know that feeling. It’s like a prickly feeling on the back of your neck. You can’t let them catch you. Some deep part of your lizard brain wipes out every thought except: don’t get caught.
I didn’t even think the words. I just felt them.
I am not a risk-taker or a thrill-seeker. I am the opposite of those things. That moment on the Iron Shark was enough fear to last me forever. I blame the adrenaline. I blame my frustration with Duncan. I blame the fact that every single thing I’d tried to do lately had failed.
I just ran.
And when Duncan chased me, I ran faster.
And when I got to the end of the pier, I ran right through the opening in the railing, launched myself off the end, and plunged down toward the water.
twenty-three
I regretted it instantly.
The very second that I passed the railing, the second there was no turning back, I wanted nothing more in my whole life than to turn back.
My life that might not last very long.
The fall took forever and gave me plenty of time to review my idiocy. There could be pilings down there, or jetty rocks, or a shipwrecked boat. There could be an oil slick, or a whole school of jellyfish, or even a patch of flesh-eating bacteria. Anything was possible.
No matter what, this was the dumbest thing I’d ever done.
My arms spun involuntarily, by the way, as if they might find something to grab on to in the empty air. And my legs kept pumping, as well, as if their efforts might inspire some solid ground to appear underneath them.
And I’ll tell you something: I knew a sudden truth in those dead-silent seconds before I met whatever gory death awaited me below.
I definitely didn’t want to die.
I’d known it in a casual way before. But now I knew it in a hundred new ways.