Leo takes something out of his pocket and throws it onto the ground in front of William Lyt. A cigarette lighter. William lashes out instantly, and his fist hits Leo’s face as hard as a block of wood. Leo collapses and rolls around on all fours to keep the blood out of his eyes. He knows there’s no way he can fight William and win. But there are many ways to avoid defeat. He sees that William has tears of rage in his eyes as he gets ready to kick him. He manages to dart out of the way in time, and in the same movement he kicks out as hard as he can and hits William in the crotch. Then he gets to his feet and hits as hard as he can.

That might have been enough if he’d been bigger and heavier and William smaller and lighter. But Leo’s punches are weak, half of them miss, and William merely sways. The boys at the ends of the tunnel stand motionless. William’s fingers grab hold of Leo’s top and close like a claw. Then the eighteen-year-old head butts the twelve-year-old in the nose. Blinded, Leo falls to the ground. And then? Dear God.

* * *

Then William Lyt doesn’t stop stamping.

* * *

Mother’s Song

You asked “Am I a good mother?,” always the same, the same . . .

. . . answer that you were seeking, when you should have known that

You were the strength inside

You were all that I could become

You taught me the value of “sorry,” but the only time you retreated was when you were taking aim

You taught me the humility of tears but never let me apologize for existing

You didn’t dress me up in fragile garments, you gave me armor

You taught me that daughters don’t have to have dreams—we can have goals.

* * *

The boys at the ends of the tunnel stand silent. Perhaps some of them feel they should intervene, call out that that’s enough, that the kid’s only twelve, for God’s sake. But it’s easy to become desensitized; you can see something happen right in front of you without it having any greater effect than if you were seeing it in a film. Perhaps you have time to feel scared, think, “Good thing it isn’t me,” unless you’re so shocked that you feel paralyzed.

* * *

Could William have killed Leo in that tunnel? No one knows. Because someone stops him.

* * *

Jeanette, the teacher, has lots of little bad habits that she does her best to hide from both the pupils and the other staff in the school. She cracks her knuckles when she’s nervous; she started doing that when she played on Hed Hockey’s girls’ team. When she got older, she took up boxing, then martial arts, and she has plenty of strange habits left from those days. She stretches when she feels restless, warms up before classes each morning as if she were preparing for a game. For a while she was good, really good. Maybe she could even have become the best. For a single wonderful year she was a professional fighter, but hardly anyone in this town knows that because she got injured and things went the way they always do: either you’re the best, or you’re everyone else. She studied to become a teacher, lost the fire in her heart, the killer instinct. She had a coach who told her, “Jeanette, you have to want to go into the ring and crush another girl’s dream, because if you don’t, you’ve no business being here.” That may have been true, she wishes it weren’t, but perhaps sport really is precisely that merciless.

She doesn’t miss the pressure and stress, just the adrenaline. There’s nothing in normal life that can replace it, that life-affirming fear when she climbed into the ring and there was just her and her opponent. You against me. Right here, right now.

She tries to find other ways of getting kicks. Working as a teacher often feels hopeless, but every now and then there are tiny, shimmering moments that make the long hours and humiliating wages worthwhile, when she manages to get through to someone. Maybe even save something. There aren’t many jobs that give you the chance to do that.

In the afternoons, after the end of the school day, she goes up the hidden access ladder onto the roof. And up there, behind a ventilation drum above the dining room, a teacher can stand and look out across almost the whole of Beartown and have a cigarette without anyone seeing. That’s the worst habit of all.

She can see the tunnel from there, the one built under the main road to keep the children safe. She sees Leo and the girl go in. Only the girl runs out. Jeanette sees William and his guys approach from both directions. She drops her cigarette and runs for the ladder. This is a small school in a small town, but the building feels endless when you’re running through it in panic.

* * *

Kira and Maya arrive home. When Maya goes into her room, Kira sees the concert tickets on her wall. She can still remember the very first one, possibly more clearly than her daughter, and how Maya and Ana carried the tickets in their pockets for weeks. They secretly bought eye shadow and put far too much on, then cut off their denim shorts until they were way too revealing. Kira dropped them off outside the concert and made them promise to come straight out the moment it was over, and they promised and laughed, and they were only children but Kira knew she’d lost them, ever so slightly, at that moment. They ran off toward the stage hand in hand, along with hundreds of other screaming girls, and that first taste of freedom is something you can never take away from someone. Music transformed Maya and Ana, and even if they chose completely different styles of music later in life and did nothing but argue about what was “junkie music” and what was “bleep-bleep music,” they still had that in common: music saved something inside them that might otherwise have been lost. Imagination, power, a glowing spark in their chests that always reminded them: “Don’t let the bastards tell you what to be, go your own way, dance badly and sing loudly and become the best!”

Now Maya is sixteen years old and she kisses her mom on the cheek and goes into her room. Her mom sits in the kitchen thinking about all the stories about girls being trampled and crushed at concerts in recent years, about terrorists bombing arenas. What if she had known all that back then? Would she have let the girls go? Not a chance. How can you ever do that again when you know that the whole world wants to hurt your child?

* * *

Jeanette will always wonder what would have happened if she’d gotten there faster. Would William have found it easier to back down then? Would Leo have been less full of hate? Would the guys at the ends of the tunnel have been able to admit to themselves that things had gone too far?

She yanks William’s heavy body out of the way. He’s lucky; he recognizes her quickly enough to stop himself taking a swing at her, too. There’s a wild look in her eyes; they’re a fighter’s eyes, not a teacher’s. William gasps for breath and doesn’t even look at Leo when he splutters, “It was him who started it! He was asking for it!”

Jeanette will always feel ashamed of what she does next. She has no excuse. But everything that happened in the spring, the rape and silence toward one of the girls in Jeanette’s own school and the vile behavior that this community demonstrated afterward filled Jeanette with shame and anger. She’s not alone; the whole town is angry. She sees the same thing in William Lyt; he’s just angry at different things than she is. We rarely take out our anger on those who deserve it; we just take it out on whoever is standing closest.

“What did you say?” Jeanette hisses.

“He was asking for it!” William Lyt repeats.

Her kick hits him so hard in the side of his knee that his body disappears; he falls as if he’s been shot. Her balance is so perfect that she’s already standing on both feet by the time he hits the ground, so relaxed that she could have started whistling.

But when she realizes what she’s just done, her lungs tighten. Her martial arts coach always used to stress, “Never lose control! Never let your feeling grab the wheel, Jeanette. Because that’s when you do really stupid things!”

* * *

Kira is sobbing helplessly in the kitchen, hiding her face in her sweater so her daughter won’t hear her. On the other side of the door her daughter is lying on her bed beneath walls covered with concert tickets, crying hard under the covers so her mom won’t hear her. She’s grateful that it’s so easy to fool your parents. That they’re so desperate for you to be happy that they believe you even when you’re lying.

Maya knows that her mom and dad need to be allowed to regain control of their lives, in their own ways. And take back what Kevin took from them, too. Her mom needs to feel that she’s good enough, her dad needs to rescue his hockey club, because they need to feel they can succeed at something. Stand up, hit back, win. They mustn’t end up afraid of the dark, because it won’t be possible to survive together then. Their daughter can hear them arguing, even when they aren’t saying a word. Where there used to be two wineglasses in the kitchen she now sees only one. She knows her dad is getting home later and later, sees him stand outside the door for longer and longer before coming inside. She notices the envelopes containing invitations to conferences that her mom never asks if she can attend. Maya knows that if her parents split up they’ll say it wasn’t her fault. And she’ll know that they’re lying.

* * *

She was the one Kevin broke. But they were the ones who snapped.

* * *