I felt exposed sitting there, with nothing but Brian between me and the door. I should have gone to the back of the room. Or behind the teacher’s desk. The footsteps were getting closer, though, so I stayed put. As they echoed down the hall, I couldn’t help but remember the video they’d made us all watch freshman year. In it, the shooter had worn heavy army boots and fatigue pants, and in one chilling frame the shadow of him and the gun he carried had stretched out along the expanse of empty hall. His face registered only as a sketch in my mind, with the wide jaw and unsmiling eyes of an action figure.
It was easier that way, I thought, to think of the shooter as an anonymous outsider, to mute the reality that it was far more likely to be a fellow student. Maybe that was the thing no one really knew how to prepare for, that your life might ultimately depend on how quickly you could switch from seeing the shooter as the person who sat two seats away from you in history—the person who offered you a stick of gum—seeing them as the person who might kill you.
The footsteps grew closer and closer and then they stopped right outside the door. Through the thin sheet of paper covering the glass, I could make out the faint shape of a head. This is not real, I told myself, even as I stopped breathing and closed my eyes, waiting for the sound of them trying the doorknob.
Click, click. He paused and then tried again. Click, click.
It was locked. The room was dark. There was paper over the window.
Please keep walking, I thought. We followed the rules.
For another long, long second there was silence. And then the footsteps started again, this time walking away, toward the gym.
I wondered if they’d been able to secure the doors.
Brian shifted beside me, quietly stretching his legs.
“What were you talking about the other day?” I whispered. “About Anna?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” he said. “Keep quiet.”
“I am being quiet,” I said, still whispering, but pressing my advantage now that he couldn’t just walk off. “You said there was some stuff written about her. What did someone write about her?”
Brian shook his head. “Nothing.”
“It wasn’t nothing. Tell me.”
He looked toward the intercom, as if willing it to come on and release him from this room, this conversation. “Look, some idiot wrote some stuff about her in the bathroom,” he said eventually. “That’s all.”
I took that in, processing it. “Which bathroom?” I asked.
“By the music room,” he said. “But it’s really no big deal. You should just forget about it.”
“Sure,” I said, having no intention whatsoever of doing that. Then I leaned back and listened to the sound of footsteps walking away from the cafeteria, away from the chem lab, heading down the hall to the next room.
It felt like it took a very long time before the intercom crackled on again, telling us all that it was over.
—
AFTER TRACK, I TOLD SARAH I’d walk home, that I’d forgotten something in my locker and didn’t want to keep her. She offered to wait but I said no, that I could use the exercise. Which was, perhaps, an odd comment after running for over an hour, but she didn’t ask any follow-up questions.
The hallway was deserted, but I still knocked before entering the bathroom. Two loud, sharp knocks. I waited for a few seconds, listening for a flush, an annoyed response. There was nothing, no sound of life, so I went in.
Inside, there was an old brick for when the door needed to be propped upon. I slid it against the door so that no one else could enter.
The air was stale, and the lone window looked like it hadn’t been opened in a very long time. Each of the stalls featured a handful of scrawls—mostly a call-and-response of expletives with the occasional indecipherable drawing. None of them had anything to do with Anna.
It was only as I was leaving the second stall that I saw what I’d missed before on the opposite wall. There had been an attempt to cover the words with a layer of paint, and from a certain angle the effort had succeeded, but more paint was needed to truly obscure them from straight on.
The words were written in furious capital letters:
ANNA CUTTER IS A WHORE.
What I do know is that he was the first one to initiate contact, to vault across that gulf between us.
When he did, when he touched me in that unmistakable way, I almost stopped breathing.
I want to tell you that I moved away immediately. Instead, it took full, long seconds—ones that stretched like caramel, crackling at the edges like burnt sugar.
ANNA WAS THE GOOD ONE. People had always thought of her that way. The one who wouldn’t cause problems, the one who was kind—considerate. The one who opened doors for people, who bought thoughtful birthday presents and volunteered for food drives.
If someone had told me before, back when she was alive, that someone had called her a whore, had scrawled it across the wall of the boys’ bathroom, I’d have assumed they were making a terrible joke.
But someone had written that about her, had written it out in permanent black ink. Someone who’d seen her with someone? The person she’d been with? I didn’t know.
—
I WAS STARING OUT THE window in class, still thinking about the graffiti, when I saw a girl sitting on the edge of the roof—legs dangling back and forth, dark hair blowing in the breeze.
I thought it was Anna. Which meant it had happened, that I’d finally, officially lost it—not just momentarily seeing her in someone else, but seeing her in a place where there wasn’t anyone at all.
I closed my eyes tight and then reopened them.
The girl was still there.
