» Fiction

(the sound of children screaming has been removed)

Kira Compton 

Twenty minutes before gunfire erupts in the La Villa High School cafeteria, Cass is getting high in the parking lot. This is normal, at least junior year. Since summer, she’s been sort of dating this stoner, Lacey, a senior with a beautiful tan and shaggy bleached hair and a single dangly earring that twists in the wind. She’s so cool it makes Cass sweat, her bra sticking to her skin and a faint musky smell coming from her armpits. Lacey’s perfection bleeds into something unreal, like the teenagers in movies played by twenty-something, hundred-pound actresses. When Lacey smiles, her California teeth shining in the sun, Cass thinks this must be love. And if this is love, it is new and startling, and she is terrified she will ruin it. The worry runs a tired track in her brain. The weed is nice because it is free, yes, but mostly because it stops the background noise in her skull.  

They lie side by side in the bed of Lacey’s truck. Lacey finishes the joint while Cass pretends to watch something on her phone. Onscreen, a large, beautiful girl with a septum piercing mouths a song Cass half remembers. Lacey hums along, drawing circles on Cass’s shoulders. Her fingers are normal fingers, chewed nails and calluses, but they sear her skin. If this isn’t love, she doesn’t know what is.  

Lacey says something then, her voice raspy with the edges of sleep—she won’t be fully awake until third period. Cass sets the phone between their heads. The song plays on a loop, soft and catchy. Lacey’s tongue pokes out between her teeth, and Cass chases it with her lips.  

Probably, that final moment wasn’t so perfect. Morning breath, sunless skies, the pressing need to piss. But this is how Cass remembers it. 

◊

The exit wound is clean, but the doctors keep Cass in the hospital for six days. The bullet pierced her left shoulder, skating past arteries and bones. The scar on her back will be horrific but superficial. The ER nurse who rebandages her wound tells her how lucky she is. A centimeter to the right, her shoulder would have shattered. A centimeter to the left, she’d have bled out on cafeteria tile. Dead any other way, according to her nurses, her parents, the investigators that stream through her hospital room and pepper her with questions she doesn’t know how to answer. They are unsatisfied with the truth, no matter how many times she repeats it: I don’t remember, I don’t remember, I don’t remember. At least, she doesn’t remember anything worth talking about.   

The first day nurse is vigilant with the squat television in the corner of the hospital room, keeping it tuned to sitcoms with chattering laugh tracks. The nurse on day two doesn’t care, so Cass watches the news stations. The shooting segments are nearly identical, down to how they begin: eight smiling faces lined up in a row, school pictures from a happier day. Their names are never there, but Cass doesn’t need names. Ms. Rainier, the lunch lady who wore her hair in intricate twists, who must have spent an hour getting ready the morning she died; Mr. Gonzalez, her freshman English teacher who told her she would love Franny and Zooey; Tim Robinson, who made fun of her belly in middle school; Al Jones, who was always sleeping, always wearing the same wooly black sweatshirt; Tina Holden, who had been drawing terrible anime for years but was just now starting to get good, even had a few thousand followers on Instagram; Tori Holden, beautiful, untouchable, who wouldn’t be caught dead around her weird sister; Mark Patterson, that first, false male crush; Lacey Gold. It’s Lacey’s junior year picture, back when Lacey and Cass knew each other only in passing, before everything important came to pass. Her hair unbleached and long, a respectable shirt creased at the neck. A small, knowing smirk: this is just a photo for the fireplace mantle, something to keep the parents happy.  

Sometimes the station throws Cass’s picture up. It’s from freshman year. An XXL Metallica shirt pools around her, a band she’d been so sure she’d love forever but stopped listening to not long after picture day. They play sound bites of her mother’s weepy voice over the photo. It’s what every parent dreads. I’m so fortunate my baby girl is still here.  

No stations talk about the shooter. They’ve stopped naming shooters in the last few years, an attempt to withhold the badge of infamy given to people like Harris and Klebold. Now there is just one Shooter, a shadowy figure lurking in movie theaters and kindergartens. Always a lone male, usually killed on site by his own hand or someone else’s.  

The news loop repeats itself until Lacey’s face is imprinted in Cass’s vision. When her mother visits at the end of the day, she snaps the television off. Cass still hears that weepy, interviewed version of her mother, more vivid and sincere than the woman in the hospital chair.  

◊

The first day nurse is back, and Cass is no longer allowed to wallow in the news. High on morphine, she spends the third day on her phone. With the notifications muted, social media offers a spot of low tide. She floats through an endless stream of videos. Cooking recipes with bright yellow rice and perfectly smashed avocado; craft tips for knitting and crochet, watercolor and oil; beautiful women gliding over red carpets, voluptuous gowns clouding behind them; parsed-down, slowed-down movie moments with the wrong music playing; strangers mouthing last month’s most popular tweet; cats leaping on tables and knocking over vases, glasses, laptops; a thousand lessons on wine, lifting, baby seals, traveling solo, tattooing, social justice, DIY home remodeling, how to 5 to 9 before the 9 to 5, healthy eating, meditating, holding on and letting go. She scrolls and scrolls and finds herself.  

It’s an eight-second loop of the moment she burst out of the cafeteria. There’s a filter, making her bright and smooth, as though someone has pulled plastic wrap over her skin and tugged. Her cheekbones are jagged. Her eyes sparkle. The blood on her neck seems strategically placed. Over the loop, the chorus of Sia’s “Unstoppable” plays on repeat.  

It seems impossible that someone caught this on camera, but here it is, cycling on her screen. Another student captured what they could from the other side of the street. Cass feels nauseous. She feels something else too, wanton and unnamed. She watches herself escape to safety again and again and again. 12.7K likes. 2.3K comments.  

She flips to her notifications, which she has been soundly ignoring. Her Instagram is private, and she’d assumed the little pink dot was simply well wishes from friends and family. Instead, there are thousands of follow requests, hundreds of messages. She’s brave, a hero, lucky. She’s been tagged countless times, has her own hashtag now, #cassandrablake. Turns out, someone was livestreaming everything that happened outside the cafeteria, and everything that happened inside.  

She flicks her phone off, pulls the pillow over her face, and screams. 

◊

The fourth day, Cass refuses visitors. She ignores the nurse’s gentle, probing questions. The TV in the corner stays off, the blank screen a wide and empty mouth.  

La Villa may not have the highest kill count or the youngest victims, but thanks to the livestream, her school has captured the eye of the nation. Tina Holden’s follower count has gorged itself, three hundred to thirty thousand (Tori Holden’s private page is not among the followers). The last photo Tina ever posted—a progress update on a drawing of a rose-haired anime girl—has gotten two thousand comments. Cass reads them all. This is so fucked and xoxo rest easy angel and i don’t know you but i am so so so scared and lord jesus, we humbly ask of you, jesus, that you will give them life again, for you are our lord jesus who is always with us even in the darkest of times, amen.  

When it gets overwhelming, she flips back to Instagram reels. Her usual recommendations are there, but she spent half an hour watching herself escape. The algorithm noticed. For every thirty reels, there’s one of her. Sometimes she is running out of the cafeteria or being carted into the hospital. Friends have leaked old videos, so there are reels of her jumping into oceans or laughing at lunch tables. Slowed versions of Cass and Lacey lean into each other as the song “Mary on a Cross” twinkles over them.  

There’s a version of Cass that’s outraged, but the rage feels young and muffled beneath a broader feeling, a heady sense of anticipation. Hundreds of messages sit luridly in her inbox, unopened. Strange numbers call, and she lets them slip to voicemail.  

That night, she goes to sleep early and dreams of The Shooter. Not the boy who shot her, but The Shooter, a vague and menacing figure in camo pants. He’s chasing her, but in the strange logic of dreams, she has her hands around the barrel of his gun and is pulling. Every time she wrestles the gun away from him, another one respawns in his hands, an AK-47 or an MR-16 or another string of letters and numbers she doesn’t understand. The dream doesn’t change. Just this endless chase and tug-of-war, a video loop that never ends.  

◊

On the fifth day, Cass unprivates her accounts.  

Her last post is from the summer, a beach day group photo. Her head is on Lacey’s shoulder. She remembers that Lacey’s earring kept getting in Cass’s face, and when she blew it away, Lacey giggled. This fascinated her—Lacey was too cool for giggling—so she blew on Lacey’s cheek again and again, repeating the experiment until their friends griped at them for ruining the photo. 

That evening, Cass has over fifty thousand followers. Huddled under hospital covers, she listens to the voicemails of strangers. Sponsorships, all from figureheads of companies she’s never heard of. She’s an influencer now, the face of something larger than herself. The voices offer condolences, tell her she’s a hero, and doesn’t she want to keep making a difference?  

She stands to make a life-changing amount of money. No more rent stress for mom, no need to work a second job. Cass will be able to move wherever she wants after high school—she won’t even have to finish high school, won’t ever have to go back if she doesn’t want to. She’ll bulldoze the cafeteria to the ground and build the Lacey Gold Memorial Garden in its place.   

It’s close to midnight when she chooses a number at random and calls. A woman picks up on the second ring. Her voice is metallic over the phone. When Cass signs her life away, she pictures flowers curling through the cracks of cafeteria tile: begonias and lilies, columbines and dead nettle.   

◊

Cass watches the livestream of the shooting just once, there on her final day in the hospital. 

Strike while the iron’s hot, she’d been told. They’ll only have the nation’s attention for so long, and if they want it to matter, they’ll need to be shocking: a livestream of a livestream with Cass watching, still threaded with IVs and a heart monitor. 

A woman with severe blonde hair has driven up from LA. She helps Cass get ready—brown dusting under her eyes, her hospital gown askew so that the edgings of her bullet wound are visible. In the mirror, Cass looks strangely beautiful. She’s become one of those twenty-year-old, hundred-pound actresses playing the movie version of herself. 

Before they go live, a company-hired therapist checks in with her over the phone. The therapist wants to make sure she is okay reliving the event. She’s sure, yes, okay, but the truth is that she won’t be reliving it—she hardly remembers living it.  

What Cass does remember: Her own sweat-stench. Ripe, pungent. She’d pissed herself, the urine soaking into her crotch, her thighs, making her dark jeans darker. She smelled like a wild animal, pure adrenaline. An ape sleeping inside her all this time, awakening in a frenzy and pounding against the inside of her chest: Survive this! Survive this! 

She remembers Tori curled over Tina. Hindsight tells her they are dead, but memory tells a different story. Tori shields Tina in a sister’s embrace, simple and protective. Maybe it was only at school that the sisters hated each other. Maybe, back home, they shared a bathroom, a bedroom, a common love for mint chocolate chip ice cream. Maybe they didn’t speak at school because they spent so much time speaking everywhere else. Maybe, back home, the love between them was endless. In her memory, Tori is still breathing.  

She remembers being shot, though in a mosaic sort of way, a kaleidoscope of red and orange, yellow and black. Iron in her mouth. Salt in her eyes. Something lancing her shoulder, vaulting her awake. Heat against her neck, gunmetal searing her hands.  

She doesn’t remember the shooter. She doesn’t remember taking the gun. She doesn’t remember the last thing Lacey said, the last important thing. Cass can picture the curl of Lacey’s lips moving up and down, but though she has run through the memory every night since, the words are gone. For the livestream to be worth anything, it would need to show her that. She can see it—the camera sliding out of the cafeteria, down the hall, through the parking lot. Sun striking the lens as it presses into the truck bed. Two girls curled into one another, center screen. Chapped lips. Meaningless noise. Lacey’s words, articulated clearly in the shell of her ear. Cass would hear it and know all there was to know. Everything they had been promised would come to pass. Yellow tassels and cheap wine and swollen feet and a boring middle age. They would get it all. The camera would watch them through the years, having no reason to pan to dark cafeteria doors.  

Bright lights shiver. The livestream begins. Cass watches what she can’t remember.