But no one laughed. Even Jake’s victory chuckle was cut short because within seconds Chris had erupted from his desk and was on top of Jake, had him trapped in his seat, and in a series of spasms Chris managed to raise one hand and plunge his right thumb directly into Jake’s left eye.
Then in Lucy’s nightmare she saw Mr. Chambers afraid to move forward but yelling, “Chris, get off him now or I’ll have to report this,” as if they were still in a situation where something like the rules of a high school might apply, and Jake began to bleed from the corner of his eye as he unleashed a slaughterhouse squeal and tried to bat Chris away with his arms, and then Chris’s eyes rolled back in his head and a flat, even voice fell from his mouth saying, “Override protocol failed. Ops dispatched.”
Mr. Chambers didn’t seem to understand where the voice was coming from because he turned toward the door of the classroom, looking for the people who might be coming to restore order. After a few seconds ticked by, he must have realized that task fell to him, because he rushed over to his desk and pulled out a small black canister of pepper spray and said, “You have to stop that now, Chris! Stop or I’ll spray you!”
If Chris heard, he paid it no mind. His thumb pressed farther into Jake’s skull. Jake made noises that no one in that room would escape dreaming about.
Mr. Chambers stepped toward the boys and sprayed Chris’s eyes and then aimed the stream directly into the mouth of the young man.
Mr. Chambers gained Chris’s attention.
Chris untethered from Jake’s coiled, screaming body and stood. Blood dripped from his thumb to the tile. The class sat paralyzed, coughing and gagging and trying to breathe fresh air through folded hoodies or sleeves. A crowd had gathered at the door to the classroom, some filming with their phones, some running when they saw Jake’s body shaking its way into deep shock.
Chris straightened and looked at Mr. Chambers, then at his red, slick hand. “This fixes it. What I did. What you did to me. The signal…” His voice started to fade, airway tightening against the pepper spray assault. Chris shook his head from side to side and coughed. He blinked through hideously swollen eyelids. “It’s not so bad, Mr. Chambers. They said I would be smarter, but they lied to me. They lied to my mom. But you—you really helped me. After all this time.”
Then Chris bent forward, his movements finally smooth, and he picked up his precalculus book from the floor. He lifted the thick, sharp-cornered book up in the air with one bright red hand.
“This is the answer. You gave us the answer.”
Then Chris Carmichael took two swift strides toward the front of the room and swung the textbook down into Mr. Chambers’s face.
Mr. Chambers lost his legs and rag-dolled to the floor and then Chris was on top of him with the book raised high and he turned toward the class to speak.
“This makes it stop. This is real.”
He brought the textbook down, using both arms this time. Something crunched.
“I could see it all before, too much, but now I’m here.”
Another swing down. This time the arc of the book splattered the white tile ceiling with tiny red drops. Lucy could swear she saw something pulsing on the back of Chris’s neck as his hair flopped forward.
“We are going to be okay, you guys.”
Another swing. Mr. Chambers’s hands fish-flopped on the floor, his wedding ring ticking against tile, his moaning buried beneath the sound of gargled blood.
“We are all going to be okay.”
And then Lucy leaned forward in her desk because her vision had filled with tiny blinking stars, and she fought to stay conscious because there was a murderer in the room and she could barely breathe from the pepper spray and it was far too late for “Locks, lights, out of sight.” She didn’t know what the hell she was supposed to do. Part of her wanted to jump from her desk and restrain Chris or knock him off Mr. Chambers, but everything was moving too fast.
She heard men yelling in the hallway. Something rolled into the classroom next to Mr. Chambers’s awfully quiet, immobile body, and Chris didn’t even stop to acknowledge the purple smoke coming from the object because he was still swinging his book.
How can he hold on to the book with so much blood on his hands?
Lucy felt oddly guilty for thinking such a thing, but then her thoughts were wiped clear by the smell of the noxious purple smoke and the sudden, thunderous sound of close gunfire and then the sight of Chris’s face slumping loose from his head and slapping against his chest.
The air was toxic with pepper spray and gunpowder and atomized blood.
Screams ran through the room at full surround.
Chris’s body gave one last tremor and collapsed onto Mr. Chambers.
Then the school bell rang.
It was the final shock Lucy could bear. Some distant part of her mind thought, School’s out, and she slid into static, then nothing.
chapter two ESCAPE ATTEMPTS
Lucy’s alarm sounded from the dresser across the room, waking her for another day of playing pretend.
“Yes, I’m fine today.”
“No, I didn’t have any nightmares.”
“Yes, I care whether or not there are fresh blueberries at breakfast. The simple pleasures are important! Where are we without our day-to-day niceties?”
“No, I don’t want another appointment with Dr. Nielsen. And there definitely aren’t any details about that day that I’m concealing from her so she won’t have me committed.”
“Yes, I’m dealing with everything just fine.”
“No, I didn’t have a dream where I posted a picture of Chris Carmichael’s exploding face to my account and then I pushed my phone down between my legs and rubbed up against the flood of buzzing notifications. Because that would mean that something is broken inside of me, right? And I’m doing great!”
“Yes, I think graduating is still important, and yes, it might be good to change schools. But didn’t Nielsen say I needed to confront what happened on my own time? Thank you for being so patient with me. Thank you for reminding me every day that you’ve got my back! Yes, this is our challenge to face together.”
“No, I haven’t had any suicidal or self-destructive thoughts. Trust me, I’m going to be okay.”
We are all going to be okay.
* * *
Lucy knew the Hendersons’ every action came from a place of love. She knew how lucky she was to have Bill and Carol in her life, and how they were afraid she’d go back to being the near-catatonic little girl they’d adopted after the tragedy in Peru.
That being said, there were times after “the incident” when their love felt like a lead fucking apron on her chest and she couldn’t breathe from all the goddamn heartfelt care and protection.
That afternoon she texted Bucket: Dying here. Bill and Carol treating me like a baby deer. Please come pick me up. Let’s go to The Exchange.
* * *
The Marwanis did all right. They didn’t pull St. Andrews or IMTECH money, but Bucket’s dad had his own dermatology clinic, and his mom worked as a dental assistant, so they weren’t hurting. They could have forked over enough cash to put Bucket in an older used sedan, but they wanted him to earn it, so he worked part-time at Culbertson’s Grocery. As a result he always smelled like fresh-baked bread when he came to pick up Lucy.