Chapter One
Minutes after the shootings, everybody's cell phone rang. We weren't supposed to have cell phones unless we had a note from our parents explaining why they had to be able to reach us in a hurry.
But most of us had them anyway, and, as it turned out, most of the parents (for all their complaining about how much TV kids watched) were close enough to a radio or television so that they found out immediately, and all the phones went off at once. The annoying rings and the stupid songs sang out, only slightly muffled, from inside everyone's backpacks.
I was relieved that mine didn't ring first. By the time my dad reached me, practically everyone in the class had a phone pressed to one ear and a finger in the other. Mrs. Davis, our algebra teacher, had given up trying to keep order and was just trying to listen in because it was clear, even to her, that something awful had happened.
My dad said, "Tomster! Are you okay?"
I said, "Don't call me that. Why wouldn't I be? What's with you? I'm in math class."
After a silence my dad said, "I thought you hated math."
"So?" I said. "So what?"
"So what's the big deal about my interrupting?"
"Earth to Dad," I said. I imagined him in his studio, in the barn behind our house, surrounded by piles of papers and drawings and little bottles of ink. He always said that I never paid any attention to what he was working on, but in fact I knew that his current project involved illustrating a cookbook about the different ways to cook beans. International beans from around the world. "What's going on?"
He said, "I've got some really bad news. Some crazy kids shot up the school gym at Pleasant Valley and killed abunch of students and teachers."
"Oh, man," I said. "That is really bad. But Dad . . . that's fifty miles away. I'm in math class."
"I don't know. Sorry," said Dad. "I got worried. I wanted to make sure you were okay."
There were three killers. Two boys and a girl. No one even knew they were friends, let alone that they'd been plotting to bring a whole arsenal into the school and go on a murder spree. They never even registered as blips on the other kids' radar screens.
The TV news made a big point of that, long before anyone was even sure how many students and teachers were dead, or exactly who had been killed. Those details took longer to come out. Five kids and three teachers had been shot dead on the spot. Fourteen students were critically wounded. The killers all shot themselves. The one girl killer left a note on her computer at home saying she wasn't sorry for what she had done except for the heartache and trouble that this was probably going to cause her mom and dad. Probably? I'd say definitely.
Most of the kids they shot were in the gym. They hunted down the jocks. As they flashed the faces of the dead on the screen, it was horribly depressing. They must have killed all the best-looking kids, the most handsome and photogenic.
The fact that they'd mostly killed athletes really gave me the creeps. Because in our school, me and my friends -- Brian, Avery, and Silas -- we were the jocks. Except we were a subclique of jocks. The Smart Jocks -- that's what everyone called us. Not that we were outstandingly smart. Except for Brian and sometimes Avery, we weren't especially good in school, plus we weren't that jocky. We could play basketball passably well. Butcalling us the Smart Jocks set us apart from the Dumb Jocks, who were certifiably dumb, and also from the Brains, none of whom could even have made the junior basketball team.
Also we were known as rebels. Sort of. Because there wasn't much to rebel against, we never got into actual trouble. And it wasn't exactly that we had a bad attitude. It was more that we needed to cultivate the appearance of having a bad attitude. We always sat in the back rows -- on the bus, in class, during assembly. We were the first to roll our eyes when a teacher said something corny. And no one expected us to offer our services when, say, at the end of ninth grade, they'd asked kids to volunteer to be Big Brothers for next year's incoming freshmen. Not that we were completely lacking in community spirit. But, as Silas said, who wanted to waste the best two weeks of school -- those few days when you could still imagine that the year might be interesting and fun -- showing some little dweeb how to open his locker and where the bathrooms were?
And it was fine, no one expected us to volunteer, that was one good thing about Central. Everyone had a place; you were allowed to be who you were. I mean, whoever you were. It was totally live and let live. But after Pleasant Valley, all that began to change. You started looking at other kids differently. Because the nasty lesson of Pleasant Valley was that kids you never thought about, kids you hardly even noticed . . . well, they could be thinking about you all the time, they could hate you and plan to kill you. Which turned out to have been their problem: No one ever noticed them until they started shooting.