Page 128 of What You Wish For

He had just told me that he cared about us—about me—but I couldn’t even hear it. “We are not in danger!” I shouted. “No more than anybody else is any other minute of the day. Life is full of danger. Terrible things happen all the time. That doesn’t mean you live your life in fear.”

Looking back, I want to grab that version of myself by the collar and yell at her to shut up. Who was she to lecture Duncan? Who was she to talk about fear? Who was she to dole out life advice?

Something shifted in Duncan’s eyes then. He stood up a little straighter, too. Then he said, “Ask me why I didn’t want to dance with you.”

“What?”

“The other night. At the party. I didn’t want to dance. I said I don’t do it anymore. Ask me why not.”

I hesitated, and I felt my righteous irritation drain away. I suddenly knew he was going to have a hell of an answer to this question. When I did it, my voice was much quieter. “Okay, Duncan,” I said. “Why don’t you dance anymore?”

He nodded, likeRight. Here we go.“Because when I got shot, we were right in the middle of having a dance party in class.”

I put my hand over my mouth.

He took a deep breath to continue. Then, without letting himself pause, he told me. “We’d been reviewing for finals all week. It was Friday, which was always Hat Day—so the kids were all wearing top hats, and cowboy hats, and hats that looked like sharks, and traffic cones, and roasted chickens. We were burned out and just needed to laugh like crazy and jump around.

“We heard the gunshots down the hall over the music—so much louder than the music—and silliness shifted to soul-blazing terror in one second. I mean, that sound is unmistakable. Even if you’ve never heard it in real life—even if you’ve only seen it in movies. We all knew in an instant what was happening.

“My classroom was a square—there was no place to hide. I even had a window in my classroom door, but I locked it anyway and got my kids down behind my desk, and then I shoved the bookshelf in front of it. Some of the boys jumped in to help, and I’m telling you, it was like a war zone—we could hear the shots and the screaming—and you think you’ve heard screaming before, but you have never heard anything like that. It ripped my soul in half. I will never forget that sound until the day I die.

“Anyway, I was still piling things—a computer cart, a bunch of student desks—in front of the kids, when a kid named Jackson appeared at my door window, and he started trying to get in. He was rattling the handle and beating on the door and shouting, ‘He’s coming! He’s coming!’ And that’s when a girl who’d been behind the barricade—her last name was Stevenson, so we all called her Stevie—she darted out toward the door, unlocked it, let the kid in, and shoved it closed again. She got it locked in time, and the kid made a break for the barricade, but before Stevie had a chance to get away from the door, the shooter just… got her. Just shot right through the door itself like it wasn’t even there. Just riddled her with bullets, and the force of the impact actually jerked her backward, and when she hit the floor, she just… turned red—like she’d sprung a hundred leaks.”

Duncan was shaking now—his voice, his hands, his breath.

He shook his head. “Stevie, you know?Stevie. She made origami butterflies all the time and gave them to people—out of gum wrappers and notebook paper decorated with highlighters. She was wearing a crown for Hat Day, and she’d forgotten to take it off—but it flew off on impact and dragged a streak of blood across the floor. I started to go to her, but that’s when he shot out the window, and that’s when he got me. I was halfway to her when I felt it like burning acid all up and down my side. And then I just collapsed—facedown on the classroom tiles. Watching my own blood seep out and pool around me, the sound of my own breath swallowing me up. And that’s the last thing I remember before everything went black.”

Oh, God.

“Did Stevie make it?” I finally whispered.

He shook his head.

“What about—” I started, but my voice caught. “What about the kid she saved?”

“He got hit, too, as he dove for the barricade. But he made it.”

“That’s good,” I said—though “good” felt like the wrong word in reference to anything about this.

“He made it… but I don’t know if he’ll make it in the end.”

I shook my head. “What do you mean?”

“He’s tried to kill himself twice since it happened.”

I put my hand over my mouth.

“They were eighth-graders,” Duncan said then. “They were kids. But Stevie… was his girlfriend.” He squeezed his eyes tight, then rubbed them. “First girlfriend. First love. They were always passing notes. Half the teachers thought they’d wind up getting married.”

I didn’t know what to say. I reached out and took Duncan’s hands.

“You said one time that you miss the guy I used to be. But I’m not that guy anymore. I can’t be him. I can’t know what I know now and be who I was then. I can’t go back. Sometimes I really hate that guy—how naïve he was. How happy he was. How he was filling kiddie pools with Jell-O when he should have been working harder to look after the world.” He took a deep breath. “I’ll never be that guy again, and if you’re waiting for it, you’re going to be disappointed.”

All I could do was nod.

Duncan fell quiet for a second. Then he said, “You keep telling me not to live my life in fear. But I need you to understand that you don’t know what fear is.”

And do you know what? He was right.

---