The pressure of his fingers tightened; the pinch bringing tears to my eyes as the little tease of pain surged though my chest and pooled as thick hot need in my belly. “Do you know what it’s like to HAVE to continue breathing, dreaming, thinking, living, hating, needing, while the friends you once had are rotting deep below the dirt?
What happened to me that day shattered my trust in the world; my belief in goodness and innocence. It was my introduction to what is truly evil. I didn’t understand it at sixteen how I could have had a best mate, like a brother, do something so…so…heinous. It was NOT clear to me. He joked about it… I didn’t know the right way to feel and the remorse, the guilt, the shame paralyzed me. IT. STILL. DOES. It wasn’t like I got a bloody email from God that pleasantly said: ‘Kade Grayson, I have looked over the situation with your best mate Thomas and his complete annihilation of innocent youth, and I’m just dropping a line to let you know I consider your knowledge of the subject, and your continued love for your childhood friend to show no guilt of association for the murders and I hereby drop all judgment against you. You’re free to live with no regrets. You’re hereby off the hook. You have a guaranteed full paid ticket into heaven when your time comes. Signed, God. Cheers.’” The scruff of his unshaven face scraped sharply against my skin as he pulled away from me. A small moment of silence sliced through the air and the only sound that reached my ears was the heavy breaths we both took.
I wanted to cry for him. Brushing my knuckles past his cheek, I said, “That guilt and shame you have for surviving is going to destroy you, it is destroying you. It’s like a lethal injection that you’ve given to yourself. You’re fucking drowning in it. Guilt is like a fucking cancer, Kade. If you don’t stop, it will creep and crawl into every crack and crevice of your soul and kill you.”
“I’m not guilty for surviving. I’m guilty because I knew he was going to do it. He joked about it. For fucking months, I didn’t take him seriously, and I could have stopped it. Lainey, he went for me first, shooting both my fucking legs so I couldn’t run, then picked off every single person in that room and made me watch and told me I should have listened to him. I could have stopped him. Then he blew a hole in my chest, and finished off anyone else that moved. I wasn’t supposed to live.”
“Kade,” I whimpered, struggling to get up.
“No. No. No. Listen to me. You wanted to hear everything, know everything. I’m going to fucking give you everything,” he hissed, hands gripped my face. “There will be no excuse for you not to trust in me. I’m giving you everything I am, right fucking now.”
I tried to hold back my tears, but the words, the expression on his face, and God, the grip of his fingers just hurt so much.
“Their lives were over. Over. All of them. None of them would feel the warmth of the sunshine against their skin or get to look upon the shining stars in a midnight sky again. They wouldn’t be graduating with me that next year, learning to drive or fall in love and marry. They would never have those things. Never. They would NEVER.”
He pressed his lips softly against my bruised cheek, causing a small lick of pain. “School shootings are so breathtakingly evil. They carry such suffering that is so far beyond the imagination, so fucking inconceivable to any ordinary human thoughts that no one can ever understand. No one can understand why, and no one can understand me. Everybody thinks they could figure out why, but they can’t, they never will. Thomas wasn’t someone you could ever think would do such violence. He was popular and everybody loved him…He wasn’t clamoring for acceptance or attention. He wasn’t bullied, or gay, or too short, too fat, too dumb or awkward, not a juvenile delinquent, not a depressed or disgruntled teen, not anything they claimed his reasons might be. He was a fucking psychopath, sly and clever. Thomas was the most charming and well-mannered little psychopath you could have ever met. I have spent years, years, trying to put reasons to what he did. And there are none.
What he did in front of me re-wired my brain. I resorted to violence - lavish in it now, so I stay away from everything and everyone so it doesn’t completely overthrow me. It’s like I feel as if I can become him. Redemption for me is unthinkable, because I still grieve for my best friend, and the fact that I still miss him…is sick. Nobody ever understood me after. And everyone blamed me, accused me of planning it with him, encouraging him, creating a suicide pact with him. He left diaries and video journals telling whomever would listen that it was my fault for not stopping him. And he was right. I should have stopped him. And I shouldn’t miss him.”
I heard him swallow, felt it against my skin. He tangled his fingers through mine and tightened his grip. I think he was using me for strength. “I mean, I didn’t understand any of it. School was supposed to be a safe place. My girlfriend, we had just started dating, she…she was shot with a sawed off shotgun which blew a hole in her chest the size of a baseball. It blew her fucking shirt right off her body. That was the first time I’d seen her without a shirt on. Do you know what that’s like? To get to see the tits you been trying to see for two months with a bloody gaping hole between them. It was horrific.
Bodies were all around me. All I saw were limp bodies. Some moved sluggishly trying to escape, gasping for their lasts breath. I can still see them, in front of me, as if it was happening all over again. The sounds were inhuman. Cries. Pleas. Gasping rattles of blood through lungs. The sounds of boots sloshing through the thick puddles of the blood coated floor.”
Kade laughed darkly, a choking sound that made my chest ache and I needed a break, a pause. A moment to help me deal with how fucked up everything was that he was saying, but he kept up. Anguish and savageness dripped off his words. “There were blast holes in the monitors of the computers in the back of the classroom and someone’s sneaker, smeared with blood, covered a keyboard with a dangling mouse moving back and forth. Back and forth. I was left hollow inside; my insides…the things that made me Kade, never escaped that classroom. He never made it out of that school alive.”
Kade shifted off me and stood. The absence of his weight and tightness of the grasp he had on me, made my body throb with pain. He walked over to a stone fireplace and went about building a fire and as the first flames licked at the dry wood he had placed inside, the scent of pine and burning cedar filled the room. His muscular broad back, full of its hard ridges and tight muscles held a tattooed list that ran down his spine. A list of names, 32 of them, with Thomas’ at the very bottom. Just as if he’d carried the weight of them on his shoulders and down his spine since that very day. My throat knotted and I jutted my chin out painfully to stop my tears from falling. Kade Grayson was not the kind of man that wanted anyone’s pity, but I sure as hell wanted desperately to cry out loud and sob for the sixteen-year old boy who lived through that hell. As he turned back to face me, a log crackled in the fireplace and a burst of small sparks shot against the darkness of the room.
I folded my legs underneath my body and leaned further into the cushions of the couch, quickly wiping at the stream of tears rushing down my cheeks. “Have you ever spoken to anyone about this?” I asked.
He was gazing down at something on the floor, and I waited patiently until he lifted his head and pained pale eyes locked on mine. “No.”