“The cheerleader?” Grant asked. He resumed his paper-shooting game. Aim. Shoot. The paper bounced off the rim, the cup toppled over and fell to the floor. He looked at it like he wanted to pick it up, but didn’t move.
“Yeah, that beautiful, perfect little cheerleader. Who—on top of being the only cheerleader who could pull off stunts—was also like super nice? And she took calculus. Super nice calculus taking cheerleader. Ugh. And she really liked him, you know?”
“I don’t remember her dating anyone,” Lucy said. Just to say something, anything. Just to be a part of the conversation, but she knew better than to question Salem’s recollection of events.
“Well, it was like a six month thing. Went right into the summer. Then something happened and they broke it off the next school year. That doesn’t matter. Brittney, true to form, never said anything bad about him. And he dropped the ties and started hanging out with the student council kids and joined yearbook. One day I had to go ask him for a yearbook photo for an article I was writing and I just felt all clammy. Like, well, here’s my chance. But I mean...seriously...Brittney Phillips? I convinced myself that my first crush on him was because I felt sorry for him. But that he was gonna be alright, you know? He survived that first year here, got a hot girlfriend, made some friends. And I wanted to be like, you know, I liked you first. I liked you before. Hey, Patrick. Remember when you would sneak into the band room and play Beatles songs on the piano? I stalked you and would listen. And I kinda fell in love with you. And I’m kinda sorry you’re popular now. Because I kinda, actually, want you all to myself.”
Salem shrugged and picked at lint on her pants.
“You never told me about him,” Lucy replied.
“Yeah, well, I thought you might tell me to go for it,” the corners of Salem’s mouth turned up into a soft smile. “And what-might-have-been is always easier than well-that-was-a-disaster.”
“The dream is better than the reality,” Grant affirmed.
“Exactly. But it wasn’t entirely just in my head. He was the coolest kid I ever wanted to be with. And I never told him.” Salem looked to all of them. She sniffed. “Here’s the thing though. He was out there today trying to get into the school with me.”
Grant and Lucy looked down at the floor—Lucy lowered her upper body to the floor and rested her head on her forearms.
“One minute, he was there. I saw him and I was going to talk to him. The next minute, gone. Just like that. People moved him out of the courtyard and just dumped him on the grass, like he was garbage. Patrick Miller, the boy I still thought well, maybe, in the future. After college even. Or maybe I could just say, I don’t know, just admit that I liked him. And now it’s not even that I’ll never get to say it. It’s not even that. It’s this idea that he’s completely gone. And I want to remember him. I just keep thinking of everyone who will never be remembered. How sad is that? And there won’t be memorials or funerals or...I mean...they don’t even get their own time to be remembered. Just another body.”
Lucy felt the tears building. She sniffed and let them fall. “Yeah. I thought that too,” she said.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—” Salem paused. “It’s just—” her hand went up to her crucifix and she spun it along the chain.
“I get it,” Grant said. “I understand. Their lives mattered.” There was a long pause and then he added, “Amanda. Amanda Starr.”
“I knew her,” Salem said and closed her eyes.
“Yeah. She was my first love. For a whole summer she came to my dad’s farm and we swam in the little creek by my house and we’d ride horses. Then in September, the day before school was starting…she came out to me. She was too embarrassed to tell anyone. She said she always knew since she was little, but that her parents told her she just needed to find the right guy. We talked for hours. It was actually a really good moment. I told her I loved her. And she asked me not to tell anyone. She said she wasn’t ready. That we’d take it to our graves.”
“I didn’t know that. Amanda was gay,” Salem repeated the news slowly and shook her head. “What else didn’t we know about people? People we saw every day.”
There was a bit of jealousy in her voice; here was a juicy piece of someone’s life that Salem was not privy too. Something she had missed, that someone else knew. She looked at Grant with adoration and begged for him to keep going. “What else? What do you remember? What were you too afraid to tell someone?”
So Grant cozied up, wrapping the fleece blanket around his legs and leaning his head back. “I don’t know…what do I remember?”
Slowly, slowly, they brought classmates back to life with humor and anecdotes. The spilling of secrets that no longer mattered.
Lucy contributed when she could, but mostly she listened, feeling heartsick. She wondered what they’d say about her if she had been one of the fallen.
It was human to want people to remember you; human to want to feel heard. With her last remaining battery life, Lucy opened up her profile page and her fingers hovered over a status update. She typed, slowly: I’m still alive. Then she poised her finger around the send key and contemplated if it mattered if she sent it, if anyone would see it, or if just saying it out loud made it feel like a victory instead of a loss.
Then Lucy gasped. Just as she was about to exit out, her phone buzzed in her hand.
She had a text message.
Lucy’s heart stopped and her veins ran cold. Her hand was almost too heavy to click on the smiling-face icon. That little emoticon so bright and cheery and so full of hope.
She looked.
It was from Ethan.
Ethan was out there and he was alive.
His message was from mere seconds ago and it just read: “Don’t leave. Stay safe. I’m coming for you.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Five days after The Release
Ethan’s imminent arrival gave Lucy hope and equipped her with temporary patience. She had tried unsuccessfully to send him a text in reply, but the network kept bouncing it back. Out of anger and frustration she just sent a message that said Waiting! both as a battle cry for her frustration and an exclamation of her excitement. Of course, that text slipped away and sent. The last message she could get to him was neither revealing nor warm, and she hoped that Ethan would not think her text was implying she had been anxiously expecting him for two days.
They all worried about immediate details. How would Ethan find them? How would he navigate Spencer’s supreme desire for a school absent of all other life? And then the most dangerous thought of all—maybe the text had been sent days ago and only now found its way through the fickle network. Then their hope and plans would be futile and in vain, entirely rooted in misconception.
It didn’t help that it had been three days since Lucy began expecting Ethan. Her phone died not long after the text arrived and Salem and Grant’s phones didn’t last much longer. She was vigilant and aware, but losing confidence that Ethan was safe.
“Something must’ve happened. It wouldn’t take him this long to get here,” Lucy complained. It was day five. Grant’s baby-face began showing subtle signs of fur as pale blonde whiskers poked up on his chin and under his nose, barely noticeable, but still there.