THINGS YOU GET OVER, THINGS YOU DON’T
PART ONE
Here was a thing Caleb learned about school shootings: a lot of the people who get shot end up surviving. Caleb had looked it up on the Internet, and was surprised to find out that, in most cases, the survivors outnumbered the dead. Evidently, with modern medical technology—and depending on where the school was in proximity to the nearest hospital or whatever—killing someone with a gun was a lot harder than they made it look on TV. Of course, it was the dead people who mostly got talked about afterward; the dead kids in particular. Dead teachers got some play if they did something heroic. Otherwise there was a weird undercurrent of resentment in how the dead teachers were talked about. Like people thought a teacher who got killed without doing something totally Chuck Norris hadn’t really earned his or her $40K a year plus benefits. Caleb thought that was unfair. Because, for one thing, if the dead teachers had owed it to the world to die heroically, why did the surviving teachers seem to get a pass? Maybe people were just afraid to criticize someone to their face while they were still alive.
* * *
Lisa and Caleb had been together for about six months when the shooting started. She was on the rebound when they got together. She’d been with a guy named Phil Young since they were all freshmen, and everyone had sort of assumed Lisa and Phil were going to get married someday. Because it was hard not to have an opinion about high school students who stayed together for more than a few months. Some people called them PhiLisa, like one of those celebrity duos. Caleb himself had been something of a fan, though he didn’t know either of them personally until he and Lisa hooked up.
Phil and Lisa, as a couple, had been boring in a way that Caleb found vaguely exotic. Lincoln High School had a huge attendance area; Caleb was from the part where people had bad teeth, diabetes, and funny stories about getting mauled by pit bulls. Phil and Lisa were from not-that-part, and it showed. Phil was six feet tall, and casually athletic. He had short brown hair, and a healthy, if decidedly Anglo-Saxon, complexion. His clothing was nothing special: loose jeans, oxford-cloth button-down shirts, and inexpensive brand-name basketball shoes. But it all had a startling vibrancy to it. Caleb had noticed the same phenomenon in German exchange students.
Caleb thought Phil had the air of a guy who’d go to college and get a professional degree—like a master’s in journalism, or business. Maybe a law degree. Phil could do or be anything he wanted in later life. He came from a perfect family. And there’d never be any dirt to dig up on Phil. He seemed to lack the imagination to do bad things. He was the kind of guy who could grow up to be president someday.
Lisa was more or less the girl version of Phil: tallish, medium build, medium-length light-brown hair with blond highlights. Varsity volleyball. She favored knee-length skirts and fitted tops, but sometimes she went with jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt. Every once in a while she’d come to school wearing thick plastic-framed nerd glasses, which always knocked Caleb for a loop. He figured she was also bound for professional school, though maybe something the tiniest bit more granola than Phil; a master’s in social work, or a law degree she’d take to a legal aid organization. Or maybe she’d get married, get a Realtor’s license, and be one of those women. She was like a mannequin. A blank slate. Hang any outfit on her, she could be anything—but she’d always be the rich, smart, hot version of whatever she was. Caleb wondered what it must be like to be with someone so unwrought—someone who could be all things, or nothing. Sometimes he thought maybe, if he went away to college, he could reinvent himself and find out: pass for a Phil; score himself a Lisa.
As it worked out, he didn’t have to wait that long. Lisa and Phil broke up early senior year. The story around school was that they realized they were too young to be tied down like that. Which made sense, but Caleb couldn’t help being a little disappointed. He’d lost his virginity to a college girl at a kegger freshman year, and he’d been on a fairly steady roll since then, but he’d never had a regular girlfriend. Phil and Lisa had been his proxy couple, and their breakup made him question whether anyone could be truly happy in a committed relationship.
A week after her breakup with Phil, Lisa showed up at a barn party in her nerd glasses, and Caleb was pretty much helpless. He chatted her up in the cool-off area all night, between bouts of dancing and trying to pound enough ephedrine to get a buzz going. When the party started to wind down, around three in the morning, she asked him to drive her home.
“My parents are out of town,” she said as soon as they were outside, in the quiet night air.
Her room was different than he’d thought it would be. It was definitely a rich girl’s room, but it was also more serious than he’d expected. Dark, heavy bedspread. Antiques. Lots of books. The posters on her walls were for theaters and museums, rather than the boy bands and chick flicks he’d imagined. When she let him get past second base he decided to bring his A game, so he went down and did the whole alphabet-with-his-tongue thing. It worked like a charm, and after she came he didn’t press for more—he just held her while she shivered, and her breathing slowed.
“Phil would never do this,” she said, after a while. Which should have been tacky—bringing up another guy right then—except that it was also exactly what Caleb wanted to hear. He imagined three years of hand-holding and missionary position, and himself as the great emancipator of Lisa’s clitoris. Then she added, “His idea of a special night when my parents were away was usually me pegging him in the basement while we watched fake lesbian porn on his iPad.”
The frozen silence that followed was only broken when she said, politely but firmly, “If you ever tell anyone I just said that, I’ll castrate you.”
But Caleb never did. He never even felt tempted.
* * *
The shooting started between fourth and fifth periods, when the halls were packed with students. It was almost the end of the school year. The first bell sounded, and everyone spilled out of their classrooms. Some people went to their lockers to drop off or pick up books during the five minutes between bells. The air was hot and stagnant, the hallways rang with the smells of deodorant, perfume, and a hundred kinds of sweat; foods and soaps and lotions. All the things kids put on and inside their bodies, filling the halls as they jostled and slid past one another, intimate and anonymous at the same time.
PART TWO
The weird part was, Caleb had been thinking about breaking up with Lisa. She was going to Stanford, and he’d gotten into the University of Oregon. He didn’t know how he was going to pay for school. He qualified for loans, but that made him nervous. Still, he figured he’d just move to Eugene, start school, get a job, and do his best to keep his debt down as he went. There was no question of not going. He’d been working a night job in the laundry room at a posh downtown hotel, and there was no fucking way he was going to spend the rest of his life doing stuff like that.
He liked Lisa a lot. But he’d been thinking about breaking up with her because they just didn’t have much in common. They had fun together. But they were constantly running up against all the things that were different about them. That was tiring. And there was also just something about how sensible she was. Caleb had been with girls who told him they loved him after one or two times in the sack. Lisa never said it. Didn’t seem to want him to say it. And she didn’t talk about the future—about what they were going to do when college started. He assumed this was because she was planning on them breaking up. It just made sense, and she always did the thing that made sense.
She was very smart, and very pretty, and she was ferocious and hilarious and wonderful when they were alone. Sometimes she’d even surprise him with an off-color joke about oral sex, or she’d suggest they go see an action movie together. She could be a lot of fun. But it was a lot of work, and trying to do it long distance wouldn’t make it any easier. Caleb had an idea about the arc of a person’s life. Hard relationships could be good relationships—they could be the kinds of relationships that turned into something real. But they were for later; after college, certainly. High school was for fun relationships.
Plus, if he was being honest with himself, she didn’t seem that into him. Not even as into him as he was into her. He didn’t think she’d be too upset, really. He assumed she was thinking pretty much the same thing.
It seemed like such a given that he almost didn’t think about it. Except that he did. Kind of all the time.
* * *
The shooting started on the first floor, at the north end of the school. Caleb was on the second floor, south end, because that was where his locker was. He didn’t realize that he was hearing gunfire until the fourth or fifth shot, and then it was only because he also heard screaming. When Caleb turned around and looked down the long hallway that reached to the other end of the school, he could see a shock wave of reaction moving toward him, like an experiment in physics class. The students closest to the noises reacted first, and jostled into the students behind them—who jostled into the students behind them—creating a compression wave of fear and revulsion that rippled down the hall. Then the wave front began to collapse as panicked teenagers stumbled and fell in a tangle of arms and legs, scrambling, trampling one another.
Caleb was taller than most of the other students, so he saw what was headed his way. And he was standing next to an exit staircase, so he managed to get clear before the wave hit him. He ran down one floor and out of the building with a few dozen other early adopters who’d bolted before herd instinct took over and the stampede started. They all paused in the open field next to the school, and it felt like the whole world was inhaling to scream. Then more shots rang out, inside the building. Everyone else headed south, for the cover of the gym, a hundred yards away. But Caleb ran north, parallel with the wall of the building, toward the shooting. He stuck close to the bed of rhododendrons that grew next to the school as he went. The plants wouldn’t stop bullets, he knew. But at least this way, if someone with a gun suddenly popped out of the doorway he was heading for, he’d have somewhere to hide.
* * *
Caleb had no idea what neurogenic bladder dysfunction was. He had to look it up on the Internet. Wikipedia described it as a condition common to people with spinal cord injuries, where the nerve pathways between the brain and the bladder are cut or damaged, so the bladder just empties or overflows or whatever. There were disposable catheters for people with temporary neurogenic dysfunction. If the condition was permanent, the doctors would basically put in a plastic bypass tube that would empty into a disposable pee bag. Forever.
PART THREE
Caleb thought he and Lisa made a weird couple. But if she agreed with him, she didn’t let on. The differences between them, the ones that worried him so much, hardly seemed to make an impression on her. She actually seemed to find a lot of them funny.
A week before the shooting, Caleb took his little silver freestyle bike to pick Lisa up at her off-site internship. She was getting college credit for spending two days a week injecting radioactive tracking dyes into fish for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Lisa was waiting for him outside the office in her casual business attire. She was sitting on a low concrete retaining wall on the waterfront, and as Caleb rode up she was handing something to a gutter punk girl about the same age as him and Lisa. The girl hustled off like she had something to hide, and Caleb coasted to a stop in front of Lisa.
“Hey, babe,” he said.
“Hi, Caleb. No car today?”
“I’m saving the environment,” he said with a grin. “Hey, did you give that girl money?”
“Yep.”
“Lisa…”
“Caleb…” she mimicked.
“You shouldn’t let everyone take advantage of you like that.”
She arched an eyebrow at him.
“Yeah, okay,” he said, acknowledging the pointlessness of giving her grief about her charitable impulses. “Where do you want to go for dinner?”
“You’re supposed to have an idea for that, Caleb.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Because, see, you asked me out to dinner, so you’re supposed to know where we’re eating. This is part of my new plan? In which you don’t take me for granted? You may remember me mentioning this plan. I believe I brought it up during a lengthy discussion which I initiated last week for the specific purpose of explaining The Plan.”
“I know, I know. Geez! I was just messing with you. I was thinking … Roscoe’s?”
Roscoe’s was an old-school burger stand down in Caleb’s neighborhood that, for some weird reason, also sold the vegetarian burgers Lisa liked.
“Roscoe’s would be lovely,” she said. “How are we getting there?”
“Well, it’s a nice night for a walk. Or, you know, I could ride you on my bike.”
“What an excellent suggestion. I think it’s a lovely night for a bike ride.”
“Cool,” he said.
She hopped down from the retaining wall and hitched up her khaki office work skirt. Then she straddled the back tire of his bike, put her hands lightly on his shoulders, and stepped onto the pipe-shaped pegs he had fitted to the ends of the axle on his rear wheel. With her hands on his shoulders, she could ride standing up on the back of his bike.
“You on there okay?” he asked.
She bounced experimentally on the pegs to test her footing. Her cool, dry hands were steady on his bare skin where his tank top exposed his shoulders.
“Ready to go,” she said.
He stood up on the pedals and the bike rocked into motion, swaying back and forth as he leaned in to each push. She rode high behind him, flexing her knees to keep her center of gravity lined up with the rear wheel. All those dance lessons her parents got her when she was little, paying off at last, he thought.
She leaned down and spoke into his ear. “Can you keep this up all the way?”
“Shit,” he said, and spat cleanly into the street. “You don’t weigh hardly anything. I could keep this up all day.”
She squeezed his shoulders and stood up straight again. He thought he heard her laugh.
* * *
When he came through the door closest to where he thought the shooting was, the first thing Caleb saw was Madison McCann lying in the stairwell, a few yards away. She was lying on her stomach with her head turned to the side, so he could see her face in profile. She looked surprised and scared, which made sense. She was also tangibly dead, which made no sense at all. There was a lot of blood. After staring at her for a second, Caleb realized that the side of her head that was resting on the floor was not all there, and that the stuff that he’d thought was clotted blood was actually small fragments of bloodstained brain matter.
A string of shots sounded up the hall to his right. He was still standing in the stairwell with Madison’s body. He’d come in through an external set of double doors. Another set of double doors separated the stairs from the hall. The inside set was mostly closed, except that one of Madison’s feet was caught between them. Which probably would have hurt, if she’d been alive.
Screw it, Caleb thought.
He stepped carefully around Madison, eased the door open, and took a quick peek up the hall. There was one kid walking slowly away, toward the south end of the building. Caleb recognized him immediately. Patrick Ressler. Another senior. With his broad, hunched back, olive drab Army jacket, and straight red hair, he looked like some kind of deadly parade float, ambling down the hallway, occasionally pausing to fire into a classroom. The hall was totally quiet now, except for the gunshots. When Patrick fired, Caleb could hear people trapped inside some of the rooms scream in surprise and fear. But Patrick didn’t go into any of the rooms. He looked like he was headed somewhere specific, and shooting people along the way was just a sideline. Not worth stopping or changing course for.
Caleb stepped back and looked across the long north-south hallway Patrick was in, to the shorter east-west hallway at the end of the building. Patrick’s locker was there. Caleb knew this because he’d seen Patrick there a bunch of times while he was chatting with Lisa, at her locker. Which was just across the hall from Patrick’s locker.
The scene in the shorter hallway almost looked fake, because it seemed overdone. There were bodies, backpacks, and books all over the floor. There was blood spattered on the walls. The floor was almost completely covered with it. And Caleb could see he’d have to go out there, because he could see Lisa lying near her locker, and he could tell she was injured, and alive.
More shots, farther away.
Some of Caleb’s mom’s boyfriends had guns. Every once in a while one of them would take him to a range, but more often they’d just take him out to the woods and spend the day plinking cans and blowing up watermelons. So Caleb knew that shooting without ear protection of some kind, especially in a confined space, could really mess a person up: ears ringing, loss of equilibrium, eyes dazzled from the muzzle flash. Which meant that Patrick was either wearing earplugs, which seemed unlikely, or he was half-deaf by now. Either way, Caleb hoped Patrick wouldn’t be too much aware of what was going on behind him.
Caleb would have to walk. If he ran, he’d slip and fall in the blood.
He glanced down the hall, to make sure Patrick’s back was still to him—that he was still walking away. Then Caleb fixed his eyes on Lisa, and stepped through the doorway.
* * *
It took Caleb the better part of a week to visit her, even though her parents had been calling him for days by then. At first there was just too much going on. The cops locked everything down while they cleared the building, and the EMTs were doing triage. Then the cops started interviewing people while ambulances and helicopters took the survivors to hospitals. Caleb talked to a half dozen cops, then got taken to a hospital with about a hundred other kids who weren’t actually hurt, but were covered in blood. Someone had decided it was better to be safe than sorry. So five hours after the shooting, ER nurses cut Caleb’s clothes off him, checked him over for injuries, filled out a report that included a diagram of all the places he didn’t have bullet holes in him, and sent him to the hospital cafeteria in blue hospital scrubs, with his wallet, pocket change, and keys in a plastic bag. His mom and aunt were waiting for him there, and that was a whole embarrassing scene with a lot of crying.
They drove him home. He walked into his room, dropped his bag of stuff on the floor next to the bed, kicked off his bloody shoes and socks, and slept for fourteen hours.
He found out later that Lisa was in surgery for most of that time.
When he woke up, his mom told him school was closed for the week, and the neighborhood was crawling with reporters. Someone from the school district office had come by and given them contact information for trauma counselors and grief counselors, paid for by the district. So many strangers were calling their apartment that they stopped answering the landline.
It was around the third day that Lisa’s parents started calling Caleb and leaving messages on his cell phone, saying Lisa wanted to see him. But he spent that day in his room, with the lights off and a pillow over his head.
He got the messages on the fourth day, but he didn’t go visit until the fifth day.
* * *
Caleb didn’t pay attention to the other people in the hallway. Most of them seemed to be dead or unconscious, but that wasn’t why he ignored them. He ignored them because something in his mind was whispering that if he paid attention to them, he’d have to stop and deal with them—or he’d have to live with the memory of making a choice not to. So he stayed focused on Lisa. He walked stiff-legged, clenching the muscles in his ass, thighs, and back, so he wouldn’t slip in the fresh blood that covered the floor. He walked the twenty feet across the long hallway where Patrick Ressler was shooting people, and he didn’t look to his right, toward where he’d last seen Patrick, because there was nothing he could do about it.
Lisa was lying on her back, near her locker. Her head was barely touching the wall, and she was breathing in quick, shallow gasps, while her hands twitched around her midsection like injured birds. Her navy blue skirt was hiked up around her waist. Her green tights were sopping with gore from the blood on the floor, and her white Keds had gone a splotchy dark cherry red. Caleb knelt down next to her, but he didn’t look at her eyes. Not yet. He looked at her hands, and lifted the edge of her shirt so he could see the small hole, just under her belly button, that was pumping out thick gouts of blood.
Someone in the hallway was crying. Caleb wished they’d be quiet. He didn’t want Patrick coming back.
He took his pocketknife out—the one he wasn’t supposed to have at school, but carried anyway—and cut a piece of the hem off of Lisa’s skirt. Then he rolled it up like a tampon, gauged the thickness, jammed one end of the roll of cloth into the hole in Lisa’s stomach, put his hand over it, and, finally, looked at her. Her eyes were wandering in their sockets, but they settled on him and he saw the recognition there.
“This is going to hurt,” he whispered.
One of her twitching hands landed on his wrist and stilled. They locked eyes, and she nodded just the tiniest bit.
Caleb leaned on the wound, putting pressure on it. Lisa inhaled deeply, and passed out. Or he hoped she passed out. He held still, keeping pressure on the wound.
He heard more shooting in the hallway behind him. He didn’t turn around. Then the fire alarm came on and he jerked in surprise and nearly lost his hold on the wound. Still, he kept his hand on it and kept leaning down, and the shots were further apart now, but he felt like they were closer to him. It didn’t matter. There was something wrong with the blood around Lisa’s body. It wasn’t just the blood that had been there when he’d started. There was more. She was still bleeding from somewhere. The shots were definitely getting closer now, but that was fine. Caleb reached under Lisa with his free hand and felt something weird on her lower back. It felt like someone had scooped out a big chunk of her back and filled the hole with raw hamburger.
Exit wound. The term popped into his head. Every so often someone in his neighborhood would get shot, so Caleb was familiar with the idea of an exit wound. Little hole where the bullet goes in, big hole where it goes out. He needed—
“Goddamn it,” he muttered. And as quickly as he could, he stripped off his T-shirt, wadded it into a ball, lifted Lisa’s side, and jammed the shirt into the hole in her back. Then he resettled her and leaned on the wound in her stomach, using his weight to press her back down on the wadded-up T-shirt.
The last three shots had been just around the corner. Patrick was close. It didn’t matter. And suddenly the doors behind him crashed open—the ones he’d come through, where Madison McCann was dead. And someone yelled, “Freeze! Police! Put your hands where I can—”
Caleb closed his eyes. A long burst of sustained gunfire and it was over.
* * *
On the fourth day after the shooting, Caleb tracked down the EMTs who’d taken Lisa to the hospital. The messages her family kept leaving said the bullet had damaged her spine. They were rambling, exhausted messages, and they used terms like neurogenic bladder dysfunction. So Caleb tracked down the right EMTs, and, when he got ahold of one of them, he explained how he’d found Lisa, and how he’d almost missed the exit wound. How he’d rolled her partway over to pack his shirt into the wound.
“You did right,” the EMT said, cutting Caleb off before he was halfway through his explanation. The EMT’s name was Igor. He had a Russian accent, and a calm, unflappable manner on the phone.
“But is it possible … maybe I hurt her spine?” Caleb asked.
“Maybe you did. But probably not. Okay? And she would bleed to death if you not plug exit wound. Dead. No question. So you address problems in right order. And like I say—about the spine, probably nothing to do with you.”
“Is it what you would have done?” Caleb asked.
“Me? No. I have backboard. Coagulant powder to stop bleeding. Half-million-dollar ambulance full of equipment. But if I was you, with T-shirt and pocketknife? Yeah. It is what I would have done.”
“Thank you,” Caleb said.
“Is nothing. Listen. You did good, kid. Other things to worry about now. Don’t worry about this. Go see girl. You did right. Save her life. Understand?”
So on the fifth day he went to see her. The room was crowded. Her parents were there. And her younger brother and sister. The family’s pastor. Lisa’s grandmother, a little gray bird of a woman in a knitted shawl and a dress that seemed to be made of cobwebs. And Caleb’s mom, standing awkwardly in the doorway in her frayed jeans and off-brand sweatshirt. Everyone was acting like it was a party. Lisa’s dad kept shaking Caleb’s hand, and her grandma kept pulling him down and kissing his cheek. And then Lisa looked up from her hospital bed and said, “Okay, guys? I’d like a moment with Caleb, please.” But she had to say it three more times before they left. Caleb smiled and waved awkwardly as everyone filed out. Some of them winked. Some smiled. Only Caleb’s mom looked in any way concerned.
When they were gone, Caleb and Lisa looked at each other and she gestured for him to come over to the bed. She reached for his hand, and there were a bunch of tubes in her arm, but he ignored those and took her hand. And it was weird. She looked so different, so tired and broken. But her hand felt the same. She felt the same to him, even if she wouldn’t look him in the eyes.
“So listen,” she said. “I … guess I’m a paraplegic now.”
He nodded. “They said that. Over the phone.”
“My bladder wasn’t working right. That was pretty upsetting. But I guess some of the problems were just from swelling. I’ve been getting a little more feeling back, and that started … some things work better than others. But they’re saying I might not walk again. And the bullet. Went through my—uterus. So that’s done too. My bladder works again though. So yay. I guess.”
“I’m sorry, Lisa.”
“Me too. But listen.” She paused and took a deep breath, and he was almost relieved to see she was crying. “When I was in the hall. Before you got there. I had some time to think. And one of the things I was thinking was, I should have told you how I felt when I had the chance.”
Caleb raised his eyebrows.
“But I feel weird about it now,” she said. “After what you did. I wouldn’t want you to think I was just grateful. Still. I promised myself I’d tell you, so I love you. That’s all. I didn’t say it before because I guess I felt silly, going right from Phil to you. Like I didn’t seem to be able to make it on my own. So I figured we’d go our separate ways to college and there was no point making a thing out of it, but I really—you’ve made me so happy. The whole time we’ve been together. That was what I wanted you to know, while I was lying there. What I wished I’d said.”
Caleb looked down at her, and something went out of him. Like he’d been holding his breath for weeks, and he finally let it go.
“Hold on,” he said as he let go of her hand. There was a big reclining chair in the corner, designed for family members to sleep in during overnight stays. He went around behind it and pushed it up next to Lisa’s bed. Then he climbed into it and took her hand again.
“I’m just getting comfortable,” he said. “I’ll be here for a while, so I should be comfortable. Anyway, there was something I was thinking about too. While I was sitting there in the hall, wondering if Patrick was going to come back, there were things I was wishing I’d said to you. A bunch of things you should know.”
He was avoiding looking at her, but he could feel her move. She seemed to sit up a little taller, and she squeezed his hand where they touched on the dry linen of the hospital bed. He thought he heard her laugh. She said, “Tell me now.”
And he began.