1. In the cold of winter, the wood frog’s heart freezes and stops, waiting until spring until it thaws and beats again.
2. Sometimes, humans must also attempt to come back to life.
She can’t do it. Annabelle is backstage. She is trembling. Grandpa Ed has his hand on her shoulder. A woman, Ilene Chen, head of the Carnegie Mellon Gender Studies program, stands at a microphone and speaks to the audience.
There are a lot of people out there. Way, way more than the small groups of students Annabelle’s spoken to before now. Ilene is introducing her. It’s strange to hear her own name reverberating in the auditorium. Annabelle feels sick with anxiety. She tries not to listen to what Ilene is saying about her run and the tragedy. Instead, she concentrates on the tap, tap, tap of her thumb to her fingers, and on the weight of the Saint Christopher medal in her pocket. She concentrates on what her mom has said, and on what Dr. Mann and Malc and Zach and Olivia and Dawn Celeste and Luke have said: Just be honest. Luke said this to her only ten minutes ago, right before he and Dawn Celeste took their seats in the audience. She can do that. She can be honest. But honesty seems so small and quiet and insubstantial with all those people out there.
The microphone scares her. She’s never spoken into a microphone before.
“I can’t,” she says to Grandpa Ed.
“Yeah, you can.” He is sweating, though. His forehead is shiny, and he’s so pale, he looks like he might throw up.
Now, the audience applauds. Jesus, they’re clapping for her.
It is so wrong. After all she’s done, after all she didn’t do, they shouldn’t be clapping.
“I can’t.”
Like a mother bird, Grandpa Ed gives her a little push.
And, oh my God, she’s out here. Wow, there are a lot of people sitting in those red velvet seats. She might be sick right here onstage. Carly Cox did that during the second-grade play and never lived it down. Annabelle is going to do that now at Carnegie Mellon.
The microphone is up too high. She has to stand on her toes. Ilene comes back out and lowers it. Luke and Dawn Celeste are out there somewhere, but she can’t see where. This calms her and makes her crazy-nervous both. Her throat is tight.
She clears it. It is a bad scene in a movie, because the microphone makes the throat-clearing sound like a rocket lifting off.
“I . . .”
Oh my God. It’s quiet out there, except for the little shuffling sounds of waiting. It is a room of mostly young women, she sees. They look friendly. They smile at her and look up at her with kind eyes. But there are so many of them.
“I—the first thing I want to say is . . .”
They wait. She’s had a long time to think about what she wants to say, but it’s still hard to articulate. How is it possible to have words for this?
“The first thing I want to say is that that he, he . . . I can’t say his name. But, the shooter . . . He sat in his car before coming into the party, and he read the instructions on how to work the gun he bought the day before.”
The audience murmurs. There are exhales of outrage. It reminds her that those people out there want to hear what she has to say. Plenty of others won’t, but these people do. She tries to breathe. She will just be honest, like those who love her have advised.
“I don’t know why I feel like I have to start with that. There are so many things to say about what happened. But this just seems particularly horrifying, you know. That you can have a thought to destroy people, and within hours, hours, you can be doing it. I just can’t get that out of my head.
“The shooter . . . He was eighteen.” She turns away from the microphone. She has to clear her throat again. “I knew him, of course. I knew him pretty well. Sometimes he was funny and sweet, but he was also depressed and moody and vindictive. Clearly, he was vindictive. But, I mean, he couldn’t take criticism. He’d get furious if someone teased him about what he was eating for lunch. And this boy, who just had his eighteenth birthday, who could get furious if someone teased him about what he was eating for lunch—all he needed to buy a gun was enough money and a pen to fill out a background check. He was born here, and he never committed a crime before, so just like that, he walked out of the store with a rifle. Buying a car takes a lot longer. Buying dinner in a restaurant does.
“This boy, he took his new gun and he shot my best friend, Kat Klein, because he thought she was me. He thought she was me. Her back was turned. We look alike. He shot the boy I loved, Will MacEvans, through the heart. And then, to make sure the job was done, he shot off part of Will’s face. Her, Kat, my friend’s last words were . . .”
Annabelle doesn’t know if she can do this. Her throat squeezes with tears. It is so tight, she can barely speak. “Her last words to me were about how she hadn’t fallen in love yet.” She can’t do this. She can’t, and now she’s crying. “How that was still coming. His were . . .” She swallows. She tries to hold it together. “His were ‘See you soon.’ Their futures . . . held things. They were kind and funny and cherished people with futures that held things. I loved them both so much. I love them both so much right this minute.”
It is hard to talk now. She is crying. She has to stop and get herself together. She wipes her eyes. “Kat was murdered. Will was murdered. I was. The girl he thought I was, but also, the girl who truly was and will never be again.
“Mostly, I have a lot to say about what I don’t have. I don’t have Kat or Will or my old life. I don’t have answers. I don’t have big bunches of wisdom or statistics or facts to share with you, either. I don’t have a slide show or charts. I’m scared to look at all the numbers. I peeked one day, so that I would have those things to give to you, honestly, but I had to stop when I saw the photos again of the kindergartners and first graders who were gunned down in 2012. I can’t believe I even just said kindergartners and first graders who were gunned down.
“I don’t have a great plan about the laws or regulations needed to decrease gun violence. I’m only eighteen. I don’t have the knowledge required to devise those laws. But I’m old enough to know that even those words decrease gun violence are crazy. Decrease sounds insane, when we’re talking about kindergartners. When Will and Kat were just at a party because it was almost summer. And the most insane thing of all is that it doesn’t even have to be this way. In Japan, maybe two people a year are killed with guns. But not us, and this makes no sense.”
Annabelle shakes her head, and looks out to the dark sky of the auditorium. Her tears have turned to anger, the kind of rant she and Kat might have gone on after watching some documentary. It’s not a documentary, though. For the first time, she thinks about how pissed Kat would be about this if she were here. She thinks about Kat standing at a podium instead of her.
“When he . . . When the shooter was . . . unraveling after I rejected him, when I was scared that he might harm himself or me or someone else, I thought ‘people’ would handle it. ‘People’—adults, people bigger than me, older, smarter, with more ability to do something, I thought they’d keep us all safe. That didn’t happen. That still isn’t happening.
“Most of all, I don’t have a clear idea what I, my own self, can do about any of this. Any of this is big, too. Any of this is way larger than guns. What the shooter really wanted to do was control me. I understand that. He wanted to shut me up. He told the police that I was, um, his dream girl. He didn’t want me to be with someone else. He made sure he got his own way. When I think about it in the simplest way I can, I see that his violence was just a show of power by a bully. Maybe all violence is. But it works. It sure does. Violence shuts you up, all right. A gun always gets the last word.
“I live in this system, you know, you do, we do, where the control and the shutting up is such a regular thing that we sometimes don’t even see it. Where there are rules and rights for him and rules and rights for her and they are different rules and rights. The system says who gets to control who, and who is entitled to power and protection and who isn’t, and every day I run because I just don’t know what to do about it or how to change it.”
Annabelle pauses to catch her breath. Her words have poured out. Her truth has risen and keeps rising like lava from a once-dormant volcano. I am still here, she thinks. And this is what I’m made of, too.
“When I am on a mountain road, say, and the wind is pressing me . . . I am pressing back. I am shoving against my helplessness. I put on those shoes day after day to fight and fight and fight the powerlessness I feel after what the shooter did to Kat and Will and me. I just keep running on those hot roads because I don’t know if my country will protect me and my rights, as a female, as a person who wants to be safe from violence. It has not shown me that it will protect me, from males more powerful than me, from people who hate and intend to do harm. It has shown me that I am less than, that I am not worth being protected. It has shown recklessness with my well-being. So I run in the heat and I sweat and I push myself to persevere.
“And I run and run because I am filled with grief and sorrow, too. My running is crying and praying and screaming. It is saying that I don’t know what to do but that I must do something. That I must use my voice, because it’s the only thing you have sometimes when someone or something is larger and more powerful than you. My voice is here now, but it is mostly there in my running body. With every step, it is saying please and it is saying must. Please see my grief and sorrow. Must end this grief and sorrow.”
She stops. She is exhausted and spent, in the same way she is after her day’s work is done, her sixteen miles on the road. She is empty.
The audience begins to applaud then. The applause surprises her. She almost forgot about them out there, those mostly female students of Carnegie Mellon. She just stands in front of them. And then they stand. They are still clapping, but she looks at them and they look at her. They all look at each other. Standing—still standing. She is guessing that many of them out there, too, have felt her grief and confusion and powerlessness.
She is empty.
She is full.