I tear out of the room, and I swear the screams and shots follow me. I race along the hall, and when I hear footfalls, I spin, my hands going up, ready to defend myself.

Jesse runs over. “I heard shots. Like a recording. What the hell is going on?”

I stop and struggle to catch my breath. “Performance art.”

“What?”

“It’s…” Breathe. “It’s performance art. An installation with an audience of one. It was set up in the English room. Luka’s last…His last class.”

Jesse’s expression says he still doesn’t know what I mean. He takes my elbow, as if to steady me, and I breathe deeply.

“I’m okay,” I say.

“Yeah, no. You’re not. And this was a lousy idea. But you’ve seen what you needed to see, so we can go now.”

I nod. He keeps hold of my elbow, and we start down the hall. The audio is still going. Sounds of the shooting. Every time a gun fires. I flinch. We both do. Jesse walks closer to me, his hand tightening on my arm.

“It’s not real,” he says.

I nod.

“It’s not even from the shooting,” he continues. “Someone’s made a loop tape of random shots and screams. Probably from a movie.”

Performance art.

We turn a corner. The gym is ahead, and Jesse hesitates.

The gym. It reminds him of Jamil.

“We can go this—” I say.

“No, this way is faster.” His fingers lock in mine. “Ignore it. Just ignore it. It’s all fake. Some sick asshole—”

The sound of a door slapping open. Right beside us.

The gym doors.

We both wheel, but the doors are shut. Chained shut.

The sound comes again, the distinctive squeal of a metal door. The smack of it hitting the wall.

Light flashes. The wall across from the chained gym doors lights up with a still image of two boys.

I see their faces, and my hand clasps Jesse’s.

“Isaac and Harley,” Jesse says, and I nod, as if it was a question, but I know it’s not. I can’t remember if Jesse was ever at our place at the same time as Luka’s friends, but it doesn’t matter. These are the boys who murdered his brother. Jesse will no more be able to forget their faces than I can.

Isaac and Harley.

Isaac is in the lead. He was always in the lead. He has a gun. A handgun, and I see the news articles again. Isaac Wickham supplied two handguns, owned by his father. Harley Stewart brought his uncle’s hunting rifle.

Isaac holds the pistol like an action-movie villain. Harley has the rifle in both hands, carrying it more than wielding it. Harley looks…bewildered. Like he stepped onto a stage, and someone handed him this gun, and he has no idea what role he’s supposed to play.

And Isaac?

Isaac is grinning.

“It’s a distance shot,” Jesse says, and the sound of his voice startles me.

“Distance shot?” I say. “You mean the rifle?”

“No. The image.” He walks to the wall, and I follow, our hands still entwined. “See how crappy the resolution is? It was taken from a distance.” He turns and points. “Down there, I bet. Someone was filming—kids did, during the shooting. Isaac and Harley burst out of the gym, and a kid must have caught that on film. Probably wet himself when he realized it.”

Jesse looks at Isaac. He’s standing eye-to-eye with his brother’s killer. I’m about to speak when he turns sharply and he says, “There was stuff online. Photos. Videos. Kids were supposed to hand them in for evidence, but some emailed themselves copies and others just didn’t submit theirs. After the shooting, my parents were part of a group of victims’ families, and one thing they did was try to get this stuff off the Internet. It didn’t work. So that’s where this comes from. So that’s where we can start looking.”

He turns back to Isaac and he nods, as if in satisfaction.

I have reduced you to a clue. A useful clue. Nothing more.

He peers around the dark hallway. “And there,” he says. “That’s the source.” He points to what looks like a dot on the opposite wall, near the top. “The video feed. If I boost you up, can you get a better look?”

This is how Jesse will handle the ghoulish performance. Turn the fear and grief into something we can use against whoever is doing this.

I’m struggling to follow his lead. I can’t tear my gaze away from Isaac. I can’t stop seeing his expression. His joy. I can’t stop hearing the screams and shots echoing around us.

I want to run. Just get out.

Which is exactly what my tormenter hopes I’ll do. Run home sobbing and pull up my sheets and tumble into a world of endless nightmare, faced with the reality of what my brother did. The stark reality that I’ve been spared until now.

I will not give anyone that power.

I will take what has been given here, and I will use it.

I block the sounds of the shooting and turn my back on Isaac and his grin and his gun, and I let Jesse boost me. There in the wall…

It’s a bullet hole.

“Skye?”

“It’s…” I swallow. Then my light glints off something inside the depression. “Hold on.” I take a pen from my back pocket and poke inside. Bits of plaster crumble, and I see a lens.

I tell Jesse, and then say, “The projector must be on the other side of the wall.”

He nods. “It’ll be in a room off the next hall. We’ll get to that in a second. First, let’s see if we can find one of those speakers, too.”

“Just follow the screams?”

A wry smile. “Exactly.”

We pass the gym. Jesse has homed in on a source up ahead. We seem to be leaving one speaker behind, the sound growing softer as another increases in volume, and Jesse has his chin up, his gaze on the right wall, flashlight app lifted. He’s gotten two steps ahead of me in his eagerness, and when the wall to our left lights up, he’s already moved past it.

I’m going to do the same. Just keep walking. Jesse doesn’t see the projection, and so I’m not going to look…

I look.

And I see a picture of Jesse.

That’s what I think as I’m turning, my gaze in motion, catching a flash of a figure on the wall. I realize my mistake in a heartbeat. This boy has the same hair as Jesse. Similar features. Wider shoulders.

Jamil.

The camera caught Jamil turning, his body in motion, as if hearing something over his shoulder. Jamil has heard or seen something, and he’s—

That’s when I realize Jesse has stopped. He looks to his left, noticing I’m no longer at his side.

“Skye?”

I lunge, saying, “Right here,” and I prod him forward. Keep going. Just keep—

He sees his brother’s photo on the wall.

“Let’s go,” I say, grabbing his hand. “Forget the speaker and—”

He pulls free and walks to the wall, one slow step at a time. Then he stops in front of Jamil.

Seconds tick past. I want to grab his hand again and drag him out. But I know I can’t, no more than he could have pulled me from that restroom door.

“Mom used to say—” Jesse’s voice cracks, and he clears his throat. “Sometimes, he’d pick on me in front of them—just little things, like elbowing me aside. Kids’ stuff. Mom would tell him to be careful, because someday I might be bigger than him. He’d laugh and say that would never happen.”

Jesse stands in front of Jamil’s photo, and has to look down to meet his brother’s eyes. It’s not much, maybe an inch. But he is looking down.

“He seems so…young.” Jesse rubs his mouth and gives a shaky laugh. “That makes me sound old. I just mean…when I remember him, at the end, he was practically grown-up. And now…”

And now Jesse realizes Jamil was our age when he died.

“He’s scared.” Jesse pushes his hands into his pockets. “He looks so…”

He swallows hard.

I put my arm around Jesse’s waist and lean against his shoulder, and I look at Jamil, and I remember the boy I hated. Hated as I have never hated anyone in my life.

No matter what happened to me in the years after that shooting, I never hated my tormentors the way I hated Jamil Mandal. In my memory, he looms huge, this brawny, sneering, preening bully who tormented his little brother, simply because he existed and as long as he existed, Jamil could never be the center of attention at home, the way he was at school. He always had to share. Share a house, share his parents, share the limelight, with his little brother.

Jesse had refused to play sports because he didn’t want to compete with Jamil. He stepped aside for his brother and shone in his own corner of the universe. He would be the academic to Jamil’s athlete.

But that didn’t help, did it? It divided the limelight between them, and Jamil’s ego—the ego of the older brother, the first in line—could not accept that. So he shoved Jesse down every chance he got.

I hated Jamil. Hated him so much. I used to dream of the day when Jesse would be an engineer or a doctor, a guy with a string of letters after his name and an amazing career ahead of him…and Jamil would be that loser in a crappy job, looking back on his glory days of high school football.

But now I look at Jamil on that wall, and I don’t see the ogre from my memory. I just see a boy. Smaller and younger than I remember. And scared. So incredibly scared.

What you did to Jesse was unforgivable, but I wish you’d had a chance to ask for that forgiveness. I wish you had a chance to grow older and grow wiser and realize what you did and ask him to forgive you. Jesse would have. I know he would have. I wish that for you, and I wish it for him.

“I’m sorry he was so frightened,” Jesse says, his voice barely audible. “I’m sorry…” His voice hitches. “I’m just…”

I step in front of Jamil’s image, and I put my arms around Jesse and hug him as tight as I can.

“I’m sorry, too,” I whisper.