35.

THAT WASN’T THE END. The shooter at Alek’s college, the terrorist reprisal attack on Spencer that turned out to not be a terrorist attack, but just a street fight, but then turned out to be almost fatal . . . it was happening; the boys were paying back for the luck they’d had.

Anthony was in biomechanics class early on a Friday afternoon when his phone started buzzing with messages coming from numbers he didn’t recognize. THEY COULD’VE REALLY USED YOU IN PARIS.

On the drive back to his apartment, more came in: Y AREN’T U SAVING PARIS RIGHT NOW?

Then another, and another; he parked in the driveway and pulled up the news on his phone, and his heart sank. He went inside, sat on the couch and turned on the TV. The same images scrolled again and again; nighttime in Paris, with a local time stamp, excited anchors talking over each other, but the banner across the bottom of the screen said it all: 18 KILLED IN PARIS SHOOTINGS.

This has to do with us.

The banner changed. AT LEAST 30 DEAD IN PARIS ATTACKS.

Then it changed again. FRENCH PRESIDENT DECLARES EMERGENCY, CLOSES BORDERS. And again: AT LEAST 60 DEAD IN PARIS TERROR ATTACKS.

He felt weary. He was, in an instant, exhausted with violence, and he couldn’t watch anymore. He still had a hard time trusting the news, so he turned off the TV and hoped they’d screwed up again, somehow got the details confused and drastically overestimated the death toll, or maybe even got the whole thing totally wrong, maybe a hoax, but already something heavy had fallen in his stomach and he thought, We did this to Paris.

Anthony looked back at his phone; the headline on the CNN website still saying sixty had been killed IN SHOOTINGS AND BLASTS; HOSTAGES HELD. He willed it not to be true, to be a mistake, at least for the count to start going in the opposite direction.

The headline changed to a big black banner, with big white letters: MORE THAN 100 KILLED.¹

He couldn’t shake the notion that he was at fault. That this is because of us. We stopped an attack, and they had to come back ten times worse to let the people of France know we didn’t stop anything.

He did not feel what all the people sending him messages felt. He didn’t wish he’d been there. Instead he felt he’d been so stupidly lucky when he was there, and he felt guilt. He and Spencer and Alek had stepped in the way of fate, and fate had come roaring back with a vengeance. Terrorists were responding to the three of them, and using hundreds of innocent people in France to make the point that you couldn’t stop history from happening; you just could maybe change when and how bad it was.

We’ve done this to them.

It would be months before he could fully accept that his reaction was wrong, that he hadn’t somehow inspired a reprisal attack, and that instead the mastermind planned at least four other attacks that had stalled out before, and as many as six. His name was Abdelhamid Abaoud, and though he was involved in Ayoub El-Khazzani’s plot against the train² and might have felt pressure because of past failures, he had many wells to draw from beyond what happened aboard the 15:17 to Paris. If Anthony and Alek and Spencer, and the others there that day—“Damian A” who slowed El-Khazzani down, and Mark Moogalian who tried to grab the machine gun and got shot, all before Anthony even woke up, and Chris Norman who helped bind El-Khazzani and then spent about two straight days translating—if any of them had happened to be somewhere else, had not been there to stop the attack, there was no reason to believe it would have stopped the mastermind from planning more. It would have meant that instead of a hundred thirty people dying in one attack, four or five hundred would have died in two.

But at that moment, it didn’t matter. No amount of reasoning would have helped him shed the awful thought that he was responsible.

And there was another reason he felt so personally connected to the killings in Paris. It wasn’t just that he’d convinced himself he’d somehow inspired them. It was because he now felt a closeness with the city. It was funny, in a way, that this city they’d kept hearing lukewarm things about on their trip, and which they were just about to skip altogether, instead gave him his fondest memories.

Partially, of course, because the appreciation was amazing, breathtaking, and so obviously genuine. It was not about celebrity; it was about humanity. It hadn’t felt like people in Paris wanted to be around them because they were famous—he didn’t even feel famous yet. The people there made Anthony feel like he and his friends had given a tremendous gift. People didn’t want a part of them, people wanted to make sure the boys were properly thanked. So after Anthony turned off the TV, that’s what he started thinking about.

Paris, just after the train. The city’s people; the beginning of his fame. He sat in front of the blank TV screen, thinking about those four days they had in Paris, and everything that came after.