The B Building was burning.
Anna could barely catch a breath through the smoke stinging her eyes and lungs. The wide dark halls were thick with it, curling, wafting.
A chemical fire? Those morons from Litwack’s 3rd period lab, trying to shut down the building?
There had been a dozen fire drills since the beginning of school.
But why were the lights out? The only illumination was from the red EXIT signs above the side stairwell doors. The whole building was dark… just the drifting smoke, tinged red from the neon.
Alarm bells were ringing, but far, far away.
And why was she alone?
Anna looked around her for what oddly felt like the first time, blinking through the smoky gloom. The cavernous halls were empty, no one in the open classrooms either.
There was the sound of sobbing, though, from somewhere, resonating faintly in the tomblike dark.
And softly, softly, screams. Screams.
She glanced down the center aisle of the classroom to the left of her, down the collapsing fiberglass curtain that served as a wall between classrooms, and froze.
Male legs in khaki pants and reindeer socks stuck out from under sweet Mr. Brooke’s desk. The legs were stiff and still. Anna thought absurdly of the Wicked Witch of the East, how she’d run screaming from the living room when she was five and had first seen The Wizard of Oz on TV and those black-and-white-striped witch legs had curled up and rolled under the house…
In her peripheral vision, a dark shadow ran suddenly past.
It was fast, so fast. Sinuous, snakelike.
Anna whipped around, staring down the corridor. Silence, stillness—but a heavy stillness, live. She held her breath, watching… and the shadow fell again across the wall. A chill ran through Anna’s entire body.
It had two heads.
Anna unfroze and ran for the main staircase. It felt unbearably slow, like running through sand. Like running—
In a dream.
The alarms started to shrill, piercing, pulsing beats.
Her breath was coming faster, her legs moving even more maddeningly slowly. Her pulse was pounding in her head, the sound distorted and visceral. She knew the shadow was behind her… she could hear a double breath.
Madness…
She reached the edge of the main staircase, grabbed the rail to pull herself forward onto the stairs—
At the foot of the staircase, on the landing, Tyler Marsh stood looking up at her, as real as she was, perfect profile and long dark silky hair falling into his eyes. The alarms pulsed around them, vibrating through her body.
Run, he said, without opening his mouth.
And she woke up.
The clock alarm was bleating in shrill pulses, five a.m blinking redly from the digital screen. The morning was pitch black. Anna’s heart was still pounding crazily in her chest, shaking the mattress. She reached clumsily for the clock to silence it, then lay back, dazed and groggy. The dream was gone.
The stench of smoke was in her nose.
Shower to wash away the lingering smell of smoke, then way too long with the hair dryer, reluctant to shut off the warmth. She mostly avoided her own eyes in the mirror, but sometimes, with her thick dark hair blowing around her, she was almost pretty.
She negotiated the tiny but labyrinthinely cluttered living room by the light of the TV screen. Her father was passed out and snoring in the huge vile LaZBoy, empty beer bottles scattered at his feet.
Anna grabbed a Diet Coke from the kitchen fridge, grabbed her backpack from the hall, and plunged out the front door into the chilly dark.
She made it to the corner just in time to catch her bus, and rode in rumbling darkness, alone with the bus driver and two Latina housekeepers, over potholed streets, under the towering silhouettes of palms and old-growth trees, through sleeping San Gorgonio.
San G was a base town, or had been until the base was shut down in the closures of the nineties, plunging the city into economic depression. The war in Iraq had not revived the base. The dying town sprawled in a semi-desert ringed by mountains, pocketed in a valley which trapped heat and smog for the entirety of the summer, only somewhat relieved in fall by the winds Raymond Chandler famously described as “those hot dry Santa Anas that come through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch.” And brought asthma and arson and wildfires, Anna knew all that. But the winds also signaled change and excitement, and sometimes, even, magic—like that fall in first grade when she for some reason had brought an umbrella to school on a cloudless Santa Ana day and discovered, walking home through the gusts, that she could fly, actually fly off the ground like Mary Poppins, with the umbrella open against the winds, flying. And for one day, she was magical—
She sat up on the cracked bus seat with a gasp.
She’d dreamed about Tyler Marsh last night. Definitely. Definitely something about Tyler. Something she couldn’t quite remember, but so intimate it made her stomach flutter.
But the dream hadn’t been good. That much she remembered. Not good at all.
Her chest tightened with anticipation and unease as the bus shuddered to a stop in front of the high school.
SGHS was the town’s original school, boasting several vintage buildings and a decrepitly grand auditorium surrounding a faded brick plaza, a core around which more modern buildings, if you could by any stretch of the imagination call the 1970s modern, had sprouted. There was the open-classroomed, two-story windowless monolith of the B Building, along with rows of “temporary” trailers that had constituted a significant portion of the school since the late sixties.
Anna made her way through the empty quad in the pre-dawn dark. The buildings were looming shadows around her, no lights on yet. Zero period, 6 a.m., existed so that seniors could get in their class hours for graduation while still being able to leave school early enough to work. Anna was cramming in all the credits she could in the desperate hope of graduating early. After fourth period she left the school to get downtown to her job at the Inland Center Gap—anything to avoid going home.
The long shining corridor of the A Building was dim and deserted, only one lit classroom at the far end of the hall. Anna’s zero period, Problems of Democracy, was a graduation requirement, and unlike most other classes in the school, which were tracked according to student test scores, POD was taught on only one level, which meant classes were mixed in a way they simply were not for any other class. POD was technically a senior course, and Anna was a junior, but the class was easily the least challenging she’d ever taken, possibly in her life. The scattered students in the large, militantly undecorated room were the absolute dregs of the school: the dumbest of the football team, linebacks or whatever the biggest ones were called; a few slutty girls who seemed physically incapable of picking up their feet and consequently shuffled noisily when they walked; some sweet-faced Latino boys who no one seemed to have noticed didn’t speak more than ten words of English. A good three-quarters of the class was sleeping, heads down on their crossed arms on their desks, including the teacher: pale, doughy Mr. Doyle. It all looked like the courtyard scene from Sleeping Beauty after the fairies had put the whole castle in suspended animation while Beauty awaited the awakening kiss of the Prince.
Despite herself, Anna stole a glance around the room for Tyler, the closest thing SGHS had to a prince, the only thing that kept Anna coming to POD at this ungodly hour. No sign of him.
The only other moving thing in the room was Carrie Thorne, the school’s most unfortunate dwarf. “Little person” was the PC phrase, but Carrie was undeniably a dwarf: three foot ten, a hundred and fifty pounds, with a froglike face, lashless eyes. She wasn’t retarded, exactly, but there was something not right about her mind, either. The jocks were merciless, pretending to be her friend and then mimicking her duck walk and turtle blink behind her back—barely behind her back. Carrie surely knew she was being mocked, but waddled after them anyway, trying to keep up with the young gods on her stumpy legs.
It was the height of teenage cruelty: Darren Elwes, captain of the football team, school sociopath, the ringleader, ostentatiously flirting with her, going on and on and on obscenely about taking her out to the drive-in, about what base they’d gotten to the night before, about jerking off to the memory afterward. Disgusting… and unbearably, it seemed to excite Carrie. She’d stagger away in a flushed stupor as Darren mugged behind her in panting imitation of her froggy face, the lettermen and any stray cheerleaders laughing uproariously.
Except for Tyler, who never laughed, but sat beside them, a million miles away, as if on another planet. Never entirely present, always at the edge of the group, dreamily aloof or (Anna wasn’t stupid) drugged.
So different. So different—from Them. But he never left them, and at the lunch bell or the last bell he would get into Darren’s car or Darren into his, and they drove off together to their childhood homes, three houses apart from each other.
Anna quickly took a seat between two sleeping students to avoid engaging in conversation with Carrie, whom she pitied, but not enough to endure her desperate, disjointed chatter.
The bell rang (such an assault at this hour) and Mr. Doyle blinked awake at his desk. The class slept on. Doyle licked his lips, growled, “Get out pencils for a quiz. No books.”
Anna fumbled in her backpack, and then felt someone looking at her.
What an odd thing to think, that you can feel someone looking at you.
But the back of her neck was hot.
She turned to the row of tables behind her.
Tyler Marsh sat behind her, alone at one of the two-person desks as if he’d materialized from—
A dream… the dream…
He was looking straight at her, his long dark hair falling around his face. Their eyes locked in an electric moment.
It all came flooding back to her, the smoke-filled halls, the ominous dark shape darting in the classroom behind her, too quick to be human—two heads.
And Tyler, at the foot of the stairs, looking up.
She was there, then here, then both at once, realities layered on top of each other.
Tyler locked in to Anna’s gaze from across the room. Chills ran up her back as he slowly nodded.
What? What?
I was there, he said without speaking.
She caught her breath, looking into those eyes.
And then Doyle stepped in front of her, and slapped a paper down in front of her, beginning the test.
At the sound of the bell Anna raced out of class to catch up with Tyler, running into a chair and bruising her shin in her hurry to escape the room. But outside POD the halls stretched out endlessly, filled with nothing but the shuffling corpses of her other classmates. He’d disappeared.
Daylight had brought the Santa Anas gale force, gusting and crackling through the palms.
Anna walked through the quad, prime real estate for jocks, cheerleaders and other socies. Wannabees hovered hopefully on the periphery, always looking for an opening or whatever miracle it would take to join the inner circle. She saw Tyler as soon as she hit the bricks of the inner quad. He was in the usual gang seated around the central planter, Darren never far from his side.
It was a childhood connection, that much Anna understood: the two of them growing on the same block of Valencia, the broad main street of town, prime real estate for society parents, facing the golf course, a short drunk walk to or from the Country Club, kids growing up with golf and Junior League and SUVs and iPhones and iPods and an inbred sense of entitlement. Big fish in a small, small pond.
Tyler was in his place on the south side of the planter, as always at the edges of the group, smiling slightly, never quite participating in Darren’s antics. Today, some sort of air guitar recounting of a concert, with lots of tongue involved.
Anna drifted more slowly, willing Tyler to look at her. He had spoken in her head, as clearly as if he had been on the phone. Could she speak in his?
Try it, why not? Nothing to lose, everything, everything to win.
She breathed in, and said it in her head.
Tyler.
She kept her eyes on him, every cell within her concentrating, focused on one thought.
Tyler.
She saw him blink, frown, look up and around him. She was barely moving, barely breathing.
Then Darren cavorted closer, shoved him. Tyler struck out and hit him so quickly even Darren looked surprised, before he burst into manic laughter, echoed by everyone around them.
“You are one crazy motherfucker,” Darren crowed, feinting back at Tyler.
Tyler did not once look at Anna. She dropped her eyes and walked quickly on, her face a mask.
So maybe it hadn’t happened at all. Maybe none of it had.
Maybe she was crazy. As crazy as her father.
The morning dragged on: her hated Algebra II class, Mr. Maitland with his too-tight shorts and crawling eyes; then third period Chem: the dark, windowless second-floor lab soporific as always, Litwack spacing out behind his desk, mug of coffee well-laced with Vodka.
As the class practiced titration, Anna could see more than the assignment bubbling at a back table: Darren and a couple other football guys huddling too industriously over a beaker. Darren suddenly looked up, straight across the room at Anna. His lip curled and his eyes went colder than their usual glacial blue. The menace in his face made Anna look quickly down at her own notes and try to disappear into them.
It was not two minutes later that the beaker exploded. Blue smoke spread instantly through the room, noxious, suffocating. Startled back to semi-sobriety, Litwack barked orders at the hapless TAs and ordered the students out of the room “In an orderly fashion.”
In the halls, chaos. Alarms shrieked as students poured from the science and math and computer labs, pushing and shoving. It was instantly clear that the school population far exceeded the evacuation capacity of the building. A wall-to-wall river of bodies undulated in excruciating slow motion toward the main staircase in the front of the building. Anna turned instinctively toward the side emergency stairs. A clutch of students was squeezed against the doors, voices rising in a spiraling frenzy. From where she was, Anna could see that some idiot had twisted a bike chain around the doors of the back emergency exit.
This was planned. It’s a setup.
The students twisted, fighting to turn where they stood. Teachers shouted over the chaos, adding to the madness.
The river of students surged forward. Anna was surrounded by the sound of crashing glass, blue smoke, shrilling alarms; she was carried through the corridor on a wave of déjà vu.
In the pushing, shoving horde, someone fell into step with her, and she looked up to see long silky dark hair, deep wary eyes, perfect skin in profile. Tyler. He put a hand to her elbow and held her, keeping her beside him in the jostling crowd. They moved in tandem, saying nothing. She was dizzy with the reality of him.
There was a logjam at the stairs, an ocean of students. Anna and Tyler inched forward.
“Good thing it’s not for real,” Tyler said with casual cynicism.
“It was real last night,” she said. For a moment she thought he would not speak. Then—
“It was something.”
Their voices were soft in the din of wired chattering and occasional shrieks. She could hear him perfectly. She looked up, into his eyes, as if she had every right to do it. They were green, like the sea. “We had the same dream.”
He shook his head slowly. “I don’t dream.”
“Everybody dreams,” she said automatically. “We’d all be completely psychotic if we didn’t.” She’d read it somewhere, or maybe it was one of those classroom movies that have a strange way of sticking, random facts popping up when you least expect it.
“I don’t dream,” he repeated. “You were in my bed last night.”
She was flooded with heat and confusion until she realized he’d said “head” not “bed.” “You were in my head last night.”
The smoke was thicker— people all around them were coughing, crying.
“The smoke was in the beginning,” she said, the dream flashing with crystal clarity in her mind. “There were people dead.”
He looked down at her a long time, then nodded without speaking.
“There was someone. Someone dark and fast in the halls. Someone… with two heads.” She’d actually said it aloud. He didn’t react. “Did you see?” she asked urgently. She couldn’t believe she was talking to him like this. They had never spoken before.
He frowned slightly, “No.” There was not a trace of skepticism in his voice.
The crowd moved them closer to the stairs. People around them were coughing and crying. If someone tripped, they would be trampled.
Anna glanced toward Mr. Brooke’s classroom to the left of the stairs, remembered the legs sticking out from under the desk, and shivered.
“People are going to die,“ she said softly.
* * *
Algebra II. Maitland, with his bristly red beard and red mouth, tennis shorts with their insinuating bulge, rubbing past her in the aisle as he lectured, standing with his crotch at her eye level as he paused to “check her work.”
They were studying probability, and Anna vaguely realized that there was something potentially magnificent about it, something philosophical and profound. But Maitland’s leering and covert groping made it impossible for her to concentrate; her mind just shut down. She stared down at her textbook, trying to block him out as he cruised the aisles. She copied a definition onto her worksheet, a list of probability terms:
Sample Space: The set of all possible outcomes.
She sat up straighter, with a thrill of significance. Right there, for example. Sample Space. Wasn’t that where she and Tyler were right now, in a set of all possible outcomes? She scooted up farther on her seat and flipped pages to find the definition of the next phrase.
Probability: The likelihood of the occurrence of an event.
Again, she felt a chill. That’s what they were struggling with, the likelihood of the occurrence of an event. An event… Her mind skittered away from the dream memory and she hurried on to:
Conditional Probability: A probability that is compiled based on the assumption that some event has already occurred.
Some event that had already occurred. The fire alarm in their dream… and then in reality….
The next term on the list made her heart leap.
Impossible Event
That was it. That’s what she needed to know. Her eyes raced over the chapter text looking for the explanation as if—as if—
As if lives depended on it.
She looked down at the page and the line suddenly jumped out at her.
“An impossible event has zero probability of occurring.”
She stared down at the page bleakly. Well, that’s self-evident, isn’t it? But if an impossible event had zero probability of occurring, then probability had nothing to do with what was happening, because it was all impossible—
A shadow fell on the page. Maitland was standing above her, his eyes glittering down. Anna froze as his hand moved down to his crotch and he began to stroke himself.
She stared up, hating him—
And his head exploded. Blood and brain drenched Anna’s dress and Doc Martens. She gasped, recoiled from the coppery stink and slime of blood.
Headless, brains stem exposed, Maitland turned in slow motion as if to confront his killer…
…then crumpled to the floor.
Anna stood from her desk, awash in red. She was alone in the classroom, Maitland’s body at her feet.
She looked around her. No, not alone. There were others, slumped at desks, holes in their heads and chests.
Smoke and blood were everywhere.
In the hall behind her, the shadow skittered. Fast, so fast…
Anna ducked down beneath the desk, and crouched there, her ears filled with the thudding of her own heart and the faraway pulse of the alarms. She peered through the smoke toward the hall. Nothing moving. She took a breath and crawled along the edge of the fiberglass dividing curtain to the wall-less back of the Algebra classroom.
More smoke in the corridor and more fallen students. She felt movement, turned her head to see a figure down the hallway, almost obscured by the smoke. She caught a glimpse of legs in jeans and snakeskin boots, a rifle at thigh level and the shadow on the wall, its two heads bobbing.
A dull boom rocked the building, jolting Anna onto her hands and knees.
Around her there was screaming and screaming and screaming, and then the crackle of flames. The smoke surrounded her, hot and intimate and oppressive.
She crawled along the wall, eyes streaming.
There was another body in front of her, crumpled, not moving. Dark silky hair pooled on the carpet around his head. And blood, so much blood.
No, God, oh no, no…
Her heart was in her mouth as she crawled to Tyler, oblivious of the shadow creature. He was still, so still, and pale. She lifted his head, cradling him in her arms. Blood was sticky on her hands, running through her fingers. The back of his head was soft, like melted Jello. Her pulse spiked sickly, feeling the ooze.
He opened his eyes, found her gaze. She saw recognition, longing… relief. He shuddered, and she held him harder.
“Help me,” he whispered.
Her eyes swam with tears. His hand moved beside her leg, touched her fingers and picked up her hand. He raised her hand to his mouth; she felt his lips brush her palm -
Behind them, the two-headed shadow loomed on the wall—
* * *
“We have to stop it.”
She spoke with utter calm. In her head was her own screaming from the dream.
They were sitting on the stairs at the side of the auditorium, privacy from the traffic of the quad, its cliques and gossip. They sat close, legs touching, as if they had known each other forever. As if, as if….
“What is ‘It’?” Tyler said. His voice was mocking but his eyes were not.
“You know,“ she said, and still hesitated. “Like Columbine.” It felt odd to say it aloud. Had she ever said the word before?
It can’t happen here it can’t happen here it can’t happen here.
“What do you suggest we do?” He said reasonably. And there’s the rub, isn’t it?
“Tell someone.” Her voice grated, as if she were irritated. As if irritated could begin to describe her feelings.
“Tell who? Our parents?” There were layers of complexity in the way he said the word.
“No,” Anna said quickly, and he smiled without amusement.
“No,” he agreed. A vision of her father, stumbling drunk and raving, flashed in Anna’s mind. Tyler flinched, as if he saw. Their eyes met and she knew they had much more in common than she had ever guessed.
Then he looked away, and shrugged. “What’s there to tell, anyway? ‘We had a dream…’”
“It was more than a dream. You know it. You know it. People don’t dream the same thing.”
He didn’t answer—he didn’t need to. She looked out at the wind rippling the nets of the tennis courts, and continued, feeling her way. “We’re dreaming something real… something that could be real.”
After a moment he said, “So how are we supposed to stop the future?”
She shook her head, intent. “We don’t know it’s the future. I think… it’s one future.” She visualized the probability equations from the dream. She’d looked them up in the morning and they were there in her textbook, exactly the same. “It’s a possible outcome. One of a number of outcomes. It’s Sample Space.” She knew she was babbling, but his eyes flickered with sudden interest.
“Sample Space.”
“A set of all possible outcomes,” she said, though she knew he’d already gotten it. “Maybe…” she paused to grasp at a thought that was just out of reach. “Maybe we’re being shown for a reason. So we can make a different outcome.”
His grin twisted. “Maybe you can. I’m dead, remember?”
“No,” she said so fiercely she saw him jump.
“No,” she said more softly.
He leaned forward and put his hand against her cheek, his forehead against hers, his hair falling against her face, and breathed her in.
She walked for English in a dreamy daze, the touch of his hands and head running under her skin. She rounded a corner and ran into someone tall and hard.
Darren’s fingers dug into her shoulders, his ice eyes shone down at her. Her first thought was that he had seen her with Tyler.
“Watch it, cunt.” So casually malevolent.
She looked at him steadily and saw the ice turn to rage. “Better watch those eyes, little girl,” he breathed. “Someone might put them out.”
Anna took a sudden step forward, startling herself and him. He didn’t flinch, exactly, but his balance shifted, and he no longer seemed quite so tall. “I’m not afraid of you,” she said softly.
Darren’s face was blank and still. He seemed to have gone someplace else altogether. Then his eyes focused again, and narrowed to slivers. “You should be, little one.”
* * *
The screaming was louder. And the curling smoke.
She was following feathers on the floor, past little piles of carnage: a head of a bird, twisted from its body. The glowing eyes of a cat, with its organs spilled out all around it. A charred lump of something that was once a dog.
Oh God. Oh God… it was so much worse than she’d thought. It was years… years of madness… hidden from everyone. Who—What—could do that to an animal?
She felt herself becoming hysterical, though she had no real concept of the state, and she forced herself to breathe in, to focus.
Tyler. Must find Tyler.
She started to run past spreading pools of blood on the floor.
A shadow loomed up behind her. The two-headed thing stalked her in the halls. Anna bolted away from it, around a corner, and drew up short with a gasp.
Carrie stood under a cottonwood tree that had somehow sprung up in the upstairs hall of the B Building. She stared up at Anna, oversized head bobbing on her neck, lashless eyes blinking. She wore black-and-white-striped stockings and black shoes that curled up at the toes.
“You’re playing with fire,” she intoned.
“Where is it?” Anna gasped, only she wasn’t sure if she’d said Where? or Who?
“You know,” said Carrie. Her legs curled, rolling up underneath her, then she disappeared in a puff of smoke.
* * *
The winds blew trash across the blacktop as Anna ran through the scarred green picnic tables that lined the asphalt passage between the Vocational Arts building and the student parking lot. She’d overslept and missed her bus, subsequently missing POD, but it was not quite first period yet and she still had time to get there and catch Tyler before class let out. She pulled up short when she saw the cottonwood. There were more than one of the scraggly trees struggling defiantly up among the picnic tables, but the sight of this one hit her like lightning cracking through clear sky.
Carrie sat beneath it at a picnic table. Her stumpy legs stuck out in front of her on the bench, her toes turned up. There was a bilious assortment of junk food spread out in front of her on the table—Cheetos, Snickers bars, Red Vines, Peppermint Patties.
Anna walked slowly to the table and sat down opposite her. Carrie looked across at her, and they were both still, as perfectly alive and awake as in the dream.
“You were there,” Anna said softly.
“There where?” Carrie said. But her smile was knowing.
Anna took a breath. “What did you mean?”
Carrie stared at her without blinking.
“Last night. What did you mean?”
Carrie’s eyes shifted craftily. She licked chocolate off her fingers, leaned across the table toward Anna. “Is it worse to be ugly inside or outside?”
“Inside,” Anna said, and looked away.
Carrie snorted, a phlegmy laugh. “Liar. Everybody lies.” She reached for another candy bar.
Anna leaned forward urgently. “Carrie, where is he?” Only she didn’t know if she’d said “where” or “who.”
“You know,” Carrie said, exactly as in the dream, and bit into the chocolate.
Anna shook her head. “I don’t—”
“Liar,” Carrie said again. “Why does everyone lie?”
Anna swallowed. “Carrie, is it Darren?”
Carrie laughed, and kept laughing, rocking back and forth on the bench. Anna grabbed her backpack from the table and fled.
She got to POD just before the bell. Tyler was not in class.
Nor was he on the planter in the quad. Darren watched Anna walk by, like a snake watching a mouse. Her heart was racing, her backpack clutched close to her chest. She held her head high and straight, not looking at him.
Mr. Brooke was grading papers in his upstairs history classroom, decorated with maps from World War II battle campaigns, National Geographic history charts. Anna had had his American History last year as a sophomore and secretly adored him. Brooke was close to retirement, just a few wisps of hair left on his shiny head, but still as wiry and enthusiastic as a little boy. That enthusiasm and his off-the-wall humor had kept him a favorite through decades of students. True to form, he lit up when Anna walked in, springing from his chair and spreading his arms wide.
“Sullivan, Sullivan, such a good Russian name. Splendid to see you.” He frowned, taking her in. “But you look disturbed. Nay, perturbed. Yes, a definite aura of perturbation. We can’t have that.” He waved grandly to the rows of empty desks. “Have a seat. Unburden yourself.”
Anna opened her mouth, and to her chagrin felt tears just behind her eyes. Mr. Brooke saw, because his face lost its jolliness and reassembled itself into something so concerned and fatherly she very nearly broke down altogether. She swallowed through the ache in her throat. “I think I know something. That something bad is going to happen.” She knew she had to say more, but nothing would come. The words hung in the silent classroom.
“Something bad?” Brooke said.
She nodded. The silence deepened.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know.” Appallingly, she started to cry, then.
Brooke looked alarmed. “Sullivan, are you in danger? Are you being hurt, or threatened—”
“No. No, no,” she choked out, took a shuddering breath. “It’s not about me— exactly. I don’t know what it is, exactly.”
“Is it a police thing? A family thing?”
“No. No.” She tried to get hold of herself. “It’s a probability. Right now we’re in Sample Space, but the outcome—”
Brooke looked confused. “Is that algebra? I never was much good at math.”
“Not math.” She kept shaking her head, sobbing. “I don’t know. I can’t figure it out. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I don’t know. I don’t know.”
Brooke came around to the front edge of his desk, in front of her, not too close, like Maitland, but just the right distance. She could feel his concern, like warmth rolling off him. He was wearing faded but neat khaki pants, and when he sat on the desk, the cuffs hiked up to reveal reindeer socks.
Anna froze, staring at the reindeer. The legs under the desk. The blood…
There was smoke in her nose, and screaming in her ears.
Brooke was speaking, right into her eyes, and the tone of his voice brought her back.
“Sullivan, you know a whole lot. You are so much stronger than you think you are. There is a world of good inside of you. You can trust yourself to do the right thing. I have no doubt.”
The bell rang. Anna jumped up to leave, blinded by tears. “I have to go,” and he stood with her.
“You come talk to me any time you’re ready. I’ll always be here.”
But you won’t, she cried inside. And for a moment he had an odd look, but then it was gone.
“Trust yourself,” he said.
* * *
Probability (P) is the likelihood of the occurrence of an event (A). If all outcomes are equally likely, then:
P(A) = Number of outcomes in event A
Number of outcomes in the Sample Space
Blood bloomed over Anna’s algebra paper, drenching it with crimson.
She stood from her desk, awash in red and the cloying stench. She was alone in the Algebra classroom, Maitland’s headless body at her feet.
She looked around her. No, not alone. There were others, slumped at desks, holes in their heads and chests.
Smoke and blood was everywhere.
Behind her, the shadow skittered. Fast, so fast…
She ducked down beneath the desk, and crouched there, her ears filled with the thudding of her own heart and the faraway pulse of the alarms. She peered through the smoke toward the hall. Nothing moving. She took a breath and crawled along the edge of the fiberglass dividing curtain to the wall-less back of the Algebra classroom.
More smoke in the corridor and more fallen students. She felt movement, turned her head to see a figure almost obscured by the smoke. She caught a glimpse of legs in jeans and snakeskin boots, a rifle at thigh level… and the shadow on the wall, its two heads bobbing.
A dull boom rocked the building, jolting Anna onto her hands and knees. Around her there was screaming and screaming and screaming, and then the crackle of flames.
The smoke surrounded her, hot and intimate and oppressive.
She crawled along the wall, eyes streaming. The screaming was louder, all around, and the curling smoke. Pools of blood spread on the carpet. She was following a trail of feathers on the floor—past the head of a bird, twisted from its body, the glowing eyes of a cat with its organs spilled out all around it, a charred lump of something that was once a dog. Small fires were lit everywhere.
She strained to see through the thickening smoke and gasped.
Tyler sat against the wall, slumped and still. He was drenched in blood, head down, long hair falling around his face
No, God, oh no, no…
Heart in her mouth, she crawled to him, now oblivious of the shadow creature. She reached Tyler, touched him frantically. Blood was everywhere, but she could find no wounds. She looked over his chest, down his legs…
And froze… seeing his snakeskin boots.
Tyler stirred.
Behind him, the two-headed shadow slithered on the wall. It lifted its two heads as he lifted his.
Tyler opened his eyes and found Anna’s gaze. She saw recognition, longing… relief. He shuddered, and she held him harder.
“Help me,” he whispered. His two-headed shadow was motionless on the wall.
Anna’s eyes swam with tears. His hand moved beside her leg, touched her fingers. He picked up her hand and clasped his fingers around hers. She felt something cold and heavy and hard in her palm.
“No—” she said.
He looked into her face, his eyes as green as the sea. “Help me,” he whispered. He closed his hand around her fingers and put his mouth around the barrel of the gun.
She closed her eyes, and he squeezed her hand.
She woke with her ears still ringing. She did not move for minutes, felt no desire to move ever again. Her chest felt as empty and hollow as a tomb.
After a time her hands moved at her sides and she wiped the blood onto the sheets.
The quad was buzzing with rumors like wildfire, like the Santa Anas rippling through the palms around the courtyard. Cheerleaders were sobbing, freshmen looking scared and disoriented.
One of the football guys was speaking with dazed incomprehension. “Marsh shot himself. His old man came into his room in the morning and found his brains all over the wall.”
Anna walked by them without turning her head.
She sat in Algebra II with her test paper in front of her and no thoughts in her mind but the numbers in front of her. The numbers were a relief. If only she’d never have to think again.
Probability is the likelihood of the occurrence of an event.
For any event A, O < P(A) < 1
P (impossible event) = 0
Maitland’s hairy legs moved in front of her. Anna looked up from her test paper. His eyes glittered down at her, wet red mouth working.
Anna stared into his face. In her mind she saw his head explode in blood.
Maitland’s eyes widened and he stumbled back in shock. Around them, the class turned to look, curious.
Maitland moved quickly away from her, mumbling, “Good work, looks fine.”
Anna watched him without moving as he fumbled his way back behind his desk and dropped into his chair. He shuffled papers in front of him with shaking hands.
Anna dropped her gaze to her paper. She scratched out the equation she’d written and wrote instead:
Probability does not equal Possibility
She put down her pencil, stood, and walked out of the classroom, out of the building… into the wind.
* * *
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