The Journey Prize Stories 22 (11 page)

“Should have read the memo, Miss.”

Every class has a smartass. Hers comes in a T-shirt, tight as a leotard over his bench-press chest, that reads
Ultimate Fighting Champion, Southwest Regionals, Kick Ass ‘08
. Katrin cannot gauge Cody's cheekiness. He has a lazy eye. She never knows whether to smile or call him out.

She peeks. The hallway's empty but for Slobo, a math teacher. His face, prairie dog – curious, bobs out from the frame two doors up. A fellow memo truant. Katrin offers a sheepish wave. He smirks, shrugs, and pulls back into his classroom.
She lingers a second longer. With Slobo's head out of the way, she catches something that doesn't fit by the vending machine at the end of the hall – a crouching nimbus unfurling like bad weather. Katrin watches with queasy fascination. The dark blur becomes a figure; then the figure comes into focus. Five feet eight inches of stooping, luckless boyhood made tall with adrenaline turns towards her. In black combat boots, no less. Her first feeling is irritation. The horrid familiarity of it all. His right hand hangs heavy with the dull glint of metal.

Katrin's knees go weak. He's moving. She shuts the door, flicks off the lights, waves at the students. Her voice comes out as a pant, tentative and thin.

“Get down. Get back.”

Somebody snickers. For a moment, she feels the concavity of her will; she wishes one of the boys with good shoulders – Cody? – would step forward and take charge, so she could crumple. This is not who you are, Katrin. You don't save the day.

Nobody moves. Her glance fastens on a roll of Scotch tape and that's enough to forestall her panic. She grabs it, runs back to the door, slaps an uncollected test – it was a pass – over the small window, and fastens it down with the tape. One defensive step, and there's no turning back.

“It's for real,” somebody whispers. They stand up, chairs screech along the tiles.

“Push the desks back. Everybody in the far corner. There. Go!”

Now her voice is stronger, gale force even. There is swearing, jostling. She hears cellphones open. Click. Click. Click. Like a dog's toenails on ceramic tiles.

“No!”

She gestures – slapping her hands shut. Then she's pointing like a drill sergeant. I don't know who you are, she thinks. I don't know who this is.

“One person dials security. One person calls 911. The rest –off.”

She'd read that memo after all. So why pretend? She glanced at it really, but didn't pin it primly to her cubicle like her colleagues, hurling it instead into the recycling bin, her one small rebellion against scare-mongering and bureaucracy.

The door won't lock. The bolt moves but won't catch in the frame. She tries once, twice, three times. Why didn't she think of this earlier? Of all things, how could she make the door an afterthought?

In her head, she hears Ariane's laughter – the true kind, straight from the belly when she plays with the dog – so unlike the helium twitter she uses with friends. How good, how right, some sounds seem.

The
PA
repeats its old news in long tones: a melancholic war drum. It is violated with a crack.

Peter's lips vibrating on the back of her neck, his horny humming of the CBC morning show jingle, as she breaks from sleep – how she'd miss such waking.

The taut spring releasing the hammer. The cartridge's back end slammed. Friction. A chamber-fed explosion, its wretched propulsion. Pow. She resents the intimacy of this new sound, the space it claims.

The shot rings near Slobo's class. She hopes his door is locked. Two girls are whimpering in the back of her room and another student says,
Shut the fuck up
.

She flips the teacher's desk at the front of the room so it is on its side, and shoves it against the door.

“The door won't lock.”

She's not looking at them when she says it.

But when she turns, Warbly, a tall and awkward boy with a flutter of vestigial adolescence in his speech, is beside her. Him, of all people? He shoves another smaller desk against the door, nesting inside the larger desk. And then Ole Bill, an injured steelworker taking her class for disability retraining, is up. She can't waste a second on surprise. He stacks four chairs and pushes them against the flipped desk, dragging his bum leg with every step.

The first thump. Ole Bill drops to his knees. Warbly flattens himself against the whiteboard. Katrin scrambles under the smaller desks, so her weight pushes against the flipped desk and the door. Leaning into her shoulder, she sees Esam, her quietest student, stand up quickly, remove the belt from his jeans, loop it around the doorknob, and pull it tight into a slip knot. The doorway juts out slightly into the classroom, and Esam pushes his body into the corner the door's depth creates with the adjacent wall. He sits down, pulls the belt taut, braces his feet against the floor, so his entire body anchors a vector of opposing tension. Katrin is eye level with him. She can see the distended veins on his brown forearms, the weird calm of his face.

The thump repeats, more insistent. The doorknob rattles. She absorbs the small agonies of the huddled students, stifled cries, tight-throated inhalations, and a whiff of heartbreaking shame – somebody has shit. Katrin pours all her weight against the desk.

“Open up!”

Katrin imagines the fixed-eye vacancy of a video game shooter. The voice is loud and young. Impossibly young. And then, freighted with menace and cortisol, all of him heaves against the door. The thump smacks hard against Katrin's shoulder, the desk's underbelly scrapes her cheek. Rough wood. Ole Bill's stack of chairs tumbles. He sprawls out under them with a small groan. She kicks at them with her feet, digging him out. Warbly slides down the wall, wiggles Bill free and gathers him into the huddle. Esam yanks harder on the belt.

“Don't fuck with me.”

Katrin hears the vocal cords ragged with rage and regrets again that she is middle-aged, that she is not strong, that she has let disappointment chip away at the better part of herself.

She thinks about the fulcrum of Peter's elbow, his knee, resting her head in the hinges of his body, feeling quiet and safe with her nose pressed into the spice of his unworried warmth.

She has never seen a semi-automatic. Yet Katrin instinctively knows the sound a handgun slide makes – the queer metallic sibilance – when it's pushed back, the hammer cocked. What she doesn't know are the physics of a propelled bullet – whether it can penetrate the thin metal and Styrofoam sandwich of the door plus her laminate desk before reaching her shoulder's tight, acidic flesh.

She wonders if Ariane will arrive home from school on the verge of tears again today – the small humiliations of phys. ed. and recess, the snubs on the bus ride home, her own reflection in passing windows building into a low pressure system that
bursts in the vestibule by the coat hooks and the refurbished deacon's bench. Katrin wishes for a good day. Let someone – anyone – say something nice to her. The lustre of her hair. Her perfect homework.

It doesn't matter. He is already shooting. The bullets make a pinging thud against the door metal. Two. Three. Four. Five. She is a thickness of skin, sinew, and bone between the bullets and her students, without understanding her own risks. She regrets this. She is unfit for selflessness. She's all self – except that it's frozen in place.

Katrin is suddenly full of a hard aching for sweetness – her mother's pear pie with its buttered pastry, warm sugary fruit, a hint of cloves in the syrup. One bite, held against her teeth, left only room for pleasure in the world.

The small rectangle of glass. Katrin hears the smash of his handgun against it, followed by a shot. The glass shatters and tremolos like a harpsichord. Tinkling. Tinkling. Tinkling. Katrin watches the test she'd pasted to the door drop like Victory Parade flotsam. Warbly pulls the students, crawling and crab-walking, tears streaming down hunted faces, to the wall flush with the door.

Bullets come into the room, ricochet off the low cement walls, the greyed tile.

“I know you're in there, fucker. I'll get you.”

Who? Which one of them has brought this on? Katrin wonders wildly if she has done the right thing. If the door were open, he'd come in, find his target. Perhaps there would be one dead. Not all.

She hears the bullet's whine and seconds later, a gasp, a recoil of fright. Giovanna, a large, pleasant girl, slumps away
from the huddle, holding her upper arm. Carmine lava spurts from her good earthy flesh. Esam turns, takes one hand off the belt to reach for her.

“No!” Katrin hisses.

She gets on her belly, wiggling like a salamander over to the girl who sits grey-faced, gushing blood, in the thrall of her own frailty. She pulls Giovanna down low, sinks her palm against the wound to exert pressure. But blood leaks recklessly out, staining Katrin's fingers crimson.

The next shot ricochets off the wall above the heads of the huddling students. There is a cry of disbelief, of insult. The bullet falls beside Katrin and the bleeding girl. Katrin pulls her hand off the wound, kicks off her shoes, lies on her back, and squirms out of her leotards. Her butt cheeks press into the tiles' archeology of spit, grit, bootprints, and crumbs. The tile is cold against her bare flesh. She yanks her tights from her feet, rolls back onto her belly, and fashions a tourniquet for Giovanna's arm.

The whole time, she says, “You're okay. It's okay.”

Sirens. They have been ringing in her ears.

Another shot. It splits the air outside the classroom but does not enter.

There is the sound of feet. There are voices. Katrin nods to Esam, who lets go of the belt and takes over the tourniquet.

“Stay down,” she tells the students.

Katrin is the first to stand up. She is bare-legged, barefoot. The blood of her student soaks through her thin blouse to her skin. Bile – a hot sickening cud – worms up her throat. The voice that comes through the glass is older, authoritative.

“Police! It's okay. Open up!”

She looks over at the huddled students and meets the eyes of Cody. The squatting boy's face is ashen. He lets out a soft groan, then topples into the shoulder of the girl next to him in a dead faint. Katrin turns and begins to pull the chairs and desk away from the door.

Leave us be.

Peter answers the phone. He answers the door. Grey crescents pool under his eyes. He says please, please, she won't talk. Katrin regrets the sound of his voice – its polite roundness, its deferential pleading, its way of making her notice how all the edges of their existence have been rubbed away, rounded off, avoided.

She won't read the newspapers. But Peter clips. He clips.
The things they're saying about you
, he beams.

“Courageous. Brave. A her –”

She holds up a hand. Don't.
I won't hear it
. And he stops. Then the phone stops with him, before the week is out.

She spends whole days in the bedroom, knees pulled to her chest, girding herself against her own choices – down duvets, decorative pillows, thick towels, the devouring softness of her home. Her husband with his edgeless voice.

“Mom.”

Ariane pushes open the bedroom door. Katrin studies her daughter's ridiculous slippers: shaggy defanged yetis. Pink, no less. Her thighs are too generous, too round for twelve years. This is her child? Seriously? The girl's shoulders curve over a fleshy continuum of breasts, the belly pushes against an outgrown T-shirt and busts out at the waist of her sweatpants. What kind of mother have I been? Katrin wonders.

The girl advances across the room, 165 pounds of reticence, and curls herself on the bed at Katrin's feet.

“Are you okay, Mom?”

The voice is sugared with need, the eyes moist. Katrin wants to slap her, slap her so hard the ample flesh splits and the young girl suffocating within it frees. Run. Get the fuck out. Save yourself.

Ariane whimpers and clutches her mother's ankles. Katrin feels her tummy clench, the shaky feeling of her wrists. Who was I? Who am I now? She looks around and sees her authorship in all of it. Still she can't believe she'd ever wanted this life, this fabric-softener-scented necrosis.

Asleep, Peter's breathing is a rustle of raw silk. Katrin gets out of bed, goes down to the basement, presses her palms into the computer's unyielding plastic.

Somebody has made a Room 221A Facebook page. Warbly, Ole Bill, most of the others are online. Nobody sleeps.

There's only one topic. They trade details like she once swapped hockey cards with her brothers.

Depressed mom.

World of Warcraft.

Bad case of acne.

Dead crows in the backyard.

Neighb ours creeped out.

Got ‘em. Got ‘em, she thinks.

And then one day, this:

Picked the wrong room.

Sorry, what?

Yeah. Shooter buddy had the wrong room. Wanted to carve up the physics prof who failed him a year earlier.

Yeah. I heard that too. Choked on his own blood clutching this semester's schedule. But it was an early version, before the room changes.

Fuckin' guy planned everything but had the wrong fuckin' schedule. Ha!

Trade.

U
OK?

It's not funny.

Hey, nobody died.

He died.

He deserved it.

The computer screen goes black, stays black.

Katrin walks at night. Her survey smells of ozone and unraked leaves. The reproduction street lamps hiss. She sheds the flagstones, the Kentucky Blue Grass, the cast iron urns of sedum for alleys of big box stores. They are silent places, lit up like landing strips in sodium yellow haze, whole tarmacs of emptied parking lots. She studies the late-season moths, pitching half-heartedly at pole-top haloes. She looks for clues. What makes a life worth living? Worth taking?

The few cars that slow beside her leave her unrattled. Men ask her to get in. Some shout out the things they need, the way they will use her. She keeps walking.