What she had done with Mr. Avalon on the sofa, the bedroom mattress, the floor of the shed, the backseat of the Cadillac, had made her wiring go wonky. Her body had started to come up with its own odd decisions; sometimes, after she came home from Mr. Avalon’s house, her hands reached instinctively for a cheese knife and pressed it into her thigh. Her stomach heaved at unpredictable times, so direly that she worried next time, in the middle of literature class, she wouldn’t make it to the bathroom.
Literature class, poor Oliver. She’d still often find him sitting there, pretending not to have waited for her. Sometimes, she’d catch Oliver stealing glimpses of her through the window of the theater room door. She hadn’t spoken with the boy in weeks. She wanted only to spare him from more hurt. In truth she thought little of Oliver at all. But then, one day, Oliver did that astonishing thing: he raised his hand in class and read his poem to everyone. That poem Oliver had made of their conversations, of the stars, of her silence toward him. Rebekkah thought it was beautiful, and so it was awful, the distance from the girl he imagined to the person she had become. She wanted only to disappear, to be the object of no one’s attention. She stayed at home for three days, wanting it all to stop, until her mother noticed and made her return. She tried to think of a way to tell Oliver to leave her alone. Of course, he didn’t understand. She felt she must have worn her secret on her skin, but she perceived anew how alone she was in it.
Or maybe not alone, not completely. Hector came back, just once more. She was at Mr. Avalon’s house. They were together on the couch, watching one of the Shirley Temple films he inflicted upon her. No knock at the door this time. Hector let himself in, careened into the living room on unsteady feet.
“What in God’s name—” But when Hector collapsed into an armchair, the thing he rested on his lap silenced Mr. Avalon’s protest.
“I’m not going to ask you again,” Hector said, his tough guy routine slurry and unconvincing, as he ran a quaking finger along the hilt of a sheathed hunting knife. “If you are so special, let’s hear you sing.” Even in the madness of her fear, some other Rebekkah, the one who had metamorphosed inside her, was relieved that the moment of crisis had at last arrived.
“Hector—” Mr. Avalon said.
“Sing,” Hector told Rebekkah. What could she do? She looked to Mr. Avalon, who nodded at her faintly. She put her hands on her knees. She opened her mouth, but no sound would come out.
“You’ll be nothing. Nothing. Just like me,” Hector said, as if something had been settled. He lifted himself from the chair, knelt clumsily to retrieve the weapon he’d dropped, but Mr. Avalon was faster. The ridiculous way Mr. Avalon waved around that knife, still in its fringed leather casing, was nearly funny. “If I see you again, I’m calling the police.”
Edwina snuffled up to this scene. “A dog,” Hector said. “Don’t tell me you even bought her a dog, too?”
“Her name is Edwina,” Rebekkah said.
Rebekkah scooped up Edwina, as if worried that Hector might abduct her. The boy’s eyes had gone smoky. He asked Mr. Avalon the question that Rebekkah had never asked. “Just tell me. How many of us have there been?”
“Please,” Mr. Avalon said. “Just leave.”
Hector turned to Rebekkah then, his eyes emphatic and wide. “The mistake,” Hector said, “is to hope. I’m sorry for you. I am.”
After that last visit from Hector, Rebekkah and Mr. Avalon tried to continue as before, but the spell was broken, the circuit blown. They hardly touched at all, or at least not in the ways they had. In the days that followed, Hector did not reappear, and Rebekkah just played her music for Mr. Avalon, his favorite songs and a few beloved country hits. “Jolene,” “Achy Breaky Heart,” “Devil Town,” “The Thunder Rolls,” “West Texas Waltz.”
The only time anyone saw the truth, it was the sad-eyed boy from her English class. It was Oliver’s face in the window, as Mr. Avalon hunched over her in a kitchen chair. Oliver was there and then he vanished. Had she just imagined him in the shapes the moonlight etched onto the glass?
And yet. The night of November fifteenth, the Homecoming Dance, and Oliver pulled her aside and told her he would tell someone. She begged him not to say anything; she wanted more than anything for him to say something. A boy from the Theater Club tugged her away, made her follow him to the classroom. Distantly, songs still played: “Baby Got Back,” “Push It,” “Kiss from a Rose.” As the other kids tuned their instruments, studied their lyrics, Rebekkah felt she was watching her bandmates from underwater. She was down there, at the bottom of her own dark sea, when she saw Hector Espina again, framed in the classroom door.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Stashed in the drawer of a desk, Jed kept a certain document, now worn down to the softness of cloth. He’d read it a thousand times. The page was a timeline he’d made, with the assistance of the official police report. The numbers were a torture, but the only containers for the horrors that still flashed through him: the ultrabright gymnasium lights thrown on, a chaos of teenage bodies and squad lights outside, a blind panic hurtling him back down the halls, redness spreading on the shining schoolhouse floors. Arms holding him back, a throat howling. His own.
9:06: Hector Espina enters the school carrying AR-15-style assault rifle.
9:08: Hector Espina enters theater classroom.
9:09: Hector Espina fires first round, striking Brad Rossening in the leg.
9:10–9:11: Twenty-two rounds fired, injuring Jonathan Strom, Brian Hadley, Anna Hoke, Jennifer Schmidt. Fatal shots to Keith Larsen, Vera Grass, Roy Lopez, and Reginald Avalon.
9:13: Hector Espina exits classroom. Hector finds Oliver in the hall. Fires three rounds, two striking the wall, one striking Oliver.
9:16: Ernesto Ruiz tackles Hector in the school atrium, takes Hector’s rifle. Hector escapes out the front doors.
9:20: From the atrium, Ernesto Ruiz hears sound of one more shot fired.
9:25: First police car arrives to find Hector’s body on the school’s front steps, handgun still in his hand.
“Nine thirteen,” Jed said aloud, so many times over the years, as if those numbers might bring him back to that instant. The torture, the appalling fact turning a decade old and as unbelievable as ever: that minute had already passed. Nine thirteen: Oliver, he could have screamed. Hector. He could have tackled the boy. Thrown his body over the weapon. Taken the shot. Killed him. Oliver! Too late: 9:13 passed to 9:14, passed to ten years. Jed had done nothing.