“Morgan’s gonna come to my play, right, Mom? She’s coming, right?”
I can tell my mom is scooping water into a big cup and pouring it over Ben’s head because I can hear him sputtering against the bubbles. He does that when they run down his face, too close to his mouth.
“She’ll try her best, Benjamin.”
“She better come.”
I sink into my pillow and scrub my fists against my eyelids. I try to picture myself at Ben’s play in six weeks. I want to go, but the idea seems absurd. It really does. He can never know that.
“Why was Morgan on the floor?” Ben asks.
“She had a long day.”
“I think she was tired.”
“Yeah, she probably was.”
“She should’ve gone to bed.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you think she’s sick?”
“She’s fine. She’ll be fine.”
*
The screen on my cell phone lights up after Ben is asleep and our room is dark.
Evan: What’s going on? Talk to me.
Me: Not now.
Evan: Seriously? What the hell, Morgan?
His annoyance shouts at me in the dark.
I delete his message.
I shut off the phone.
I shove it into the drawer of my nightstand.
I slam the drawer shut.
I roll over to face the wall.
I try to sleep.
I can’t.
Why does everyone always want to talk?
*
The day that everything happened, I had to talk to so many people. I had to talk to police officers and counselors. At first, we all ended up on the soggy grass of the football field. It was the emergency evacuation center for my school. So many of us were saturated from the pounding rain. Tents were haphazardly erected and umbrellas were handed out. Students huddled in clumps under tents or stood three to an umbrella. Obviously nobody expected a downpour when they thought up my school’s evacuation plan. Everything on the field was chaotic. Tears. Primal screams when bad news came. We all wanted to leave, but it was where we had to wait until we could be released to our parents. They had to check us off on a list. We had to be accounted for.
I borrowed a phone to call my mom and tell her I was okay. She was so relieved to hear my voice. She was standing across the street from my school with a bunch of other parents who were waiting for news. As soon as she heard about students arriving at the emergency room of the hospital where she worked, she’d raced to my school to find me.
At the field, we had to say where we’d been when everything happened. When I said I’d been in English class, I was put into a separate line. The language arts building line. We were the ones who had really seen things. They were going to question us one by one.
It was in this line that I finally found Sage. We crashed into each other and sobbed. She’d talked to Brianna and Chelsea. They’d gotten out okay. I was so glad to hear that, because I hadn’t been able to get ahold of them. So many people left their backpacks when they ran. So many people didn’t have their phones.
After I talked to a police officer on the field and he found out what I saw and where I hid, he wanted me to go to the police station. They needed to talk to me more in depth. It was getting late, so my mom arranged for Ben to go home with a friend from his after-school program so she could drive me downtown.
Once there, I sat at a table in an office and stared at a poster of the schedule for my school’s football team. It was orange and blue and had a picture of Neptune crashing through sea foam. He gripped a trident and stared back at me. We still had four games left in the season.
My mom sat at my side, pushing tissues into my fist and rubbing her knuckles in tiny circles across my back. I was finally dry. But the rain had made the blood spread out on my shirt, resulting in the most morbid-looking tie-dye job ever.
A pretty blond woman, who was tall like a professional basketball player, sat across from me, writing stuff down on a notepad. Kind of like Brenda, but not all the way like Brenda. A digital recorder was set up, too.
I had to give statements.
I had to say where I was sitting.
I had to say where I ran.
I had to say where I hid.
I had to say what I saw.
I didn’t tell them everything.
She wrote my words down and said thank you.
A counselor visited me last. He told me what I was feeling was normal. He said it was okay to feel angry or sad or any of the emotions I had and that right now I might not feel anything at all. He gave me a card with a phone number on it. He said I could call it twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. He said someone would always be there to talk to me no matter what. He said I should go home and eat. Then sleep. He said he’d check in with me in a few days. He did. I told him I was fine. It was a lie.