Bang

  We stop for an early dinner near campus at Five Guys and spend a couple of hours talking everything through. Sawyer tells me the entire vision one more time, using the map to point out where he thinks things are. I borrow his phone to check the weather, but it still calls for sunny skies tomorrow.

  “Question,” I say. “In the vision, when you see the, uh, girl,” I say, looking around to see if anybody can hear me, “do you see other students around? Like, do you get a broad view of the quad?”

  “No other students, no broad view. Just the sky and tree, then the grass and pavement and little stop sign. We zoom in to the building, then out to see the back of the girl’s body, and then we’re in the classroom.”

  I look more closely at the map, seeing the individual buildings labeled. “Do you think the music building is in the main quad?”

  “That’s my guess.”

  I frown and start googling the names of the buildings around the Snell-Hitchcock Halls. “These are mostly sciencey. Like labs and stuff.” I keep going. “Cobb. That’s the building with the ivy that we thought the vision was focusing on the other day, right?”

  “Yeah.” He’s got his laptop out and is searching too.

  “Here,” I say. “Music. It’s this one next to Cobb. Goodspeed Hall. Offices, music classrooms, and practice rooms all on the bottom four floors. Practice rooms open seven days a week.”

  “Sweet.” After a minute, Sawyer looks up. “Is Trey coming?”

  “Oh, crap,” I say. “Yeah. Does he need to? Are you sure it’s tomorrow?”

  “It’s a classroom, Jules. It’ll be tomorrow.”

  “Okay, well, that’s probably better timing. . . . ” I whip out my phone and call Trey.

  He answers and says in a curt voice, “Not now. I’ll call you later.”

  “Oh,” I say, but he’s already hung up. I look at Sawyer. “He’s handling the Rowan thing.” I drum my fingers on the table, suddenly nervous about that. She should have called me by now. Hours ago, in fact. I call her cell phone.

  “Are you alive?” I almost yell when she answers.

  “Shit,” she says. “I forgot, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I figured you knew I made it since Mom’s been screaming at me on the phone for the last two hours.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not at home. How’s it going?”

  “Good. I think Trey has them settled down enough not to call the cops, and poor Charlie here is kind of pissed at me for doing this without them knowing.”

  I hadn’t thought of that. “Ack. Do his parents know?”

  “Not yet. Hopefully not ever.” She hesitates and I hear her talking to someone. “I gotta go, Jules. Love you.”

  “Love you, too.”

  “And, Jules?”

  “Yeah?”

  But she doesn’t say anything, and I figure one of us hit a dead spot or she’s got to answer another call from our parents. I bite my lip and hang up. And then I look at Sawyer. “I think I’d better head home.”

  He smiles. “Yeah, you definitely should. Poor Trey.” He gathers the wrappers and we get up. “I’m going to go to the campus and see if I can figure out the classroom situation.”

  I feel terrible leaving him here alone. “Are you sure you’re cool with that?”

  “Hundred percent.”

  I glance at my watch. There’s a bus in twenty-three minutes. “Okay. Call me whenever you find out anything. And when you’re on your way home. And when you get there. And if anything weird happens.”

  He grins. “I’ll call you every five minutes just to let you know I’m still alive.”

  I grin. “That sounds perfect.” I look outside, and it’s sprinkling again. The sky is a roiling cauldron of dark, angry clouds. We go outside and I reach up to kiss him, and then we split up, him to campus, me to the bus stop.

  As I stand there under the shelter of a nearby overhang, the rain pelting down, I grip my phone, waiting for it to ring. Waiting to hear from Sawyer. Or Trey. And I think about my parents, and Rowan, and how everything we’re doing feels so underhanded, and I kind of don’t like myself much these days. It’s way too easy to lie. I have an argument with myself, telling me that there’s no other way to go about it. That all the superheroes have to lie to hide their true identity, and this is a lot like that.

  “Except you’re not a superhero,” I mutter. “You’re a not-quite-seventeen-year-old kid with a contagious mental disorder.” I bounce on my toes, waiting for the stupid bus, which is most certainly late. “Come on. Somebody call. I’m anxious.” I pause, and then I say, “I’m so anxious I’m talking to myself.”

  Finally, ten minutes late, the bus pulls up just as the heavens open. I watch the people get off and prepare to make a mad dash for the bus door.

  And then I see her getting off the bus.

  It’s the girl. The girl with the gun.

  Thirty-Six

  Her black hat is pulled down over her eyes, and she looks like a guy. She’s alone. I think. She’s wearing dark-wash jeans and a black jacket, and she’s gripping a little backpack so hard her knuckles are white. And on the backpack is a button with a picture of a rainbow with a line through it. My heart thunks around in my chest and I almost can’t breathe. So it is the GSA they’re after? I’m so confused.

  The bus driver inches forward and cranes his neck at me. I shake my head and wave him off. And after a second, I follow the girl. I let her get a few dozen feet ahead of me and inch my phone from my pocket. I dial Sawyer’s number, but nothing happens. No signal. I try him again, and then I look at the phone battery. It’s not dead. But there’s a little notice in the corner in the tiniest print that says “minutes used: 250.”

  “Shit,” I mutter. And then it really hits me. My prepaid minutes are used up. I have no phone. No wonder neither of the boys has called me.

  I have no phone.

  I look up to make sure the girl is still in sight. At the corner where we’d turn to go to U of C, she stops and waits for traffic. I pretend to look in a shopwindow, and then when the light changes I begin to follow again. And I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know what she’s going to do. For all I know, she’s just doing one more stakeout of the campus in preparation for tomorrow. But the way she’s gripping that little bag tells me otherwise.

  Thankfully, the rain keeps her from looking around. She scurries along, head down, and when we cross a street, she’s joined by the blond guy who she was with the other day. They barely say two words to each other, and then they walk together but not very closely. And I realize this is really it.

  My hand finds my phone again and I try a few more times in case I’m wrong and the minutes haven’t expired, but it’s futile. My phone is useless. I want to run ahead, try to find Sawyer, but I don’t want them to see me, and I don’t want to lose track of them. I follow the two into the quad as the rain stops, the only drops now coming from the trees.

  “Where are you?” I mutter. The quad is huge, and there are a lot of buildings. And the campus is alive again with students running through the rain, transporting their suitcases, bags, and backpacks back to their dorms. I want to go toward the hall we determined was the music building, but the two people in black go to the opposite corner of the quad toward the Hitchcock Hall dorm. I strain my eyes looking for Sawyer, but I don’t see him anywhere.

  My chest is tight. I hear a distant church bell chiming the hour as we near Hitchcock Hall. Eight bells. The two in black stop at the side of the big wooden door and stare at something as people dash in and out of the building. The guy looks panicked for a moment, but the girl shakes her head slightly and says something. I stay by the road, trying to look like I’m waiting for someone, trying to hide that I’m praying my brains out to whoever will listen that Sawyer is okay.

  The two stand there whispering for a minute, and then they come back toward me. I freeze, and then I pull a notebook from my backpack and rip a page out. I fumble for a pen and keep my head down as they pass by me, pretending to
write things down. And then I walk as fast as I can to the Hitchcock door to see what they were looking at.

  It’s the Gay-Straight Alliance flyer. But the green room meeting place is crossed out and instead it says, “Moved to Goodspeed 4th Fl!!”

  The blood pulses in my ears. That’s the music building. And suddenly everything I can remember from Sawyer’s vision is coming together and making sense. It’s all happening right now, and Sawyer doesn’t know. I look at the torn sheet of notebook paper in my hand, write, “Call 911—Goodspeed 4th Fl!” and take off after the shooters at full speed, shoving my paper into the hands of a surprised student as he enters the dorm.

  I race across the quad to Goodspeed, splashing through puddles, soaking wet, watching the shooters enter the music hall. When I reach the door I dash up the stairs to the fourth floor, trying to look casual, as others move through the short hallways, some carrying backpacks or musical instrument cases. And I don’t even care about the massive deaths right now. All I can think of is that I need to find Sawyer and get him out of here. We’re not ready. We can’t do this. We need to bail. Just call the cops, get the hell out of the way, and hope for the best.

  A few students wander the fourth floor, some of them peering at closed office doors or into classrooms, and I’m guessing they are looking for the same room I am. And then I spy the cute guy with the glasses who handed us the flyer yesterday. He’s down the hallway, standing in front of an open door, frowning at his watch. “Come on, people,” he says.

  He takes a look at my wet clothes and hair. “Now that’s dedication,” he says with a grin. “Hey—I remember you. Your boyfriend is inside.”

  My eyes bug out. “I—he—what?”

  His kind eyes crinkle. “Oops. Did I get that wrong? I thought you were holding hands the other day. I’m sorry.”

  “No, I mean . . . never mind. Thanks.” I push past him into the room and look around, spying the two shooters immediately at the front table. Sitting at the table behind them is Sawyer, whose normally olive complexion is alabaster now. He stares at me. I walk in like I don’t know him and go to the window.

  A minute later, he’s next to me. “What happened?” he whispers.

  “It’s now,” I say back.

  “No shit. You could have answered your phone!”

  “Ran out of minutes. Couldn’t call you either. Now what?”

  “Ohh,” he says. “Crap. I should have thought of that.” He glances over his shoulder. “I texted the tip hotline. Can’t exactly call.”

  “We can get out of here. There’s time.”

  Sawyer grips my arm. “No, we can’t. It’s changing. The vision. Us being here is changing it. Fewer gunshots, fewer bodies. Down to seven. We have to stay and try to stop it.”

  “But what if the bodies are us?”

  “Jules,” he says, and he grips my wrist. “Remember how it was with you. You have to trust me.” There’s no time for him to explain—the cute guy clears his throat loudly and announces that it’s well past eight. Sawyer gets a text message and responds quickly as we sit down at the table. I question him with my eyes. “Trey,” he mouths.

  My eyes widen, begging for more information. But Sawyer glances at the shooters and shakes his head. He puts his hands below the table and holds out nine fingers, then one, then one again.

  “Oh,” I breathe, relieved. Trey’s calling the cops. Everybody continues to make small talk except for the shooters, who sit there stone-faced.

  From the doorway, the cute guy asks the students to finish up their conversations. He looks down the hallway once more and closes the door. “Okay, everybody, settle. Sorry about the last-minute venue change—the green room was too noisy with everybody coming back from break with all their luggage and parents and junk.” He looks around the room and grins.

  “If you don’t know me, I’m Ben Galang, freshman, next year’s secretary of the alliance, and this is my first time organizing a charity event, so yeah. Help a guy out, will ya?” He laughs. A few people smile. “Okay, well. Welcome to the choir members, some of whom are already part of the GSA here at UC. It’s great to work with you all and to see some new faces.” He smiles at somebody on the other side of the room, at Sawyer and me, and at the shooters.

  I can’t smile back. I don’t dare to turn my head to see who else is in here. I’m freaking out. I can’t even focus on what this guy Ben is saying. All I can do is stare at the shooters in front of me, stare at the girl’s black bag, at the bulge on the blond guy’s hip, under his jacket. I glance at Sawyer and he’s sweating, watching the glass in the door, and I know from experience that, one, he’s watching that vision very closely and, two, all I can do is trust him and follow his lead, because he’s the only one who knows how this is all going down. And if I mess with it, it could change everything. I dare a quick glance around the room at the faces, all these faces that Sawyer has been seeing for weeks with bullet holes in them, but my mind can’t even record them—they are all a blur of one victim’s face.

  Sawyer’s elbow touches mine, and I look at him. He points to the clock above the door. “New scene,” he whispers. Does that mean he knows the time this will happen? He points to the table and mimics flipping it. Then he points to the girl and looks at me.

  I nod. He scratches his knee and looks at me again. I swallow hard and panic—I don’t know what that means. He points to their legs, his fingers shaking, and finally I understand what he’s trying to say. I nod again. And then he spreads his hand out on his thigh, five fingers, and before I know it he hides his thumb, and then his first finger, and I realize that he’s counting down, and this is happening in two, one . . .

  The shooter girl pulls a gun from her little black backpack, stands up, and whirls around, yelling, “All you fags to the back of the room!” The blond guy follows her lead, pulling his gun out and shoving their table out of the way, but at first nobody else in the room moves. Nobody understands what’s happening. They’re in shock.

  It all goes in slow motion. Sawyer and I flip our table, trying to give others something to hide behind. Ben, smile fading, turns to see what the commotion is all about. Sawyer springs forward from his chair, stays low, hops over the table, and tackles the blond guy at the back of the thighs, making his knees crumple. A shot rings out, hitting the ceiling light fixture. The whole row of lights goes out, leaving us in semi-darkness, and that wakes me from my frozen state. I dive from my seat and tackle the girl the same way Sawyer tackled the guy. She loses her balance and lands on my back as two more shots pierce the air and shatter my eardrums, along with a chorus of screams.

  “Run!” I yell from under the girl, pulling sound from the depths of my lungs. “Go! Get out! Run!” I hear tables and chairs scraping and crashing, people screaming, almost everyone running for the door as a few more shots ring out.

  Sawyer gets on top of the blond guy and starts pounding his wrist, trying to get him to let go of the gun, and it goes off again, but I can’t afford to look at what, or who, it hits. I struggle to get the girl off my back, rising quickly to my hands and knees to throw her off balance. I can feel her weight shift, and she teeters, grabbing my hair and yanking it, trying to hold on. I reach deep, finding some other inner strength, and try to buck her off me, digging my cast into the floor like a cane to push me up. The girl’s gun hits me in the head as she loses her grip on my hair and falls to the floor.

  I scramble aside and turn to look where she is. She kicks me in the face, and I see stars. As she gets to her feet she starts screaming over and over, “Die, you sick fags!”

  My cheek throbs. I try to grab her around the ankles, but all I get is her pant leg, which she rips from my grasp, taking parts of my fingernails with it. She stumbles off balance and kicks me again. Awkwardly I reel away from her kick, then try to catch her foot, but instead I trip over a chair and I’m back on the floor once again as she catches herself and stares at me like she hates me. I roll to my stomach and cover my face like a coward because I
think this has to be the end for me.

  I hear three gunshots and I don’t know if anybody’s hit. I freeze in place, cringing and crying, figuring she’d be shooting at me, but she isn’t. At least I don’t think so, anyway. When I dare to look, she’s grabbing Ben, who is stoically trying to drag a bloody person out of the room. The shooter girl shoves him, makes him turn around to face her, digs the gun into his forehead, and backs him up against the wall just as Sawyer and the blond guy, rolling on the floor, bump into me. I can hear Sawyer cussing, trying to stand but slipping on a smear of blood, twisting crazily and falling hard. With the momentum, Sawyer manages to extend his arm, slamming it down across the shooter’s chest.

  The blond guy’s gun goes flying. I get to my hands and knees and crawl after it, trying shakily to get to my feet, but the guy grabs me and yanks my legs out from under me, making me land hard next to him. I hoist myself up with my good hand, swing my cast around awkwardly to block his fist, and slam my knee into his groin before he can choke me. He gasps and shrivels up, his face telling me I nailed him just right, and I’m free. But my muscles are in shock and I can’t get them to obey me. I roll away, out of his reach, searching desperately for Sawyer.

  Sawyer’s got blood on his face and he staggers to his knees, crawling around desks and chairs and broken equipment, trying to get to the guy’s gun, while I refocus on the girl with the gun to Ben’s forehead as she screams in his face, and for the first time I feel like we have failed. I am helpless to save him. I know he’s about to die, and there’s nothing I can do. “No,” I whisper, and I can’t even hear the word come out because of the screaming. But Ben is silent, stiff, gun jabbed between his eyes, facing the girl and barely flinching. Something about his bravery gives me the weirdest sense of courage. I grab the edge of a table and stagger to my feet once more.

  Then the door bursts open. It hits the wall hard, the glass window shattering and sprinkling shards everywhere. The girl turns her head at the noise, and Ben—the new, desperate leader Ben—slams his fist into her gut and she doubles over. Her gun goes off. And just as Sawyer staggers over to grab the blond guy’s gun, I fling myself at the girl and start flailing my arms and legs, feeling like I’ve got no plan but nothing to lose. I kick the crap out of her arm that holds the gun, and I whack the shit out of her face with my cast, once, twice, three times, until she drops, and I kneel on her fucking head as she screams.