INTO IT (a novel) Chapter 2: The Number
Our phones lit up with the news, one thousand of us moving through the halls and sitting in the classrooms of Lincoln High. We bent our heads over our screens like dowsers divining for answers. Something above thirty dead, and then the wounded. It was a fifth grader in Texas, a child shooter.
We pressed Refresh and the number of the dead rose.
A reporter said via satellite phone, “Taking you there.”
We floated through the halls, our motion slowed, the ambient noise hushed, our attention stabbed. We were in Illinois, but that didn’t seem true anymore. We existed where everything was happening, at an elementary school called Elmwood.
Refresh. Thirty-two dead.
We opened our lockers, forgetting what we wanted inside. We wondered, were we supposed to be scared? We looked over our shoulders and we saw ourselves looking back.
“What the fuck?” we said.
We said, “He’s so little.”
“No, he shot thirty-eight,” we said.
We ignored the period bells. We searched out our school’s TVs. We watched a helicopter shot circle a school surrounded by police cars, ambulances and fire engines. The boy’s name emerged. We typed it into the search boxes and got service errors. We wanted to be taken there, but something somewhere had crashed. Girls cried in their boyfriends’ arms. We looked at each other, needing to say something, even to the people we didn’t know, even to the people we didn’t like and weren’t liked by.
We answered the calls from our parents on the first ring to tell them we were all right. They told us the number shot, but it had already moved upward. One site said thirty-nine dead, a dozen more in critical condition.
We shut our lockers and thought, copycat. We believed that some of us could be into it.
Refresh. The Texas boy’s eyes tunneled out of a yearbook photo, Facebook albums of family snapshots, like it had always been in him now. And then every piece of him was in us.
Someone broke the glass box and pulled the fire-alarm lever. The school froze, then convulsed. We made a great rush for the exits. The doorways were immediately swamped. We pushed into each other, shoulder-to-shoulder, wedged ourselves between the doors. Those of us in front tripped and yelled in blooming panic. Those of us behind shoved, stumbled and fell onto our backs, reached out and grabbed our clothing, our hair, hooked our open mouths. We shoved, stepped over each other’s bodies, dragged ourselves down, trying to get outside our school to the safety of the late August heat and glare.