PROLOGUE
NOLAN HIGH SCHOOL SENIOR PROM, FIFTEEN YEARS AGO
Dean, aged 18
The song keeps playing.
Underneath all the screaming and rattling gunfire. Under the vague sound of a fire alarm somewhere. While a room full of people I grew up with sob and beg and stampede and die and try to understand what’s happening, the music carries on like nothing’s happening.
The Power of LovefromBack to the Future. I watched that movie just the other day, or maybe last month, with my family. Family movie night, first Sunday of every month. Dad’s choice that time. I’ll never see Marty McFly again. Never see my family again. My seat in the living room will be empty from now on.
Is the DJ dead, too? Is that why it won’t stop?
I can’t think straight. I don’t know what to do. What the fuck do Ido?
Whoever’s doing this is diagonally across from the table I’m hiding under right now, across the other side of the gymnasium. Callie and the rest of the Prom committee spent ages hangingthe decorations here for tonight. He’s shot the mirror balls to shit, raining broken shards on everything like he’s adding insult to injury. The debris of streamers and balloons and eighties movie posters are sprayed with thick, livid blood.
I never realized blood has a smell, but it does, coppery and harsh and relentless.
And it’s all over me.
Somebody PLEASE help us…
My arms tighten around Callie, cradled in my arms. Well…what’s left of her.
A few minutes ago, or maybe a lifetime ago, we were just taking a break between dances for a glass of cheap, neon orange punch, and then, without any warning…
Her head…
It…burst.
Her blood splashed onto my face. Into my eyes.
Into mymouth.
I spit out as much as I could, but I can still taste it, and I can’t bear to think about that. I can’t make much sense of my own thoughts right now, slow and claggy as the run of my girlfriend’s blood, but I for sure want to avoid that one.
Her brains. They’re splattered all over my lap. I need to get them back into her head so she’ll be OK. So she can wake up, and I can get us out of here. But I’m not a brain surgeon, I’m just a dumb kid, I can’t…I can’t…
Callie’s dead.
But I was just dancing with her seconds ago…
She’s so still. So heavy and limp.
But people can…can live with brain injuries…maybe she…
She’s.Dead.
I hold onto her even tighter as I rock back and forth, unable to do anything else. My blood smeared eyes stare blankly at the paper tablecloth hanging over the edge of this table, my heartracing with horror. I feel like I’ll fall through the floor if I let her go, crash through six feet under. I’m headed there anyway.She can’t be dead. We’re supposed to go to Luke Dennings’ after party tonight. I hooked us up with one of his lockable bedrooms so we could finally make love for the first time, lose our V cards to each other the way we planned. She asked me to make sure we got one, so I did. We’ve been together since the end of sophomore year, and I love her. Iloveher. We were voted Cutest Couple in our yearbook, and we fucking are.
Wewere.
We’re going to Louisiana State after we graduate this summer. Going to separate colleges was unthinkable. Not even an option. She’s going to do Actuarial Science, and I’m doing Studio Art.
The pink corsage thing I got to match her pink dress is torn and limp and bloody on her wrist. She was one of the first he hit. She barely had time to register the sound of the first shots…
Maybe she didn’t suffer.Please, God, please don’t let her have suffered.
