“Do you know anything else, Eve?” Alexa glanced at the girl’s hands, but Eve was the daughter of old farmers. They may have tolerated her alliance with the skeezer crowd, but they were too thrifty to allow their daughter a cell phone. Eve had neither called nor been called in the frantic minutes since the school was evacuated.
“Someone said a name?” Eve squirmed like an insect impaled on a pin, equal parts misery and defiance. The poor girl constantly sought attention yet was mortified once she got it.
“A name?”
“Of the person who’s, like, shot.”
Alexa waited.
“They said-” Eve leaned even closer to Alexa and whispered-“Kat Hartigan.”
“Kat? Are you sure?”
“It’s what she said.”
“Who, Eve?” But Alexa knew that even if Eve had any more concrete information, she wouldn’t share it, not under the watchful eyes of her friends.
“Someone? I don’t know. I didn’t see her? I only, like, heard as I was walking out.” Eve lifted up her hair and let it drop back on her neck, then disappeared into her group, blending in with them so thoroughly that she might have been a chameleon, taking on the protective coloration of a tree or a leaf.
And now that Alexa had the name-Kat Hartigan-it suddenly seemed to be everywhere, on everyone’s lips. “Did you hear? It was Kat Hartigan.” “Shut up!” “No, seriously. Kat.” Kat. Kat. Kat.
The students and teachers shared the rumor with horror, shock, and just a little bit of smugness-the smugness born of knowing, the smugness born of being alive. All information was gossip, Alexa thought, even in the mouths of the best-intentioned people. As she told her students, gossip was not about content, and it was not necessarily false. Gossip was about self-importance, the thrill of knowing something and telling others. Those who passed along Kat Hartigan’s name were not simply sharing a fact. They were establishing that they were inside the loop and therefore important. Later she would try to impress this fact upon her students, use this as a learning tool-assuming the school year hadn’t just come to a premature end. It was hard to know what the school district would choose to do.
What was she doing, making lesson plans in her head, when a student might be wounded in the school, or even dead? It had to be a rumor, Alexa thought. Kat Hartigan didn’t have an enemy in the world. She was the school’s figurative and literal princess, crowned at the prom just two weeks ago. Many students envied her, but no one disliked her. She had the kind of gentle prettiness and self-deprecating manner that girls find tolerable and boys find preferable.
The police arrived, and now the school property was officially sealed off, with no one permitted to enter or leave. Media vans lined the street just beyond the school’s driveway, and a few parents stood along the road’s shoulder, craning their necks, gesturing at the students, some of whom ran back and forth, relaying Lord-knows-what information. Alexa felt bad for these parents and others, the ones gathering at the middle school. Of course, many of them would have spoken to their children by now, thanks to the omnipresent cell phones. Even those who did not have phones, girls such as Eve Muhly, could find a way to get word to their parents, assuming that they understood how worried their parents would be. It was all too possible for teenagers to forget that the news of a shooting would scare their parents. Teenagers took their immortality for granted.
And it was still possible, wasn’t it, that everything would be okay? That Kat Hartigan would walk out of the school, tossing her hair and laughing in her apologetic way, embarrassed to have been the focus of so much attention, to have caused any interruption to the school day. Maybe it was a senior prank, a kind of emotional vandalism that Barbara Paulson hadn’t thought to outlaw. The official news was not bad, not yet. Nothing had been established for the record. Alexa held to that hope even as the Shock Trauma helicopter came and went, even as an ambulance drove across the grass and back again, then left the school parking lot with its lights flashing. These were vehicles for survivors, for those who could be saved.
Then the coroner’s car arrived, slow and deliberate. A man and woman ambled across the grass, and while their gait was not slow, there was no urgency to their movements. Kat, the voices began again. Kat. It’s Kat. Eve Muhly caught Alexa’s eye and made an “I told you so” face. Alexa summoned her with a stern “I’m not kidding this time” wave.
“Who did this?”
Eve shrugged. “I haven’t heard anything about that.”
“Eve.”
“Everyone’s saying Josie Patel must have been there, because she’s so far up Kat’s butt the only time she ever gets out is in the bathroom.” She waited to see if Alexa would appreciate this bit of schoolhouse wit. “But I don’t know for sure.”
“Still, you must have heard something more.” Alexa tried to pack a lot of weight behind those words, letting Eve know that she believed Eve was, if not an eyewitness, then someone who had seen or heard more than she was letting on. “Isn’t there anything else you can tell me, Eve?”
Eve took on an air of injured innocence. “Why, Ms. Cunningham, you’re always saying we shouldn’t talk about things unless we know them firsthand or have talked to someone who has firsthand information.”
Alexa let her go again. An ambulance, a helicopter, a gurney. She thought of three families and the news that awaited them. The parents of the student in the ambulance were the luckiest-the injuries must not be too bad if the police had decided the student could make the trip along north county’s congested roads. The helicopter was potentially bad, proof of life-threatening injuries, but at least those parents could hope for a good outcome. And everywhere else in Glendale, parents would be given the gift of learning that their dread was groundless, that their children were alive and well.
Only one set of parents wouldn’t be let off the hook. Alexa had a mental image of these parents, alone in the middle-school cafeteria, seeing family after family reunited, watching the door nervously to see when their child would be returned to them.
But surely Barbara would get to the parents of the dead child as quickly as possible, would not prolong this agony of wondering. Alexa could only hope that Barbara would manage to express herself warmly and openly, eschewing her usual bureaucrat-speak. Not a school shooting but a shooting at a school. What an utterly strange distinction to make in the midst of a crisis. She might as well have said, Not a bank robbery but a robbery at the bank. It was as if Barbara wanted to establish that Glendale High School could not be to blame for what had happened there, that it was as much a victim of circumstance as whatever students had been claimed by today’s events.
Alexa glanced back at the building. It looked smug to her, as if it knew in what low esteem it was held and was happy for this moment of revenge against those who had reviled it.
3
When Baltimore County began training its police officers in the new response protocol for school shootings-“The latest trend, if you please,” as Sergeant Harold Lenhardt liked to say-Lenhardt knew he could never follow it to the letter. Not that the policy wasn’t sound, jokes about trends aside. Police departments across the country were all doing the same thing, under various names, abandoning the SWAT model that had proved so disastrous at Columbine. Some places called it homicide-in-progress. In Baltimore County they preferred to define it by the response, First-Four-In. This meant that the first four responding officers, no matter their rank, no matter their normal assignments, went in together, weapons drawn. The idea was to get to the shooter as quickly as possible, limiting the scope of casualties. Step over the dead, step over the wounded, the officers were told. Just stop the kid and contain the damage as soon as you can.