ON FEBRUARY 20th, Michael McKiernan pulled a shotgun out of his dad’s pick-up truck and shot Tim O’Connor, Ricky Stanik, and Mitch Letendre in the parking lot of our high school. He just walked up and shot them point-blank. Tim and Ricky took it in the chest and were dead before they got to the hospital. Mitch got fucked up, but he was expected to be okay. The cops caught Michael in the woods within an hour and hauled him off. We got three days off school so we could all sit around and drink and reel. The population of our town nearly doubled overnight when the news crews showed up from all the major channels with their cameras and lights and well-coiffed reporters. It was the weirdest thing, seeing my decaying high school sagging in the background while Kim Chang from Channel 7 interviewed my third period French teacher. Was Michael a troubled boy? Oh yes, we were all worried about him. We were white kids shooting white kids, so the local media loved it. The talking heads spent days analyzing Michael’s long black hair and Iron Maiden T-shirts. Was America failing its youth?

The most fucked up part of it all? I knew the kid who did it, Michael. He was my next door neighbor. We grew up together. We were friends, or at least we had been in the past.

Classes resumed the following Thursday. My mother got up unusually early so she could see me off.

“You don’t have to go if you don’t want to,” she said, standing in the bathroom doorway while she watched me brush my teeth. In the dim light she looked ancient. “If you need more time to cope…”

I’d been there, at the parking lot that night. A lot of the juniors had. After some great basketball victory, the team had returned to the school with a bunch of beer and started a bonfire. Word got around, and more and more kids showed up, until it was a party right there in the parking lot. There was nothing else to do on a Friday in our shitty town, so even David and I stopped by to check it out. We didn’t stay long, since the jocks welcomed us by pelting us with beer cans, and we were just getting back into David’s truck when we heard the gunshots and everyone started running.

I spat into the sink and wiped my mouth. “Staying home would be even worse. And I told David I’d go. I can’t ditch him.”

Mom nodded and chewed on her lip. “I have to work pretty late tonight, but you have my work number, right? If you feel at all like you can’t deal with it, please call me, okay?”

I combed my lank blond hair with my fingers. My hair was still wet from showering, and if the heat in the bus was broken again, it’d freeze. But Ricky, one of the dead kids, had stolen my hat last week.

“I’ll be fine,” I said, not meeting her eyes in the mirror.

“I still can’t believe it,” she sighed. “I can’t believe he did that. I knew he was troubled, but I never imagined he could do something so horrible. God, it breaks my heart. The whole time you were growing up, he was your little buddy, always following you around like a shadow. How many times did I make hot cocoa and mac-and-cheese for you two?”

My stomach lurched. “I gotta go, I don’t want to miss the bus,” I mumbled.

Mom wrapped me in a quick hug. I flinched, my whole skinny body tense. She meant well, she always did, she was a working poor Madonna—but any more of this and I was going to lose my nerve. I had to steel myself for school on a normal day; today I had to be like ice, cold, frozen, unfeeling. It wasn’t too much of a stretch. I’d felt frozen for days, numb with shock.

I awkwardly pulled away and gathered my coat and backpack.

“Be careful, Bryce,” Mum said. “Remember, you can call me.”

“Yeah, okay,” I said. I gave her a peck on the cheek without looking at her and rushed out the door.

I stood at the bus stop at the end of the road for five or ten minutes, rubbing my hands together and trying to stamp some feeling back into my boots. It was like Siberia out here, the dirt road frozen solid, any signs of civilization swallowed up by the sea of black skeletal trees. Waiting here in the dark every morning with just the wind and the ice, I sometimes felt like I was the only person left in the whole world. The silence, the cold, and the pre-dawn exhaustion messed with my head. When the bus ran late, my heart would start pounding. I’d start to doubt everything—maybe the bus would never come, maybe there was no bus, maybe I really was the only person left, maybe the whole world had frozen over and I was the only survivor. There was no solace in these dead trees, just the horrifying feeling that I was alone at the edge of the universe. This town was so empty and quiet that I was sad to see the camera crews pack up and leave. It had been nice to feel connected to the outside world, to know that someone had noticed us sad, shivering refugees, even for just a few days.

Since we were neighbors, Michael and I had stood here together many, many mornings. It had always been an extraordinary relief to find another living thing out here, another refugee, even though Michael could be mean and unpredictable. Sometimes he’d tip some of his dad’s liquor into his coffee, and we’d wordlessly pass the travel mug back and forth while we waited, stamping our feet and just trying to survive.