Charlie Quinn walked through the darkened halls of Pikeville middle school with a gnawing sense of trepidation. This wasn’t an early morning walk of shame. This was a walk of deeply held regret. Fitting, since the first time she’d had sex with a boy she shouldn’t have had sex with was inside this very building. The gymnasium, to be exact, which just went to show that her father had been right about the perils of a late curfew.
She gripped the cell phone in her hand as she turned a corner. The wrong boy. The wrong man. The wrong phone. The wrong way because she didn’t know where the hell she was going. Charlie turned around and retraced her steps. Everything in this stupid building looked familiar, but nothing was where she remembered it was supposed to be.
She took a left and found herself standing outside the front office. Empty chairs were waiting for the bad students who would be sent to the principal. The plastic seats looked similar to the ones in which Charlie had whiled away her early years. Talking back. Mouthing off. Arguing with teachers, fellow students, inanimate objects. Her adult self would’ve slapped her teenage self for being such a pain in the ass.
She cupped her hand to the window and peered inside the dark office. Finally, something that looked how it was supposed to look. The high counter where Mrs. Jenkins, the school secretary, had held court. Pennants drooping from the water-stained ceiling. Student artwork taped to the walls. A lone light was on in the back. Charlie wasn’t about to ask Principal Pinkman for directions to her booty call. Not that this was a booty call. It was more of a “Hey, girl, you picked up the wrong iPhone after I nailed you in my truck at Shady Ray’s last night” call.
There was no point in Charlie asking herself what she had been thinking, because you didn’t go to a bar named Shady Ray’s to think.
The phone in her hand rang. Charlie saw the unfamiliar screen saver of a German Shepherd with a Kong toy in its mouth. The caller ID read SCHOOL.
She answered, “Yes?”
“Where are you?” He sounded tense, and she thought of all the hidden dangers that came from screwing a stranger she’d met in a bar: incurable venereal diseases, a jealous wife, a murderous baby mama, an obnoxious Alabama affiliation.
She said, “I’m in front of Pink’s office.”
“Turn around and take your second right.”
“Yep.” Charlie ended the call. She felt herself wanting to puzzle out his tone of voice, but then she told herself that it didn’t matter because she was never going to see him again.
She walked back the way she’d come, her sneakers squeaking on the waxed floor as she made her way down the dark hallway. She heard a snap behind her. The lights had come on in the front office. A hunched old woman who looked suspiciously like the ghost of Mrs. Jenkins shuffled her way behind the counter. Somewhere in the distance, heavy metal doors opened and closed. The beep-whir of the metal detectors swirled into her ears. Someone jangled a set of keys.
The air seemed to contract with each new sound, as if the school was bracing itself for the morning onslaught. Charlie looked at the large clock on the wall. If the schedule was still the same, the first homeroom bell would ring soon, and the kids who had been dropped off early and warehoused in the cafeteria would flood the building.
Charlie had been one of those kids. For a long time, whenever she thought of her father, her mind conjured up the scene of his arm leaning out of the Chevette’s window, freshly lit cigarette between his fingers, as he pulled out of the school parking lot.
She stopped walking.
The room numbers finally caught her attention, and she knew immediately where she was. Charlie touched her fingers to a closed wooden door. Room three, her safe haven. Ms. Beavers had retired eons ago, but the old woman’s voice echoed in Charlie’s ears: “They’ll only get your goat if you show them where you keep your hay.”
Charlie still didn’t know what that meant, exactly. You could extrapolate that it had something to do with the extended Culpepper clan, who had bullied Charlie relentlessly when she’d finally returned to school.
Or, you could take it that, as a girls’ basketball coach named Etta Beavers, the teacher knew what it felt like to be taunted.
There was no one who could give Charlie advice on how to handle the present situation. For the first time since college, she’d had a one-night stand. Or a one-night sit, if it boiled down to the exact position. Charlie wasn’t the type of person who did that sort of thing. She didn’t go to bars. She didn’t drink to excess. She didn’t really make hugely regrettable mistakes. At least not until recently.
Her life had started to unspool back in August of last year. Charlie had spent almost every waking hour since then raveling out mistake after mistake. Apparently, the new month of May was not going to see any improvement. The blunders were now starting before she even got out of bed. This morning, she’d been wide awake on her back, staring up at the ceiling, trying to convince herself that what had happened last night had not happened at all when an unfamiliar ringtone had come from her purse.
She had answered because wrapping the phone in aluminum foil, throwing it into the dumpster behind her office and buying a new phone that would restore from her old phone backup did not occur to her until after she had said hello.
The short conversation that followed was of the kind you would expect between two total strangers: Hello, person whose name I must have asked for but now can’t recall. I believe I have your phone.
Charlie had offered to meet the man at his work because she didn’t want him to know where she lived. Or worked. Or what kind of car she drove. Between his pickup truck and his admittedly exquisite body, she’d thought he’d tell her he was a mechanic or a farmer. Then he’d said that he was a teacher and she’d instantly flashed up a Dead Poets Society kind of thing. Then he’d said he taught middle school and she’d jumped to the unfounded conclusion that he was a pedophile.
“Here.” He stood outside an open door at the far end of the hall.
As if on cue, the overhead fluorescents popped on, bathing Charlie in the most unflattering light possible. She instantly regretted her choice of ratty jeans and a faded, long-sleeved Duke Blue Devils basketball T-shirt.
“Good Lord God,” Charlie muttered. No such problems at the end of the hall.
Mr. I-Can’t-Remember-Your-Name was even more attractive than she remembered. The standard button-down-with-khakis uniform of a middle-school teacher couldn’t hide the fact that he had muscles in places that men in their forties had generally replaced with beer and fried meat. His scraggly beard was more of a five o’clock shadow. The gray at his temples gave him a wizened air of mystery. He had one of those dimples in his chin that you could use to open a bottle.
This was not the type of man Charlie dated. This was the exact type of man that she studiously avoided. He felt too coiled, too strong, too unknowable. It was like playing with a loaded gun.
“This is me.” He pointed to the bulletin board outside his room. Small handprints were traced onto white butcher paper. Purple cut-out letters read MR. HUCKLEBERRY.
“Huckleberry?” Charlie asked.
“It’s Huckabee, actually.” He held out his hand. “Huck.”
Charlie shook his hand, too late realizing that he was asking for his iPhone. “Sorry.” She handed him the phone.
He gave her a crooked smile that had probably sent many a young girl into puberty. “Yours is in here.”
Charlie followed him into the classroom. The walls were adorned with maps, which made sense because he was apparently a history teacher. At least if you believed the sign that said MR. HUCKLEBERRY LOVES WORLD HISTORY.
She said, “I may be a little sketchy on last night, but I thought you said you were a Marine?”
“Not anymore, but it sounds sexier than middle-school teacher.” He gave a self-deprecating laugh. “Joined up when I was seventeen, took my retirement six years ago.” He leaned against his desk. “I was looking for a way to keep serving, so I got my master’s on a GI bill and here we are.”
“I bet you get a lot of tear-stained cards on Valentine’s Day.” Charlie would’ve failed history every single day of her life if her teacher had looked like Mr. Huckleberry.
He asked, “Do you have kids?”
“Not that I know of.” Charlie didn’t return the question. She assumed that someone with kids wouldn’t use a photo of his dog as his screen saver. “You married?”
He shook his head. “Didn’t suit me.”
“It suited me.” She explained, “We’ve been officially separated for nine months.”
“Did you cheat on him?”
“You’d think so, but no.” Charlie ran her finger along the books on the shelf by his desk. Homer. Euripides. Voltaire. Brontë. “You don’t strike me as the Wuthering Heights type.”
He grinned. “Not much talking in the truck.”
Charlie started to return the grin, but regret pulled down the corners of her mouth. In some ways, this easy, flirty banter felt like more of a transgression than the physical act of sex. She bantered with her husband. She asked inane questions of her husband.
And last night, for the first time in her married life, she had cheated on her husband.
Huck seemed to sense her mood shift. “It’s obviously none of my business, but he’s nuts for letting you go.”
“I’m a lot of work.” Charlie studied one of the maps. There were blue pins in most of Europe and some of the Middle East. “You go to all of these places?”
He nodded, but didn’t elaborate.
“Marines,” she said. “Were you a Navy SEAL?”
“Marines can be SEALs but not all SEALs are Marines.”
Charlie was about to tell him that he hadn’t answered the question, but Huck spoke first.
“Your phone started ringing at o’dark thirty.”
Her heart flipped in her chest. “You didn’t answer?”
“Nah, it’s much more fun trying to figure you out from your caller ID.” He pushed himself up on the desk. “B2 called around five this morning. I’m assuming that’s your hook-up at the vitamin shop.”
Charlie’s heart flipped again. “That’s Riboflavin, my spin-class instructor.”
He narrowed his eyes, but he didn’t push her. “The next call came at approximately five fifteen, someone who showed up as Daddy, who I deduce by the lack of the word ‘sugar’ in front of the name is your father.”
She nodded, even as her mother’s voice silently stressed that it was whom. “Any other clues?”
He pretended to stroke a long beard. “Beginning around five thirty, you got a series of calls from the county jail. At least six, spaced out about five minutes apart.”
“You got me, Nancy Drew.” Charlie held up her hands in surrender. “I’m a drug trafficker. Some of my mules got picked up over the weekend.”
He laughed. “I’m halfway believing you.”
“I’m a defense lawyer,” she admitted. “Usually people are more receptive to drug trafficker.”
Huck stopped laughing. His eyes narrowed again, but the playfulness had evaporated. “What’s your name?”
“Charlie Quinn.”
She could’ve sworn he flinched.
She asked, “Is there a problem?”
His jaw was clenched so hard the bone jutted out. “That’s not the name on your credit card.”
Charlie paused, because there was a lot wrong with that statement. “That’s my married name. Why were you looking at my credit card?”
“I wasn’t looking. I glanced at it when you put it down on the bar.” He stood up from the desk. “I should get ready for school.”
“Was it something I said?” She was trying to make a joke out of it, because of course it was something she’d said. “Look everybody hates lawyers until they need one.”
“I grew up in Pikeville.”
“You’re saying that like it’s an explanation.”
He opened and closed the desk drawers. “Homeroom’s about to start. I need to do my first-period prep.”
Charlie crossed her arms. This wasn’t the first time she’d had this conversation with long-time Pikeville residents. “There’s two reasons for you to be acting like you’re acting.”
He ignored her, opening and closing another drawer.
She counted out the possibilities on her fingers. “Either you hate my father, which is okay, because a lot of people hate him, or—” She held up her finger for the more likely excuse, the one that had put a target on Charlie’s back twenty-eight years ago when she’d returned to school, the one that still got her nasty looks in town from the people who supported the extended, inbred Culpepper clan. “You think I’m a spoiled little bitch who helped frame Zachariah Culpepper and his innocent baby brother so my dad could get his hands on some pissant life insurance policy and their shitty little trailer. Which he never did, by the way. He could’ve sued them for the twenty grand they owed in legal bills, but he didn’t. Not to mention I could pick those fuckers out of a line-up with my eyes closed.”
He was shaking his head before she even finished. “None of those things.”
“Really?” She had pegged him for a Culpepper truther when he’d told her that he’d grown up in Pikeville.
On the other hand, Charlie could see a career-Marine hating Rusty’s kind of lawyering right up until that Marine got caught with a little too much Oxy or a lot too much hooker. As her father always said, a Democrat is a Republican who’s been through the criminal justice system.
She told Huck, “Look, I love my dad, but I don’t practice the same kind of law that he does. Half my caseload is in juvenile court, the other half is in drug court. I work with stupid people who do stupid things, who need a lawyer to keep the prosecutor from overcharging them.” She held out her hands in a shrug. “I just level the playing field.”
Huck glared at her. His initial anger had escalated to furious in the blink of an eye. “I want you to leave my room. Right now.”
His hard tone made Charlie take a step back. For the first time, it occurred to her that no one knew she was at the school and that Mr. Huckleberry could probably break her neck with one hand.
“Fine.” She snatched her phone off his desk and started toward the door. Even as Charlie was telling herself she should shut up and go, she swung back around. “What did my father ever do to you?”
Huck didn’t answer. He was sitting at his desk, head bent over a stack of papers, red ink pen in hand.
Charlie waited.
He tapped the pen on his desk, a drumbeat of a dismissal.
She was about to tell him where to stick the pen when she heard a loud crack echo down the hallway.
Three more cracks followed in quick succession.
Not a car backfiring.
Not fireworks.
A person who has been up close when a gun is fired into another human being never mistakes the sound of a gunshot for something else.
Charlie was yanked down to the floor. Huck threw her behind a filing cabinet, shielding her body with his own.
He said something—she saw his mouth move—but the only sound she could hear was the gunshots echoing inside her head. Four shots, each a distinctive, terrifying echo to the past. Just like before, her mouth went dry. Just like before, her heart stopped beating. Her throat closed. Her vision tunneled. Everything looked small, narrowed to a single, tiny point.
Huck’s voice rushed back in. “Active shooter at the middle school,” he whispered calmly into his phone. “Sounds like he’s near the principal’s—”
Another crack.
Another bullet fired.
Then another.
Then the homeroom bell rang.
“Jesus,” Huck said. “There’s at least fifty kids in the cafeteria. I have to—”
A blood-curdling scream broke off the rest of his words.
“Help!” a woman yelled. “Please, help us!”
Charlie blinked.
Gamma’s chest exploding.
She blinked again.
Blood misting from Sam’s head.
Charlie, run!
She was out the door before Huck could stop her. Her legs pistoned. Her heart pounded. Her sneakers gripped the waxy floor but in her mind, she could feel the earth moving against her bare feet, tree limbs slicing into her face, fear cinching a length of barbed wire around her chest.
“Help us!” the woman cried. “Please!”
Huck caught up with Charlie as she rounded the corner. He was nothing more than a blur as her vision tunneled again, this time to the three people at the end of the hallway.
A man’s feet pointed up at the ceiling.
Behind him, to his right, a smaller set of feet splayed out.
Pink shoes. White stars on the soles. Lights that would flash when she walked.
An older woman knelt beside the little girl rocking back and forth, wailing.
Charlie wanted to wail, too.
Blood had sprayed the plastic chairs outside the office, splattered onto the walls and ceiling, jetted onto the floors.
There was a familiarity to the carnage that spread a numbness through Charlie’s body. She slowed to a jog, then a brisk walk. She had seen this before. She knew that you could put it all in a little box and close it up later, that you could go on with your life if you didn’t sleep too much, didn’t breathe too much, didn’t live too much so that death came back and snatched you away for the taking.
Somewhere, a set of doors banged open. Loud footsteps clumped through the hallways. Voices were raised. Screaming. Crying. Words were being shouted, but they were unintelligible to Charlie. She was underwater. Her body moved slowly, arms and legs floating against an exaggerated gravity. Her brain silently cataloged all of the things that she did not want to see.
Mr. Pinkman was on his back. His blue tie was tossed over his shoulder. Blood mushroomed from the center of his white dress shirt. The left side of his head was open, skin hanging like tattered paper around the white of his skull. There was a deep, black hole where his right eye should have been.
Mrs. Pinkman was not beside her husband. She was the screaming woman who had suddenly stopped screaming. She was cradling the child’s head in her lap, holding a pastel blue sweater to the girl’s neck. The bullet had ripped open something vital. Mrs. Pinkman’s hands were bright red. Blood had turned the diamond on her wedding ring the color of a cherry pit.
Charlie’s knees gave out.
She was on the floor beside the girl.
She was seeing herself lying on the ground in the forest.
Twelve? Thirteen?
Spindly little legs. Short black hair like Gamma. Long eyelashes like Sam.
“Help,” Mrs. Pinkman whispered, her voice hoarse. “Please.”
Charlie reached out her hands, not knowing where to put them. The little girl’s eyes rolled up, then just as suddenly, she focused on Charlie.
“It’s okay,” Charlie told her. “You’ll be okay.”
“Go before this lamb, oh Lord,” Mrs. Pinkman prayed. “Be not far from her. Make haste to help her.”
You won’t die, Charlie’s brain begged. You won’t surrender. You will graduate high school. You will go to college. You will get married. You will not leave a gaping hole in your family where your love used to be.
“Make haste to guide me, oh Lord my salvation.”
“Look at me,” Charlie told the girl. “You’re going to be fine.”
The girl was not going to be fine.
Her eyelids began to flutter. Her blue-tinged lips parted. Tiny teeth. White gums. The light pink tip of her tongue.
Slowly, the color began to drain from her face. Charlie was reminded of the way winter came down the mountain, the festive red and orange and yellow leaves turning umber, then brown, then starting to fall, so that by the time the cold reached its icy fingers into the foothills outside of town, everything was dead.
“Oh God,” Mrs. Pinkman sobbed. “Little angel. Poor little angel.”
Charlie couldn’t remember taking the child’s hand, but there were her little fingers caught between Charlie’s bigger ones. So small and cold, like a lost glove on the playground. Charlie watched the fingers slowly release until the girl’s hand fell slack to the floor.
Gone.
“Code Black!”
Charlie jerked at the sound.
“Code Black!” A cop was running up the hallway. He had his radio in one hand, a shotgun in the other. Panic cracked his voice. “Get to the school! Get to the school!”
For a brief second, the man made eye contact with Charlie. There was a spark of recognition, and then he saw the body of the dead child. Horror, then grief collapsed his features. The toe of his shoe caught a streak of blood. His feet slipped out from underneath him. He fell hard to the ground. His breath oofed out of his open mouth. The shotgun flew from his hand and skittered across the floor.
Charlie looked down at her own hand, the one that had held the child’s. She rubbed together her fingers. The blood was sticky, not like Gamma’s, which had felt slick like oil.
Bright white bone. Pieces of heart and lung. Cords of tendon and arteries and veins and life spilling out of her gaping wounds.
She remembered going back to the farmhouse after it was all over. Rusty had hired someone to clean, but they hadn’t done a thorough job. Months later, Charlie was looking for a bowl at the back of one of the cabinets and she’d found a piece of Gamma’s tooth.
“Don’t!” Huck yelled.
Charlie looked up, shocked by what she saw. What she had missed. What at first she couldn’t comprehend even though it was taking place less than fifty feet in front of her.
A teenage girl was sitting on the floor, her back to the lockers. Charlie’s brain flashed up an image from before, the girl sneaking into the edge of her tunnel vision as Charlie ran up the hallway toward the carnage. Charlie had instantly recognized the girl’s type: black clothes, black eyeliner. A Goth. No blood. Round face showing shock, not pain. She’s okay, Charlie had thought, running past her to reach Mrs. Pinkman, to reach the child. But the Goth girl wasn’t okay.
She was the shooter.
She had a revolver in her hand. Instead of picking off more victims, she was pointing the gun at her own chest.
“Put it down!” The cop was standing a few yards away, his shotgun jammed into his shoulder. Terror informed his every movement, from the way he was bouncing on the balls of his feet to the death grip he had on the weapon. “I said put it the fuck down!”
“She will.” Huck knelt with his back to the girl, shielding her. His hands were up. His voice was steady. “It’s okay, Officer. Let’s stay calm here.”
“Get out of my way!” The cop wasn’t calm. He was amped up, ready to pull the trigger the moment he got a clean shot. “Get the fuck out of my way!”
“Her name is Kelly,” Huck said. “Kelly Wilson.”
“Fucking move, asshole!”
Charlie didn’t watch the men. She watched the weapons.
Revolver and shotgun.
Shotgun and revolver.
She felt a wave pass through her body, the same kind of anesthesia that had numbed her so many times before.
“Move!” the cop screamed. He jerked the shotgun one way, then the other, trying to angle around Huck. “Get the fuck out of my way!”
“No.” Huck stayed on his knees, his back to Kelly. His hands stayed in the air. “Don’t do this, man. She’s only sixteen years old. You don’t want to kill a—”
“Move out of my way!” The cop’s fear was like an electric current crackling the air. “Get on the floor!”
“Stop it, man.” Huck moved with the shotgun, blocking him at every point. “She’s not trying to shoot anybody but herself.”
The girl’s mouth opened. Charlie couldn’t hear the words, but the cop obviously did.
“Did you hear that fucking bitch!” the cop screamed. “Let her do it or get the fuck out of my way!”
“Please,” Mrs. Pinkman whispered. Charlie had almost forgotten about the woman. The principal’s wife had her head in her hands, her eyes covered so she didn’t have to see. “Please stop.”
“Kelly.” Huck’s voice was calm. He reached his hand over his shoulder, palm up. “Kelly, give me the gun, sweetheart. You don’t have to do this.” He waited a few seconds, then said, “Kelly. Look at me.”
Slowly, the girl looked up. Her mouth was slack. Her eyes were glassy.
“Front hallway! Front hallway!” Another cop rushed past Charlie. He went down on one knee, sliding across the floor, two-handing his Glock and screaming, “Put it down!”
“Please, God,” Mrs. Pinkman sobbed into her hands. “Forgive this sin.”
“Kelly,” Huck said. “Hand me the gun. Nobody else has to get hurt.”
“Down!” the second cop boomed. Hysteria pitched his voice up too high. Charlie could see his finger tense on the trigger. “Get down on the ground!”
“Kelly.” Huck made his voice firm, like an angry parent. “I’m not asking anymore. Give me the gun right now.” He shook his open hand in the air for emphasis. “I mean it.”
Kelly Wilson began to nod. Charlie watched the teenager’s eyes gradually come back into focus as Huck’s words started to penetrate. Someone was telling her what to do, showing her a way out of this. Her shoulders relaxed. Her mouth closed. She blinked several times. Charlie intrinsically understood what the girl was going through. Time had stopped, and then someone, somehow, had found a key to wind it back up again.
Slowly, Kelly moved to put the revolver in Huck’s hand.
The cop pulled the trigger anyway.