He glanced up. “I’ve been up to Sterling, and I’ve spoken to the investigators who are working hard, round the clock, to understand what happened yesterday. I’ve spent time with some of the families of the victims, and at the hospital with the brave survivors. Part of our past and part of our future disappeared in this tragedy,” the governor said as he looked solemnly into the cameras. “What we all need, now, is to focus on the future.”

It took Josie less than a morning to learn the magic words: when she wanted her mother to leave her alone, when she was sick of her mother watching her like a hawk, all she had to do was say that she needed a nap. Then, her mother would back off, completely unaware of the fact that her whole face relaxed the minute Josie let her off the hook, and that only then could Josie recognize her.

Upstairs, in her room, Josie sat in the dark with her shades drawn and her hands folded in her lap. It was broad daylight, but you’d never know it. People had figured out all sorts of ways to make things seem different than they truly were. A room could be turned into an artificial night. Botox transformed people’s faces into something they weren’t. TiVo let you think you could freeze time, or at least reorder it to your own liking. An arraignment at a courthouse fit like a Band-Aid over a wound that really needed a tourniquet.

Fumbling in the dark, Josie reached underneath the frame of her bed for the plastic bag she’d stashed-her supply of sleeping pills. She was no better than any of the other stupid people in this world who thought if they pretended hard enough, they could make it so. She’d thought that death could be an answer, because she was too immature to realize it was the biggest question of all.

Yesterday, she hadn’t known what patterns blood could make when it sprayed on a whitewashed wall. She hadn’t understood that life left a person’s lungs first, and their eyes last. She had pictured suicide as a final statement, a fuck you to the people who hadn’t understood how hard it was for her to be the Josie they wanted her to be. She’d somehow thought that if she killed herself, she’d be able to watch everyone else’s reaction; that she’d get the last laugh. Until yesterday, she hadn’t really understood. Dead was dead. When you died, you did not get to come back and see what you were missing. You didn’t get to apologize. You didn’t get a second chance.

Death wasn’t something you could control. In fact, it would always have the upper hand.

She ripped the plastic bag open into her palm and stuffed five of the pills into her mouth. She walked into the bathroom and ran the tap, stuck her head close to the faucet until the pills were swimming in the fishbowl of her bulging cheeks.

Swallow, she told herself.

But instead, Josie fell in front of the toilet and spit the pills out. She emptied the rest of the pills, still clutched in her fist. She flushed before she could think twice.

Her mother came upstairs because she heard the sobbing. It had seeped through the grout of the tile and the soffits and the plaster that made up the ceiling downstairs. It would, in fact, become as much of this household as the bricks and the mortar, although neither of the women realized it yet. Josie’s mother burst into the bedroom and sank down beside her daughter in the attached bathroom. “What can I do, baby?” she whispered, running her hands up and down Josie’s shoulders and back, as if the answer were a visible tattoo instead of a scar on the heart.

Yvette Harvey sat on a couch holding her daughter’s eighth-grade graduation photo, taken two years, six months, and four days before she died. Kaitlyn’s hair had grown out, but you could still see the easy lopsided smile, the moon face that was part and parcel of Down syndrome.

What would have happened if she hadn’t chosen to mainstream Kaitlyn in middle school? If she’d sent her to a school for kids who had disabilities? Were those kids any less angry, less likely to have bred a killer?

The producer from The Oprah Winfrey Show handed back the stack of photographs that Yvette had given her. She hadn’t known, before today, that there were levels of tragedy, that even if the Oprah show called you to ask you to tell your sad story, they would want to make sure it was sad enough before they let you speak on camera. Yvette hadn’t planned to show her pain on television-in fact, her husband was so dead set against it he refused to be here when the producer came to call-but she was determined. She had been listening to the news. And now, she had something to say.

“Kaitlyn had a beautiful smile,” the producer said gently.

“She does,” Yvette replied, then shook her head. “Did.”

“Did she know Peter Houghton?”

“No. They weren’t in the same grade; they wouldn’t have had classes together. Kaitlyn’s were in the learning center.” She pushed her thumb into the edge of the silver portrait frame until it hurt. “All of these people who are going around saying that Peter Houghton had no friends-that Peter Houghton was teased…that’s not true,” she said. “My daughter had no friends. My daughter was teased every single day. My daughter was the one who felt like she was on the fringe, because she was. Peter Houghton wasn’t a misfit, like everyone wants to make him out to be. Peter Houghton was just evil.”

Yvette looked down at the glass covering Kaitlyn’s portrait. “The grief counselor from the police department told me Kaitlyn died first,” she said. “She wanted me to know that Kaitie didn’t know what was going on-that she didn’t suffer.”

“That must have been some consolation,” the producer offered.

“It was. Until we all started talking to each other and realized that the grief counselor had told the same thing to every one of us with a dead child.” Yvette glanced up, tears in her eyes. “The thing is, they couldn’t all have been first.”

In the days after the shooting, the families of the victims were showered with donations: money, casseroles, babysitting services, sympathy. Kaitlyn Harvey’s father woke up one morning after a light, last springtime snow to find that his driveway had already been shoveled by a Samaritan. Courtney Ignatio’s family became the beneficiaries of their local church, whose members signed up to provide food or cleaning services on a different day of the week, a rotating schedule that would take them through June. John Eberhard’s mother was presented with a handicapped-accessible van, courtesy of Sterling Ford, to help her son adapt to life as a paraplegic. Everyone wounded at Sterling High received a letter from the president of the United States, crisp White House stationery commending them on their bravery.

The media-at first a wave as unwelcome as a tsunami-became something ordinary on the streets of Sterling. After days of watching their high-heeled black boots sink into the soft mud of a New England March, they visited the local Farm-Way and bought Merrell clogs and muck boots. They stopped asking the front desk at the Sterling Inn why their cell phones didn’t work and instead congregated in the parking lot of the Mobil station, the point of highest elevation in town, where they could get a minimal signal. They hovered in front of the police station and the courthouse and the local coffee shop, waiting for any crumb of information they could call their own.

Every day in Sterling, there was a different funeral.

Matthew Royston’s memorial service was held in a church that wasn’t large enough to hold the grief of its mourners. Classmates and parents and family friends packed into the pews, stood along the walls, spilled out the doors. A contingent of kids from Sterling High had come dressed in green T-shirts with the number 19 on the front-the same one that had graced Matt’s hockey jersey.