Olivia lay next to her, not asking for anyone. Olivia was dead.

Teddy flung the door open. Beneath the important oak table, where Headmaster Mah hosted steak dinners for the parents who donated at the platinum level, were others. The Shark, Peyton, Liam, and Ansilee Chase, a senior who overacted in every school play she starred in. This random representation of year and social standing, this was it. This was the awful tie that would always bind us.

My first memory of sound is Ansilee panting, the way she sputtered, “Oh my God, oh my God,” as he came into the room not thirty seconds after we did, the gun dangling playfully at his side exactly at our eye level. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was holding an Intratec TEC-9 semiautomatic handgun. It looked like a scaled-down submachine gun. We silently pleaded with Ansilee to shut up, holding our trembling fingers to our mouths. He would have found us anyway. It was hardly a great hiding spot.

“Boo!” His face appeared between the chair’s elegant claw legs. A tiny, pale face, garnished with fluffy black hair that looked as soft and new as an infant’s.

Ansilee broke, blubbering and crawling away from him, knocking a chair over as she wiggled out from underneath the table and shot to her feet. His face disappeared and then all we saw were his legs from the knees down. He was wearing shorts, even though it was November, and his calves were white and shockingly smooth. I’d like to say one of us went after her, tried to save her—she’d been accepted early decision to Harvard, she couldn’t die—but instead, here is where I always say, “We were in shock! It all happened so fast!”

The sound the gun made was nothing compared to the sound of Ansilee’s body hitting the floor. “Jesus fucking Christ,” Liam gasped. He was next to me, and he grabbed my hand, looked at me like he loved me. The hardwood floor was covered with a large Oriental carpet, but by the sickening crack Ansilee’s head made when it connected with the ground, it wasn’t nearly as thick and lush as it appeared.

The Shark clutched me to her chest, and I felt her large bosom heaving like on the cover of a romance novel. His face appeared between the chair legs again.

“Hi.” He smiled. It was a smile totally unconnected to all the things in life that bring us joy: a spectacular spring day after a bleak winter, the first time the groom sees his bride, her excited face buoyed by layers of white. He aimed the gun at us, swinging his arm from right to left so, for a moment, it was trained on each of us, and a low groan rippled through the group. I stared at the ground when it was my turn, willing myself not to shake, not to be the most obviously scared, which I somehow understood would make me the most interesting to him.

“Ben,” the Shark whispered. “Please.” I felt her fingers dig into my skin, her armpit sweaty on my shoulder, and I remembered the name Ben.

“Fuck you.” It wasn’t aimed at any of us. There was a long moment where he wore us down. Then his expression softened like the flame of a candle descending on wax. “Oh, goody. It’s Peyton.”

“Ben”—Peyton was shaking so hard the floor picked up the tremor—“man, you don’t have to—” Peyton never said anything after “to.” What a stupid little word to be your last. His beautiful face took the brunt. One Peyton tooth skittered right in front of me, white and perfectly shaped as a piece of Chiclets gum.

This time the gun had been low and close. The sound sent Liam behind the Shark and me, as far away as he could get from Peyton without abandoning the hood of the table. Teddy was all the way at the other end, holding on to a chair leg like it was his mother’s and he was begging her not to go out on a Saturday night. My ears felt like they were turning in on my skull. I brought a finger to one and felt the wet. A drop of blood hit the carpet, spread red in the fibers like a sonic boom. It was the only drop that was mine.

Ben rested on his haunches a little longer, admiring his work. The chairs had caught Peyton, and they held his body upright, arms flung wide scarecrow-like. There was nothing left of his face below the nose. A great gust of steam billowed all around him, like laughter on a freezing cold night.

Liam was burrowed in my back, his mouth a humid kiss on my shoulder, so he didn’t see the miraculous thing that happened next. But the rest of us watched in disbelief as Ben stretched out, and then all that was visible of him were his smooth white calves moving further and further away from us, turning left, in the direction of the back stairwell that led to the ground floor, where the Language wing was located. Above it were the abandoned dorm rooms left over from Bradley’s boarding school days. They only used them for in-school suspensions now.

I didn’t even realize I’d been holding my breath until I was gasping like it was the finish line at a cross-country race. “Who is he?” I heaved into the Shark’s chest. “Who was that?” I asked again, even though I knew.

“Is Ansilee okay?” Liam whimpered, his voice high and pathetically foreign, this abrupt shift in power stripping him of all his cool new-guy bravado. All he had to do was look behind him to answer his own question. Because I did, and Ansilee’s head was open like a casket.

“This is like fucking Columbine,” Teddy mumbled from the other end of the table. We’d all been in middle school when that happened. I don’t know about Bradley, but at Mt. St. Theresa’s, we stood around the lone, crackly TV in the library, watching the coverage, until Sister Dennis unplugged it and threatened all of us with demerits if we didn’t go back to class immediately.

Smoke was slithering in from the cafeteria. I was aware that we had to leave, but also that the only way out was to follow His path.

“Does anyone have their cell phone?” Not every teenager owned a cell phone back then, but everyone in that room did. It didn’t matter, because no one had had time to grab their book bags before they fled.

“What do we do?” I looked at the Shark, certain she would have the answer. When she didn’t speak, I said, “We have to get out of here.”

None of us wanted to crawl out from underneath the table. But the smoke was wafting in, putrid with human hair and melting man-made materials: polyester book bags, plastic lunch trays, rayon purchases from Abercrombie & Fitch. I pushed out the chair to our right and Teddy did the same at his end, and the four of us scrambled to our feet. There was a heroic-looking buffet in the corner, and it became the place where we met. Its body blocking us from the waist down felt like some small measure of protection.

We argued. Liam wanted to stay put and wait for the police, who surely had to be on their way. Teddy wanted to leave. The fire was too fast. There was a large window high on the wall, beaming sunlight onto the table, beneath which Peyton and Ansilee waited. That was a compromise for a bit. Teddy stood on a chair, bumping Ansilee’s shoulder as he positioned it beneath our maybe escape. Teddy pushed and grunted, but he couldn’t get the window open, and he was the strongest one left in the room.

“We have to get out of here!” Teddy insisted.

“He could be waiting out there for us!” Liam said. “That’s what those Columbine kids did!” He slammed his hand down on the buffet. “Faggot! Fucking faggot!”

“Shut up!” I yelled. You had to yell to hear over the fire alarm, sizzling in our ears. “That’s why he’s doing it!” Liam looked at me like he was afraid of me. I didn’t understand how important that was at the time.

“He won’t hurt us if we’re with her.” Teddy pointed to the Shark.

Liam laughed viciously. “He won’t hurt you either! That’s why you’re willing to leave.”

“No”—Teddy shook his head—“Ben and I were never friends. He loved Beth though.” It had been so long since I’d heard the Shark’s real name that I didn’t even know who Teddy was talking about at first.