“I haven’t seen Ben in a long time.” The Shark sniffled, dragging her forearm across her nose. “And that . . . that was not Ben.”

A chair toppled over, and the ruckus brought all four of us together in a nervous clamor of bodies. It was the moan that broke us apart.

“Oh my God,” the Shark said. “Peyton.”

The air sounded wet as he tried to breathe it. The Shark and I crept around the buffet and crouched by Peyton’s side. He’d managed to drag half his body out from underneath the table, and he was clawing at the air, his fingers so set in their gnarl it was as though he’d sunk them into plaster before it dried. He tried to speak, but only blood gurgled up where his lips should have been.

“Get a towel or something!” the Shark shrieked at Teddy and Liam, both still as photographs in the corner.

They started into action. I heard silverware jangling as they raided the buffet, finally coming up with linens emblazoned spring green with THE BRADLEY SCHOOL. They tossed them at us.

The Shark and I pressed a napkin on either side of Peyton’s beautiful, ravaged face. Blood and sticky muscle tissue sealed the cloth to where his jaw had been, turned it red as completely and quickly as a magic trick. It was a horrifying thing to look at, his face shred of features and skin, but it was like saying the word “the” over and over until you don’t even recognize it, the power of repetition to transform the ordinary to the exotic. Semantic satiation, is it? With Peyton, it was the converse: Look at his face long enough and it was less grotesque than if you’d never seen it at all, if you’d only imagined how bad it could be.

Peyton managed a moan. I took his hand, still signaling madly, and guided it to the floor, squeezing his fingers gently.

“It’s okay,” the Shark said. “You have that big game next week.” She started to cry harder. “You’re going to win that big game next week.”

Everyone knew Bradley didn’t stand a chance. Peyton sobbed and squeezed my hand back.

I don’t know how long we sat there. Talking to Peyton. Telling him that his parents loved him and they needed him to come home, so just fight. Keep fighting, you’re doing great, you’re so strong, we told him, even as his hand chilled in my own, even as it stopped being so laborious for him to breathe, because soon he was barely breathing at all.

And all the while, the flames in the cafeteria bounced up the stairs, until we could make out their sharp peaks, threatening to dance down the hallway, trap us in the Brenner Baulkin Room and never let us out.

“Where the fuck are the police?” Liam wailed. We’d all cried with relief when we heard their sirens at least ten minutes ago.

“We have to go,” Teddy said. He looked at Peyton and immediately looked away, digging the heels of his hands into his swollen eyes. “I’m sorry, you guys, but we have to go.”

“But he’s still breathing.” I looked down at Peyton. I’d eased his head into my lap when he started to gag on his own blood. My crotch was soaked and sticky, and some wild, grisly corner of my mind turned on the memory of the last time his head had been between my legs, like a sudden, jarring flick of a light switch in the middle of the night, shocking you out of the thickest stage of sleep. At least in that vision, Peyton’s eyes were open, crystal and ignorantly kind, thinking he was doing something good.

“TifAni, we are going to die in here if we don’t go now!” Teddy said.

The Shark pleaded, “Can you carry him or something?”

Teddy tried, and all of us tried to help him, even Liam, but Peyton was as final and as heavy as a block of cement.

The room smelled hot and sick. Teddy begged us one last time.

Before we slunk into the hallway, holding the hands of the person ahead of us and behind us, four tough teenagers linked together like kindergartners crossing the street, Liam pillaged the buffet. He was looking for something, anything, to protect us. The best he could do was to offer each of us a steak knife.

“My mom told me to never fight off a rapist with a knife,” I said, so woozy from the heat it didn’t even occur to me the morbid hilarity of saying that to Liam. “Because he can overpower you and turn it on you.”

“He’s not a rapist,” the Shark said, softly.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Liam said. “Should she have said ‘psycho faggot murderer’?”

We also took the fine linen napkins, what was left of the ones we’d piled onto Peyton’s face, tying them around our mouths like bandits.

I looked at Peyton one last time before we left. His chest sighed a good-bye, a final plea: I’m still alive. I felt the agony of leaving him alone and alive like a pregnancy, so full and all encompassing it had the power to change my entire life.

The fastest we moved was down the hallway, to the left, until we got into the stairwell. We burst through the door, our neat little line breaking as we became a whirlwind of arms and legs clutching at each other in a tight circle—no one knew what we would find in there, no one wanted to be at the front of the line.

To our immense relief, the stairwell appeared empty. We tore off our face masks, gratefully.

“What do you think?” the Shark asked. “Up or down?”

“I say up,” Teddy said. “He wouldn’t have gone up.” The old boarding rooms bled out to another stairwell, which would loop us down to the Mathematics wing. There was an exit in the Mathematics wing.

“Good call,” Liam said, and Teddy smiled. He was still smiling as the bullet dovetailed into his collarbone, blood splashing the wall behind him like the Jackson Pollock paintings we were learning about in Contemporary Art.

I only knew that the bullet had come from up. And I was running down the stairs, skidding around the turns, bumping into the Shark and Liam as bullets met the railing, the sharp clang of metal on metal unlike anything I’d ever heard.

The door on the first floor led to the Language wing, and the longest moment of my life was the time it took for the Shark to turn the handle and swing it open, those seconds enough for Ben to close in on us. The door was old and slow, and it remained open behind us after we dashed through. Ben didn’t have to slow down to open it again, he simply ducked through right after us. He was skinny and quick, would have been a great cross-country runner.

Liam hooked right, mistaking an empty classroom for cover. It was an inadvertently noble, intentionally self-preserving turn (not that I blame him for that), and it saved me.

“Why didn’t you follow him?” I’m usually asked, at this point in the story.

“Because,” I say, irritated that I’ve been interrupted, that whatever moron interrupted me couldn’t understand that Ben was so close I could hear that his breathing was different than our breathing. Sharp and quick, like that of an animal whose lungs have evolved to chase. “He was right behind us. I knew he would have seen and followed us, and then we’d have been cornered, which is what happened.”

“To Liam?” Aaron asked.

“To Liam.”

“Let’s get back to what happened next.”

The Shark and I tore through the Language wing. We pounded up the stairs, and when we cleared the last step, there was the door to the cafeteria. Shut tight, it should have created the fire hazard Mr. Harold was always warning us about, only it hadn’t. It had contained the fire in the old part of the cafeteria, tucked it deeper in, so that it had advanced on the Brenner Baulkin Room where we had just been, where Peyton and Ansilee remained. There was a clear path from the door, through the new addition, where the overhead sprinklers had gone on, drenched the fire into submission. There was an exit to the quad there. The Shark and I never broke our stride, just plunged in.

But it was in the spot where the Hairy Legs and the HOs used to sit where we both stopped, water up to our ankles and still coming down, plastering our hair to the sides of our faces. Where I thought I would vomit up my own heart when I saw Arthur.