Dad headed straight for the master bedroom. Twenty minutes later he emerged, shaved and wearing khakis and that ugly yellow button-down I worried about on the rare day he came to pick me up from school.

“What are you doing?” Mom asked.

“I’m going in to the office, Dina.” Dad opened the refrigerator and grabbed an apple. He bit into it, his teeth peeling back the flesh the way that knife had in Arthur’s back. I looked away. “What do you think I’m doing?”

“I just thought we should be together today,” Mom said, a little too brightly, and I suddenly ached for a storied Main Line family with brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles nearby, for the house to be alive with generations of our great name.

“I would if I could.” Dad held the apple between his teeth as he pulled his coat out of the hall closet and shrugged it on. “I’ll try to be home early.” Before he left he told me to feel better. Thanks, Dad.

Our thin house rocked on its foundation when Dad slammed the door. Mom waited for it to right itself before she said, “Okay, if you’d prefer to lie on the couch that’s fine. But I’d prefer that you didn’t watch the news.”

The news. It hadn’t even occurred to me to tune in to it before Mom brought it up, and now it was all I wanted to watch. I focused my eyes on her, challenging. “Why not?”

“Because it will be very disturbing for you,” Mom said. “They’re showing images of—” She stopped and pressed her lips together firmly. “You don’t need to see that.”

“Images of what?” I pushed.

“Please, TifAni,” Mom begged. “Just respect my wishes.”

I said I would even though I didn’t, and went upstairs to shower and change into clean clothes. Then I came right back downstairs, intending to put the news on, but Mom was rummaging through the refrigerator. The house was designed with a large window in the middle of the kitchen, so that you could sit at the table and watch the TV in the living room. I didn’t feel like hearing it from Mom about how I disrespected her wishes, so I turned the channel to MTV.

A few minutes later, I heard Mom padding around in the kitchen, muttering something about how we had no food in the house. “TifAni,” she said, “I’m going to make a run to the grocery store. Is there anything you want?”

“That tomato soup,” I said. “And Cheez-Its.”

“What about drinks? Soda?”

She knew I stopped drinking that stuff when I started running. Mr. Larson said anything but water would dehydrate us. I rolled my eyes and gave her a barely audible “No.”

Mom came around to the front of the couch, looking down at me like I was a body in a casket. She found a blanket and shook it in the air. It landed on me, the perfect trap. “I hate the idea of leaving you alone.”

“I’m fine,” I groaned.

“Please don’t watch the news when I go,” she pleaded.

“I won’t.”

“I know you’re going to,” Mom said.

“Then why did you even tell me not to?”

Mom sighed and sat down on the smaller couch across from me, the cushions exhaling with her weight. She picked up the controller and said, “If you’re going to do it, I’d rather you do it with me.” Like it was my first time smoking a cigarette or something. “In case you have any questions,” she added.

Mom switched the channel from MTV to NBC, and, sure enough, even though it was the time of day the Today show should have been testing the newest vacuum cleaners, the segment was dedicated to “Another School Shooting Tragedy.” Matt Lauer was actually standing on the sidewalk in front of the old mansion, the part that had been charred by the fire in the cafeteria.

“The Main Line is one of the most affluent areas in the country,” Matt was saying. “I’ve heard numerous times this morning that no one can believe it’s happened here, and, for once, it’s really true.” The camera cut away from him to reveal an aerial shot of the school while Matt listed the grim body count. “Seven are dead, two of them the shooters, five victims of the shooters. One of the victims died in the blast in the cafeteria, the result of a homemade pipe bomb placed inside a backpack and left near what officials have confirmed was the table favored by the school’s most popular students. Only one of the bombs detonated, while police believe there were at least five, and, had they all gone off, the carnage would have been much worse. Nine students are in the hospital with severe but not life-threatening injuries. Some are believed to have lost limbs.”

I gasped. “Lost limbs?”

Mom’s eyes looked bigger with tears in them. “This is what I was talking about.”

“Who? Who did that happen to?”

Mom brought a shaky hand to her forehead. “I didn’t recognize some of the names so I forgot them. But there was one. Your friend Hilary.”

I kicked at the blanket. It tangled in my legs, and I wanted to tear that fucking thing thread from thread. The orange juice felt like a citrus boil in my stomach. “What happened to her?”

“I’m not sure,” Mom whimpered. “But I think it was her foot.”

I tried to make it to the bathroom before I spewed that putrid green bile everywhere, I really did. Mom said it was fine, she could get the stain out with spot remover, no problem. The important thing was that I just rest. She gave me an Anita pill. Just rest.

I came to a few times to hear Mom on the phone. I heard her say, “That’s very sweet. But she’s resting at the moment.”

I fell into black muck after that, so dense it took physical effort to wade out of it. I tried a few times before giving up, falling under again. It was nighttime when I finally punctured the murky glaze, when I could form the words to ask Mom who she had been talking to earlier.

“A few people,” Mom said. “Your old English teacher called to see how you were doing—”

“Mr. Larson?”

“Uh-huh, and also another mother. They activated that call chain thing.”

School was suspended indefinitely. Mom said I was lucky I wasn’t a senior. “Just imagine, trying to send out your college applications in this mess?” She clucked her sympathy.

“Did Mr. Larson leave a number?”

“He didn’t,” Mom said. “But he said he would call back later.”

The phone didn’t ring again for the rest of the evening, and I spent the first night on the couch, blank faced in front of the TV screen, listening to Beverly, mother of four, rave that the ABtastic DVD was the only thing that had given her her body back, and she had tried everything. The lights stayed on too. Another thing about our house is that the second-floor hallway is completely open, so that you can come out of any of the four bedrooms and look over the railing, see me, a lump beneath a pastel acrylic throw. Dad stormed out of the bedroom a few times, raging about how the sliver of light beneath his door was keeping him awake. Finally I told him I’d take that petty torment over the grisly scene on repeat in my mind, and he didn’t come out of his room again.

I dozed off just as the sun came up, and, when I came to again, the TV was off and I couldn’t find the remote control anywhere.

“Daddy took it,” Mom called from the kitchen, when she heard me flailing around. “He went out and bought you a bunch of magazines before he went to work though.”

Usually, Mom would monitor the magazines I read. But she gave a long list to Dad and told him to buy them all, even the ones that promised to teach me how to “Set His Thighs on Fire.” It was a small peace offering, I knew, because they’d banned TV. I cherished those magazines, still have them in a box underneath my childhood bed to this day. They made me want to move to a city—any city—wear heels, and live a fabulous life. In their world, everything was fabulous.