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feet, like antelope spooked by a lion.
    Which she recognizes as being an unreasonable there-you-go-thinking-you’re-better-than-they-are judgment, considering she is among the frozen. She thinks of those National Geographic films where you watch the stupid baby antelope, the one without the sense to even try to run, get taken down and devoured.
    Still—burst appendix and thunderstorms notwithstanding—this is as close as she’s ever come to dying in her fifteen years. At least, as far as she knows. She supposes the world is full of idiot drivers—really-too-old-to-be-driving or really-too-young-to-be-driving or really-too-stupid-to-be-driving drivers—who end up hitting a street sign before they have a chance to head off into oncoming traffic, so all the people who might have been plowed into never even know how close a call they’ve had. Not to mention assorted meteor strikes and flash floods and earthquakes and plagues and spontaneous combustions that might have occurred, but didn’t.
    But Zoe recognizes that she’s intentionally trying to distract herself with some pretty lame nitpicking. The fact is, she could very easily have been killed just now—and for the moment she is stillfeeling more scared by the might-have-been s than grateful for the big wasn’t.
    One of the bank tellers is screaming—a reaction for which Zoe has no patience, not after the fact—and at least one of the customers is crying, which Zoe is more willing to accept, as she herself might give in to crying later on. It’s just there’s no time now. Not because the police are coming in, which they are, too late, carrying enough gear to attack a terrorist stronghold. But because a decision must be made. By Zoe. She must make a decision, and she doesn’t want to because she knows how easily things could have gone another way, how easily the bank robber could have turned his gun on all of them.
    This has nothing to do with you , Zoe reminds herself. Not for the first time since she walked into this bank. Not for the first time in her life.
    She intentionally tries to avoid thinking of the young man who may well have died in her place.
    She is staring so intently at her knees to avoid looking at the two dead bodies, which she’s almost close enough to touch, that she does not at first see the feet and legs of the policeman who steps between her and the bodies, specifically trying to block them from her view. As though the image isn’t fixed in her brain indelibly.
    Despite the way she knows she looks—like a street kid, or at least a troublesome kid, neither of which she is, but that’s what she looks like—despite that, the situation is such that the policeman doesn’t focus on this. He puts his hand, his free hand, not the one holding the assault rifle, on her shoulder. “It’s all right,” he encourages her. “It’s all over.”
    Shows how much he knows.
    Zoe looks up the length of his black-clad legs, his flak jacket, past his face, hoping to catch sight of a clock, but she can’t get beyond the blood on the wall behind him. A normal teenager would have a cell phone to tell the time, but the group home kids are not allowed to carry them.
    How many minutes have passed, have been wasted by her feeling sorry for herself? Twenty-three minutes are all she has. After that, her options will have ended.
    Which would be a relief.
    For a coward.
    But it hasn’t been twenty-three minutes. Definitely not since the shooting. Probably not even since she walked into the bank.
    Is Zoe a coward? She doesn’t want to be. But she doesn’t want to be dead, either. Dead is the end of all the possible stories of one’s life. Dead is closing the choose-your-own-adventure book and returning it to the library—no, it’s burning the book. Dead means no more chance for even having options.
    I don’t have to put my life in danger , Zoe tells