Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down Read Online Free

shout all clear from behind the helmet’s visor. Is anyone hurt? the officer called to Mr. Broussard, hidden behind his desk. He looked up and shook his head and raised his hands above his head, a gesture Christina would commit to memory as though her French teacher had done something wrong, as though he were guilty and not simply reacting immediately to the officer’s drawn gun. The officer waved them out: Follow me . She told everyone to keep their eyes closed. Christina would remember the static white noise of the television, the vocabulary video long over, receding behind them as her class moved single-file into the hallway and she tried to keep her eyes closed butslid them open anyway and saw a custodian, Mr. Rourke, splayed across the carpet, his legs askew, a dark flood beneath him.
    Matt and Tyler had already vanished from the hallway. They had not received instructions, had not been in class, had not been waiting for an all-clear but had only waited silently in the bathroom stall until the gunfire at last ceased. They had waited ten minutes in the silence, a wait that felt longer than the four months they’d known one another. They had stepped down from the toilet’s edge, unlocked the stall, and slipped into the hallway. They had stood only moments above Caroline Black’s body before Tyler took off running down the hallway, away from Matt, either in shock or not wanting to be found and questioned with Matt, not even in crisis, leaving no chance that they would be asked what they’d been doing together away from class. Matt watched Tyler disappear down the stairs, then knelt down beside Caroline’s body, her eyes open behind her glasses, a ruby-stained radius behind her head widening across the carpet. He watched her for only a moment, long enough. He leaned forward and lifted her glasses. He let his hands close her eyes. Then he followed Tyler’s path, away and down Lewis and Clark’s central staircase but with an afterimage coiled forever in the fractals of memory, a reiterated image that burned back as a spiraling, that rewired his brain.
    Zola was the only one of us who did not exit Lewis and Clark through the hallways and then through the school’s entrances. When the SWAT teams arrived at the library they found the doors blockaded and impassible. Not by bookcases or by desks, not by storage units pushed against the door as barriers, but by a convergence of bodies collapsed behind the doorway where Caleb Raynor had entered firing. Zola stayed huddled within the stacks. She focused on the racks of titles and their blocks of lettering to drown away the sounds of crying, of sputtering blood, of rasping voices calling for assistance. She wanted to help them. She could not move. She waited immobile, her hands over her ears, until she felt a solid armgrab her around the waist, until she screamed and the arm spoke, It’s all right, until her body at last let go and her weight fell away and her jeans dampened with a wash of urine and the arm pulled her up and out of the stacks and toward the library’s high windows.
    Zola saw only broken chairs and splintered tables, only people slumped into the ground as if they were sleeping before the officer pushed her through the window and down a makeshift pulley to a cluster of officers waiting on the ground, officers who wrapped her in blankets along with thirty-three other students and teachers, thirty-three shuttled outside on a system of levers though they left twelve behind in the library, what would be the location of heaviest casualties in the entire school.
    We stood in the parking lot, a chaos of students and police, of parents who had been alerted in the two hours that had passed since Caleb first walked through the east doors, parents who pushed through the lot searching each face for the certainty of their children. Parents who did find their kids: a shocked freshman, a quiet senior sitting on the curb holding his head in