The Stranger I Mistook For A Monster

Adriana The first shot cracked through the hallway before I understood what it was. Nobody moved for a second. Mrs. Veronica kept talking about the last homework submission on Monday, like nothing had happened. Then two more shots, close together, and the room broke apart. Chairs scraped against the floor and one of the students screamed. Someone's water flask hit the floor, and nobody stopped to pick it up. A teacher I didn’t recognize shoved the door shut and screamed at us to get down, get down, get under the desks. I didn’t get under a desk. I was already moving toward the side exit, past the notice board, out into a hallway that smelled like smoke. Lockers stood open, doors hanging crooked like someone had gone down the row kicking them. I ran. My shoes lost their grip near the laboratory hall, and I went down hard on one knee. Pain shot up my leg, bright and immediate. Somewhere behind me, a man was shouting orders. Somewhere ahead of me, a woman screamed and then stopped. I didn’t remember choosing the side door over the main hallway. I remembered cold air slapping my face, then the ground rushing up as my legs stopped listening to whatever was left of my brain. Gravel A bit into my palms. Somewhere close by, a car alarm was going off, useless and endless, nobody coming to silence it. My backpack was still slung over one shoulder, with an English textbook and half a sandwich inside it, like the ordinary version of my day was still trying to catch up to what was actually happening. Something warm spread across my stomach, and when I looked down, I noticed blood had soaked through my shirt in a shape that didn’t make sense yet. My own breathing sounded very far away, like it belonged to someone else. A voice cut through the ringing in my ears. Hey. Hey, look at me. A boy dropped to his knees beside me in the grass. Older than me, maybe twenty or twenty-one, dark hair falling into his eyes, breathing hard like he had been running too. I had never seen him before. He could have been one of them. He pulled his shirt over his head in one motion, fast, no hesitation, and pressed it hard against my stomach. I made a sound I didn’t recognize as mine, something high and broken scraped its way out of my throat. I know it hurts. His hands didn’t shake. I need you to stay with me. Can you do that for me? Who are you? My voice came out as thin and cracked. He didn’t answer that. His hands stayed steady on the wound, and his eyes kept flicking up and past me, toward the noise still coming from the direction of the main building. I watched him calculate how much time was left before whatever was happening behind caught us up. Don't close your eyes. Stay awake, okay. Look at me and not at the sky. I tried to focus on his face, so I would have something to hold onto besides the pain climbing up through my whole body. His eyes were dark, almost black in the gray afternoon light, and I saw a mark low on his chest, just above his ribs, pale against his skin, half hidden by the shirt he had just torn away to save my life. My mind was already coming apart from fear and blood loss. All I understood was a stranger kneeling over me with his own skin marked like that, and men who had come through the school gates an hour earlier with guns and shouting who might have marks just like it, for all I knew. I thought of the men who had stormed through the halls like they owned every inch of them and how quickly everything had gone wrong, how easily something ordinary could turn into this. I wondered if he was one of them. I tried to pull away, but it took everything I had left in my body to move even a few inches. Easy. Easy, I've got you. His voice dropped lower, steadier, like he understood exactly what was happening behind my eyes even though I hadn’t said a word of it out loud. I'm not going to hurt you. I promise you that. Just stay with me a little longer. I wanted to believe him. Some small, quiet part of me already did, even while the rest of me stayed braced for the worst. Lights swept across the parking lot beyond the trees, red and blue cutting through the gray afternoon. Radios crackled somewhere close, voices overlapping, urgent. He looked up once, and something shifted behind his face, quick and unreadable. Then his hands were gone from my stomach, and so was he. One second he was there, solid and warm and holding the only thing keeping me from bleeding out onto the grass, and the next second there was only cold air where he had been. The paramedics reached me maybe thirty seconds later, though it felt much longer. A woman with a kind, tired face knelt where he had been and pressed a fresh dressing against my stomach. “What’s your name? How old are you? Do you know what day it is?” I tried to answer, but my mind kept going back to the boy. The shirt. The mark on his chest. I tried to tell her about him, but the words came out tangled and wrong, more sound than sense. I do not remember much after that. Someone else's hands replaced his, gloved this time, less certain. Someone else's voice told me to stay awake, the words the same but the sound of them completely different. I remember thinking, even as the world went soft and gray at the edges, that I had seen his face clearly enough to keep it. I was wrong about that part. Ten years is a long time. Faces fade. Voices fade, worn smooth by every day that comes after them. But some things stay stitched into a person whether they want them there or not. A mark on a stranger's chest. A shirt pressed hard against a wound that should have killed me. Two words that would live inside my head for the rest of my life, whether I asked for them or not. Stay awake.