Chapter 1: Chapter 1 – A Typical Day in the American Public School System

There are few things more nerve wracking than being shot on your first day of high school. For most incoming freshmen, it ranks somewhere between throwing up in front of your crush and being asked to name three songs by the band on your t-shirt. 

It starts with a thunderclap in the hallway. Students and teachers alike stop what they’re doing to interpret the sound. Some joke, some murmur. Some perk their ears up like deer in a field, listening for the distant rustle of predators. A quick succession of pops followed by screaming makes it clear that the unthinkable is happening. In every classroom, a slightly different drama plays out. 

Mr. Godbold, who had spent many sleepless nights obsessively researching the best equipment to prevent a forced entry, leaps into action. He shoves a thick rubber wedge bombastically labeled Fortress Defender™ under the wooden door of his biology classroom. Then, he loops a titanium security cable around the door’s handle and an adjacent hook protruding from the wall. He turns to the room of students hiding underneath desks. “We should be safe.” The explosion of a pipe bomb takes out the door along with Mr. Godbold’s arms. He lays on the floor. As the smoke clears, a tall figure in a black trench coat and welding mask walks through the newly formed crater in the wall. He whips around an AR-15 and sprays bullets at the petrified students. Their bodies mingle with the splinters of their desks as they split apart and mosaic the walls of the classroom.

During the slaughter of Ms. Black’s English class, a few students rush the shooter, pushing a wheeled bookshelf like a battering ram. He puts them down while muffled laughter sneaks out of his welding mask. To punish them for their theatrics, he takes extra care to mutilate their genitals and faces. 

Like so, the trench coated killer traverses the long, L-shaped hallway of the school’s main building, entering a room, exterminating its inhabitants, then moving on to the next one. 

The largest obstacle the shooter faces is the fat P.E. teacher who appears outside of the janitorial closet. He stands golem-like, arms stretched out in front of him, gripping a desert eagle. As the shooter rounds the corner, the P.E. teacher empties the entire magazine in his direction. The bullets crack drywall and shatter windows and perforate locker doors. None hit their intended target. In answer, the shooter sends two bullets smacking into the P.E. teacher’s throat and he goes down whistling, his eyelids still squinting like Clint Eastwood. 

The school is quiet. Anyone alive enough to scream holds it in because no one is coming to save them. The shooter’s bloody footsteps echo off the linoleum floor. Sirens whining in the distance mingle with the school’s automated PA system, which drones off announcements about lunchtime and first-day administrivia. As the shooter reaches the school’s exit, he flips a switch on his helmet and ends his livestream.

#

The stream cuts off and the black mirror of Ryan Gibbons’s laptop screen reflects his chubby, distorted face back to him. Unstylish glasses and a stupid haircut. He looks away quickly. He’s going to be late for class if he doesn’t leave his dorm room soon. He gathers himself and his belongings. Wallet. Phone. Dorm key.

He taps his pockets to check that the three possessions he just placed within are still there. The door opens. Ryan’s roommate Micah sighs as he enters the room. He’s crew cut with meticulously maintained 5 o’clock shadow. When they were speaking more, Micah told Ryan he would like to be an FBI agent some day. Micah sets down his factory-distressed faux leather messenger bag and glances at Ryan’s desk while doing an exaggerated eyebrow raise and half frown, like Chris Evans would do in an Avengers movie. (Micah often slipped into conversations that a girl on Tinder had once told him he looked like Captain America.) Fucking prick.

“You really gotta get your cord management under control, man. Ahh I’m just a clean freak, it bothers me. Forget it.”

Ryan glances at the single charging cord hanging from his macbook to the surge protector below, which also has a fan and desk lamp plugged into it.

He looks at Micah’s desk: 3 large monitors, a light-up mechanical keyboard, and an ergonomic mouse. In the space beneath the desk rests the glowing hulk of a custom built gaming computer, complete with a water cooling system and RGB fans. Gaming chair that looks like it belongs in a fighter jet. Playstation 5. Headset. Unopened buckets of protein powder and pre-workout decorate the bookshelf, next to a pair of family photos in a pewter frame that opens like a book. In one photo: Micah with his Bald dad. Once-hot mom. Cute sister. A perfect family of automatons. In the other photo: Micah embracing his sister, with his chin buried in her auburn hair, eyes closed in ecstasy. He clearly wanted to fuck her, if he hadn’t already. 

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“Yeah man, you’re right. I gotta go to class, though.”

Ryan grabs his backpack and leaves the dorm room. He tries to keep his head up and eyes forward as he walks through the dorm hallway. His heart beats and a bubble rises up in his chest as he prepares to avoid eye contact with the other tenants of his building. 

Thankfully, no one he knows is the hallway for him to not say “hi” to. His voice is hoarse and he knows it would come out weak and croaking from lack of use. He clears his throat, but then faces the unpleasant decision of spitting or swallowing the half-loosed glob of phlegm that is now hanging in the back of his throat. He gets out of the dormitory building and spits out into the courtyard. Some of the spit gets caught on the side of his mouth but he wipes it off quickly enough that he thinks no one has noticed. He begins the fifteen minute walk to class. If Ryan walked at his normal pace, it would be closer to ten minutes, but at the relaxed rate he was going right now, he could easily add on that extra five. 

Walking at a 75% pace to and from class, to and from the library, to and from the cafeteria, to and from the parking lot, etc. could add up to an entire twenty minutes he didn’t have isolated, self conscious, with the feeling that every single other person on the campus was enjoying a robust social life like one sees in the movies, and looking at Ryan like he was that nerd (no… not a nerd. Nerds at least did things like create start ups, and get rich at tech companies, and create things like Facebook, and Snapchat, and Tesla, and would hang out with their buddies and play video games and were quickly becoming the most powerful group of people on Earth…Ryan was more of just a nothing… He wasn’t smart enough to be a nerd. He had nothing to contribute to anyone or anything) with no friends. That weird one who might commit a school shooting and who you better at least smile at if you don’t want him pointing his AR-15 at you when he finally snaps and does the thing. Ryan would always try to convince himself that they weren’t thinking that about him. After all, he wasn’t a mind reader, and he’d read on Reddit advice threads for people with social anxiety that everyone is too concerned with their own lives to even notice or think about a stranger in public. But they were staring at him. And they were thinking that about him. And they were probably right. Lucky for them, Ryan didn’t think he had the balls to ever shoot anyone. He could barely walk into a classroom without having a full blown panic attack. 

On the fifteen minute walk to Ancient Greek Literature, Ryan lets his mind live in the fantasy of the stream he just saw. It was quite a show, but there’s no doubt in his mind that it was some type of publicity stunt, or engineered viral prank, albeit a dark one. Of course, there’d been livestreams of shootings before, like the one in Christchurch New Zealand, and plenty of videos of real-time police shootings all over the Internet. But this one felt different. The production value was too high for it to be real. No one could get such clear, high definition action shots like that on the go. No common school shooter could whip around like that and pop off so many accurate rounds under pressure. It was like watching James Bond. Much easier to think of it as fake. Ryan shook off the notion that all those people actually lost their lives in such an inglorious manner. 

Another reason it couldn’t have been real, he reasoned, was that the shooting was streamed on Twitch, which was one of the most highly regulated, commercialized streaming websites. Its daily traffic competed with YouTube and other digital media giants. It was a website that would ban women for even showing cleavage, so it was miraculous they’d run such a violent display. Ryan was lucky enough to stumble upon it while browsing through the “real life” streaming section. He already wanted more. 

Ryan stops at a crosswalk. Among the beautiful young men and women he’s supposed to think of as his peers. Gods and goddesses with perfect hair and tanned skin taut over well developed muscles. Under shirts and shorts that look so right on them but so sloppy on Ryan. They laugh and shout about some party. 

The thing they don’t tell you about college is that it’s only the best time in your life if your life is already pretty good. If you graduate high school a friendless virgin with cystic acne, gynecomastia, stretch marks, clinical depression, and the social skills of a crustacean, you don’t exactly transform into Van Wilder with your first step onto a campus of higher learning. The good thing about college, though, was the girls. Hundreds of them. If not thousands. In slutty outfits. A veritable feast of skin for the eyes. He may not be getting laid, but he was masturbating to girls way farther out of his league than the ones from high school.

Case in point: a raven haired freshman standing in front of Ryan at the crosswalk. She shifts her weight from leg to leg, pantomiming to a friend her eagerness for the walking signal to change. Her dark denim cut off shorts ride just above the bottom curves of her plump, perky ass cheeks. Black combat boots accentuate her calves and thighs. It’s too hot for Ryan to contain in his imaginary spank bank, so he pulls out his phone.

As the crosswalk changes, he walks with the group, right behind her, recording every step with his iPhone’s built in video camera. He gets pretty close to her without anyone noticing, capturing multiple angles in 4k. Her vintage Metallica t-shirt lifts ever so slightly as she turns to speak to the friend to the side of her. It reveals the full view of her tight, denimed ass, and even a portion of the upper quadrant of her lower back. Her back dimples are perfect. The waist of her shorts presses into her hip, deliciously mimicking the grip of a lover. He can’t wait to upload the footage later.

Mid recording, Ryan gets a push notification from Apple News. 30+ Killed in New Jersey school shooting. His heart throbs in his chest. It was real.

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