Sure to Shine

"Cheery day it’s going to be today, isn’t it?" Adam asked, as Eric sat down next to him in homeroom.

"Huh?" Eric asked. He had slept from the moment he had gotten in the previous afternoon and had thankfully not been interrupted by Skylar, but he was still so tired he was finding it hard to pay much attention to anything.

"Did you not hear what’s happening today?" Adam asked.

"Probably not," Eric replied. "I wasn’t in homeroom, remember? I was fast asleep in the library."

"Oh yeah," Adam sniggered. "Well, you know how we have to have those stupid senior assemblies on Wednesday mornings?"

Eric groaned. Usually they were just allowed to go to study hall, but something must be going on today.

"What do we have to listen to now?" he asked, rolling his eyes. "Drugs and alcohol? Drinking and driving?"

"Well, I think it might be interesting, but still depressing," Adam said. "They’ve got this guy in to come talk to us about the shooting that happened here, seems the anniversary is in a couple of weeks."

"All ready?" Eric asked. "Usually they do stuff like that closer to the time."

"That’s what we were saying yesterday," Adam said. "But apparently this is the first time the guy’s been back since it happened, and he didn’t want to be here on the actual anniversary. Plus we have the memorial assembly and everything on the actual day."

"I suppose," Eric said. There was no denying it would be interesting, but Adam was right. It would certainly put a downer on the day.

Feeling practically comatose, Eric made his way down to the lecture theatre with the rest of the class. Their teacher had been running late this morning (Eric briefly wondered if Bobby had been back for another go) and so their class was stuck with no other option but to file into the front two rows of seats. This was always the worst place to sit when you were feeling tired, as it was prime hunting ground when people were being picked on to answer questions.

Eric hoped he wouldn’t fall asleep. That would be disrespectful, to say the least. It would be on purpose, but Eric still didn’t think it would go down well.

The man’s name was Jeremy Pritchard. His friends called him Jerry. This was the first time he had been anywhere near the school since the day it had happened, and he was a little nervous.

Eric could hear it in his voice as he told them these facts. He wondered what it must be like, to see a place so familiar, yet so alien. The school hadn’t changed much in terms of layout and organisation. Most rooms looked exactly the same now as they had twelve years ago.

"I suppose you’re wondering what good this will do?" Jeremy asked them. "I suppose you’re all wondering why I decided it would be a good idea to bring it all up again? To be honest, I don’t really know. I guess I just wanted to tell you a few things which you may or may not know."

Eric had never heard his year so silent in something like this before. Then again, this subject was the sort of subject that all of the pupils were interested in, but rarely brought up because of the fact the subject was mostly taboo.

"I know the sort of interest which surrounds these sorts of things," Jeremy told them softly. "It’s only to be expected. No one is interested in nicey-nice things, and the media’s proof of that. But while it’s fine to be interested in it, it’s not fine to glorify it, and that’s one of the things I wanted to talk about. I may have left the school after everything happened, but I didn’t leave the area. I heard the kids saying that they wanted to “Finish the job”, or that Ben Murdoch had “the right idea”. I heard all the sick jokes that went round about the event, and to be honest, they hurt me just as much as being here on that day did."

Jeremy watched them all closely.

"So if any of you sitting in here right now are thinking that it’s cool, or awesome, or whatever, if you’re going to joke and brag about it all when you get out of here, you can leave now. Because I’m not here to give you the gory details and entertain you. I’m here to tell you what something like this does to somebody."

The room was still. Eric didn’t even dare turn his head to see what everyone else’s reactions were.

"I’m sure you all know the basics about me all ready," Jeremy said. "I was a senior in 1997, and I was in most of the same classes as Ben. Now, I know it must be strange for you to hear him called by his first name, but I knew him for a long while and I find it strange to call him by his surname. We were close friends in elementary school, grew up down the road from one another. In high school, we drifted apart. Most of Ben’s friends drifted away from him in high school, and I really regret that. I can’t help but think things might have ended differently if we’d stuck by him more. But he changed drastically over those high school years. By senior year, he really wasn’t a nice guy. He was rude and violent and basically, trouble. I stayed as friendly as I could, but that basically consisted of being civil to him, while others would just call him names and generally make his life Hell."

Jeremy sighed.

"And you know what? Although I didn’t do much, I think what I did do saved my life. I was in the study room when we heard someone was attacking the school, and a lot of us ran for it. There were only a few of us left. I was going to get out of there as well, but I decided against it when we heard how close the gunshots were. Instead, we hit the deck, scrambled under tables. Three people died in that room, and for a short while I was convinced I was going to be one of them. Ben recognised me and pulled me out from under the table, and let me tell all you kids who think you’d have gone for him something. You think you would have tried to run for it? You think you would have tried to get the gun off of him? When someone’s pointing the barrel of a gun at your face, it’s all you can do not to pee yourself. For the longest minute of my life he just stared at me, and then he hit me with the barrel of the gun and walked away. I’ll never know for sure why he didn’t kill me, but I think perhaps he realised that, out of everyone who had been in his year, perhaps I had been the most civil to him. I don’t know, but I’m certainly thankful, whatever it was."

There was no denying the haunted look on Jeremy’s face, and Eric wondered how he was coping with standing up in front of people and talking about what surely must have been the most terrifying experience of his life.

"Of course, I’m thankful I walked away with my life," Jeremy continued. "But it leaves a mark on you. I couldn’t return to this school to graduate. I had so much time off I had to repeat senior year, which, although I was a good student, impacted my college choices. I could have graduated on time, but I hated to be in a school atmosphere. Everything was too haunting, too alien to me after that. It was a place you were meant to feel safe, and when something so horrible happens, it can have all sorts of effects. Even when I dragged myself into school finally, I was constantly on edge. I was in therapy for years and years. It wasn’t just the fact I had seen people killed in front of me, it was the guilt as well. People who didn’t even know Ben got killed, and I thought that if anyone had failed him, it had been me, one of his old best friends. Then there was the guilt over the event itself. I thought I should have seen it coming, considering I used to know Ben so well. About a week before the shootings, I bumped into him in town, and we caught up a little. I realised I actually kinda missed him, you know? We’d had some good times. We were messing around and it was like old times. He seemed happier, and I remember thinking that perhaps he was coming out of whatever had been dragging him down."

Jeremy sighed.

"It’s hard to grieve when the person you lose does such a terrible thing," he said, "You feel like you’re not allowed. But that’s another thing I wanted to point out. Just because someone knew a person who did a terrible thing, it doesn’t mean that they agree or condone it in any way. I was put through Hell when people found out I used to be good friends with Ben. I still even get stick for calling him by his first name. But the thing is, he was my friend at one point, and I guess I kinda owe him my life. He could have blown me away that day, but he didn’t."

Eric could again feel the heavy weight in his chest, and for some reason he felt as though he had suffered a loss as well. Perhaps it was because Eric felt as though he understood more than the other people in this room?

"Blame was pointed in a lot of directions," Jeremy said. "All of them were wrong. They blamed the movies he watched, the music he listened to, his parents, his friends, his teachers … but the only person to blame was Ben. He chose to do such a thing. He wasn’t influenced by the fact some lyrics said it would be cool. He could tell video games from real life. His parents were wonderful people. Unfortunately, Ben was his own worst enemy. He couldn’t control his emotions, he didn’t know how to deal with them, and he went down the wrong path. He could have asked if he wanted help, but I think he didn’t want help. I think he wanted revenge. I don’t think I’ll ever understand the exact reasons why, but I think Ben knew full well what he was going to do, what he was always going to do."

There was a brief silence, during which not a single person so much as twitched. Eric felt as though the whole room was holding its breath.

"You never know when something like this is going to happen," Jeremy eventually said quietly. "You see kids who you think might do it, perhaps there’s a stereotype of kids in your mind who would do it. Goths or nerds or I don’t know. But Ben wasn’t any of those sorts of stereotypes. He wasn’t into death metal or whatever. He was a normal, average kid. The best way you can stop someone from heading down this path is by treating everyone how you would want to be treated. Just accept people, right? That was what got to Ben the most. He told me he never felt accepted. This isn’t a miracle cure, obviously. Things like this, unfortunately, will always happen. Some people can’t be helped. But if someone makes threats, take them seriously. Tell someone about it. Don’t think they’re joking around, because they might not be. The best thing is vigilance. Vigilance and acceptance, if you ask me personally."

Jeremy watched them all again.

"I knew him differently to how most people know him. To most people he’s a number, a statistic, but to me he was a friend. We might have drifted apart, but I’ll always count him as a friend. In the media he’s whittled down to one school photograph and a rant about the failures of society and lost generations and all of that, but to his friends and family he was actually a person."

Eric somehow knew there was going to be some sort of photo of Ben, and he hunched down in his seat, hoping that he was just being overly paranoid. However, even though there was a photo of him, out onto the whiteboard by the projector, he wasn’t filled with dread over it. It was a picture he hadn’t seen before, even in his research, and although they of course still looked identical, there was something different about Ben in this picture.

"This is the last picture ever taken of him," Jeremy explained. "I took it the day I bumped into him and we were messing around. This was literally days before the shootings, and I think you can see it in his face."

Eric agreed. There was a look in Ben’s eyes, and he couldn’t quite place what it was. There was fear, obviously, but above all there was excitement. As though he was finally going to put himself at peace. The smile he wore was genuine, but Eric knew it wasn’t for the camera. There was a deeper happiness in him. A sicker happiness.

However, he was brought out of his thoughts by the fact that he could feel eyes on him again, and he knew that the rest of the year had noticed, finally, the similarities. Eric knew that there were many similarities, because they could pull as twins in certain photos, and this one was no exception.

He refused to turn around. He would just be casual over it.

However, Eric soon realised that he would have rather faced his year’s stares than the look that Jeremy was giving him. He looked like he was staring at a ghost.

Eric wondered if he thought he was.