The Forever Year

Tenor is released from the hospital only five days before the estimated month before the return of school is over. He leaves the hospital walking (barely, leaning on his father and biting back winces) and with bullets still embedded in his flesh. The tenth of April is a happy day and he ends up gathering his friends to spend a bit of time with them, like they used to. Now he’s strong enough to stand on his own (usually) and doesn’t need to be in the wheelchair like he’d been in at the funeral. He has a prescription for painkillers and continues to change the bandages around his torso, but otherwise he feels healthy and relatively happy. Happier than Gavin, who’s begun to take his anger out on a video game and attempted to pick a fight with the drywall when he’d died on an especially difficult task. K.C. has taken to curling up like a cat on whoever is closest to her and likes to braid Cadence’s hair into intricate buns and various other hairstyles. Graham is still like he’s been, tired and quiet, sad and strung out; he nearly dozes off on the couch, leaning the weight of his head against his fist and is woken each time Gavin shouts at the television.

Benedict is at work and Dawn is working in her upstairs studio, leaving the kids to the lower levels. About an hour and a half into the gathering, she pops her head through the doorway to the basement, calling down to the teens: “You kids hungry? I’m going out for supplies and I can pick something up!”

They ask for pizza and half an hour later Dawn returns with it, reminding them to keep from making too much of a mess and then once again leaves them to whatever they please, returning to her upstairs artwork.

Dawn Shetterly is a good mother. A kind woman with a good heart, she’d married her husband when they were expecting their first child and brought her daughter into the world seven months later. Jeanette, named for Benedict’s college French professor. Next was Zachary, whose name Benedict thought to be strong and masculine. Dawn named the twins, her last two children, and gave them the sorts of names that Benedict hated—artsy, different names that were, in his opinion, outlandish. He didn’t mention it to his wife at the time, but he still hasn’t grown fond of their names. The conflict between Dawn and her husband, however, hadn’t started there, but rather it began eight years after the twins’ birth when she decided to pursue an arts career. It wasn’t as though they were struggling; Benedict’s work paid enough for their six-person family and could support three more, so they lived securely and Dawn figured that her art, which she now works on almost daily, would be acceptable.

Benedict disagreed, and he still disagrees.

Today, rather than a job, the art is her outlet. Since her youngest had been hospitalized, she’d been working on this painting and today she’s nearly finished it. The brushstrokes are a tizzy and create no real form, giving the piece an abstract appearance and shows the confusion and tumult associated with Tenor’s injuries and the overall effects of the shooting. Dawn uses blue to show her sorrow and red to show the anger and the blood; yellow brings a sort of peace, with the return of her son and his health. Black is the fear that resides in her family and the community. Grey represents the dreary days and the overcast skies and the brand new tombstones in the cemetery. When she’s done, Dawn sobs; she breaks down and falls to her knees and cries, staining her cheeks with paint as she presses her hands to her face and all but screams as the sobs quake her body. It takes nearly an hour for the calm to set over her and by that time her hair is soaked with tears and paint and her eyes are red as if she’d been inebriated and her upper lip is saturated with the liquid from her runny nose.

James Brooks’ eyes are red as if he’d been inebriated and his upper lip is saturated with liquid from his runny nose. The nightmares are awful; they are gory and as real as the day that the events of his nightmare occurred. Because of the nature of his crimes, James has been held in solitary confinement since the day of his arrest. Every time he sleeps, the nightmares return and every time he wakes, there are shakes in his muscles and tears on his cheeks. Eyes permanently bloodshot, irises and the surrounding white too pale to not be affected by the strain of constant tears, he looks like he’s always been smoking and smoking and smoking. And although the dreams are terrible, he continues to sleep and sleep and sleep because what else is there to do?

Each nightmare is a story.

Callum; angry first—no, brother first. First he was nice, first he was moral, first he was a protector and a lover, not a destroyer and a killer. First he hated guns and knives and bullets and blood but soon he couldn’t get enough of them—of the stench of gun powder and of the thick warmth of blood betwixt his fingertips. There was a time, believe it or not, when Callum didn’t force James and Marc to go out shooting every weekend. Before he decided their plans and their motives and the date and time and place. There was a time that James idolized his brother and up until the fifteenth of March, he still did. But now he cries in his sleep at the mere glance of his brother’s gaze, of his brother’s voice and smell and frame. He’s scared and he’s sad and every time he awakens, his brother is nowhere to be found but in that very same dream with the very same voice and smell and frame and completely raging, livid anger.

James hears the sound of gunfire. The crackle of splintered wood and the cheers of Marc and Drew in the background, their voice shrouded by the fog of the ring of gunshot’s resonation. Callum’s arms were crossed, always crossed, but a smile—a smirk—a twitch of his lips and that made all of it worth it to James. That small beacon of honest, uncensored pride from Callum, the approval from his brother, that made every single slashed life and injured body and months upon months of training and planning and shooting worth it. It was worth it then but now it’s not. It’s not and James hates it and it makes him sick that it was ever gold to him, that that small sliver of someone being proud of him pushed him to kill another, to put his morals aside and take on those that his brother held. It makes him sick and he hates himself.

Callum had targets. Not targets like the targets they shot on the range, but targets as in people he wanted to put the most bullets into. He killed a few of them and James remembers the grin that pulled at his brother’s lips as they crumbled to the bloodied tile. Blood smells vile and it stings against his skin as he robotically fires, closes his eyes for the spatter, and moves on. Marc yells in his ear, screaming at the cowering students and firing at them despite their pleas for mercy. Did James want any of this? James was tugged along, roped in by Callum and kept in by his anger. And where did that land him? The corner of a cell while his brother and the third accomplice are six feet under, no cares in the world for the horrifying act they had committed.

The guard looks at him like he’s trash—dog shit on the heel of his shoe—molded food that sits in the back of his fridge until his wife cleans it out. James hates the taste of the meals but he’d rather eat than starve and forces it down like it’s a school lunch. He thinks about those who died. Twenty total: sixteen students, four staff. Plus the wounded. How much damage had they done? Too much. James feels nauseous and regurgitates his school-lunch jail meal into the nailed-to-the-ground toilet and shakes off a cold sweat. His trial date is still up in the air—there’s so much evidence—so many pictures—so much blood—so many bullets—so many accounts and witnesses to be interviewed; it’ll be years before he faces the black-robed judge and he can only hope that by then, he’ll be able to sleep at night without seeing his brother’s face.

He can live with the ghosts that haunt his mind, he can live with spending the rest of his life in a cell, but he can’t live with his brother sitting inside of him, whispering in his ear and screaming in his eardrum. Callum and Marc need to leave before James can be at peace. His father hasn’t visited him. Nathan hates him, and so do the girls; James is alone, now, without his elder brother and best friend to carry the load of their crime alongside him.

James remembers a scream. A flash of black hair flying up as a girl, younger than he, scampers back and stumbles, falling to the ground. She’s crying because she’s so scared and her eyes are glued to the gun in his hand. The boy next to her, James knows. His name’s Alec, and he’s in a few of Callum’s classes; Callum calls him a “stupid, pretty, preppy Asian boy” and he surely lives up to the brazen nickname. Fear is painted onto Alec’s expression just as it’s painted on his sister’s as he tells her to run. She doesn’t and Alec turns to shout at her to run and that’s when James takes his aim and fires—once, twice, thrice; the bullets fill Alec’s shirt with red as if they were shots fired from a paintball gun and the choked cry of another witness passes into the air. She (Cadence) is pulled away by another student (Gavin) and into Mrs. Annabelle Mathers’ classroom. James doesn’t know that; he’s rapt in the falling of Alec’s body and the tears that coat his sister’s cheeks.

Red; red everywhere. That’s all James can see and all he can feel and all he can hear. There’s a whimper coming from the bathroom. More shots. Screams. He fires a few and aims one in the direction of the door to the classroom that Mrs. Annabelle Mathers and students occupy. He stops only when he runs out of ammo and returns to where he’d started, with Callum and Marc at the meeting place of the senior courtyard, lunch room, and library. He sits on the bloody stairs, guns at his side. The police storm the building and arrest him. He doesn’t know where Callum and Marc are but he still sees red everywhere, even in the blue of the police sirens and even the sky contains the bloody, haematic tone.

These events led to here, to the metal toilet and walls and bed and floor and the trial that awaits him in some undetermined amount of time. No bail, no bond; he’s jailed until he’s tried and the thought of a jury churns James’ stomach. Will his siblings attend? His father? There’s no way to say and he wouldn’t be lying if he said he’d be unsurprised if no one showed up for him. And he doesn’t want anyone to show up for him; he deserves the loneliness and the overwhelming feeling of guilt and remorse. He should have killed himself like Callum and Marc. For their crimes, they do not deserve life.