Page 17 of I Will Ruin You

Finally, there was the sound of Mark LeDrew’s bomb going off.

Everyone in the class had screamed. They’d been steeling themselves to hear gunfire, a single shot at least. But the explosion came as a surprise. A bomb? A fucking bomb? Was the entire school going to blow up? Should they clear the door and make a run for it? Pull back the shades, break glass, and escape through the windows?

But within a minute or two of the blast, Trent went on the PA system and told everyone to stay where they were. The situation, he said, appeared to have reached a resolution, but the lockdown would continue until they got an “all-clear” from the police.

“That was the worst time,” Eldon said. “Wondering if there was gonna be more bombs, or shooting, or what. The weird thing was, we were all kind of freaking out at first but we were all calm at the same time, you know?”

I nodded.

They had plenty of questions for me, some of them about the most grisly details, but I dodged most of them. “You know the basics,” I said. “It’s not easy for me to talk about. I hope you get that.”

They did.

Eldon said, “They fired Mr. Grant.”

The caretaker.

“He’s not fired,” Emma said. “He’s on some kind of suspension. That’s what my mom said. He kept meaning to fix the latch on that door but never got around to it. I think he should be fired. If we’d have been killed it would have been all his fault.”

I didn’t want to get into it. I made one vain attempt to talk about our current reading project, but the bell was going to ring in two minutes so I don’t know why I bothered. I assigned no homework and wished everyone a good weekend. On Monday, I warned them, we were going to get back to work. Tests and essays, I told them. Lots and lots of them. The most homework in the history of homework. No one looked particularly worried.

I noticed there was one student who hadn’t said a word the entire period. As he was exiting the class, head down, I called to him.

“Andrew,” I said.

Andrew Kanin stopped and turned. “Yes, Mr. B.?” he said.

“Got a second?”

“You want me to close the door?” he asked.

“No, leave it open. You were pretty quiet. You okay?”

“I guess,” he said, taking a few steps toward my desk. “This is my first day back, too.”

I nodded. “There’s quite a few kids still haven’t returned.”

“My parents didn’t want me to come back but neither of them could get off work today and they didn’t want me to stay home alone.”

At fifteen?

“I promised them I’d text them every hour.”

“Okay,” I said. “It’s going to take a while for everything to feel back to normal.”

“When are we going to be reading a different book?”

“You don’t like The Road?”

He thought for a moment. “I’ll finish it, but are there any happy books?”

A wave of guilt washed over me. Maybe, given the current state of things, there were better choices than the apocalypse.

I thought a moment. “How about happy and funny?”

“Sure.”

I didn’t want to overwhelm him with a list. “Go to the library and find Carl Hiaasen.” I spelled the last name for him. “He writes for grown-ups and young adults. See if they have Hoot.”