Bang (2 page)

Before lunch I dodge strangers and classmates

trying to talk to me, which is absolutely the weirdest experience of my school life, and find Trey to let him know I’m going to have a private lunch with Sawyer, so I’ll see him

in art class.

He smirks. “Tell the two-timing lunch whore I said hey.”

“I will kiss him for you,” I say, and then I add, “I hope,

anyway.” But Trey has moved on with the hallway traffic.

I slip into Mr. Polselli’s empty room, sit at a desk,

and wait, forcing myself to work on a math assignment.

When the door opens I look up and my smile freezes on

my face. Not only is it Sawyer with two lunch trays, but

Roxie and BFF Sarah are with him, apparently there to

open the door.

Sawyer and Roxie are laughing at BFF Sarah, who

rants about something, and all I can think about is how I

want them gone.

“Oh. Hi, Julia,” Roxie says to me, like she didn’t expect

to see me. “Thanks for saving our favorite restaurant.”
I stare at her, wondering if she’s really that rude that

she values the restaurant over the human lives—Sawyer’s

life—or if she’s just stupid. But new Jules isn’t going to

smile and walk away. “Wow. Did you really just say that?”

I say. I glance at Sawyer, who looks almost as offended as

I feel.
Roxie looks confused. “Yeah, did you not just hear me?”
BFF Sarah’s lack of greeting brings frostiness to the

air. She’s probably still peeved about the V-Day decorations I knocked out of her hands.
“Okay, well, thanks for the help,” Sawyer says pointedly to them. He sets a tray on my desk and then sits down at the one next to me. “Can you close the door on the way

out?”
Roxie’s hands go to her hips, and her lips part as if to

protest, but Sawyer ignores them both. He reaches out

and strokes my shoulder. “How’s it going so far? You taking it easy?”
BFF Sarah rolls her eyes, mutters, “Whatever,” and

walks out the door, then stands in the hallway waiting for

Roxie.
“It’s good,” I say. My mouth has gone completely dry

from the tension.
Finally Roxie turns and leaves, letting the door close

hard behind her.
I press my lips together and form a smile. “That went

well.”
“I don’t want to talk about them,” Sawyer says. He

leans toward me and slides a warm hand along my cheek,

sinking his fingers into my hair and pulling me close.

I close my eyes and our mouths meet. Blood pounds

through his fingers and lips, echoing in my ears. My head

spins with all kinds of surprising thoughts as my fingers

explore his shoulders through his shirt. Thoughts like

how I saw his bare, bony torso once when the boys played

shirts and skins in fifth grade, and now, even though he’s

still lean, his sinewy arms and back are roped with muscle,

and I really want to see that chest once more.
When I come to my senses and realize the trouble

we’ll be in if Mr. Polselli walks in right now, I reluctantly

pull back, a little breathless.
Sawyer opens his eyes. “I’ve been waiting a long time

for that.” He pulls his fingers from my hair and smooths

it back into place.
“Tell me about it,” I say, and then I get a little shy,

because here we are, in school, having hardly spoken to

each other for years, and now we’re making out. In a way

everything with Sawyer is so new and raw, but in another

way, it feels like the most natural progression. We were

so close before, and I still feel like I
know
him, you know?
“So . . .” I say, still tasting him on my lips. “Are we,

like, going public with this? And if so, is that a good idea?”
He grins. “I’ve been thinking about that, and you

know, Jules, I don’t want to hide it. But it’s up to you. If

you feel like we need to because of your parents, I totally

understand. Obviously.”
“What about your parents and your grandfather?”
Sawyer’s face sets. “Like I said in the hospital, I’m

done playing along with their stupid game.”
“But—” Impulsively I reach out and brush my fingers

across his cheekbone, imagining his grandfather beating

him, and let my hand rest on his arm.
“He can’t hurt me anymore,” he says in a quiet voice,

and I feel his biceps twitch through his sleeve. “Besides,

I’ve got other shit to worry about.”
“Annnd there’s that,” I murmur, and turn to our lunch

trays. I grab a few carrot sticks and blush when I bite

down and they explode like firecrackers in the quiet room.

“Ready to tell me?”
Sawyer’s eyes close and he lets out a resigned breath.

He shakes his head the slightest bit, and then he opens his

eyes and stares at the whiteboard in front of us. “I’m not

exactly sure how to explain this,” he says. “I mean, I’m

not sure what happened with you or how you saw your .

. . your clues, or whatever . . .” He looks at me for help,

and I realize I’ve never actually had a chance to describe to

him what happened to me—I’d only told him that I saw a

vision of a truck hitting his restaurant and exploding.
“The first time was at the movies,” I say. “Before the

previews, when they have that ‘Turn off your cell phones’

ad. I saw a few seconds of the snowplow careening over

the curb, smashing into your restaurant, and exploding.

There was never any sound, just the picture. And then

the Jose Cuervo billboard—it had a still shot of the truck

explosion.” I hesitate as I relive it, having tried so hard to

block it out. “Then I saw it on TV—and there was a new

part added. Nine body bags in the snow. One of them was

open, showing a face.”
I drop my head into my hand, not wanting to say the

next part.
“A face?” he asks.
I nod and whisper, “Your face.”
He is quiet for a long minute. Then he stands up and

shoves his desk right up to mine, moving our uneaten food

to a different desk. He sits back down and we drape our

arms around each other as I tell him the rest of it. I tell

him about the gripping fear when I found out Angotti’s

was closed that one Saturday night. All the times I drove

past his restaurant to check if it was still there. The way

I studied the scenes and tried to figure things out by the

snow levels on the street. The vision’s growing frequency,

intensity, and urgency until almost every place I looked

was covered in the scene being played out. And my weird

phone calls and visits to him, knowing there was no way

he’d believe me, but having to do something about it.
When I finish, he nods slowly. And then he says,

“Mine has sound. But not voices or street sounds or background noises. Eleven sounds, to be exact. All the same.”

He makes a gun with his finger and thumb and points it

at Mr. Polselli’s papier mâché bust of Ivan Pavlov. “Bang.”

My hand goes to my mouth. “A shooting?” I whisper.

His mouth twitches. “A school shooting.”
“Oh my God.” I look around the room as the shock of

it hits home. “What, here? Our school?”

His Adam’s apple bobs and his eyes turn desperate. “I

don’t know, Jules. I can’t tell where it is.”
“Tell me everything you can think of.”
“At first it was so quick I missed it. I remember thinking, ‘Wait, what just happened?’ and then brushing it off as me being tired. But then I started catching a glimpse of

something out of the corner of my eye in the restaurant

window, like there was a person standing there on the other

side with his arms raised straight out, but whenever I’d look

full on, he was gone.”
I rest my head against his shoulder and stay quiet, not

wanting to interrupt.
“The next thing was the billboard. A still picture of

a figure, arms raised and pointing straight ahead, firing a

gun—muzzle flash and everything.”
I frown. “Muzzle flash?”
“When you pull the trigger of a gun, it ignites gunpowder, which explodes, pushing the bullet out. There’s a little flash of fire that comes out the barrel, but you can’t

usually see it.”
“Why not?”
He shrugs and thinks about that for a minute. “Partly

because it happens really fast. But also because there’s usually too much natural light, I guess.”
“Ah. So this vision of yours—it happens at night?”
He frowns. “Huh,” he says, and then he looks at me.

“Maybe. You’re good at this.”
I give a sordid laugh. “Forced on-the-job training

makes you an expert in a hurry. You’ll learn, kid. Stick

with me.”
“No worries there,” he says, looking slightly relieved.
“So you’re only seeing stills? And you hear gunfire

from them?”
“No, no sound from the stills. We have TVs in the

restaurant bar, and not long after the billboard incident,

when I was bussing a table, I glanced at it and saw the

same figure—person with a gun, arm outstretched, and he

was stepping backward and swinging the gun wide, like he

was feeling threatened. I stopped working and stared at it,

and then the gunshots exploded in my head and I dropped

my tray.”
I wince. “Was it dark?”
He hesitates. “Well, I could see the guy. Not his face—

he was turned away. And I could see, um, bodies. But it

wasn’t sunny or bright in there or anything.”
I knit my brows, thinking. “How do you know this guy

is at a school?”
“I don’t know—it just looked like a school. It was all

really fast—it felt . . . schoolish.”
“Yeah, okay,” I say, trying not to sound impatient. I

remember how many hundreds of times I had to see mine

before I caught everything. “You’ll get more information

eventually.”
Just then somebody opens the door, sees us, and says,

“Oops!” really loudly. I can hear people swarming the hallways. The dude closes the door again, and I glance at the clock. Four minutes until lunch is over.
Sawyer follows my gaze. “That went way too fast,” he

says, getting up. He picks up the food trays and stacks one

on top of the other like the server pro that he is, balancing

them with one hand. “I guess I should get these back to

the kitchen.”
I stand up too, grabbing a roll from the top tray and

pulling a hunk off. “You should try to eat something,” I

say. “You’re going to need the energy.”
He gives me a weary smile. “Does that mean it only

gets worse from here?”
I nod, taking a bite of the roll.
“And it doesn’t end until . . . ?”
I swallow. “Until it’s over.”
We walk to the door and he pauses. “Wait a sec.”

With his free hand he reaches into his pocket. “I hope this

isn’t weird,” he says, “and you can say no and I won’t be

offended or anything, but I can’t stand not being able to

talk to you, especially with . . .
this
thing going on.” He

pulls out a cell phone and hands it to me. “It’s just one of

those cheap prepaid ones. No frills. Phone only.”
I take it, and it feels like I just got out of jail. “You are

brilliant,” I say, turning it over in my hand, and then I look

up at him and my heart swishes. “Thank you.”
“Don’t get caught.”
“I won’t.” I shove the phone into my pocket and reach

up, thumbing the corner of his mouth until he gives me

the smile I love. “I’ll call you tonight.” It’s amazing how

nice it feels to be able to say that.
He hesitates, his hand on the doorknob. “Jules?”
I look at him.
“In the vision, I don’t see any faces I know.”
“Oh.” I’m not sure what he’s trying to say. “Okay, well,

that’s good, right?”
But that’s not what he means. He hesitates, and then

he squeezes his eyes shut like he’s making the hardest decision of his life and says, “I was kind of wondering what happens if I don’t want to do this.”

The bell rings before I can answer, and besides,

the question is too much to absorb in ten seconds, so we

say a hasty good-bye. All afternoon I think about what

he said. And I wonder. If he doesn’t know or care about

any of the people in the vision, does he have to do something? Is he legally obligated to do something? What about, like, morally?

My guess is that my vision probably would have gone

away whether I saved people or not, but I didn’t know that

back then. Does that change anything? I go back in time

in my mind. If I knew that the vision would stop pounding me at every turn if I only waited long enough, would I have done what I did?

That one’s not hard. Sure I would have, because of

Sawyer’s dead face in the body bag. But then I wonder how I

would have looked at it had it been a stranger’s face. If every

part of the vision stayed the same except Sawyer wasn’t

going to be hurt or killed, would I have done what I did?

Not quite as simple, but the answer is still yes, because

it was Sawyer’s family business, and chances were good

that some family members filled the other body bags. And

as much as we both are disgusted by our parents’ behavior—and I’m not talking just my dad’s affair with Sawyer’s mom, but also the ridiculous rivalry over a stupid sauce

recipe—that doesn’t mean we want them to die, and I

wouldn’t want Sawyer to go through that pain.

But what if I knew back then what I know now, and

it
wasn’t
Angotti’s restaurant but some other restaurant

somewhere else? If I knew that the visions would get

worse and become insane, but I knew that it would end

as soon as the crash was over, would I still risk my life to

save those people?

I don’t think I know the answer.

In the evening, while everybody’s still down in the restaurant and I’m stuck doing mountains of worksheets and make-up quizzes that didn’t come home with one of

the sibs, my mind wanders to it again. I pull out the cell

phone, wondering if Sawyer is working, wondering if he’s

slammed or if he maybe has time to talk.

I start pressing the numbers I know by heart but

hardly ever get to use thanks to my father, and the phone’s

address book recognizes them and brings up Sawyer’s

name with a <3 next to it. I smile and look at it for a minute, and then I press the call button. It rings a few times, and I cringe. He’s probably busy.

“Hey,” comes his breathless voice.

Why is it that every time I talk to him I feel like my

brain won’t work? It takes me a full second to form the

word “hi” in response. “Are you slammed?”

“Nope,” he says. “I just got back to the car. Delivered

my last pizza for the night. How’s your new phone?”
“Love it,” I say. Love
you
. “Everybody else is still

downstairs, but if I hang up quickly you’ll know why.”
“I will always assume a quick click means the proprietors are coming, and not that you’re mad or something,”

he teases.
“Oh, I’ll let you know if I’m mad.”
There’s a smile in his voice. “I do not doubt that. As

long as every now and then you still drag me out of bed in

the middle of the night to tell me you’re sorry I’m going

to die, and tell me that you . . .”
He doesn’t say it.
I don’t know what to say.
When you tell a guy you love him before you’re in

a relationship with him, does it mean love love? Or just

love? And what words do you use
after
you start the relationship? You can’t say “I love you” after a first kiss, I don’t care who it’s with. That screams of one of those crash-andburn relationships half the school is in. I think I have to go back to saying “like.” For a while at least.
“Anyway,” he says in the awkward pause.
“Anyway,” I agree. “So, um, I thought about your

question.”
“Me too.”
“I guess all I can say is that I don’t think you have to

risk your life for strangers.” And I stop there, even though

there’s so much more I have to say. And want to say.
He’s quiet for a long moment. “What do you think will

happen if I don’t try to save them?”
“The vision will get stronger and more frequent, and

you’ll see it everywhere. You might not be able to drive—I

was really struggling there at the end.”
“I’m so sorry—”
“Don’t. It’s really okay. I never expected you to believe

me.” I pause, listening for footsteps on the stairs, but all is

quiet. “The main thing you need to get you through it is

to remember it’ll end eventually.”
“How do you know that for sure—that it’ll end?”
His question stops me. “Um . . . because it ended for

me?” I say weakly.
“Yeah, but you did what it wanted you to do,” he says.

“Will my vision still end if I don’t do what it wants?”
“I—I guess I don’t actually know.” I think about it,

wondering if I’d still be tormented by the vision today if

I hadn’t stopped the crash. If I’d have to look at Sawyer’s

dead face in the body bag until the end of time. And for

whatever reason, I think about my dad, and his own apparently tormented life. But Sawyer interrupts my thoughts.
“It’s getting worse,” he says. “As I’m driving around

doing deliveries, it’s showing up on street signs.”
I frown. “Any new scenes?”
“Not so far. I’m going to try to watch some TV

tonight to see if the vision shows up there. Try the rewind/

slow motion thing like you said.”
I feel helpless. I sigh heavily and say, “I’m just so sorry

about this.”
“Yeah, well, I blame you, of course.”
I afford a small smile, but I can’t help it. I feel responsible. This is happening because of me, and it’s like bodies and bodies—eleven gunshots? Holy shit. “So . . . are you

going to try stop the shooting, then?” The words come

out strained, because I’ve already made my decision on

what has to happen if he decides not to save anyone. I’m

going to have to save them myself.
He’s quiet. “Jules,” he says finally, sounding a little

hurt. “Do you really think I could do that? I volunteer

at the freaking Humane Society, you know. How could

I possibly not try to save eleven people from some crazy

gunman?”
My heart floods with relief. “I didn’t think you

would—or could. I just didn’t want you to think I’d blame

you for hoping to try and make it go away.”
“Well,” he says. “Whatever controls this vision thing

sure knows how to pick the right people to get the job

done.”
I hear a door shut at the bottom of the stairs and my

heart races. “Gotta go,” I say in a hushed whisper. “But

I’m with you on this.”
“Thank dog for that,” he says, and we hang up.
Eleven fucking gunshots. And his vision is getting

worse. I feel like I’m going to puke. All I know is that we

gotta get moving on this thing. Now.