Excerpt from the Novel, Out of Order

Boom!

I jumped in my own skin. Was that a gunshot? My eyes widened in slow motion, my hands gripping the sides of the sink in surprise. I watched the color drain out of the reflection of my face in the mirror as I heard Ricky and Jessa’s terrified screams.

Boom!

I took a step back from the sink, feeling my gut twist. My heart was racing. The screaming continued, shrill, scared, desperate. Singular. Jessa.

Boom!

I ran to the bathroom door, dropped to my knees, opened it a sliver. My breath fogged up the shiny doorknob as I pressed my face to the wall to look out the crack. I could see the whole diner, could see—

Blood. His face, unmasked but in profile, bare but for the flecks of blood across his cheeks, his lips. The gun in his hand: a sawed-off shotgun, long, black, deadly. His baseball cap turned backward, Cincinnati Reds. Pupils dilated to mere pinpricks. He was red-nosed and clearly strung out.

Jake’s hands up, his face pale beneath a thick constellation of freckles, dropping to his knees, “Please—”

Boom!

I let go of the door and fell back onto my tulle skirt with a whoosh.

And then everything was quiet.

I backed against the far wall, crab-walking, heart racing, breath coming in spurts. I couldn’t hear anything but my own gasping, the air cold against my lips as rivulets of water fell down my face, over my lips, down my neck. I was frozen, pressed against the dirty tile wall next to the garbage can underneath the paper towel dispenser.

I heard a distinctive creak and flinched, waiting for the death shot. It didn’t come. The man had gone into the men’s washroom next door.

Bam! He kicked a stall door in. It slammed against the one next to it. He was checking for witnesses.

I was frozen still, breathing hard. I reached down with shaky hands and pulled off one high heel and then the other, methodical, slow. Standing in stocking feet, I walked to the out-of-order stall on the far end of the row, listening to the madman’s kicks. Bam. Bam. Bam.

I crawled under the door, ignoring the automatic response to be grossed out, stood, and placed my heels on top of the toilet paper dispenser. The sound of him opening the door covered the soft porcelain-on-porcelain sound of me climbing on top of the broken toilet and sitting on the water tank.

Bang! He kicked the first stall door in. Bang, the second.

I held my breath, my toes curling against the toilet seat—one hand over my mouth and nose, the other against the wall, steadying my awkward position as I balanced precariously above the water in a crouch.

My heart was racing. It was beating so hard and so loudly in my ears that I was sure he could hear it. 

Bang! Bang! 

When he kicked each door open, the whole structure shuddered. In between each kick, his footsteps were loud and heavy; he was wearing some kind of work boots. When he kicked in the door of the stall next to mine, the flimsy divider vibrated so violently that one of my shoes slipped from the toilet paper dispenser and fell—

—into my hand, flung out on reflex. I caught the shoe by the ridiculously high heel, almost falling off the toilet to do so. I took a breath—couldn’t help it—and slammed my eyes shut so hard I could see a nebula of swirling colors on the inside of my eyelids.

Oh God oh God oh God oh God, my brain screamed in the thundering silence. My lungs burned, my eyes filled with terrified tears, and my thighs shuddered from the effort of holding myself absolutely still in such a strange way. My foot was slipping, sweaty against the toilet seat.

I heard his footsteps leaving. Leaving. I didn’t breathe until the huge metal door to the bathroom slammed shut behind him. A hush fell.

The first real breath I took was a sob—a broken, desperate noise as my stockinged foot finally slipped into the toilet, getting soaked almost to the knee. The splash of cold water up my calf shocked me into moving, and I tumbled off the toilet and against the locked stall door, feeling hot tears spill over my cheeks.

I choked on every breath, the panic attack finally taking over. A nightmare seen through the cracked door: Kate’s sparkly high-heeled shoe covered in blood; Ricky’s limp arm hanging over the table; Jake’s pale face, his lips forming the word, “Please,” voice cracking. He didn’t even have a chance to close his eyes before the shooter pulled the trigger, point blank.

It played over and over in my head like a surreal nightmare, the worst dream I’d ever had, worse even than all the nightmares that had come after we’d all watched The Ring when we were ten. We hadn’t been supposed to watch it—my mother had said no—but we’d done it anyway, and we had all been so scared that night. We made a pile of pillows and blankets in the middle of the living room and slept in a tangle wrapped so tight you almost couldn’t tell whose limbs were whose. I’d woken up with Jessa’s foot on my face the next morning.

With my eyes still closed and my teeth pressed together so hard that my jaw ached, I prayed for the first time in my life. I prayed that I was about to wake up with Jessa’s foot on my face, with a penis drawn on my forehead in washable marker, with Kate’s face buried in my stomach and Ricky wheezing in my ear. This can’t be happening, I thought hysterically. Please, God, don’t let this be happening.

The seconds ticked by in an eerie, unnatural silence broken only by my rapid heartbeat. After what felt like an eternity, I finally let go of my high heel and heard it clatter to the floor, too loud. I opened my eyes. This wasn’t a nightmare. This was real.

They say that your life flashes before your eyes when you think that you’re about to die. If that were true, I would have gotten the highlight reel while perched atop a broken toilet at Sparky’s Diner, listening to a pair of steel-toed boots approach my stall. Instead, as I stood on the stage at my high school graduation, in front of dozens of witnesses, I watched my senior year play out like a movie projected onto the faceless crowd.

I closed my eyes and squared my shoulders, trying to forget, just for a moment, the way Kate crinkled her nose when she laughed, the way Jessa huffed and crossed her arms when we made fun of her and Brandon’s constant kissy-face, the way Ricky’s voice sounded as she sang along to the car radio. I couldn’t forget a single moment like that. And why should I?

When I opened my eyes, I was still standing on the stage in my high school’s auditorium, but I felt more clearheaded than I had in days. Only a few breaths had passed, but I knew what I needed to say.

“You all know what happened on prom night by now. News travels fast in a small town. And our small town, the place we all feel safe, was the home of a vicious and senseless murder.

“I was told repeatedly not to use that word when preparing to give this speech. Murder. I was told to make my speech as uplifting as possible under the circumstances, and I’m sorry Principal Sterner, but I cannot and shall not do that. You wanted me to come up here and talk in front of everyone, to tell them why we are here today, and that is precisely what I am going to do.”

The audience was silent as I swept my eyes over the crowd, trying to distinguish one face from another. I could not. The stage lights in my eyes made them all faceless, shadows of people I knew and respected.

“When I was elected valedictorian, I was a different person than the one who stands before you today. I had not been touched by tragedy—by grief—and I was ignorant. Not because, as my cue cards say here, I thought I was invincible. Not because I thought that being young made me indestructible. I was ignorant because I believed that human nature was essentially good. I believed in karma, and fate, and paying it forward.

“I have never believed myself or my friends invincible, but I did believe in our futures. I believed I would die one day surrounded by friends, family, and grandchildren, and that the majority of my peers would end their lives the same way, sixty, seventy, or even eighty years from now. I would have gone to college, gotten a degree, and found a job. After years of hard work, I would have retired; after meet-cutes and breakups I would find my soul mate and make a life with them, have children, watch them grow.

“This is the life that awaits most of the graduates sitting in this auditorium. Thank God that you are here. You have all worked very hard to be here today, and you deserve recognition for that accomplishment. Those of us who are lucky enough to walk across this stage today and shake hands with Principal Sterner will go on to achieve wonderful things in this life, whether those things include a great success like developing a new treatment for cancer or simply settling down to start a family. You will make choices every day that will move you through your future. Whether you earn bachelor’s degrees or doctorates, whether you get married at nineteen or at thirty-five, whether you make a million dollars a year or ten thousand, you will make great accomplishments. This I can promise you.

“I can promise you this because you are alive. You are bright and vibrant young people with goals and the perseverance to reach them. The four people that we lost to this senseless crime were also young, bright, and vibrant. They too had amazing things in the future to learn and teach and create. Four young lives just like mine and yours were cut short because a man with a gun—”

I felt like my throat was closing. I’d already said so much, but there was more. I had to get it out now or it would never come out. It would be frozen in my mind, stuck in my mouth, and it would fester and rot there until it was all I’d ever be able to taste. I coughed bitterly, swallowed past the bad taste in my mouth—and pushed on.

“—a man with a gun decided he could play God and end those lives.” I bit my lip and shook my head. “I don’t know why, and I might never know why, but he did. He chose to murder four people, those four people, and that is why we are here today. We are here today because that man chose to kill those four people and not us.”

I could see Vice Principal Redding pulling violently at her blonde curls just offstage. I had gone incredibly off script, but everything I was saying demanded to be said. If no one else was going to be brave enough, I would have to be.

“We are here, and they are not. I used to believe in things like karma, fate, and paying it forward. I’m not sure I can believe in those things anymore, because it seems to me that these four were chosen without logic or reason. We are here and they are not here, so we must be the ones to mourn and to remember them. Today cannot be the joyous occasion that it will be for the hundreds of other high schools across the country, because they are not here to share it with us.”

I glanced down at my cue cards. There was nothing in them that I needed to say.

Excerpt from
Out of Order
JMS Books 2023
ISBN 9781685504472 
 

©2023 Casey Lawrence
All rights reserved
Used by permission of the author

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Casey Lawrence…

… has a doctorate in English Literature from Trinity College Dublin. She is a queer activist, feminist, and democratic socialist who writes contemporary fiction, sci-fi, and fantasy, as well as nonfiction and poetry. Originally from Ontario, Casey currently lives in Denmark with her partner of six years. She writes the books she wishes she’d been able to read growing up and doesn’t shy away from the problems of today.

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