Paper Airplanes (4 page)

“Not Aiden,” I said, looking at Marley for confirmation.

Her crumbling face told me everything. “He tried to save me. When the guy shot Will, Aiden pulled me behind the cash register. The cashier was huddled back there, so we stayed with him. But Aiden tried to look out to see if he could see Reese. I called out to him, because I didn’t want him to leave me, and the guy found us. Aiden went after him when he pointed the gun at me. I couldn’t stop screaming. I was so scared, and he told me to shut up or he’d kill me. Aiden went after him, and–”

Marley couldn’t finish her sentence, but she didn’t need to. I knew exactly what had happened. Instead of saying anything, I just pulled her to me and held her as she cried, both of us mourning the boy she’d loved and someone who’d
been a good friend to me since the day I’d met him.

“
What happened to Reese?” I asked then, my voice muffled by her hair.

I wasn’t sure I could handle hearing that Reese was dead too. In the span of five minutes I’d lost two people close to me. I couldn’t take hearing that I’d lost another.

“He was shot in the chest, but he survived,” she said, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

Then
I started to put the pieces together in my mind of what had happened that night. Will. Aiden. Reese. He’d shot all three of them. He’d tried to shoot me, and he’d gone after Marley. I squeezed her tighter. I was so relieved that she was there, that she was alive, that I was alive. But my brain was so jumbled by the fact that I’d lost two of my friends. Why had the guy been there? Why had he shot at us? Who was he? Did he have some issue with us?

“Why?” I asked, looking between Marley and my mother.

My mother shook her head, sadness sweeping her features. “No one knows for sure, but when they searched the gunman’s dorm room, they found a lot of evidence that he’d been contemplating something like this for a while. I think you all just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. You didn’t know him.”

Her voice cracked on the last words, so I reached out and took her hand, squeezing it in mine. Tears started to fall down her cheeks, and she looked away from me.

“Mar?” I asked, turning to my best friend.

She looked up at me, lifting her head so I could see her tear-stained cheeks and red, bloodshot eyes.

“Did you get shot?”

She started to cry again as she shook her head. “No. After he shot Aiden, he aimed the gun at me, and I knew that was it. I
was going to die. But the cashier – he was just another student – he tackled the guy and knocked me out of the way. I broke my wrist when I fell, and then I blacked out. When I came to, the police were there. The gunman was dead, and so was the cashier. I found out later that they’d fought, and the gunman killed him. The police had snipers take out the gunman right after.”

She shuttered as she remembered every detail, and for the first time I was glad I had no memories. The images she’d put in my head were bad enough. I couldn’t fathom what it was like to close your eyes and see the things she’d seen.

All I could do was hug her again, pull her close to me and cry along with her. The reality of my situation was slowly sinking in. I’d been shot. I’d been unconscious for three weeks, in a coma, and two of my best friends were dead along with twelve other students. Seventeen others had been injured, including Reese.

This was not happening. This was not my life. This wasn’t real.

Three Months Later

Chapter Three

Cassie

“Cass?” my mom asked when she poked her head in
to my room.

“Yeah
, Mom?”

I looked up from
the book I was reading and met her gaze.

She sat down on the end of my bed. “How are you feeling?”

She’d asked me that every day since I’d moved home. And each day, I gave her some variation of the same answer. I said I was fine because it was the easiest thing to say. And it seemed logical since I still couldn’t remember anything about the shooting, even though I’d watched countless interviews with witnesses and the students who’d survived and read the articles about what had happened. I had no recollection of anything that had happened in the dining hall that night.

I couldn’t believe I’d been there, that I’d witnessed it
, and that I’d survived it. It didn’t seem real. It was like watching a news story unfold, except in this story, I not only knew people who were involved, I’d also been involved. It was a surreal feeling of being on the outside looking in but not really. A part of me had shifted after than night. I felt different, but I couldn’t explain why that was. It was almost as if my body knew it should feel different, but my brain couldn’t wrap around why that was.

“I’m
good, Mom,” I told my mother, but I knew she didn’t believe me.

I wasn’t
good, and we both knew that. I was just okay. I was getting by as best I could, because despite what I didn’t remember, I had been through something traumatic and my brain knew it. I just couldn’t connect what I was feeling with what I remembered. It was incredibly frustrating.

But aside from that, what resonated with me the most
, what made me sadder than I’d ever felt was the reminder that I’d lost two people I loved. That hurt the worst, waking up each day knowing that Will and Aiden were gone, that they’d sacrificed themselves for me and Marley, and they were dead because of it.

I was so torn inside feeling grateful at the same time I felt angry that Will did that. Why had he saved me? He was dead, and I had lived, and it wasn’t fair. Not that I wanted to be dead, but why him? Why did he have to die at all?

God, I missed him.
I missed him and Aiden every day. I hadn’t been able to go to either of their funerals. They’d been held while I was in the hospital, and I’d missed the memorial the students had held on campus a few days after the shooting. I’d lost almost a month of my life, and I’d woken up feeling like a different person.

Maybe it was simply
knowing what had happened to me, or maybe it was the fact that my friends had been gunned down so brutally for being at the wrong place at the wrong time, but I knew my life was never going to be the same. None of it made sense. Will was a nice guy. Everyone liked him. And Aiden was the comedian of the frat. Neither of them deserved to have their lives ended like they had.

And the twelve other students who’d been killed, they didn’t deserve it either. All I kept thinking as I stayed in my room at my parents’ house and avoided the outside world as much as I could was how unfair it all was. I knew that was
a childish way to think, but it was what kept running through my head. It was all so unfair.

I’
d been home for three months after getting released from the hospital a week after I’d woken up. The doctors had examined me and determined there wasn’t anything physically wrong with me. There wasn’t any medical reason for why I’d been in a coma for three weeks, and the only explanation they offered about my amnesia was trauma. I’d been traumatized – emotionally. Physically I was fine. The bullet that had hit me had grazed my scalp along the side of my head, tearing open part of my skull, but it hadn’t entered my brain. A few inches to the left, and I would have been dead.

I’d had stitches, but by the time I’d woken up they had been removed, and my wound was healed. There was a scar I could feel along the side of my head that was several inches long, and I had a patch of hair that was
just a few inches long growing from the spot of my injury where they had to shave my hair. You couldn’t tell when you looked at me, but I knew it was there, and I had developed a bad habit of touching it, feeling the raised ridge and the short curls of hair. But that was my only physical reminder of the day.

After getting out of the hospital, i
t had taken me a while to get my strength back, but for me that was a convenient excuse not to do much of anything once I was home. In truth I was afraid. The fear I felt was intrinsic, never leaving, always inside me, and because of that, I stayed home a lot, hanging out in my childhood bedroom, reading to pass the time and watching movies that would make me laugh. I also talked to Marley daily. And I’d talked to Reese a few times. We’d never been all that close, but going through what we had changed that, and I knew we’d be bonded for life. Reese and Marley were bonded too. I knew they spoke more often than Reese and I did, talking about Aiden and what had happened, finding comfort in each other. It was really all any of us could do.

I was glad Marley had him to talk to, since he remembered everything. He’d seen his brother go after the gunman, and he’d seen him fall, just like
Marley had. I knew I couldn’t help Marley like he could, but I tried. She was home in Seattle, and I just wished she was with me. We needed each other, but her parents had insisted she come home. After the shooting, she’d tried to go to classes and resume her normal life, but it had been too hard. She couldn’t do it. But she refused to leave Wisconsin until she knew I was okay. Then after I was released from the hospital and my parents brought me home to Illinois, she went home too.

I wished she could have come home wit
h me. If she was there I knew she’d bring me a level of comfort I’d been missing since we’d been separated, and I’d do the same for her. She was like my sister, and I needed her more than ever. I needed someone. I’d never felt so alone, but Marley was the only person I felt like letting in. She was the only person who knew how I felt, how scared I was and how out of control my life had become in a short amount of time. She just got it.

She’d been my
best friend since kindergarten. We had grown up together, but right before high school her family had moved when her father got transferred for his job. But we’d kept in touch, always best friends, and we’d decided to go to the same college. We’d even taken a road trip to Coleman when we decided we wanted to go there. It was our first time being away from home alone, and we’d felt so free. The campus had been incredible, and we’d met two cute guys when we were grabbing lunch. It was a no-brainer. We left knowing that’s where we’d wanted to go to school.

And we’d made a home
there. We had friends and an apartment and a life in Wisconsin. But now we were separated again, just when we needed each other the most.

I ran my
hand though my long blond curls, my fingers tracing my scar. I could feel my mother’s eyes on me, so I looked up at her.

“I’m okay, Mom. I promise,
” I said, my hand moving to finger my paper airplane necklace. I hadn’t taken it off since I’d woken up in the hospital. It was like having a piece of Will with me all the time.

My mom looked at me skeptically.
I knew she wouldn’t believe me until I proved to her that I was fine. And staying at home like I had been wasn’t going to build my case. I knew it wasn’t healthy. At home I was stagnant, never moving forward, never getting over the mess my life had become. And as apprehensive as I was, I knew it was time to start making it right again. I knew that if I didn’t start living the gunman would win. I couldn’t let him win. He’d already taken too much from me, and I wasn’t going to let him take anything else.

I’d had to drop all of my classes
at Coleman, because I’d missed a month of school. There wasn’t any way for me to make up the lost time. But the week before I’d put on a brave face and gone to our local community college to enroll in summer classes in a joint effort to not fall completely behind in school and to force myself to leave the house on a daily basis. It was a baby step, and I knew that. I couldn’t go back to Coleman – to my friends and my program and the campus I’d fallen in love with – not yet. But it had been my goal since I’d gotten home. I’d always planned to go back. I just needed time.

I needed
to work up the nerve to do it. I hadn’t been back to campus since the day I’d gotten out of the hospital, even though I still had the apartment nearby that I’d shared with Marley until the end of the summer. Our furniture and personal belongings were still inside. I’d taken most of my clothes home with me, but that was it. I hadn’t had the strength to pack much more than that, and a part of me knew that if I had my parents pack everything else up and turn the apartment back over to the leasing office, then it meant I definitely wouldn’t be back.

And I loved going to school
at Coleman. I loved my classes and the student life and the campus that looked so beautiful in the fall. But I also loved my friends. And that was why I wasn’t sure if I could ever go back. Will and Aiden wouldn’t be there, and I knew I’d be able to feel them missing as I walked across campus. If anything kept me away, it would be that harsh reality.

I think I
might have also been afraid of my memories of the shooting coming back when I was so close to where it had taken place. Marley had nightmares constantly. She said she’d wake up in the middle of the night screaming for Aiden, and she’d be terrified all over again, watching him die and not being able to do anything to save him. I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to remember Will dying. In truth, I didn’t want to remember any of it.

So for now I
was home, and my goal was to take some parts of my life back slowly over the summer. My hope was that by the time fall came around, Marley and I could return to school. It was what I wanted most – a sense of normalcy in a world where I felt shattered and broken and helpless. I didn’t want to feel like that anymore, and I knew I needed to start pushing myself to get past what had happened. It was the only way to not drown in reality. I needed to create a new reality for myself, one where I was strong and thriving, not where I lived in constant fear, jumped from loud noises and didn’t let anyone close to me. I wasn’t that girl, and I didn’t want to be her any longer.

My mom smiled at me. She was so worried, and rightfully so. I couldn’t imagine going through what she’d been through
in learning your only child had been involved in a violent, senseless shooting, had been shot in the head and was in a coma. Three long weeks she and my father had waited to see if I was going to wake up. They’d also lived in fear of what would happen when I woke up. There was the chance that small fragments of the bullet had entered my brain, and I wouldn’t be the same. They had three weeks of not knowing if their daughter was okay. And those seemingly short weeks had aged them like nothing else.

“I’ve got a decently long day in court today
,” my mother said instead of what was really on her mind. “One particular case isn’t going to go over so well with the judge, so I’ll probably be home late.”

“Okay,” I said amiably
, knowing how hard she’d been working.

She’d taken
a month off of work for me, so her caseload had doubled since she’d been back at her firm. Long hours were the norm for her these days. My dad was working the same long hours at the DA’s office. He was also a lawyer. I didn’t see them often, which I knew was compounding the guilt they both felt about what I’d been through. But I was okay when I was alone. It was being around other people that sometimes unsettled me. And I had big plans to get past that. I hated being afraid.

“And
your father and I have a counseling appointment at eight,” she added when I didn’t say anything else.

“I know,” I told her. “It’s Thursday. No worries. I’ll be fine
grabbing dinner on my own.”

She pursed her lips together an
d appraised me. I knew what she was thinking.
I’d like for you to come with us, Cassie.

My
parents had started seeing a therapist once a week after they’d brought me home. They’d had trouble dealing with what I’d been through, and it helped to talk through it with someone. After a month they’d evolved to group therapy where they could talk to other parents who’d been through similar things with their children. From what my mother had told me, I was lucky to have gotten out of my situation relatively unscathed. Most of the children of the parents in their group hadn’t been as lucky.

And I knew I was lucky, but I was also still existing in a dreamlike state where what had happened to me wasn’t real. It wasn’t mine. It was like watching a tragedy unfold on the news. It saddened you, but since you weren’t there, you couldn’t really feel the emotions of the situation. I’d heard enough from Marley and Reese and read enough on the Internet to put the pieces together
. The headlines and the pictures told most of the gruesome story.

Fourteen Gunned Down at Coleman College.

Coleman College Junior Goes on a Shooting Spree, Killing Fourteen People.

Students and Faculty Mourn the Loss of Their Own at Coleman College Memorial.