Chapter Twenty-Two Kami #2
Not even twenty-four hours had passed since we’d been in bed together, wrapped in each other’s arms, kissing, exploring each other’s bodies, giving each other pleasure and starting to truly love one another—because when that happens, you can feel it.
You know it’s real. You know this is the person you’re meant to be with, you can sense the trust taking root deep within your heart, real, palpable.
I had felt that, I had seen our future, and I didn’t need to go out with him for years to find out all the little details about him, his best virtues and worst defects, because I already knew him.
Because he was my missing half, my soulmate—call it what you want. He was the one who had made me the happiest girl in the world, the one who drove me crazy, who had consoled me in the bottomless pit of pain, protected me, and given himself to me, body, mind, and soul, and you know how I knew this?
Because I was the very same for him.
We sat in the waiting room for hours. First, they told us about Taylor. The surgery had gone well, and they were bringing him out of anesthesia. He would need to rest, but he’d soon be back on his feet.
I was relieved. They took us back to see him. He was breathing on his own, he was battered and bruised, but he was still Taylor, my Taylor, my best friend.
Thiago, though… A doctor told us he’d gone into cardiac arrest, but they’d managed to revive him. His life was hanging by a thread, and they hadn’t finished his operation yet.
For ten hours, they tried to save him. Ten hours to stop the blood loss, extract the bits of bone lodged in his brain, and remove the damaged tissue.
They told us he’d been lucky: The bullet had traveled partway along the bone and hadn’t penetrated the skull very deeply.
They had performed what they called a decompressive craniectomy, which meant they removed a section of bone to keep the brain swelling from killing him.
The surgeon, looking exhausted from so many hours’ work, continued, “The upcoming days will be crucial. If the inflammation goes down, we can replace the bone. After that, it’s wait and see. ”
“So he’ll get better, right?” Ms. Di Bianco asked the doctor, looking at him as if he were God come down to earth.
“Ma’am, your son’s suffered a very serious injury.
An injury of this type has about a 5 percent survival rate.
Most of those who don’t die immediately don’t make it long once they enter the emergency room.
Your son’s strong; he’s held on through ten hours of surgery.
He’s young, too, and he’s in excellent shape, so that’s not to be underestimated.
His blood pressure and his oxygenation levels are in the normal range.
He was semiconscious when he arrived, he could squeeze a hand on command when we asked him to, he could blink, and that tells us there is some baseline brain functioning despite the trauma.
Trust me, that’s a blessing, and the surgery went as well as anyone could have hoped.
But this is a very delicate situation, and only time will tell. ”
Only Thiago’s mother was allowed to see him.
He spent the next twenty-eight days in an induced coma in the ICU.
The inflammation went down, they replaced the bone, but his recovery was slow, and those days were hard—the worst days of my life.
Not just because of what had happened to Thiago, but also because the whole town was suffering.
Carsville was now news across the nation and the globe.
Hundreds of journalists descended on us, camping outside the school and outside the homes of the survivors, ready to entertain the world with our suffering.
The death count rose over the next few days: the principal, almost the entire staff, and so many students shot in cold blood.
The town was in mourning. The parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles of the children lost were our shop owners, our businesspeople, our police and firefighters, and so everything was closed. Things would never be the same here.
We had all lost someone. A friend, a brother, a teacher, a colleague. All of us had to walk behind that long line of cars that drove through the center of Carsville to the cemetery.
Sadness bled into every nook and cranny of our town.
A population of fifteen thousand—minus the recent losses—had to watch their loved ones be laid in the ground before their eyes.
And most of those gone weren’t even seventeen.
Lives cut short, dreams cut short, all that joy and hope, all those dreams, gone.
I watched as some of my best friends were buried. Lana died two days after the shooting. They operated on her, they tried to save her, but the damage was too great. Ellie had been shot as we ran to escape, side by side. I missed Chloe’s funeral—when the time came, I just couldn’t do it again.
Their families were torn to pieces. I remember the look on Mr. and Mrs. Webber’s faces, the pain. It was so intense, I could never manage to describe it.
I remember the rage I felt when I saw Danny at the funeral dressed in black.
He’d been lucky—he’d been suspended when everything happened.
He hadn’t had to witness what we’d seen, his life had never been in danger, he didn’t have to live knowing all that horror.
And to think, he had been one of the first to start beating up Julian that day.
I couldn’t help but feel this was partly his fault.
Nothing could ever justify what Julian had done.
I knew that, but I guess I had to try to find someone to blame now that the person who had truly been responsible was gone.
When they’d buried Julian, people had gone to the funeral to scream at his grave.
The police had shown up to keep a riot from breaking out.
I hoped he was burning in hell.
The days were brutal, the weeks seemed endless. Every day there was another funeral. All the loved ones who were gone deserved our mourning, our farewells, our words of recollection about their lives.
My father hurried home as soon as he heard the news. He stayed with us, sleeping on the sofa, making us dinner, trying to do whatever he could to help us recover.
We didn’t take Cam to any of the funerals.
We tried to keep him distracted, and when Dad left, my grandmother took care of him.
Cam couldn’t really comprehend everything that had happened.
Luckily, Thiago had kept him clear from the real horror.
My brother hadn’t witnessed any deaths, and that helped to preserve his innocence.
Still, Cam was never the same person again.
When I wasn’t at someone’s funeral or consoling someone’s family, I was visiting the brothers at the hospital.
They still wouldn’t let me back to see Thiago, so I would sit in the waiting room for hours, praying for him to open his eyes and smile.
Then I’d go see Taylor, until he was eventually discharged a few days later.
We cried together. We held each other in his bedroom, trying to figure out how to process what we’d seen and lived through, trying to get over all the goodbyes we’d had to say.
He was on crutches, and in a great deal of pain, but he went to every funeral he could, every memorial at every church.
We saw psychologists, talked to the police, gave statements to the press. Parents called us, looking for answers, hoping for consolation to ease their suffering. We did what we could. We wanted to help, and we both felt guilty because we’d survived.
It was hard when we saw the images on TV, heard the names of the victims read out, watched the interviews with parents crying in front of the cameras, wanting answers, wishing there was someone still alive they could blame.
The three perpetrators were identified as Julian Murphy, Raphael Vantinsky, and Lucas O’Donnell.
All of them were minors, and no one knew where they’d gotten hold of the weapons or ammunition employed in what would be known as the Carsville High Massacre.
Who would have been so careless, so heartless, as to sell pistols and high-powered rifles to a bunch of minors?
All over the press, all over the internet, people argued over the same endless debate on gun control I’d heard since I was a child.
Should I have spoken up? Maybe. But at that moment in my life, there was only one thing that mattered to me: that the love of my life would open his eyes and smile again.
And so far, there was nothing to hint that it would ever happen.