Free The Humanity Project by Jean Thompson Page B

is accustomed to seeing nothing. Instead there is this thing that refuses to make sense, a rifle barrel pointed at him, jerking up and down as the shooter tries to adjust the scope. It will not resolve itself into anything real. It takes those first shots, the bullets hitting the wall a few feet from his head, kicking out some of the plaster, for the boy to start running.
    The boy with the guns walked through the hallway, turned a corner, and entered a classroom where a sophomore civics class was in session. He knew no one there. He had never met or spoken to any of his victims. Now everything was real, he was the star of his own movie, which he watched from a little distance inside himself. He shot the teacher first, three times in the back with the handgun. He aimed haphazardly into the rows of students, who were all still in their assigned seats, because no one had yet fathomed any of it. The boy with the gun did not speak. Later it was estimated he was only in the classroom for fifteen to twenty seconds. For most of the students, it was the sight of blood, not even their own but someone else’s, that set them to moving and screaming.
    Those who had been shot did not realize it right away, or at all. The teacher, who had been bent over his desk, died without awareness or comprehension. Four students were wounded, one grievously. The boy returned to the hallways, where, unwisely, a couple of doors had been opened and people were looking out. The boy fired shots in their direction without hitting anyone.
    And here was where the sequence of events became less certain, because the boy with the guns—only the handgun now, since for some reason he’d dropped the rifle in the main hallway—appeared to hide or evade for a time, and no one reported seeing him for a space of at least twenty minutes. By now police were assembling outside the school, and a team of officers was sent inside, wearing protective vests and helmets. They cornered the shooter in the cafeteria kitchen, surrounded him and wrestled him down in the middle of the stainless steel worktables and clanging pans, and only later were the two dead girls discovered in the upstairs restroom. One of them was Linnea’s stepsister. Linnea had been there and watched the boy kill them. She herself had escaped only because his gun had misfired.
    Art stopped talking. Christie said, “Go on, what happened?”
    “That’s what happened. She watched him shoot the others. He held a gun to her head. He couldn’t get it to work right. Jammed or something. He kept trying for a while. Then he gave up and left.”
    “That’s horrible, Art.”
    “I guess she’s been having some behavior issues.”
    “I’d say whatever issues she’s having, she’s entitled to them.”
    “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with her, Chris.”
    “No school, I guess. Unless she needs to take summer classes. What’s she going to do all day?”
    “Shoplift. Sniff glue. I’m terrified.”
    “Well, try to imagine how she feels.”
    That was his problem, or part of it. He could not begin to imagine her. There was a thread of his own DNA in her, but that was braided into whatever she inherited from Louise, plus there was the confounding fact of her femaleness. What did he know about teenagers anyway? They were impossible, he’d been impossible himself, moody, hormonal, sullen. And that without anybody trying to shoot him.
    He didn’t guess it would have made any difference if he’d been a real father to her. The girls who had died presumably had real fathers.
    Vietnamese was a tonal language, so the same words had different meanings, depending on inflections. That was alarming. What if you tried asking directions to the post office but you were really saying, “Do you know where I can find unusually large eels?” He could count with confidence only to six:What if one were to say to a daughter, “Good morning,” but what she heard was, “I never meant to have children.”
    The