Chapter Text
Mid-September.
Blood. Its metallic taste was staining all over Joel’s mouth, its smell licking at the inside of his throat as his breath stuttered in and out of his trembling lips. Blood, splattered all over his face, staining the thin glass of his glasses, making it difficult to focus on what’s before him, splashes of cardinal colors, heavy as the scent of metal, staining his visions, dancing along the black spots turning in his eyes. His hands were shaking, and so was his bad knee, as he crouched —his cane was long abandoned, stained by blood just like his glasses. He pressed on the pouring wound of the teen before him as hard as his trembling arms allowed him.
“Ellie!” He believed that was her name, but he wasn't sure. “Girl, Ellie, come on!” Her hands were clawing at his wrists, nails and soft fingertips digging into the thin material of his sleeve. Her grip was weak, and Joel could hardly feel its pressure through the adrenaline pounding in his heart. She was gasping, her eyes blown wide, lost, her pupils erratic and fully black with panic. Tears and blood were rolling off her fluttering lashes, leaving on her temples wet stains of a watercolor red— yet, somehow, the watery color was still cutting with the paleness of her skin. Blood was pooling around her like the halo of an angel, red and damp, leaking between the hardwood slats, so wet, soaking the floor all around her, her jeans, her hoodie, her hair, the knees of Joel's pants as he kneeled in the warm wetness of the fluid. It was everywhere. The girl tried to hit Joel's hands away, slapping his wrists with the bloody palm of her hand; not understanding he was the only reason why she was not lying still on the floor yet, with her eyes tern and her heart unpulsing.
“Ellie, please, let me!” Joel had never been good with names. He should be, as a teacher, but he never was. The shooter was already dead, splashes of his blood splattered on ‘The Christmas Party’ by Norman Rockwell.
Joel hoped it was a reproduction.
Late August.
The air was warm. It was wet and heavy, licking at his skin, threatening to morph into a thunderstorm as the tip of his frock hit the bottom of his lunchbox. The cold pasta did not seem ready to give up just yet, escaping the tines of the fork once again, fleeing to a corner of the half-empty lunchbox.
Joel sighed, looking at the few pastas left, before abandoning his lunch on his desk, leaning back in his chair and closing his eyes, his head thrown back. The air conditioning was broken in his classroom, and a poor fan was buzzing in the corner, throwing up air toward the empty student desks before him. Joel would move it so the air was blown in his direction, just for lunch break, but he didn’t want to open his eyes and didn’t want to move. Joel would open the windows, but it would only make the heat worse. It would invite in breathes of warm and sandy wind, and the flying bugs hovering outside, the ones poking stupidly, repeatedly, on the glass windows, almost begging to be let in.
Hard laughter resonated from outside the classroom, along with the sound of shoes slapping the floor, four blurry silhouettes briefly darkening the opaque windows giving onto the hallway as they ran. Freshmen, surely.
Freshmen were who Joel taught the most. A cruel joke or a quiet apology for what had been done, Joel wasn’t sure.
Freshmen were full of energy, difficult to get quiet, with always a whisper or a laugh to throw in the silence of the classroom. They still looked like children, most of them. The roundness of their cheeks had yet to go away, and their minds were still forming, eagerly feasting on whatever information was thrown at them, growing brains feeding on everything but the classes they were given. Put a child in front of his parents fighting, and they will learn and reproduce the behavior; put them in a classroom, and they will fall asleep, dreaming of their parents loving each other. Most of them were eager in the first week, eager to learn, eager for the new smells, the new places, the new classes, the new teachers, the new people —before realizing high school was just like middle school, but with more expectations and fewer hours of sleep.
The bell rang, cutting, gouging into the heat. Kids were gathering outside his classroom.
It had only been two days since school started again, and the freshmen had yet to be discouraged.
First of September.
The weather was getting heavier each day. Long hours of burning sun —boiling the large, straight streets of the city, making the people dozy with a heat-induced drunkness and goldening the fields that surrounded the town. Despite the ever-so-present sun, the air was moist and sticking to Joel’s face and skin, and even the darkness of the night couldn’t seem to bring him relief. The bay window of his balcony was opened wide toward the field buzzing with night bugs, the mosquito net down, the clear moon shining, blue, in his open apartment.
Down in his armchair, Joel wished for a drink, perfectly knowing there was no alcohol in his house.
The night was buzzing loudly, bugs seeming even more awake than they were during the day, their little bodies hidden in the golden wheat that the night had made brown, their whole metallic abdomen vibrating with noise, their hissing almost as loud as the noise of the highway during the day.
Joel would kill for some rain.
Early September.
The classroom was buzzing, both with the noise of the fan and the swallowed whispers of the students. Most were heads down, nose nuzzled into the document study they were supposed to be finishing, but some were resisting, rebelliously giggling in the back of the classroom, laughter choked behind their hands.
Joel let them. He could pretend the droning noises of the classroom were from the fan and the flies.
Before him, on his desk, were scattered, messy, and barely correctly organized, permission slips. It was a small, mandatory field trip; a museum in the West of the city was holding, every September, a large exposition that matched the history curriculum. Joel’s predecessor had asked for this field trip fifteen years ago, and nothing had changed ever since; the school shipped both students and teachers to the very West of the city every September. Every year, the students were set free in the museum, encouraged to build up responsibility and autonomy and to go investigate the exposition themself; and every year, they could barely tell you two things about the exposition, but could throw up a million words about the benches in the garden of the museum. No teachers bothered enough to change that system, perfectly content to pretend their students were learning.
Joel checked the time on his computer, his eyes falling one second on his watch, the glass broken, the watch hands unticking. His eyes jumped back to his students. He cleared his throat, gathered the permission slips, and got up from his seat with a pained groan, handing out the papers to the students wordlessly, the whispering finally ceasing when he reached the last row of desks.
Mid-September.
The air of the bus was just as loud and heavy as the air of his classroom. It was weighing down on him as he struggled to stay stable, standing up in the alley of the bus, one hand firmly holding on to the knob of his cane, hoping to relief his bad knee that the heat had made swollen and sensible; the other up into the air as he counted the students sitting into the bus, his finger vaguely pointing at each one of them. Twenty-tow. Two girls were sitting together, their heads hunched over the same phone as they grimaced. Twenty-five. Three boys were arguing back and forth in the shallow space separating two neighboring seats, their backs twisted in positions that couldn’t possibly be comfortable. Twenty-six. A girl sitting alone with her headphones, her face turned toward the window, probably watching stream under her eyes the large buildings decorating the streets.
Joel huffed, satisfied, sitting back, his hand immediately abandoning his cane to press his thumb into the softness of his knee, hoping to relieve his pain. He drew hard circles into the muscles, feeling the relief of his knee through his jeans. Pressure worked well against the aching of his flesh and bones, but chronic pain was just that; chronic. He tried to press his thumb harder against the damaged muscles, but it did nothing other than make the skin on top of his flesh ache and burn under the roughness of the touch. Joel could imagine his skin already pinking and reddening, and, in just a few hours, turning to a faded color blue, purple, and then yellow.
He sighed, hand resting on his knee, squeezing lightly as he watched the buildings of the city fade out, leaving their places to arid fields, their golden meadow whipping in the wind, cutting with the hardness and darkness of the thunder clouds obstructing the blue sky. The air forcing past the cracked open windows of the bus carried the sweet scent of wheat and prominent rain, the gust was harsh and boiling, full of wet dust, inviting the roaring of the cars on the highway into the bus. On the horizon, the white silhouette of an old castle was distinguishable, contrasting with the sky. Then, buildings started to appear again, and the bus was back in the city, but all the way west this time. Quickly, tall glass buildings started to fade to make way for smaller ones, made with rocks of an orangy color, the bright cider blocks hot against the boiling weather, as they reached an older part of the town.
The bus slowed down in front of a large establishment. Joel’s eyes drifted quickly over the wide colored windows and the white of the stairs, having no time to linger as he got up despite the burning of his knee. Leaning as much as he could on his cane, knuckles whitening around the knob, Joel took a quick, rapid breath. Today, his knee hurt particularly badly.
“All right, eyes on the front.” He called. It took a few seconds to calm down the excited flow of voices, and Joel exchanged a quick, exasperated look with Tess, the other teacher smiling at him, amused. “You are free to go everywhere allowed in the museum, even the garden, just don’t pass the gates. The Egyptian exposition is on the first floor, but you guys can go look at the classic art on the second floor. And please, before hiding in the garden, remember that there will be tests about the exposition.” A vague groan floated among the students, but the doors were already opening, Tess going outside first, leading the students.
Joel sat back in his seat, a trembling breath of relief passing his lips when he extended his leg. Freshmen were urging outside, laughing and pushing roughly in the small alley of the bus, a brouhaha of bodies agitating the bus. Outside, on the other side of the street, the crowd of people swarming in the warmth of the city was just as agitated. People, just like his students, pushing and streaming their way among the throng, their hard shoes slapping against the boiling tar of a large plaza, a mass flowing out of the subway’s gaping mouth. Joel looked away, the last students leaving, the lonely girl from earlier behind everyone else, her headphones pushed deep on her head. Her eyes met Joel’s, quickly, her pupils immediately jumping away when he looked at her, before her gaze hastily followed along the structure of the bus until it reached Joel again. She pressed her lips tightly, in a strange grimace Joel supposed was friendly, before hurriedly getting off the bus, her brown eyes wary.
In the garden, the air was fresher, shadows of the century-old trees staining the floors with pretty light constellations. The students pretended to hurry toward the museum, but Joel could see their faces turned, eyes lingering on the benches posted between each tree of the large alley, surely already choosing which one they would run to for the rest of the afternoon, after pretending to wander in the museum for half an hour. The girl from earlier was at the back of the group, hands stuffed in the pockets of a large hoodie, headphones still on, her head as down as always. Joel’s eyes followed her as the class passed the door of the museum, frowning lightly.
There was air conditioning inside the museum. Joel leaned back in his armchair, right leg extended before him, eyes closing. People were quietly whispering to each other, lips brushing with shallow breaths as their eyes loitered on the curves of the art before them, on the round faces and the naked bodies of classical art. Joel liked classical art. He liked the fullness of the bodies, the depth of the layers of paint, the hardness of the architecture. He opened his eyes again, gaze falling on the first painting before him. ‘Scène du massacre des Innocents’ by some French painter he could never remember, Léon something. The mother was holding her baby close to her chest, his small body pressed in her clothes as she hid, her expression torn, her face melted by terror, horror surely staining her tongue at the idea of her child's death. Joel knew horror had stained his tongue, all those years ago. He grabbed the knob of his cane, getting up, deciding to find another seat.
Wandering, he left his eyes lingered here and there on paintings he knew all too well, having looked at them every arid September for the last 7 years. He still enjoyed it, but the details and the stories did not hit the same as they did in the first two years. He reached a smaller room, with art more modern than in the other rooms, Norman Rockwell and Edward Hopper covering the walls, their homogenized, bright colors having replaced the faded darkness and sorrow of the Renaissance paintings.
A familiar silhouette was stopped before ‘The Christmas Party’ by Norman Rockwell, face close to the art, headphones still pushed deep on her round head, wild brown curls escaping from the hair tie struggling to hold her ponytail up. She was one of his students, not Tess', Joel knew that, of course. But he couldn’t quite place her name. She had seemed like a quiet thing to him, always hunched on the last desk in one of the corners of his classroom, often one of the first to show to class—probably to secure the said desk as hers, students were vile little things when it came to sitting in the back of a classroom. Joel couldn’t quite place her name. Elisa, Elina. Eli, something. His colleagues had complained about her already, he believed. About starting conflicts and snarky remarks, sass whispered under her breath when called out on her lack of attention. Joel hadn’t seen any of it, but then again, if her work was done by the end of class, it didn’t matter to him if her eyes were on the board or on a phone hidden behind her pencil case.
She was still looking closely at the painting, her eyes narrowed, her lips slightly pushed in a pout as she examined the piece.
Joel walked to her, and her eyes jumped on him when he entered the corner of her brown vision. “Like it?” he asked. The girl straightened up, pushing her headphones off her ears.
“What?”
“Ah, I wanted to know if you liked it?” The girl —Elianne? Elise? Maybe just Ellie?— seemed to consider him a second, her eyes still slightly narrowed, before she turned back to the painting, shrugging a little, the hood of her hoodie settling around the headphones she pushed down around her neck.
“I guess.” She said, eyes following the silhouette of the child in the painting. “I mean, I like the emotions behind it. Fucking cool.” She made a face at her own swearing, her gaze quickly jumping to Joel, a slight grimace pulling at her lips. He found himself amused by it and decided Ellie must probably be her name. He opened his mouth to respond.
The scream of a gunshot gutted his sentence before he could ever pronounce his words.
His body stilled, muscles tightening, knuckles whitening around the knob of his cane. He drew a long breath, the quietness that had been enveloping the museum before the gunshot now ghostly, the old establishment quiet, still like the frozen spring flowers Sarah used to collect in the earliest days of April. Next to him, his student had flinched with her whole body, surprise taking her as her hands shook in a flinch, fingers immediately going to hide her mouth as her wide brown eyes fixed on the door opening the room.
A second gunshot resonated, taking with its echo Joel’s faint hope that the deafening sound had been a painting falling to the ground, a stupid student making one of those little, cheap firecracker go off, or his PTSD acting up once more.
Joel found himself acting on instinct, grabbing the girl by the shoulder, ignoring the way she flinched at the touch on her, and the adrenaline suddenly beating in his system, making his blood boil and pound in the coldness and quietness of the museum, had him forget the burning pain of his knee. The gunshots had sounded close, close enough for his ears to ring just in the slightest, after so long of not hearing gunshots. The room, covered by the frozen painted scenes of Norman Rockwell and Edward Hopper, was a dead end, and the place was a sealed box, with only one exit that couldn’t be closed, the opening being deprived of doors. No benches, no tables to hide behind. They had to leave, get out of this richly decorated coffin. He dragged his student after him, going for the door. Another gunshot echoed at the end of the hallway, behind the corner, somewhere he couldn’t see; then a scream, one that sounded like a throat being ripped apart, high, raspy and piercing, gouging through the air louder than the gunshots had. Another gunshot. The deep noise of a limp body hitting the floor. Silence again, accompanied by a puddle of cardinal color staining the floor and leaking around the corner at the end of the hallway, painting the wooden floor in the same color as some of the paintings attached to the wall.
Joel drew a hard breath, pushing his student against the wall next to the door, his hand digging into the soft and hot material of her hoodie, palm sweating from the stress, the thick material, and the footsteps he could hear, quiet in the hallway. He could feel, as his fingers gripped the girl’s shoulder, her pulse beat through the fabric of her clothes, her blood erratic and crazy, wild as a panicked horse.
The footsteps grew closer, and Joel abandoned the girl’s shoulder to set his cane to the floor as quietly as possible. He looked back as his student, the footsteps of the shooter now menacing to enter the room. He looked in her eyes —brown little eyes— and saw the same hysterical fear he had seen in Sarah’s eyes this one night, so many years ago. This very one look, the one he couldn’t drown in alcohol, couldn’t strangle by serving in the army, and couldn’t kill by working with children. Tears were clouding her brown pupils, her gaze desperate for a way to slip out of this pretty room, her eyebrows, one splitter by a small, white scar, drawing together as she held her breath in a controlled pattern, the leash she had on how much terror she allowed out of herself held tight.
Joel took a quick stuttering breath, squeezed his eyes shut, and spun around, jumping on the shooter who was juste passing the open door. His adrenaline burned, acidic in his throat, more than the pain in his knee.
The man —young man? Old teen? Joel wasn’t sure, the panic of the moment making everything unimportant blurry, the man’s face fading so Joel could focus on the gun in his hands— jumped back, raising the muzzle of his gun, the barrel shining in the white light of the museum, toward Joel. His years of service in the military took over, and somehow, even all those years away from the field, all those years away from guns, powders, away from the metallic smell of blood, Joel knew what to do. Kicking the man’s wrists hard, this one lost his grip on the gun, the large weapon falling to the floor with a deafening noise in the silence of the museum. Joel sent the gun away with a quick kick, ignoring the way his knee would scream for days once the adrenaline faded off. He tried to grip the shooter’s throat, but this one was younger, quicker, avoiding the large hands going furiously for the soft meat of his neck. His fist was tight as he sent it violently into Joel’s jaw.
Pain burned, the world spined slightly, and Joel spat a bit a bloody saliva, before he sent his own fist into the man’s guts, grabbing him by the shoulder and hitting again and again.
The man panted and groan, the sound deep and dry from the bottom of his throat, choking on his own breath as Joel hit in the softness of his stomach until his arm felt sore and his fist ached as badly as his knee. He thought the shooter was limp, done for —if Joel had been thirty again, the man would have been— but as soon as his hits weakened, the man pushed harder against Joel’s hold on him, grabbing him by the shoulder, throwing him on the floor with a ruthless violence, the air knocked out of the older man’s lungs the second he hit the floor. Before Joel could move again —if he had been younger, quicker— before he could move again, the shooter was on him, both of his soft, young hands tightening around the old skin of Joel’s throat. Joel tried to push, to hit away the hands, nails scratching, digging into the flesh of the man as he choked, his lungs tightening, throat closing on itself, lips large open but no air flowing down his trachea. Seconds passed, and his vision was getting slightly blurry as he choked. He saw, in the corner of his eye, his student move from the crouched position she must have fallen into during the fight, her fingers fumbling on the floor for his cane.
She met his eyes, her brown gaze lighter than his, her pupils scared, focused; murderous. Her hand closed around his cane.
She got up, raised the cane, and drew it as hard as she could on the back of the man’s scalp.
A deep noise resonated with her hit, as the shooter screamed and abandoned Joel to turn toward his student. The girl was still holding his cane, soft hands trembling hysterically as she challenged the young man with her intelligent eyes. She held the cane like a sword, her posture tight and curled around her weapon, drawing it before her like it was the sharpest blade to ever exist, her eyes terribly focused on the man’s face.
“Don’t kill him,” She said, voice trembling through her provocation. “His class is the only fucking one I like.”
The shooter reached for his back pocket and drew out a small gun, with black shiny metal and a strangely curled trigger. Joel’s blood ran cold. He jumped for the gun he had kicked away a few minutes before, calloused fingertips hitting, stumbling into the hard metal as he panted hysterically. He grabbed the gun, turned back, and shot the man in the head at the same time as he shot his student in the right side of her flank.
Blood splashed on Joel’s face, maybe from the shooter, but most probably from his student. Her body crumbled to the floor in a deep noise, blood already forming a large and growing flower on her abdomen, staining through the big pockets of her hoodie, coloring the grey fabric of a deep cardinal red.
He threw the gun away, gasping, breath ragging as he scrambled toward the girl, his knee falling under him as he tried to get up. He stumbled toward the gasping body.
Blood. Its metallic taste was staining all over Joel’s mouth, its smell licking at the inside of his throat as his breath stuttered in and out of his trembling lips. Blood, splattered all over his face, staining the thin glass of his glasses, making it difficult to focus on what’s before him, splashes of cardinal colors, heavy as the scent of metal, staining his visions, dancing along the black spots turning in his eyes. His hands were shaking, and so was his bad knee, as he crouched —his cane was long abandoned, stained by blood just like his glasses. He pressed on the pouring wound of the teen before him as hard as his trembling arms allowed him.
“Ellie!” He believed that was her name, but he wasn't sure. “Girl, Ellie, come on!” Her hands were clawing at his wrists, nails and soft fingertips digging into the thin material of his sleeve. Her grip was weak, and Joel could hardly feel its pressure through the adrenaline pounding in his heart. She was gasping, her eyes blown wide, lost, her pupils erratic and fully black with panic. Tears and blood were rolling off her fluttering lashes, leaving on her temples wet stains of a watercolor red— yet, somehow, the watery color was still cutting with the paleness of her skin. Blood was pooling around her like the halo of an angel, red and damp, leaking between the hardwood slats, so wet, soaking the floor all around her, her jeans, her hoodie, her hair, the knees of Joel's pants as he kneeled in the warm wetness of the fluid. It was everywhere. The girl tried to hit Joel's hands away, slapping his wrists with the bloody palm of her hand; not understanding he was the only reason why she was not lying still on the floor yet, with her eyes tern and her heart unpulsing.
“Ellie, please, let me!” Joel had never been good with names. He should be, as a teacher, but he never was. The shooter was already dead, splashes of his blood splattered on ‘The Christmas Party’ by Norman Rockwell.
Joel hoped Ellie was really this girl’s name.
The red and blue colors of the police car's flashing lights were melting into purple stains against the whiteness of the museum’s walls. The ambulance’s sirens were screaming into the grumbling sky, rolling dark clouds stacked one on top of another, menacing to burst into tears and thunder any second. Ellie was on a stretcher, body curled in pain around the bullet inside her, paramedics in white clothes evacuated her rapidly from the museum. An oxygen mask was hiding half of her little face, her eyebrows knitted in pain as she was pushed into an ambulance. The metal doors slammed behind her, and the ambulance took off immediately.
Joel sat on the last step of the museum's white stairs, his hands, red and leaking with his student's blood, curled around his cane. He looked down at unbothered ants swarming at the bottom of the stairs, their little black and metallic bodies bustling in the warm dust of the large alley, unaware of the horror enfolding around them in a much bigger world. They were peaceful, safe, doing their work of little food soldiers without a second thought, dragging behind them a small piece of what Joel supposed to be a red fruit, a leftover from one of his students' snacks.
The sky moaned a deep sound of thunder, and a fat drop of rain came crashing in the middle of the ants.
Their formation shattered, little panicked insects fleeing everywhere as one of their companions drowned in the single drop. It fought against it, against the water for long seconds, before eventually giving up, letting the water envelope the black shininess of its body.
More rain came, and all the ants drowned.
Joel's shirt was soaking rapidly, warm rain suddenly beating against him, the thirsty dirt of the museum's garden absorbing the water avidly, the soil saturating quickly, the scent of wet lawns and drenched trees replacing the metallic smell of blood filling his nose. He held out his hands, watching the rain he had so eagerly waited for wash off his hands the blood soaking his palms and wrists. The watery blood rolled off his skin, drenching the stairs, falling on the floor, enveloping the dead ants.
The rain couldn't wash off the blood under his nails and the blood soaking the sleeves of his shirt, bloody handprints staining where Ellie had desperately squeezed his wrists.
Joel was drenched when he was urged into the back of a police car. The officer was grey under his large raincoat, eyes black under his cap, movements repeated, learned, automatic like a little ant; ordering him into the backseat with an authoritarian glance. If Joel had been less tired, perhaps younger, he might have fought against it with an annoyed eye roll. Instead, he pushed inside the police car, his wet clothes immediately soaking the old backseats, rain pouring out of his clothes into the thick fabric of the seat.
The car took off quickly. The officer behind the wheel was quiet, but Joel could sometimes see his eyes in the rear-view mirror, dark gaze slightly narrowed on him. Joel’s hands curled on his lap, his knee starting to hurt once again.
The police station was quiet, long, silent hallways droning on and on through the large window of the room Joel was in. A police man pushed the door open, throwing a thin binder on the table before him, taking a chair, its long legs making a deep scraping noise against the grey floor, and sitting down. The officer, a man who couldn’t be younger than Joel himself, judged him for a few seconds, eyes narrowed, before sighing and opening the binder.
“You killed the shooter in the museum.”
“Yeah, the one that shot my student.”
The officer’s eyes snapped from the binder to him, before slowly falling back on the papers before him.
“You don’t seem bothered by that.”
“That he shoot my student? Believe me, I am. Killing him? Not so much.”
He man hummed, one hand holding the right page of the binder, the other on his temple, his thumb scratching the tips of his index.
“Right, six years in the military.”
Joel said nothing, the officer’s eyes following the lines of his file, probably discovering the words for the first time, not having taken the time to read the file before entering the room, despite the stillness of the police station. Joel gritted his teeth, gasps of Ellie's body mixing with Sarah’s terrified and pained little whines in his imagination.
“We are going to need your statement.” Joel’s hands curled into a fist.
“Yeah,” He agreed with a scoff. “And when do I get to know my student didn’t bleed out?”
Once again, the police man looked up from the file, eyes shining in the white light of the room, looking at him like he was trying to read him. He looked down at the binder, the nail of his thumb scratching a little harder against his index.
“I don’t know about her state, but if she is still alive, she is in the West Hospital.”