GUNHEAD
The Roman Casador Story
CompleteI. Day one: Cafeteria, Lockdown
The tile under the table reeked of bleach and old milk. Out of everything happening, that was what his brain picked to notice.
Nine tables in the cafeteria. They were under the third one from the first door, the table pushed up against the wall between the two doors — nothing but cinderblock between them and the hallway. His backpack was wedged against his knee, the corner of his journal digging into his leg through the canvas. He didn’t move it. A little discomfort was the least of his problems right now.
Mrs. Okafor had the lights off and her finger against her lips — the same hush she’d have used on a room of eight-year-olds during an overplayed fire drill. Nobody was laughing. A girl two tables over was praying in Spanish, so quiet it was just breath with shapes in it.
Then the shots came again. Closer.
Not fireworks. Not lockers. This was flatter. Meaner. Each one landed in his chest before it landed in his ears.
He’d already texted Rosie twice. Fingers shaking too much to type clean the first time — Hey. I’m in the caf — then, when nothing came back inside of a minute, a second one, faster, no punctuation: Where r u
He stared at the screen after that one, waiting on the three dots. Nothing. Not even the dots.
He told himself “you have her schedule”. He swiped up on the messages until he reached the one she had shared with him earlier this morning. There it was.. her schedule. She was in History this period. She was on lockdown in class, good, safe, probably had her phone silenced, face-down, tucked somewhere she couldn’t reach. No dots means safe. He wanted to believe that but he switched over and texted Mom instead. have you heard from Rosie?
The reply came back almost instantly — Mom’s typing was always instant, always too fast, her thumb basically living over the send button. No… why? Is everything ok
He typed you haven’t heard? and immediately regretted it, that was too cryptic and to a mother’s ear it was an alarm that needed a full body reaction. Now he would have to explain it to her, before he even knew how to explain it to himself.
He switched back to Rosie’s thread. Still nothing. It hadn’t been delivered. The little status under his last text hadn’t changed in almost two full minutes now, which for Rosie, who texted back before people finished sending, might as well have been an hour.
Then, from Mom: OMG!!!!
And then his phone buzzed again, different this time — not a text, the screen lighting up whole, ringing, the light bleeding through his pocket, threatening to give him away. He checked it anyway. Mom.
He answered it, barely audible. “Mom—”
“Roman, baby, are you—oh my God, oh my God, they’re saying there’s a shooter, they’re saying North Bergen PD is already—Roman, talk to me, are you safe, where are you—”
It was her voice, weaponized by pure panic.
“I’m okay,” he whispered. “I’m hiding. I’m okay.”
“Don’t hang up. Please don’t hang up, I need to hear you, I need—”
Another shot. Closer than the last one. Close enough that somebody under the next table let out a gasp with pain already built into it, even though they probably hadn’t been hit at all.
The door at the end of the hallway banged once. Hard. A test of its weight.
Roman went stiller than he’d ever been. Even his thoughts stopped moving.
His gut knew it before his head did — whatever was on the other side of that door was going to be standing in this room in about four seconds.
II. Day one: Roman’s Room — before school
I woke up before my alarm, which never happens, and for a second I just laid there listening to the apartment — pipes ticking somewhere behind the wall, Mom’s shower running down the hall, the traffic on Bergenline starting to wake up too. First day of freshman year. Fourteen years and exactly one day old now, which still felt strange to say — the number sat on me stiff and new, no fabric softener.
My head felt weirdly clear, too. Not groggy at all, no need to fight through the usual post-sleep fog I normally get. Even my internal lexicon felt vastly expanded — a whole reservoir of articulate, sophisticated vocabulary had unlocked overnight, a spontaneous stream of eloquence arriving effortlessly, fully formed and waiting on the tip of my tongue. Just like that.. I will try and keep it low key through out this story so I won’t lose you.
Also, every little sound in the apartment seemed sharper than it should’ve been this early — I could actually pick out Mom humming something under the shower water, could hear the specific rattle of the radiator two rooms over, every tick of it, loud enough to count. I didn’t think much of it right then. I figured maybe I’d just slept good for once.
I reached over and grabbed the journal off my nightstand. The new one. Still had that stiff, unbroken spine, that smell paper gets before anybody’s touched it — Danny’s gift, my cousin, who always somehow finds the one thing I actually want instead of the thing everybody assumes a fourteen-year-old wants.
I flipped past the first three pages I’d already filled — a subway rat wearing a crown, half a mural idea I’d seen in my head after passing some brick wall on Kennedy, Rosie’s profile from memory, the one where she’s laughing at something off-page — and found a blank one. Started sketching, automatically. That’s usually how it goes. My hand just starts moving before my brain agrees.
I was drawing my own hand, actually. Just resting flat against the sheet, fingers spread, shading in the knuckle shadows, using Ms. Rivera’s old method from eighth grade — thumb pressure light, letting the graphite do the work instead of muscling it in. She was the first person who ever told me I was actually good at this, not just “good for a kid.” I still think about that sometimes, way more than I probably should.
And I stopped.
Because I was looking at my own fingers. Really looking, because I’d found out they weren’t what I’d thought they were.
Yesterday those fingers turned into gun metal in front of a TV screen. I watched it happen. Felt it happen — a cold, tight pulling sensation, my bones seeming to know something, something in them reacting with the permission it had been waiting on.
I flexed my hand. Normal. Just a hand. Just skin and knuckle and the little callus I’ve got on my middle finger from holding a pencil too hard.
“Normal”..Lol, what a lie. Another word we use as an armor to make us feel accepted.
I put the pencil down and let my head fall back against the pillow, staring at the ceiling, and I started thinking about yesterday. Warm and fuzzy yesterday. My birthday, which landed the day before school started again — in the past it’s either been the same day or the second day of school. Other kids get that thing where their moms send in cupcakes or somebody’s dad shows up with a stack of pizzas during fourth period and the whole class sings. But it’s hard to do that at the beginning of a school year, when everyone is new and there’s no class chemistry yet. FML.
I mentally slip back to yesterday…
III. Yesterday — Birthday Morning
Yesterday started at the Beacon Diner in Fairview. It’s usually a weekend thing, but birthdays get a pass, even on a Tuesday — our booth, the one by the window that we’ve basically claimed as ours since I was like six. The vinyl’s cracked in the same three places it’s always been cracked.
Our waitress, Dawn, was coming over with menus, she’s older, maybe late sixties, hair dyed a red that doesn’t occur in nature. Her name tag visible and crooked on her lapel. Some may say she’s rude, but she’s just brisk — thirty years on a diner floor but still energetic and into her job. She has not burned out yet.
“Good Morning! Drinks to start?”
“Orange juice,” Rosie said.
“Just water,” from Mom.
“Chocolate milk,” I said, and Dawn nodded, not even blinking at a fourteen-year-old ordering it, and walked off without writing it down — didn’t need to.
As I watched Dawn walk away, Mom reached over and put the back of her hand against my forehead, quick — an old fever-check reflex, even though this wasn’t that kind of morning. “How’s your head this morning? No pain, nothing?”
“I’m good, Ma. Nothing.”
“Good.” She said it easy, but her eyes lingered on me a second longer than the question needed. They always did, this time of year. My migraines liked to show up in the mornings, out of nowhere, and she’d been bracing for one every year since I was little, cake or no cake. “That’s a good thing right? let’s hope it skips you today for your birthday.. it’ll be—”
“I know, Ma.”
“I’m just saying. Maybe it won’t come at all.” She said it hopeful — wanting it true more than she actually believed it.
“Dr. Ferrer always said these things sometimes just age out on their own,” she added, more to herself than to me. “Cluster headaches, that’s what he called them. Never did explain why they mostly showed up in the mornings.”
I nodded along, not really placing the name — Dr. Ferrer wasn’t my main doctor. My actual doctor was Dr. Mangosing, a doctor in Jersey City Mom liked, and I’d never once heard her mention a Ferrer before that morning. I figured maybe he was somebody from way back, before I was old enough to remember appointments, whatever.
I didn’t tell her the real reason I didn’t have a migraine that morning was because whatever used to come out as pain, had apparently found a completely different way out of me now.
I just said, “Maybe,” and left it at that.
Dawn came back a few minutes later with the drinks, set them down, pulled her pad back out. “Y’all ready, or you need a minute?”
“French toast, extra banana, side of bacon — like, really crispy, almost burnt, and whip cream on the side, not on top,” I said.
Dawn wrote it without looking up. “And for the ladies?”
Mom and Rosie ordered — I wasn’t really looking at either of them while they did it, watching instead an old man in another booth read an actual physical newspaper, dead serious about it, some relic out of 2005, he was sort of whispering reading..but I heard every word anyway from a few tables away — a Mets score, the price of gas in Secaucus, somebody’s obituary. Then Mom said she had to use the bathroom right quick, and slid out of the booth.
Across the diner, in the other dining room, Mom leaned into the bar counter and said something to Dawn, low, quick, meant for nobody but Dawn — I focused on them and was able to catch every syllable of it, easy as anything. Can you put a candle in his plate when it comes out? It’s his birthday, thank you.
Dawn’s eyes flicked over to me for half a second, then back to Mom, and she nodded, all business now, a woman with a job to do.
I looked down at my phone, giving nothing away. I let out a sudden snort at something on my feed pretending I’d just seen a meme. Wasn’t gonna ruin Mom’s moment by letting on.
Rosie was slumped in the booth across from me, scrolling away while we waited for our food. We were both locked onto our phones in that comfortable, silent routine we always fall into. She instantly looked up.
“What’s the joke?” she asked, kicking my sneaker under the table.
I said, shaking my head, “Nothing, just internet garbage,”.
She rolled her eyes. “Whatever. “ turning back to her screen. “Oh, did you see the memes of that kid at Six Flags? I swear it’s gotta be AI. The arms look totally messed up.”
“No, send it to me”
She went digging for it, thumb flying, and it reminded me of Saturday. Same booth. Rosie had been halfway through complaining about her college essays when she stopped mid-sentence, fork in the air, eyes on the napkin dispenser, for maybe nine seconds. Then she blinked, grinned at nothing, and asked Dawn for a pen. She wrote on the back of the receipt and folded it into her pocket before I could see. I didn’t ask.
Mom came back from the “bathroom” and a while later the food came out — except it wasn’t just Dawn. It was Dawn and two other waiters, one of them balancing a tray, and they were walking toward our booth at this deliberate, semi-choreographed pace, and I played along.. I widened my eyes a little, sat up straighter, let my face go wait, what — because even though I already knew exactly what was about to happen, Mom didn’t need to know that. No one there did. Letting her have the surprise even though I couldn’t was the least I could do.
There was a candle stuck in my French toast.
And then they started singing. loud and completely unrehearsed — perfect for diner staff who’ve done this a thousand times and stopped caring how it sounds — and a couple of people in nearby booths joined in too, this older couple by the door, a guy in scrubs eating alone, the whole thing catching mid-verse and spreading, contagious. Mom was singing the loudest, off pitch on purpose, and Rosie had her phone out recording, laughing so hard she could barely hold it steady.
I sat there playing the part, face hot and fake-shocked, even if the surprise wasn’t, not knowing where to put my hands, grinning anyway — and somewhere under the performance of it, actually meaning the grin too. Both things at once. I was getting used to that.
“Make a wish, birthday boy,” Dawn said, not smiling exactly, but not not smiling either — just satisfied, job done.
I closed my eyes and wished to become the most famous, richest artist in the whole world and then I blew out the candle. Didn’t tell anybody what I wished for. Wouldn’t have mattered anyway — except maybe justifying Rosie’s world building for me.
First bite of the French toast, and it hit different than French toast usually hits — the cinnamon suddenly its own separate thing instead of just part of the flavor, the banana almost too sweet, the burnt edge of the bacon distinct from the rest of it, every note of it in 4K instead of regular. I didn’t think much of it in the moment. Just figured the food was good today. I was blissfully ignorant, completely unaware that the exquisite taste of the food was a symptom of a much darker reality.
Rosie leaned across the table still laughing, wiping under her eye. “Happy birthday, baby brother.” Then, to Mom: “He’s fourteen now. Basically an adult. Watch, he’s gonna start talking back.”
“He already talks back,” Mom said.
“Learned it from you.”
Mom laughed at that — the real laugh, not the one she does for customers at the salon — and for a second it was just us, syrup smell and old coffee and somebody two booths over still humming the last few bars of the song, reluctant to let it go.
Then Mom got the look. The one that means a speech is loading.
“You know,” she said, wrapping both hands around her mug, “high school is really it, Romy. This is where it starts. Whatever you wanna be — really be — these next four years decide a lot.” She turned and looked at Rosie for a second, really looked, something warm and a little wistful passing over her face — she was seeing four years at once, not just the one sitting across from her. “Look at your sister. Four years ago she’s sitting exactly where you’re sitting, all nervous about freshman year, and now — top of her class. Rutgers. Criminal justice, law, she’s gonna walk into a courtroom one day and run it.” She turned to me, eyes soft but locked in, love and pressure, wearing the same outfit on her face. “You’re smart like that too, Romy. Smarter, maybe. Doctor, lawyer, whatever — the door’s wide open. I just need you to walk through it.”
I nodded, because what else are you gonna do, and put a piece of French toast in my mouth so I wouldn’t have to say anything back right away.
Rosie clocked it. She always clocks it. She slid around the booth without asking, right up next to me, and put her arm around my shoulder, quick and easy, no big deal made of it — even though I could feel it was, a little, in how she left it there a beat longer.
“Or,” she said, easy, already helping herself to my whip cream, “he draws something one day and y’all are fighting over who gets front row at his gallery opening.” She looked at me and swiped a fingerful of whip cream onto my nose — family tradition, whoever’s birthday it is gets it on the nose after the candles. Then, without missing a beat: “For real though, you should go see Mr. Meli when school starts. He’s the art teacher, supposedly he’s the one — Danny’s friend had him last year, said he actually gets kids into real programs, portfolio stuff, scholarships even. Just show him your book. Let somebody who actually knows say if there’s something there.”
I sat with both of them for a second — Mom’s version, Rosie’s version — two coins that couldn’t both land heads, turning them over and over in my head. It wasn’t that one of them was lying. That was the weird part. Mom actually believed what she said about the door being open. Rosie actually believed the gallery thing wasn’t a joke. Two people who loved me, both telling me something true, and the two truths couldn’t exist in my universe in the same hand, at the same time. Or could they?
I didn’t pick one. I don’t know why picking messed with me, but it did — picking a side meant deciding, somewhere underneath it, that one of them was more right than the other, and I wasn’t sure that was even a thing you could decide. Maybe it wasn’t about picking. Maybe you were supposed to hold both until you found whatever was actually underneath them, the real thing neither one had said outright.
That’s just how I am, I guess. Slow to jump anywhere. Careful, my mom calls it — thinks about stuff too long before he moves. I wonder what my dad would’ve said. I’ve never once in my life just reacted to something without turning it over first, checking all the sides of it. Rosie used to tease me that I’d stand at a crosswalk doing math on passing cars, basically calling me a geek, I guess.
I didn’t say anything — thought about Mr. Meli and Dr. Casador co-existing.
IV. Day one: Roman’s Room — before school
[I let the pencil go loose in my hand — not really drawing anything anymore, just tracing meaningless shapes. Took a breath, a real one, all the way down, let it back out slow.
I don’t think about it enough, ngl — how much of my life just runs on love that happens to come in women. Mom, up before the sun, burning her hands for me on stuff that we can’t really afford most weeks. Rosie, half asleep and always thinking of me and saying the right things. Even yesterday — that whole diner thing, corny as it was. Rosie’s arm basically wrapped around me, protecting me.
It’s crazy. I’ve been getting carried this whole time by people who never once asked me to carry nothing back.
I don’t know why that hit different right then, laying there. Maybe it is fucking puberty. It’s the only thing that makes sense, all these changes, the way I’m feeling, thinking… transforming. Whatever it is, I wish I could pay them back with something that’s not just simply loving them back.
I looked back down at the pencil, still loose between my fingers, and noticed the wood grain running along the shaft of it — I really saw it, in HD, every ring and fiber distinct, more photograph than tree at this range. Same with the paper under it, the tooth of it, thousands of tiny fibers catching the graphite instead of just looking smooth from a normal distance. I didn’t know what that was about either. Same thing that happened at the bodega…ugh, so weird.]
V. Yesterday — Birthday, Continued
By eleven we were back at the apartment, and Mom wasted no time turning us into an errand crew. “Sazón, soda, chips, ice, cups, plates, napkins, ice cream,” she said, folding five twenties into Rosie’s hand. “A hundred, that should cover it. Write it down so you don’t forget nothing. Fortieth Street bodega, not the one on Broadway. They never have anything.”
She pulled Rosie a few steps away toward the kitchen, low voice, clearly not meaning for me to hear it — except I did. All of it. Every word, from six feet away with a running faucet between us.
“Felix is picking up the cake from Dulce de Leche, don’t let him talk you into stopping anywhere else, we don’t got time.” Ordinary. Nothing. But I stood there a second too long, a little thrown by the fact that I’d caught every word of something that wasn’t supposed to reach me at all.
“We good?” I asked, mostly just to see what Rosie would do with it.
“All good.. let’s go.” Rosie said, way too casual, already grabbing her keys off the hook, giving me absolutely nothing to work with.
I didn’t say anything else — not what I heard, but the fact that I’d heard it at all.
The bodega on Fortieth was tight and loud, aisles barely wide enough for one person to squeeze through. Rosie peeled off with her list; I got sent to the spice shelf for the sazón — one crowded shelf, labels facing every direction, packed so tight it read less as a display than as years of accumulation that no one had gotten around to straightening out.
I scanned it for the yellow packet with the rooster on it.
And my eyes did something.
It wasn’t squinting. It wasn’t looking harder. The whole shelf just — narrowed. Everything at the edges went soft and far away all at once, and dead center, this thin bright line appeared, a crosshair, steady as anything, locked over a packet three rows back behind two cans of guandules, and the tiny print on it was sharp enough to read from six feet away. Sazón con culantro y achiote. I could see a tear in the corner of the packaging. A fingerprint smudge on the plastic that wasn’t even mine.
I gasped, out loud, actually out loud. Some old man two feet away looked at me sideways, fully convinced I’d lost it.
I shook my head hard, and the crosshair snapped away, the whole shelf rushing back into normal blur and clutter, my heart going so fast I could feel it in my teeth.
“You good?” Rosie called, coming up the aisle already juggling a bag of ice against her hip and a basket full of groceries on the other hand.
“Yeah,” I said, grabbing the packet — exactly where the crosshair had already shown me it was. “I’m good.”
She looked at me a second too long. “Weirdo,” she said, bumping my shoulder on the way to the register.
A sense of guilt and an urge to tell her consumed me for that moment. But I’m not gonna… not yet.
There was a kid already at the counter by the time we got up there, younger, maybe nine, counting quarters out of a closed fist one at a time onto the counter, recounting the same three over and over. A bag of ice sweating a ring into the counter next to him, one Arizona can beside it.
Behind him in line, some older kid — high school, backpack still on both shoulders, phone already up and filming — went, “Yo, c’mon, you’re holding up the whole line, lil bro,” loud enough for the whole store to hear it, timed more for the phone than for the kid.
The kid’s ears went red. He recounted the same three quarters a third time.
Rosie put the hand basket on the floor and set the ice on the counter to relieve her arms, then began digging for Mom’s twenties, not clocking any of it. I put the sazón down next to her bags and walked up beside the kid.
“How much you short?”
He didn’t look up. “A dollar.”
I put a dollar down on the counter before he could decide whether to be embarrassed about it, then looked past him at the guy with the phone — held his eyes, waited him out.
“We good?”
He lowered the phone, half a laugh already dying on his face, looking for somewhere else to put his eyes. “Yeah. My bad. It’s all good.”
By the time the guy behind the counter rang up the ice and the soda, phone-kid had found something very interesting about the energy drinks three feet to his left. The little kid grabbed his bag, gave me one look on the way out — flat, checking whether I was going to want something back for it — and pushed through the door into the afternoon.
Rosie looked up from her wallet, finally holding actual cash. “What’d I miss?”
“Nothing.”
“Mm-hm.” She didn’t push — just bumped my shoulder again and proceeded to unloading everything from the basket onto the counter.
I stood up a little straighter, looked around and micro smiled to myself. Helping that kid felt good.
VI. Day one: Roman’s Room — before school
[I heard Rosie’s footsteps coming down the hall before I even heard her voice — quick, purposeful, somebody on a mission.
“USING THE BATHROOM!!” she yelled through my door, not asking, announcing, already past it by the time the last word landed.
I let out a breath. Lost that race again, same as basically every morning of my life. Didn’t really mind it though — I wasn’t in a rush, wasn’t even really thinking about the bathroom until she brought it up, too deep into the journal and into yesterday to care much either way.
What I did notice was how awake I already was. Fully awake, no fog, I’m usually dragging myself up out of bed on a school morning, needing like twenty more minutes, before I felt human again. Today I’d been sharp since the second my eyes opened, like what the actual fuck.
Could be nerves, the first day of school does that to people, right? Or maybe it wasn’t nerves at all. Maybe it was just the other thing, PUBERTY! I chuckled at the recurring thought.. or maybe it’s super powers, I widened my eyes in hopeful excitement. I began rearranging my whole body preparing to get out of bed.
Something’s up..I just don’t know what it is.]
VII. Day one: Cafeteria — Lockdown Continuous
Roman couldn’t tell if time had slowed down around him or if he was the one moving through it slower, but either way the cafeteria had gone quiet — too quiet for a room this full — kids covering their ears now, the silence itself gone loud, everyone bracing without making a sound.
Except it wasn’t actually silent. Not to Roman.
Underneath the held-breath quiet — floor wax, lukewarm tater tots, a copper taste in his own mouth — he could pick out individual breathing, dozens of separate rhythms, fast and shallow, some kids holding it until their lungs burned and then letting it all out at once. Whispering that sounded close, right at his ear, except when he turned his head the top of it scraped the gum-crusted underside of the table and there was nobody there — it was coming from clear across the room, from kids three and four tables away, praying in three different languages, one girl repeating the same six words over and over, rosary-steady, someone else murmuring the Our Father, low and even, an older kid trying to talk a younger one through it in a voice built for exactly this. Fear, and prayer, and an edge of kindness in it somewhere, all of it arriving at once, all of it too clear to be normal. Every eye under every table was on the bottom of the doors, on the thin strip of hallway light underneath.
He didn’t understand it yet. Just knew, somewhere underneath the confusion, that something had actually happened to him. Everything from yesterday and this morning was real.
And watching all of it — the panic, the praying, fifty different kids handling the same fear fifty different ways — his mind went to his sister.
Rosie.
Where was she? He pulled her schedule back up anyway, tapped on it and zoomed in on fifth period. History, room 303. Third floor. Was she safe, crouched under a desk, or —
Oh God please let her be okay.
VIII. Day one: Roman’s Room — before school
[“Why am I feeling like this,” I said out loud, staring at the ceiling. I hadn’t drank anything weird. Wasn’t bit by a radioactive spider or whatever. Seriously, what the hell?
And then there was the finger thing. Just thinking about it twisted my stomach. Andrew didn’t notice, too deep in the game to notice his own hands most days. But Jude. Jude I wasn’t so sure about. He’d gone quiet afterwards, quieter even for him, and he hadn’t really looked at me right the rest of the night. Could’ve been nothing. Probably was nothing.
I didn’t love how unconvinced I sounded, even just thinking it to myself.
Ugh, whatever.. yesterday was fucking weird — but it was also wrapped in a whole lot of good stuff, cake and Rosie and the diner, and the people who were there holding me down. Enough padding that the questions hadn’t found a way to actually hurt yet.]
IX. Yesterday — Birthday, Continued
By the time we got back with the bags, the apartment already smelled different — Pine-Sol and something sweet underneath it, candle wax maybe, and Mom had Marc Anthony going on the kitchen speaker, Otra Nota, the one she plays when she’s cooking. The banner was up. The balloons were up. She didn’t even let us react to it for more than a second before she was already directing traffic — ice in the cooler, sodas in the fridge, chips in the bowl, not the bag, Romy, we’re not animals.
Jude and Andrew showed up around one, Andrew first, gripping his controller with the seriousness of a guy who’d brought his own weapon to a fight, which honestly tracked.
“Yo, happy birthday, bro,” he said, half-hugging me with his free arm. “You good? You look tired.”
“I’m fourteen now. I age different.”
“You look the same as yesterday, dumbass.”
Jude showed up a few minutes later with a card he’d clearly signed in the elevator on the way up, ink still looking fresh, and we posted up in my room with the console because the living room was already getting overtaken by folding chairs and a card table Mom had dragged out of the closet. Call of Duty, obviously — same lobby we’d been running for like a year, same maps, same arguments about who camps too much.
We were maybe twenty minutes into a match, some search-and-destroy thing, three of us on a squad, when it got tight — enemy pushing our flank, Andrew yelling directions nobody was following, Jude dying immediately, as usual — and I lined up a shot on a guy peeking a corner, finger on the trigger, and I felt it.
Nothing similar to the shelf thing — that had been my eyes. This was under my skin: fast, a hot-cold pull starting right at the base of my finger, aggressive and rude.
I looked down.
My finger — my actual, real, index finger, the one on the controller — had gone a dull gunmetal gray, hardening, the nail disappearing into the smooth metal of a barrel.
“Ah—” I yanked my hand back into my chest so fast the controller went flying off my lap, clattering onto the floor.
“Bro, what—” Andrew didn’t even look over, too locked into the game. “You good?”
“Yeah — ow, my finger, I think I jammed it or something.” I was already standing, cradling my hand against my stomach, actually injured or close enough to it. “I’ll be right back.”
“Just pull it, you’re holding up the match,” Jude said, not even glancing away from the TV.
Except he had glanced away. Just for a second, just long enough. I barely clocked it, a slight head shift — I was too busy trying not to lose my mind — but Jude had looked over right as it happened, right as my finger was still catching the last of that gray, and he didn’t say anything. Not then. Not for the rest of the day, either. He stayed for the food, stayed for the cake, said all the normal stuff on his way out the door that night — “happy birthday, bro, see you tomorrow” — but something in his vibe had gone colder, a stillness that didn’t belong to him.
I locked myself in the bathroom to make sure I’d actually gotten away with it.
I stood there over the sink, staring at the steel barrel my finger had turned into, lightheaded, willing it back to normal, jaw clenched, staring at it so hard my eyes watered. Ten seconds. I counted every one. Then the gray receded back into skin, the nail reappearing, everything folding itself back into ordinary human finger, no trace of it ever having gone anywhere.
I splashed water on my face. Looked at myself in the mirror longer than I needed to.
Twice in one day, I thought. What the hell is going on?
I went back and finished the match. Died almost immediately, actually, because I couldn’t stop looking at my own hand instead of the screen, waiting for the gray to come back.
X. Day one: Roman’s Room — before school
[I held my finger up in front of my face and just stared at it, willing it to happen again, on purpose this time, wanting hard enough to summon it, treating it as some muscle I could flex if I just found the right angle. I squeezed my eyes half shut, concentrated until my head actually started to hurt a little, imagined that same hot-cold pull from yesterday.
Nothing. Just a finger. Just skin and knuckle and the callus.
Figures, I thought. Works when I don’t want it to, won’t work when I do.
I let my hand drop back onto the blanket.]
XI. Yesterday — Birthday, Continued
Dinner started around five, once the actual family started rolling in — Tío Felix first, holding the cake box flat with both hands, elbows locked, taking the hallway one slow step at a time, then a wave of cousins, then Titi Carmen with her famous flan that nobody asked for but everybody eats. The apartment got as loud as it only gets a few times a year, everybody talking over everybody, three conversations happening in the same six feet of space.
The oxtail came out first — Mom’s rabo, dark and falling-off-the-bone, the smell of it alone enough to make grown men go quiet — with the white rice and black beans, and I tore into it, starved — between the diner and the bodega and the CoD thing, I hadn’t really sat down and eaten since breakfast. Except now that I was tasting it, I was really tasting it — not just the usual stuff, the garlic and the cumin and whatever else she puts in there that she’ll never actually tell anybody, but the individual pieces of it, my mouth suddenly able to take a dish apart ingredient by ingredient instead of just eating it. I could pick out the exact moment the sazón came through on its own, could taste something faintly metallic off the pot itself, some mineral note under everything else that had probably always been there and I’d just never noticed. It should’ve freaked me out. Mostly it just made the food taste better than it ever had before. Is it puberty? That’s it.. it’s gotta be puberty. Why hasn’t anyone ever told me this is how it hits? I’ll ask my uncle. But that means there’ll be questions I can’t answer. Forget it… I’ll deal with it for now.
For a while it was just normal. Just good. Stories getting told that everybody already knew the ending of — Tío Felix telling the one about Dad’s cousin and the flat tire in Atlantic City for the four hundredth time, Mom laughing at it fresh.
Then the cake came out, and everybody sang, actually good this time, actually rehearsed a little because it’s family, and I blew out fourteen candles plus the one for good luck, and made another wish, except this one I meant a little harder.
XII. Day one: Roman’s Room — before school
[I heard Rosie finishing up in the bathroom, so I sat on the edge of my bed and waited until I heard her head back to her room. Then I made it to the bathroom, sitting on the closed toilet lid, still half asleep, holding the bracelet in my hand instead of doing anything useful with the five minutes I had left. The little silver rose caught the light differently in here than it had the night before — sharper, every petal edge distinct. I’d grabbed Rosie’s card off my nightstand on my way in too, and it was sitting on the edge of the sink now, still slightly bent from riding around in her back pocket all day yesterday.]
XIII. Yesterday — Birthday, Continued
The second the last candle went out, Mom struck — she’d been hovering right behind my shoulder the whole time, and with one practiced swipe she scooped a glob of white icing off the cake and smeared it across my nose and cheek. Tradition. The room went off. A dozen phones up at once, flashes going, cousins pointing and cracking up at the frosting all over my face.
Gifts came after. Cousins gave cousin-gifts — a hoodie, gift cards, a stuffed animal from a younger cousin who clearly still thought I was nine. Danny, my cousin, the one who actually pays attention, handed me a flat rectangular box wrapped bad on purpose, making sure I knew he’d wrapped it himself.
“You already know what it is,” he said. “You went through like three of the last ones.”
It was a journal. New, blank, that stiff unbroken spine, that smell paper gets before anybody’s touched it. “You’re welcome,” he said, before I even said anything, and I laughed and told him he knew me too well, which he did.
Mom went next, sliding a garment bag across the table she’d clearly been hiding all night, waiting for the right moment. Inside was a pair of dark jeans, stiff and unworn, a Basquiat tee she’d found on some Old Navy collab rack — “so you look like an artist already, since apparently that’s the plan now too,” she said, half joking, eyebrow raised at Rosie, daring her to deny whose idea that comment actually was — and a fresh pair of Jordans, box still taped shut.
“For tomorrow,” she said. “First day. You gotta walk in looking like you own the place.”
“These are hard, Ma. Actually hard.”
“I know. I have taste.” She kissed the top of my head. “Happy birthday, Romy.”
Rosie went last. She always goes last, on purpose, because she likes the anticipation, because she’s extra like that.
She handed me a small box. A jewelry box. My stomach flipped, because nobody puts socks in one of those.
Inside was a bracelet: a solid silver band, cool and heavy in my palm, way too heavy to be costume jewelry. It didn’t close on its own. One end stopped short in a socket, shaped to take a key.
The key was the missing piece. It slid into that open end and became the latch, the thing that held the whole circle shut. Its head was a rose, small and detailed, silver petals folded in on themselves, and once it clicked into place I couldn’t tell where the band ended and the rose began. One unbroken loop of silver. No clasp to come undone.
Engraved lines ran along the top of the band, vertical and diagonal, end to end. It was her whole Instagram in metal — the rose she’s had as her logo since freshman year, the one on all her cheer bags and her senior shirts — turned into something you could actually lock yourself into.
“Aw Ro Ro—”
“Don’t talk yet, I have a whole thing,” she said, already pulling a card out of her back pocket, slightly bent from sitting there all day. “Read it later, not in front of everybody, you’ll get embarrassed and so will I.”
I opened my mouth — actually opened it, the words already halfway up my throat, Rosie, something’s wrong with me, something’s actually wrong — and I don’t know what stopped it. Maybe the noise. Maybe just not wanting to be the reason the whole room went quiet on my birthday.
“…Thanks,” I said instead, and slid the open band around my wrist right there, pressing the key home until it clicked into place, closing the circle. “This is sick. Actually sick.”
“I know,” she said, way too pleased with herself. “I had it made. You’re welcome.”
I looked down at it for a second too long, turning my wrist a little, watching the little rose catch the light from the kitchen.
XIV. Day one: The Bathroom — before school
[I finally got up off the toilet and got moving for real, and everything felt loud. The water hitting the sink sounded almost musical, every drop distinct instead of just a blur of running water. I could smell the mint of the toothpaste before I even opened the cap, sharp and clean, cutting through everything else — the fabric softener smell still clinging to the towel, the faint trace of Mom’s perfume from somewhere down the hall, layered under the coffee she’d already started.
I brushed my teeth slower than I needed to, just noticing it. The bristles against my gums, the exact texture of it, more detail than brushing my teeth had ever had before in my entire life.
I picked the card back up off the edge of the sink and read it over again, even though I basically had it memorized already.
“This key symbolizes that the power is in your hands. That only you hold the key that will open the realm that you’ve always wanted to enter. You are in control. It’s your destiny. Believe in yourself. Trust your instincts. Good luck tomorrow, I’ll be there for you if you need me. Happy Birthday Romy! Love you! — RoRo!”
I ran my thumb over the little rose she’d sketched under her name, feeling the dent the pen had left in the paper. She had no way of knowing how much had changed since she handed it to me. Neither did I, really. Not the size of it.
I’m in control, I thought. And for the first time, I half believed it.
I set the card back down on the sink, and back in my room, I got the clothes down off the hanger — the jeans, the Basquiat shirt, the Jordans still sitting in the box — and even the denim felt different against my hands, stiffer, more textured, every individual thread there for the feeling if I paid attention long enough. I didn’t use to notice things at that level. I don’t know when I started.
I locked the bracelet back around my wrist last, the key clicking into place, closing the circle.]
XV. Day one: Cafeteria — Lockdown Continuous
Roman sat under the third table, back against the cinderblock wall, thumb moving over the little silver rose on his wrist — something for his hand to hold onto that wasn’t his own knee. The door at the end of the hall had gone quiet for a second, and then it banged again, harder this time, the whole frame of it shuddering.
Somebody under the next table whimpered. Roman didn’t look up. He just kept running his thumb over the rose, over and over, treating it as a rosary instead of jewelry.
XVI. Day one: Roman’s Room — before school
Fully dressed now, just a couple minutes left before Mom really would start yelling, I noticed something move near the ceiling — a spider, small, crawling along the crack where the plaster met the peeling paint, minding its own business.
I stared at it without meaning to stare, my eyes just landing there and refusing to move on. And the zoom happened again, easy this time, almost gentle compared to the bodega shelf — the whole ceiling narrowing, the ordinary blur of the room falling away, until it was just the spider, huge and close, every hair on its legs distinct, its front pair of eyes, tiny and black, catching the light in the room.
I didn’t gasp this time. I didn’t flinch.
I just watched it, and for a second — just a second — I was steering it, not just riding it out. If I stopped fighting the current, maybe I wouldn’t drown.
That should’ve scared me more but oddly it was a little exhilarating.
I grabbed the new journal off my nightstand and shoved it into my backpack, in the front pocket, where I could feel the corner of it against my back the second I put the bag on.
“Let’s go, kids, now now now!” Mom’s voice came down the hall, half singing it, half meaning it.
Rosie stuck her head into my doorway before I even got my shoes fully on, already dressed, hair done, backpack over one shoulder. She looked at me for a second — really looked, her usual full-attention once-over — and whatever she saw must’ve read as nerves, because she softened.
“Let’s do this,” she said, and held her fist out.
I bumped it. Didn’t correct her about what she thought she was seeing.
I sat in the back, forehead almost against the window, watching Bergenline go by in a half-blur that happens when you’re not really looking at anything specific. Mom drove with one hand on the wheel and one eye on the rearview, checking me every few seconds as if a mirror could actually tell her anything about what was going on in my head.
“You’re quiet back there,” she said.
“I’m good.”
“Freshman year,” Rosie said from the front seat, twisting around to look at me properly. “I remember my first day. I threw up before we even left the house, no lie. Actual vomit.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“That’s real. And then by lunch I already had, like, three friends. It’s not that deep, Romy. Everybody’s new. Everybody’s scared. Nobody’s watching you as hard as you think they are.”
“She’s right,” Mom said. “First day’s the worst part. After that it’s just school.”
“Honestly,” I said, going for light, going for a laugh, “I don’t even wanna go. Can we just turn around.”
Rosie snorted, already turning back to face front. “Oh my God, everybody says that. You’ll be fine, drama king.”
Mom didn’t laugh. I caught her eyes flick to the rearview again, longer this time, something tightening around them that hadn’t been there a second ago. “Why wouldn’t you want to go? Is it your head? You feeling okay?”
“Ma, he’s joking,” Rosie jumped in.
“I’m just asking.”
“I’m fine. I was kidding.” If they only knew my real concerns, I wouldn’t be able to explain it all. I will though..tonight.
She let it go, on the surface. Said “okay” and turned back toward the road as if that settled it.
But I could hear her breathing change — not dramatic, nothing anybody without what I had going on could’ve picked up on, just a fraction shorter than it’d been a second ago, held a half-beat longer before letting go, the specific rhythm of somebody trying to seem calm instead of actually being calm. I don’t think she even knew she was doing it. That’s not a sound you’re supposed to be able to hear at all. But I did, clear as anything — one more thing I can do now. What is happening to me?
I nodded and let them think that’s what it was. Let them build me a whole staircase out of first-day-nerves logic when the actual thing sitting in my chest didn’t have stairs, didn’t have a bottom I could see.
We pulled up outside North Bergen High School, the sidewalk already thick with kids in first-day fits, backpacks that still had that unscuffed newness to them. Rosie leaned over and kissed Mom’s cheek. “Love you. Thanks for the ride.”
“Love you too. Have a good first day, seniors get treated different, you know that.”
I got out, walked around to the driver’s side for my kiss. Mom held my face in both hands for a second longer than she needed to.
“You’re gonna be fine,” she said. “You hear me? Fine.”
I nodded, because I didn’t trust my voice not to give something away.
Rosie caught up to me before I made it more than a few steps, grabbing my arm to slow me down. “Hey.” She waited until I actually looked at her. “If you need me today — whatever, any reason, doesn’t have to be a big deal — you text me or you call me. Okay?”
My phone buzzed a second later; she was already sending her schedule over.
“That’s my whole day, period by period. If you got a free period or a study hall or whatever, come find me. Or just text and I’ll say I gotta use the bathroom and I’ll come to you. Whatever it takes. I don’t care.” She bumped my shoulder, softer than usual. “Just know I’m here. Okay?”
She spotted somebody up ahead — a couple girls from her group chat, already waving her over — and jogged off before I could really answer, backpack bouncing, calling “love ya, bye!” back over her shoulder without even really looking at me anymore.
I walked toward the entrance. When I glanced back once, Mom was still parked there, not pulling off yet, already pulling her phone out, calling somebody while watching me go, bottom lip caught between her teeth, eyebrows pulled together, worried about something. Maybe me.
XVII. Day one: Cafeteria — Lockdown Continuous
“Mom, I gotta go. I’ll call you back.”
“No — no, don’t hang up, Roman, please, just stay on the phone with me, I don’t care if you don’t say anything, just stay on—”
He hung up anyway. He had to. A phone pressed to his ear would be too loud in about ten seconds, and whatever came next, his mother’s voice wasn’t going to be able to follow him into it.
He shoved the phone into his pocket and looked around at the faces under the table with him. Andrew was two feet away, knees pulled to his chest, jaw clenched so tight it looked painful, eyes wet but not falling yet. A couple of the girls from B lunch were pressed together near the far table leg, one of them silently mouthing something — a prayer, or her mother’s name, or both. Somebody’s phone lit up with a text and got shoved face-down into a lap so fast it was almost violent.
Fifth period lunch — Andrew’s lunch too, the one overlap they’d found comparing schedules over text a few days before school even started. Jude had a different lunch entirely; the two of them only had eighth period gym together. Jude wasn’t here. Roman held onto that.
Roman’s backpack was still wedged against his knee. He could feel the corner of the journal through the canvas, a small hard shape. It meant nothing right now. He was still glad it was there.
The door, labeled “DOOR A” for security purposes, banged again — the third time now, each one closer together than the last. Whoever was on the other side was done testing it.
Then came the shots. Two of them, flat and close, aimed low, and the sound of the lock giving way landed almost anticlimactic after all that buildup — a small metallic clatter, nothing dramatic.
Then a kick, and the door slammed open against the wall.
For one full second, nobody under the tables moved. The whole cafeteria held its breath, all nine tables of it, fifty different people’s lungs behind it.
Then a shape stepped through the doorway, backlit by the hallway fluorescents, and the held breath broke apart into screaming.
The shooter was closer to the tables on the right, the ones nearest the door he’d just come through, and that’s where he went first — not aiming exactly, just turning and firing into anything that moved. A boy near the second table caught it in the shoulder and went down hard, dragging a chair with him. The screaming went higher, more animal.
Under the third table, Roman’s eyes cut sideways toward the door labeled “DOOR B” at the other end of the same wall the shooter had come through, only ten or fifteen feet of open cafeteria floor between here and there. Close. Doable, if they moved fast enough. He looked at Andrew and jerked his head toward it, once, sharp.
Andrew shook his head. Fast. Terrified. No.
The shooter had moved further right, chasing down kids who’d broken from under their tables and were sprinting for the windows, the back exit, the kitchen doors flung wide with cooks waving people through, one of them still gripping a serving spoon, having apparently forgotten it was even in his hand. For a few seconds his back was fully turned, gun tracking a group of fleeing juniors near the serving line.
Roman moved.
He didn’t decide to, not really — his body just went, low and fast, and Andrew, given no choice once Roman was already three feet clear of the table, scrambled up after him along with two girls who’d been crouched beside them. They ran in a loose line toward the second door, backpacks slapping against spines, somebody’s shoe coming half off, then all the way off, left behind.
They were maybe eight feet from the door when the shot came.
It didn’t sound aimed. It sounded almost incidental, one more round fired into a room already full of bodies in motion — and Andrew made a sound, a wet, cut-off groan, and then he was falling, and there was nothing gradual about it, no slow-motion movie moment, just Andrew’s whole weight coming down on top of Roman before either of them had time to think.
They went down together. Roman’s back hit the floor and Andrew landed half across his chest, over his right shoulder, close enough that Roman was looking directly into his face, close enough to count individual eyelashes, close enough to watch something behind Andrew’s eyes go from present to absent in the space of maybe four seconds.
Blood came from the back of his head first, spreading fast across the tile. Then from his nose. Then his mouth, a thin dark line of it at the corner, and his lips were moving, trying to form a word, a name, a prayer — no sound coming out anymore, just breath with no words left attached to it.
One of the girls behind them had gone down too, a few feet short of the door, blood soaking through the back of her shirt, not moving.
Roman didn’t scream. He didn’t cry. There wasn’t time for either. Everything in him went very, very still — terror first, then grief, thick and total, and then nothing. The fear drained out of him.
He felt himself fill back up with something new, cold water displacing warm in a bathtub, gradual and then all at once.
He turned his head. The shooter was standing in front of the water vending machine, thirty feet away — thirty twelve-inch tiles — gun still raised, still tracking other bodies, still working through the room with the flat efficiency of a man running a checklist.
Time slowed down again — or maybe it was him doing it to time, he still couldn’t tell which — except this time it didn’t just slow, it nearly stopped. A fly, of all things, drifted through the space between them at what should have been ordinary fly-speed, and instead Roman watched each individual wingbeat separately, watched the small iridescent shudder of it hang in the air, set in glass, the fluorescent light breaking across its eyes.
Roman’s vision did what it had done in the bodega, and again on the spider — but bigger now, total, no resistance left in him to fight it with. The whole cafeteria narrowed to a single bright line, and at the center of it: the shooter, turning, slow as a door swinging shut in a dream, some late animal instinct finally catching up to what his body should have felt minutes ago.
The shooter’s gun started to come up, started to swing back toward Roman.
There was no time to turn anything over twice, the overthinking his mother always called careful. For the first time in a whole life spent looking twice, measuring twice, and hesitating, an alien version of him took the wheel without asking permission. From a vast, cold distance, a small remnant of his human consciousness watched it happen. Whatever came next had already been decided, and he was the weapon chosen to carry it out.
It started at his jaw.
Somewhere against his hip, distant and small, his phone buzzed once — a text, maybe, or his mother calling back from the ordinary world, where people worried about late slips and cold dinners. There was no part of him left available to check it. There was barely anything of him left available for anything.
A pulling sensation first, deep under the skin, something coiled tight inside him his whole life, given permission to unwind. His face went numb, then hot. Inside his skull came the sound of a house settling — a muffled, underwater crack of knuckles, bone rearranging itself, cartilage stretching into shapes a human skull was never built to hold. His skin darkened and hardened, losing color, losing softness, taking on a dull gunmetal sheen that caught the fluorescent light harder than flesh ever had. Heat built at the base of his skull — the same heat as the migraines, he thought, distantly, from somewhere still recognizably his own. But bigger. Volcanic. And this time, instead of dropping him to his knees, it filled him.
He stopped fighting it and closed his fist around the energy building in him.
He rose. Andrew’s weight slid off his chest onto the tile.
Whatever was left of the boy who’d been lying on that floor a half-second earlier dropped low into a crouch, weight balanced forward onto the balls of his feet, shoulders squared, no fourteen-year-old left in the stance at all. Energy gathered visibly along his forearms, the air over them a heat shimmer off August asphalt, building, concentrating, enveloping everything.
Roman’s face was gone. In its place, a cannon — massive, seamless, extending twenty inches out from where his face used to be, fused to what remained of his skull, fourteen years in the making. The metal of it had no name Roman knew — a dull, deep gray with something almost oily shifting underneath the surface when the light moved across it, engineering from the future or a different dimension. And still, somehow, he could see. Perfectly. The whole room in total clarity, the crosshair steady and unwavering, locked dead center on the shooter’s flat blue eyes.
The shooter’s turn completed itself in pieces — the shoulder first, then the hips, then the head coming around last, dragged by all the rest of it — and somewhere in the middle of that turn his eyes found Roman and widened. What he saw was the mouth of a barrel, twelve inches across and twenty inches long, where a fourteen-year-old’s face should have been.
Pale blue eyes, and underneath the fear finally arriving too late, nothing. Empty. That emptiness had nothing to do with time slowing down; it had probably always been there, and Roman only let himself see it now that he wasn’t afraid of the man anymore. A single bead of sweat hung frozen halfway down the side of his temple.
The gun was still rising, still chasing a target it was never going to reach in time — that same slow, doomed arc Roman had watched begin an eternity ago, a half-second that had somehow lasted this long.
It didn’t reach him.
The blast that came out of Roman hit every ear and every chest in the room at once. The floor jumped under the tables. For one full frame of time, still stretched impossibly thin, Roman watched the shooter’s body fail to survive what was happening to it — the torso opening from the inside before the outside had caught up to it, ribs blown outward in white splinters, a wet dark spray of viscera and blood misting the air ahead of the rest of him, brain and bone following a half-beat later, reaching the acoustic ceiling tiles and hanging there in thick, heavy drops. The man was two separate ideas of a body for a fraction of a second — the shape he’d been, and the ruin already outracing it — before both of them were swallowed into what happened to the wall.
The water vending machine tore off its footing and went with him, and the cinderblock wall behind it didn’t stop the blast so much as fail to, the force punching straight through into the kitchen beyond, where two of the staff who’d been holding the back exit open, waving kids out into the alley only seconds before, never had time to move. All of it went in the same instant, folding outward into gray dust and twisted metal and a hole where a wall used to be, the shooter’s remains scattered across all of it, nothing in the wreckage recognizably human.
Roman didn’t know, in that half-second, everything the blast had taken with it. He couldn’t have. He only knew the recoil, distant and strange, moving through a body that no longer entirely belonged to the boy who’d pulled on his new Jordans that morning.
The barrel receded first, folding itself back into a jaw, a mouth, a face — his face, slack now, drained of whatever had filled it a moment before. His knees buckled almost immediately after, the crouch collapsing in on itself, and he went down hard onto the tile, onto his side, into a mess that was partly Andrew’s blood and partly his own sweat.
He didn’t lose consciousness gracefully. It was a battery dying — one second working, the next simply not.
He lay there in his new jeans, soaked dark at the knee where he’d fallen into Andrew’s blood, in the Basquiat shirt his mother had picked out with such care the day before, most of the front of it no longer any color she’d recognize, in the Jordans still box-fresh under all that red. The silver rose on his wrist caught light from somewhere in the wreckage, one clean bright thing in the middle of everything that wasn’t. Around him, the cafeteria kept happening without him — sirens outside now, radios crackling, boots on tile, someone shouting for a medic near Door B, someone else shouting a name that wasn’t his.
His phone had slid halfway out of his pocket in the fall, screen still lit, still facing up. It buzzed once against the tile, then again — ROSIE, stacked twice over on the lock screen, each one arriving on top of the last.
None of it reached him. He couldn’t have answered if he’d tried. On the tile beside him, his sister’s name lit up the screen again — a useless, glowing rectangle casting light over a boy too far gone to see it.
XVIII. Institutional Cutaway
The detective arrived fifteen minutes after the first units, while the last of the ambulances were still loading, and he walked the scene with the unhurried method he’d walked a hundred scenes before it — slow, hands clasped behind his back, letting his eyes do the work before his mouth did.
He stopped at the hole.
The edges of the hole were too clean for a bomb, the cinderblock removed more than blown apart. Something had reached through the wall instead of into it. A vending machine sat crumpled fifteen feet from where it should have been, folded nearly in half. The kitchen beyond the wall was open to the cafeteria now, a room that wasn’t supposed to have a door there suddenly had one, jagged and glowing faintly with settling dust.
He’d seen gang shootings. He’d seen a car bomb once, years back, upstate. Nothing in either had prepared him for this.
“Get me the cafeteria cameras,” he said to the principal, who was standing a few feet off, his face gray, his mouth working on nothing. “All of it. Every angle you got in this room.”
It took ten minutes to pull the footage onto a drive. The detective watched it once, the principal standing beside him, jaw tightening a little more with each new angle. He watched a boy transform. He watched a wall disappear. He watched the boy fold back into himself and drop to the floor, a puppet with its strings cut.
He took the drive. He deleted the original from the server himself, right there in front of the principal, offering no explanation and inviting no questions. The principal didn’t ask for one. He just watched it happen with the particular stillness of someone who already knew better than to argue.
“This doesn’t go anywhere,” the detective said, still facing the now-empty screen, reaching into his breast pocket for his cell phone. “Not to the superintendent. Not to your staff. Not to a single parent who calls asking what really happened in that cafeteria. As far as anyone outside this room knows, the shooter hit a gas line and brought the wall down. That’s the story that ends up in the paper tomorrow. Don’t repeat what you just saw.”
“What about the witnesses?” the principal pressed, his voice brittle. “The people there who actually saw it?”
“They saw a shooter.” The detective didn’t look up from his phone, his thumb methodically scrolling through his contacts. “They saw a gas line go. They saw a wall come down. A freak failure of infrastructure.”
He finally paused, turning his unblinking gaze toward the man, his posture perfectly, terrifyingly rigid. “That’s not a suggestion. The federal people are going to want this handled clean. Until they get here and tell you different, this stays between the two of us. You understand what I’m telling you?”
The principal nodded, slow, the color still not fully back in his face. He understood. Not the how of it — but he understood the shape of the thing well enough to know that some doors, once you’d looked through them, closed themselves behind you whether you wanted them to or not.
Then the detective walked to his car, sat behind the wheel with the door still open, and clicked on the name on his cell’s contacts — not his department radio, not anything that would show up on a log anywhere official.
The call was picked up on the second ring.
“We’ve got a situation at a school shooting in North Bergen,” the detective said, low, even. “Shooter’s dead. But not from anything I can explain in a report. I’ve got footage. Some kid’s face turned into some kind of weapon. Took out the shooter, a wall, a vending machine and killed two kitchen staff in the blast radius.”
A pause on the other end. “Send me a name.”
“Casador. Roman Casador. Charlie – Alpha – Sierra – Alpha – Delta – Oscar – Romeo. Freshman.”
The line hung in a dead, suffocating void. On the other end, there was no sharp intake of breath, no sudden spark of recognition—only a heavy, calculating silence. It was the sound of a mind scrambling to piece together an impossible puzzle in real time.
“Keep the footage on that drive,” the voice commanded, stripped of all warmth. “A physical drive only, no email or cloud storage. And you guard that damn thing with your life until it’s collected. Nobody touches it. Nobody looks at it again. Am I making myself clear?”
“Copy that.”
“One more thing.” The line paused, the hesitation thick with unspoken danger. “Wherever the ambulances are taking the injured—I assume Hackensack, it’s the closest—make sure this kid doesn’t end up there. Route him to Holy Name instead. Divert the rig if you have to. Lie to them. Tell them whatever it takes.”
The detective’s brow furrowed as he stared through the windshield. “That’s a fifteen-minute deficit for a kid who might be bleeding out in the back of that rig right now.”
“He’ll survive the trip to Holy Name. Make it happen. We’ll contain the fallout from here.”
The line cut out, leaving only a cold dial tone buzzing in his ear.
He sat frozen behind the wheel, staring at the asphalt. His mind raced, cataloging the chilling anomaly of the call: Whoever was pulling the strings knew exactly which hospital to avoid before anyone had even reported the kid was hurt. A cold knot formed in his stomach. He got out of the car, sirens blaring all around, and hurried back to execute the instructions.
Three states away, in an office with no nameplate on the door, the agent set the phone down and sat there a second before crossing the hall. He was big — six-four, still carrying the swagger of a college linebacker a decade removed from actually playing, University of Wisconsin, a name he dropped more than he probably should in casual conversation. He liked this job. Some men like contact sports for the hit more than the win; he was one of them.
His supervisor looked up from her desk when he knocked. Carrie Ann Killiard — Killer Ann, to everyone who worked under her, though never within earshot — dressed head to toe in black, a thin leather wristband on her left wrist that she never took off, a birthday gift from her partner years back. She had the build of someone who didn’t lose arguments, and she generally didn’t.
“We have something,” he said. “North Bergen. School shooting, shooter’s dead, but a kid did it. Not with a weapon — with his own body. Best I can describe it, some kind of gun came out of his head. Like his whole face turned into the barrel. I know how that sounds. An officer at the scene called it in and has video footage on a drive.”
She didn’t ask him to describe it further. She just asked, “Where’s the kid now?”
“Getting rerouted to Holy Name instead of Hackensack, per your standing directive on anything like this.”
An icy stillness settled over her features: the hyper-focused clarity of a predator that had spent years waiting in the tall grass for exactly this phone call, having long assumed the prey would never surface.
“Get that drive secured tonight,” she ordered, her voice flat and final. “And flag that kid’s medical chart the exact second he passes through admissions. Nobody lays a finger on him unless we are standing in the room.”
“And if the administration pushes back? If they want a reason?”
“They won’t ask.” Her lips thinned into a phantom smile. “I’m calling the ER director’s personal cell before the wheels touch the bay. Once he hears whose name is on this, the staff will be ready when that stretcher rolls through the doors.” She was already reaching for her phone, her fingers moving with lethal efficiency. “Let’s see if this kid is the real deal.”
— END —