Here

Mr. Jay sat with his eyes glued to his classroom computer monitor, listening loosely to each click of the mouse, each tick of the clock, tick, tick, ticking away like the fragility of life itself. The smell of freshly washed chalkboard still wafted through the air, the taste of morning coffee and donuts still lingered on his tongue.

He heard another noise. Footsteps. He shifted his gaze towards the door as the first of the students, Miranda stepped into the room – her frame small, her t-shirt and jeans way too big for her, her auburn hair a frizzled mess, as usual.

“Morning,” Mr. Jay said with a casual wave of the hand, his eyes reverting back to his computer screen. As usual, Miranda said nothing back. Mr. Jay watched as she stepped past his desk in utter silence, the smell of fast food breakfast beaming off her breath as she took her seat towards the back of the classroom.

Once most of the class filed in and started noisily chatting amongst themselves, the bell rang. “Can someone get the door?” Mr. Jay asked.

Nobody got up.

Mr. Jay sighed and rose from his desk, slamming the door shut himself with an audible thump before returning to his computer to take attendance.

“Toby?”

“Here.”

“Melissa?”

“Here.”

“Miranda?”

“…Here.”

And that was it. Here. Here was the only word that came out of Miranda’s mouth for the entirety of the school year. From September the eighth to May the first. Here. Here. Here.

She was always the first in the room.

Here.

She was always the first to leave.

This time though, Mr. Jay stopped her. “Hang on,” he said as she tried to dart out of the room the moment the second bell rang. “I need to talk with you, Miranda.”

The class oohed in unison, whispering to themselves about what had happened. Miranda looked around and then nodded her head, as the rest of the class scrambled out behind the two. Mr. Jay shut the door again and sighed.

“Miranda, you have a seventy-five in this class,” he said.

“I know,” Miranda said. Her voice was soft. Raspy. Icy. Like a small, malevolent child. Her voice immediately reminded Mr. Jay of Angelica Pickles from Rugrats. “I keep track of my grades. I check them every day. Worry about them all the time.”

“But we’re starting the final project tomorrow,” Mr. Jay explained. “It’s a group presentation, and you haven’t done any group work all year long. If you skip out on this one, you’re going to drop to a fifty-nine and have to take this class again next year.”

She shook her head. “That won’t matter at all,” she responded. “Because I’m going to kill you, Mr. Jay.”

A painful knot swiveled inside of Mr. Jay’s stomach, rippling, crimpling, bending in his gut. He opened his mouth, but his tongue shriveled and his teeth got too heavy to talk. All that came out was incomprehensible gibber. “Who the uh…huh?”

“I’m going to kill you tomorrow,” Miranda said. “I’m going to kill you, I’m going to kill Toby, I’m going to kill everyone in this class. I hope you make amends with your God, tonight. Because he can’t save you.”

Mr. Jay clutched his chest, a nauseating taste and smell taking over him. Everything became a blur. All he could hear was Miranda as she stomped away, then the door as she slammed it shut, leaving him alone in the classroom.

Now in a frenzied panic, he rushed over to lock the door, sprinting back towards his desk where he pulled out a stack of syllabi signed at the start of the year. He shuffled through the rigid yellow papers, ignoring the sear of a painful paper cut his carelessness awarded him with. Eventually, he found it. The signed syllabus belonging to Miranda Leonard.

He flipped through the pages, his blood tinkling onto the edges, not that it was a concern at the moment. His heart nearly melted when he found he was looking for – a home phone number.

He pulled out his iPhone and dialed the number printed in sloppy black ink and let out a sigh of relief as he heard the relieving click of a person on the other end. “Hi, Mr. or Mrs. Leonard? This is Mr. Joey Jacobs from your daughter Miranda’s ninth grade English class,” he said. “I was wondering if we could maybe meet together at some time and—”

“Is there a problem?” Miranda said on the other line.

“Agh!”

Mr. Jay threw his iPhone across the room, listening as the glass of the screen cracked audibly against the blunt impact of the floor.

***

Mr. Jay sat hopelessly on a bar stool that night, his fist sunk uncomfortably into his cheek, a nagging headache feeling painless in awake of his conflicting heart and mind. He listened aimlessly to the sound of chattering voices and clattering glasses around him, attempting feebly to wash out his pain with the taste of water and strong smell of booze. But nothing was working. And so he fled into the cold, windy darkness of the outside world.

His heart jumped as soon as he did.

“How did you find me here?” he asked as Miranda stood in front of him, her hands in her pockets, holding up her oversized jeans. “What, have you been following me all day?”

Miranda shrugged. “Just since school ended today,” she said.

“Well, what? Are you going to pull out a gun and murder me?”

“Why do you care that much?” Miranda shouted. A chill went up Mr. Jay’s spine as the strong winds started to pick up even further. He tightened his long brown coat and coughed uncomfortably into his sleeve. “Why do you care so much about what I said? Don’t you think I was just joking, or, whatever?”

“You want to know why I care so much?” Mr. Jay responded. “You know Columbine? Eric Harris. Eric. That’s the one.”

“The guy who shot all those people?” Miranda asked. “What about him?”

Mr. Jay sighed, rubbing his tired eyes, hoping for the moment that Miranda would simply walk off and they wouldn’t have to continue this conversation. When she didn’t budge, he opened his mouth.

“He was my nephew,” he admitted.

The wind stopped. A long, quiet pause, no sounds but chirping crickets in the far distance. Miranda froze like a solid block of ice, as the unrelenting weight of the tragedies came back to haunt Mr. Jay one more time, like they did so many times, like they would do time and time again for the rest of his life.

“I saw him a week before it all happened," he said. "And, I don’t know. I do not know! Maybe I could’ve, you know, stopped them.”

Miranda shook her head. “What is that, some sort of sick joke? You’re lying. That’s all you’re doing. Where’s your proof?”

Mr. Jay shook his head. “I don’t carry a key ring around with the bastard or anything,” he said. “But if you want, you can look me in the eye. Go ahead. See if I’m making it up.”

She did just that – and her heart skipped a beat, and she gasped in exclamation upon realizing that he was telling the absolute truth. “No. No, no, you couldn’t have,” she said. “You couldn’t have known what they were going to do.”

“Oh, like it was a big surprise the way those two acted. You know what? Why am I talking to you about this. Never mind. Have a nice night.”

He brushed past her, the edge of his coat stinging the skin on Miranda’s arm. “Aren’t you going to call the principal on me?” she asked. “Where are you going?”

Mr. Jay got in his car and drove off. When he knew she wasn’t following him anymore, he pulled out his cracked iPhone and sighed quietly.

Cutting his thumb fumbling around for the contact menu with one hand, he wiped away tears from his eyes with the other. His body went numb as he listened to the phone tell him how much time he had left, as if a simple machine would be able to keep track of something so overly complex. Something so confusing. He listened as the phone rang. And rang. And rang until the principal of his high school, his boss, picked up.

“Margaret?” he said into the speaker.

“Joey?” Margaret said in a surprised voice. “Is something the matter? What would make you call me this late?”

He paused. Gripped the phone tighter. Then he sighed. “Sorry,” he said. “Wrong number.”

He hung up and threw the phone at the windshield.

***

Every time he shut his eyes, a loud pop. Every time he turned sides, the smell of smoke and the sight of flashing lights. The blood and bodies dropping to the floor of his classroom as the sound of the mortifying muffled screams pierced his ears was a constant, deadly, dangerous shock to the heart. After lying in bed sleepless for close to seven hours, he jumped up and grabbed his keys and cell phone, heading out the door and into his car.

He grabbed Miranda’s syllabus from the glove box and read the address. It lead him to an outmoded townhouse complex just up the road from the high school. Room fifty-five, he said to himself, gritting his teeth against the tip of his dry tongue. Panting his way over to room fifty-five, he let off a heavy knock on the door.

No response. He turned the knob, and to his surprise, it wasn’t locked. He stepped inside to the dark, weird smelling home, taking careful footsteps through a narrow hall.

He heard something! He jumped and turned around but no, there was nothing there, nobody there, he was just imagining things. He sighed and turned back around, heading into a small room on the far end of the hall, the door pushed open, the lights on bright.

It was a bedroom – the walls painted cloud white, various posters hung among the walls from movies and bands he didn’t recognize. His eyes shifted from the walls to the small, unmade bed. And his heart sank.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said out loud. 

Laid out on top of the bed were several weapons – black as midnight. Shiny as gems. Large. Like the kind of weapons that you only see in movies, and don’t quite contemplate that guns that massive and scary really exist. Next to the weapons was a bulletproof vest, and next to that was a long and open metal box filled with ammunition.

“Get out before I hurt you, Mr. Jay.”

He sucked in his gut, clenched his fists and turned around. “Miranda,” he said, feeling as if he was going to vomit before he got any more words out.

“Don’t Miranda me!” the teenager responded.

“You can’t do this!”

“And why can’t I?” Miranda cried. “Nobody ever cares about me. My parents both deserted me. I'm stuck here living alone, using my dying grandmother's credit card just to pay the rent. Now I sit in class alone all day long and nobody tries to be my friend. Nobody asks me if I want to be in their class project group. I’m done with it. I’m done with everyone who never liked me.”

“Oh so what, your response to that is to murder people who didn’t do anything to you? Because you can't find a real job? The world isn’t going to hold your hand just because you don’t have the backbone to make a friend. The world sucks, and it doesn’t always revolve around you. So get used to it.”

“That doesn't help me at all! I hate you!” Miranda yelled. “I hate everyone! I swear to God. Nobody gets it. Nobody understands. I thought you'd be different.”

She stomped out of her bedroom, ultimately out of sight. Mr. Jay knew better than to leave. He wanted to help her. Over and over again, he’d think back to his nephew, and what he could have done, and the miserable life he would’ve had if he’d known what was going to happen, and if he’d have them arrested. And he thought of the good life he could’ve had if they just had one talk. Just one single talk that convinced him not to do it.

But in his eyes, there was something clearly wrong with Miranda. Something missing, mentally speaking. The same thing that was missing with his nephew. And he just couldn’t take any chances. Not again. Without thinking, without intent, he started to cry.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out his iPhone.

"Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?"