Read Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down for Free Online

it ours, none of it lasting, not even what clothing we took home and held. Home: a guilt. That we were here, in our beds and at our tables. A folly of randomness, of chance. That there was nothing that separated our bodies from a list of names scrolled in the newspaper, a list of nothing but the whims of a gun’s attention, a gun aimed from an unimaginable place.
    We knew the police were working, that they sought a motive. We knew they had let Eric Greeley go. We knew from the newspaper that even though he’d been Caleb Raynor’s best friend, he claimed they’d grown apart in recent months and that Caleb had retreated into himself, a withdrawal that according to Eric was alarming and hurtful but came with no signs of violence.
    Eric knew nothing of the guns. Knew nothing of the ammunition or the hooded sweatshirt hiding rounds of bullets or the two additional assault rifles found in Caleb’s bedroom when the police searched his home. And he knew nothing of Caleb’s plans but had merely been absent due to a bad cold, a virus he was still battling that Friday.
    We knew nothing of Caleb’s family, either: only that, accordingto the newspaper, they were grieving. That his younger brother was in eighth grade, not yet a student at Lewis and Clark High, that his mother was a social worker and his father an insurance salesman. That their home had been searched, that they’d cooperated fully with the police. That they’d issued a statement of grief and prayer for the community, that they asked only for the respect of privacy.
    We tried not to think of it. We wanted anger. Anger that would rip through the fog of our numbness. But when we looked across the table at our mothers and fathers over lasagnas and casseroles we could barely eat that neighbors had brought by, what trace of rage we could summon dissipated in the worry lines that creased our parents’ faces, faces that so easily could have been those of Elise Nguyen’s parents or Mr. Rourke’s family, faces trenched by an unconscionable weight that blanketed our entire community.
    At night, we huddled into our sheets and watched the empty ceiling above us. Spackled ceilings, ceilings with stilled fans, ceilings with glow-in-the-dark constellations, ceilings burdened by shadows. We watched the darkness pervading our bedrooms and thought of nothing but the palpable hole sunk deep into our chests, a lack as dark as space, an emptiness that had swallowed all light.
    SATURDAY NIGHT, THE night after the St. Louis Post-Dispatch printed the full list of names, our township of Midvale held a vigil. A community-wide ceremony open to anyone: to those who had been there, to those who had known someone, to those in St. Louis who knew no one but felt sorrow all the same, who wanted to excise a welled grief that if locked tight would overwhelm them. We stood upon the lawn of the public library, four blocks east of Lewis and Clark, the same library where police had gathered students and parents just three days before, the school a crime scene and an open investigation and roped off entirely. A vigil largely left to privacy by the media, local and national news outlets that had filled our streets for three days, though some of us saw a lone news van parkedat the edge of the library’s parking lot, lights extinguished, a reporter standing beside it. A vigil for the students, our peers. For their families and their friends. For the teachers and staff lost inside the building, for their fathers and sisters and daughters. A vigil of names spelled across thirty-five white signs planted in the dewed grass, names lit by the glow of staked candles, names we held silent inside our mouths. Principal Regina Jeffries. Caroline Black. Alexis Thurber. Nafisa Fields. They were a flame each of us spoke nothing of, their names caught beneath our tongues. We stood close to one another, apart, the light of our candles a heat against our cheeks in the autumn