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    Nick stood beside his father, his mother at home with his younger brother Jeff, nine years old but too young to understand fully what had happened. Sarah at home in her bedroom, still too shocked to leave the house though the chorus room where she hid never saw gunfire. Nick hadn’t seen her since Wednesday. Christina stood with her father, her mother working a rare weekend shift across the river though she’d called six times through the afternoon. Her brother, Simon, a freshman, stood next to her and watched his candle blankly. Her boyfriend, Ryan, in the hospital after hiding in the shower stalls of the boys’ locker room, where he and his classmates fled when they heard gunshots in the gymnasium. Stalls that could not hide him, in the end, each of which Caleb opened with his shotgun raised and took aim and fired. Ryan told her on the phone from the hospital that he heard one last gunshot beyond the locker room before he passed out in the stall bleeding, a gunshot we would later learn was Caleb’s final aim to his own mouth in the center of the gymnasium. Christina looked across the crowd of parents, community members, friends. She noticed Callie Rhodes, another member of the varsity women’s swim team, and knew they’d postpone practice for another several weeks despite Christina’s muscles itching to move beyond the confines of her bedroom, one of their teammates lost. Her bedroom. She wondered if she and Zolaand Nick and Matt would meet again at all, what could possibly be committed to paper about a vigil like this, what glint of candle Matt could document and what shade of sky she could write down as night descended around all of them, what anyone would want to remember in a yearbook.
    Matt stood near Christina between his parents, each holding a hand across his shoulders. He looked at Christina and couldn’t imagine saying it: that their task was to write and that they’d both fail to acknowledge it. He knew Nick was home free, that there was no research for a vigil but that he and Christina, the junior staff writers, should be taking notes if nothing else. He hadn’t brought a pen. No paper. He’d brought only the vast ocean of his own brain filled with Caroline Black and her vacant eyes and Tyler fleeing down the hallway and Tyler nowhere on the library lawn. He glanced around the crowd and saw Russ Hendricks, Alexis Thurber’s boyfriend. Another junior. His face a steady wall of stoicism though Matt knew he must have been breathless. He looked for Zola, unable to find her. He wondered if she’d brought her camera, if there would ever be a right time to photograph grief.
    Zola stood at the edge of the crowd, eyes closed, beside her mother, who held an arm around her, a grip palpable in the strain of her fingers. She’d left her Pentax manual at home, a gift her mother had bought for her when she joined the yearbook staff freshman year, a camera Zola knew was discarded somewhere on the carpet of her bedroom floor. There was nothing here. Nothing at all on this peopled lawn to commit to memory. Only faces illumined in light, tear-dried cheeks, so many parents and family members constellated together in the darkening night. Zola spied Eric Greeley, also standing at the perimeter of the gathering, wiping his nose not from crying but from the lingering remains of a cold, Zola knew from the newspaper. She couldn’t remember any interaction she’d ever had with him to know whether he’d been lying to the police or not, another face in the dense crowd of Lewis and Clark’s throngedmass of teenagers, so many faces she’d never noticed until they became pixels in the paper, photographs of students fleeing school. Eric stood alone in a gray hooded sweatshirt, the profile of his face blank beneath the jersey-knit covering, a face he hid away from the crowd though he was deemed not guilty or responsible, a grieving he came to shed alongside everyone