Read Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down for Free Online Page B

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    We listened as people rose before the crowd, a gathering of hundreds standing around the row of white signs beneath a light-stolen sky disseminating prayers and hymns through the air, a cool that descended as stars slowly appeared. Alisha Trenway’s father spoke. Elise Nguyen’s mother. Then Josh Zimmerman’s sister, a senior who’d hid in the girls’ locker room, a choice we imagined she crucified herself for in hiding somewhere away from her brother, a sophomore, where she could not protect him. Mr. Bennington’s partner, through rasping breath: Above all, love one another . Benji Ndolo’s mother, midway through speaking, lost her composure and stepped away from the crowd. And the minister from the United Methodist Church on Bethel Road, who did not have children at Lewis and Clark but who knew some of the victims and their families from his congregation, spoke as if shedding great wisdom: Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with truth . He looked out across the crowd, a gathering of faces tinged by candlelight. Love is patient, he whispered to all of us. Love is kind .
    We considered love. What was kind in it. What love meant if it meant to kill. What would move a boy to enter the school’s doors and take everything away, so many classmates and teachers and what love had meant for them, what love became for us when we saw them splayed across the floor soaked in blood and bullet and bone. We listened to the minister regardless upon the darkened lawn of a library where so many of us had once gone for summer reading and story hour. A library that had become a holding pen for fear, for parents not knowing if they’d ever see their children again. When the minister lifted his candle, we lifted ours. We raised ourcandles to the Midwestern sky, a span of black with only the faint hint of stars. We watched the night fill with a million points of light, so much light that our vision flared in burned afterimage when we looked away.
    We glanced across the crowd. Crisp air, the scent of flame and melting wax. We averted our eyes from the faces of so many parents of twenty-eight students, their cheeks streaked with candlelight and grief. We recognized parents who had volunteered, who had baked cupcakes, who had once led Girl Scouts and coached Little League, who had overseen field trips to the St. Louis Zoo. Alyssa Carver’s mother. Missy Hoffman’s parents, turned quietly into one other. Greg Alexander’s father, who had chaperoned the Homecoming dance in the gymnasium our freshman year. And Caroline Black’s parents, their eyes closed, their mouths moving softly in prayer.
    Matt watched them across the crowd, their daughter engraved into the folds of his memory, an image that had kept him awake and staring out his bedroom window across the past three nights. He’d watched the moon to block out her body. He had not slept since Tuesday night. He looked at her parents standing in the crowd and felt the weight of his mother’s hand upon his shoulders and felt his knees dissolve though he managed to stay standing. He scanned the crowd. He knew Tyler wasn’t anywhere in the cluster of faces but he looked for the mohawked tuft of his hair poking up from the crowd and couldn’t find him, hadn’t spoken to him, hadn’t heard from him at all since they’d stepped from the second-floor bathroom and fled.
    The vigil lingered after the minister spoke, then thinned, then gradually began to disperse entirely. Christina stood beside the white signs with her father and brother, signs illumined by the faint glow of the distant moon. She closed her eyes and prayed to believe in prayer for the list of names and bore silent gratitude to no God in particular that Ryan Hansen’s name was not among them, even if she hadn’t seen him since he entered the hospital. Nick foundSarah’s mother in the diluted crowd and let her gather him in an embrace, her