The Split
Day 0
By the time Zaire and Kalina reached the elementary school, the day had already gone wrong in too many directions at once.
Parents crowded the front doors, pounding on the glass with open palms hard enough to make the whole entry shiver. A teacher with blood on one sleeve kept shouting for everybody to get back, but her voice vanished into the noise before the end of each sentence. Children were crying somewhere beyond the doors. The fire alarm screamed with a steady mechanical rage that felt almost cruel now, as if the building itself had learned how to panic.
Zaire hit the entrance shoulder first with Kalina right behind him and a loose stream of high school kids breaking around them like water trying to choose a path. The second they crossed the threshold, the noise hit full force.
Teachers yelling names over one another.
Children sobbing.
Feet slapping tile.
Somebody praying too loud.
The clean smell of floor wax and pencil shavings buried under blood.
A little girl sat in front of the cubbies crying for her mama so hard her whole face had folded inward. Another child ran past with one sock on and no shoes. Construction-paper letters still hung on the walls, bright and cheerful and stupid, like the building had not yet been told what it had become.
“Split up!” one of the older kids shouted. “Find your people!”
Everybody scattered.
Zaire stayed with Kalina because staying with her still felt like the one sensible thing left in the world.
They moved down the lower hall past open classroom doors and terrified knots of children. Somewhere to their left something heavy crashed. Then came the screaming.
Not the broad roar of panic.
Something tighter.
One room.
A cluster of children all screaming together.
Zaire swore and ran toward it.
He heard Kalina behind him. Did not look back. He did not need to. She was there. She had been there all day, from the birds at Bellamy’s windows to the blood in the high school hallway to the sprint across the parking lot. The world had split open, but she was still in the shape of it. He knew the sound of her steps. Knew the brush of her shoulder when they cut corners too fast. Knew the swing of her long locs when she turned sharp enough for them to whip against her back.
The classroom door at the end of the hall stood half open. Inside, children were jammed against the cubbies in the corner, climbing over one another in terror. A woman lay on the floor by the reading rug with one hand pressed to her stomach. Another teacher was on top of a small boy, pinning him down.
Her face was pressed into his shoulder. Her mouth and chin were slick with blood that had smeared all over the front of his Spider-Man shirt while he screamed and twisted beneath her.
“Hey!”
The teacher jerked up.
For one second the whole room sharpened into pieces.
Blood on her mouth.
Eyes gone red and wrong.
A strand of hair stuck to her cheek.
The little boy beneath her screaming so hard it sounded like his throat might tear.
Zaire hit her from the side.
Hard.
He felt shoulder. Bone. The ugly wrong strength in her body before she slammed into the low bookshelf and sent picture books and bins of blocks skidding everywhere.
Kalina lunged for the little boy immediately. Good. He trusted her to grab what he could not.
“Window!” he shouted.
There was one big classroom window facing the side yard.
He grabbed a child-sized chair and swung it hard.
Glass burst outward in a bright, ugly sheet.
The children screamed louder.
“Come on,” he said, and heard his own voice change. Sharper. Steadier. The kind of voice that made scared kids look up instead of away. “One at a time. Move. Move.”
And somehow they listened.
He climbed halfway through the broken frame first, then turned and started lifting them out. Kalina passed them over one by one, fast and sure and breathing hard through her nose. A girl with pink beads hanging loose from one braid and a cut on her knee. The Spider-Man boy. A lean boy with a split lip and furious wet eyes who kept shoving smaller kids forward instead of himself. A little boy who had wet himself and was trying very hard to pretend he had not. And another girl in a yellow shirt who had not cried at all, only stared at everything with a strange, hard stillness.
The teacher was already dragging herself up again.
Kalina shoved a low table into her path, bought them one breath, then climbed through after the last child. When she dropped into the grass beside him, the silver chain at her throat flashed once in the sun.
Half a star.
His half sat under his own shirt, warm against his skin.
It was such a stupid thing to notice in a moment like that.
He noticed it anyway.
They hit the side yard with the rest of the world already collapsing around them.
Parents vaulted the fence. Teachers dragged sobbing kids through the grass. The classmates who had come with them were already breaking apart, running toward children they recognized or running because there was nothing else left to do. Sirens wailed somewhere too far away to matter.
Zaire crouched by the nearest knot of children and counted fast.
One, two, three, four, five.
The girl with the pink beads.
The Spider-Man boy.
Split lip.
The little one who had wet himself.
The quiet girl in yellow.
Too many.
Not enough.
“This way!” he shouted. “Stay with me!”
He looked up just in time to see Kalina pushing toward him through the moving bodies. Her locs had half come loose and were whipping against her shoulders as she shoved between panicked adults. Her face looked furious and scared and alive all at once.
Then a woman slammed into her shoulder.
A man grabbed one of the little girls from the cluster and nearly knocked two others down doing it.
Somebody shouted there were more coming through the front.
The crowd folded in on itself and broke apart at the same time.
“Kalina!”
She turned toward his voice.
Then bodies cut between them.
A crying child crashed into his knees. He caught the kid automatically so he would not go down, and when he looked up again there were too many people in the yard, too many hands, too much noise.
He saw the top of Kalina’s head once.
Then not again.
Not behind somebody.
Not farther away.
Gone.
Swallowed.
For one stupid second he stood there with the wrong kind of stillness in him, like maybe if he waited she would rise out of the crowd again and cuss him out for yelling her name like that.
She did not.
His hand went under his shirt before he even thought about it. His fingers closed around the chain at his throat and found the flat silver edge of the half-star hanging there.
He had given Kalina the other half on her eleventh birthday after she told him matching bracelets were childish and then got mad when he said fine, no gift then. She had rolled her eyes so hard he thought she was going to refuse it. Then she had put it on in front of him anyway and never taken it off. Not for school pictures. Not for church. Not for basketball games. Not for anything.
The quiet girl in yellow had both hands over her ears now. The Spider-Man boy was still crying. The little one who had wet himself looked like he might crumple where he stood. The split-lip boy said, very fast and very angry, “We gotta move.”
Zaire yanked out his phone with shaking hands.
A message from Kalina.
I’m heading home. Meet me there if you can.
Then another.
Please text me back.
His thumbs moved before his mind caught up.
On my way.
The message just sat there.
Did not send.
The signal bars at the top of the screen had gone thin and uncertain, blinking like they could not decide whether they were still part of the world.
A sound ripped across the yard from the far fence.
Not a siren.
Not a human scream either.
Something low and tearing.
One of the parents shouted, “Run!”
That decided it.
Zaire jammed the phone back into his pocket and grabbed the nearest little hand.
“Everybody with me,” he said. “Now.”
The words were too big for the kids. Half of them were already crying too hard to hear him. So he crouched and made his voice smaller.
“Look at me,” he said to the Spider-Man boy.
The boy hiccuped and stared.
Good enough.
“You stay on me. All of y’all. You let go and I cannot come find you. Understand?”
The girl with the pink beads nodded first. The others copied her because children survived that way. They watched the first brave one and borrowed her answer.
He took them out the side gate and into the alley behind the school because there was no world left in which he got to be just a boy again.
