It wasn’t enough of an explanation for her that what had happened was just like, some crazy evil. That’s kind of what everybody was trying to tell her—I mean, even I was trying to tell her that for a while, that, like, you can’t get caught up in this shit, because there’s just a lot of evil in the world and it’s really unfortunate that it knocked on your doorstep, but it’s got nothing to do with you—but Mandy was like: No. There’s gotta be a reason for this. There’s gotta be an explanation for why this happened beyond like, “some people are just crazy.” And so she started doing all this research.

I mean, Mandy really would’ve made an amazing high school teacher—maybe even a college professor or something—because she’s such an academic when it comes down to it. Like, when she gets into something, she gets in deep. She’s such a good student. Back when we were together, she was reading constantly—she was obsessed with all that vampire shit, like the Dying Dawn series or Sisters of the Blood, but she wouldn’t just read the books, you know? She would look up all these historical accounts of vampire sightings and like, get into all this scholarship about what vampires symbolize in literature—but now, like, after all the stuff with her concert happened, she just wanted to find out where the guys who did it were from and like, what their motivations were, and how they possibly could’ve gotten to a place in their minds where it made sense for them to do this, and so she read everything she could get her hands on. She wasn’t gonna stop until it all made sense to her.

And at first, you know, she was doing it all in secret—like, she wasn’t really making it public that she was trying to educate herself about all this shit—but then as she got deeper and deeper into it, and like, as she started to really put together a picture for herself of like, what exactly had gone wrong in the world so that something like this was even possible, she started to want to share it with people, because it felt like, I don’t know, I guess she sort of felt a responsibility, you know, as someone whose concert created the environment for something like this to happen.

And I mean, I think people were expecting a particular sort of response after Mandy returned to the public eye. Like, everybody was sort of cool with Mandy disappearing for a bit and gathering her thoughts, but I think they all assumed that when she finally did resurface, she would say something like: I’m so sorry for all the lives that have been lost, and I hope we can react to this horrible tragedy with love instead of hate. But instead, you know, when Mandy finally did come out and say something, she was talking about Western imperial aggression, and fucking drone strikes, and, like, the history of regime change in the Middle East, and people were just like: WHOA. I mean, they were just like: What the fuck? It really took them by surprise.