That sensation of being sheltered and loved would later save her from many things.

From killing herself, for instance—

Something which seemed to

DON

Completely incomprehensible—to be dead, gone, no longer enraged. The fascination Don felt about the dead ended the day of what was called the Massacre. That sort of incident—meaning: a crazed teenager shooting other teenagers—was largely unknown in the country at that point, because there were hardly any fathers with well-stocked gun cabinets, at least if you disregarded the hunting rifles of the upper class. Fathers in Rochdale had beer. If there were fathers at all, since Don’s experience with parents, as was true of most children, consisted primarily of contact with overburdened women.

Don hadn’t retained much memory of the incident. Just shots, which sounded like New Year’s firecrackers, screaming children who sounded like they were under water, and slow-motion images of people running or crawling in every direction. While lying on the floor, Don wondered about the way the killer must have revealed his intentions online. Had he worn a hoodie? Had he sat or stood with a gun and said something that included “system, disrespect, women, never taken seriously, and now I’ll show you…”? What music had he played in his video? Slipknot? Something more thumping. Pitbull? He probably wasn’t the brightest bulb, like most people here. Some of the children lying on the ground took pictures of themselves during the so-called massacre. Some of them had iPhones. The poorer fuckers had crap Chinese phones. The approximately eight hours a day they spent on their devices was supposed to make Don’s entire generation into a bunch of unfocused idiots.

Man, oh man, thought Don, who on earth sticks fake plastic nails onto their fingers? Don was lying on the ground next to an older girl, staring at her nails. She’d never seen anything so awful. You could see the yellow horn through the back of the fingernail. The girl was ten or thirteen and looked like a baby hooker. The downside of grime videos. They really didn’t offer positive lessons for discourse surrounding gender or queer theory. The women in the videos showed a lot of bust and backside, along with gold jewelry and fake nails. They mostly waltzed over to the passenger seat of some showy car that a gangster rapper had stolen or bought with his mad riches. Money doesn’t make you happy, Don thought randomly, and started laughing just as the police commando team came storming in. Then there were more shots. The dull click of the attacker’s semiautomatic rifle faded into the rich stew of noise produced by the commandos’ proper machine guns. When it was over it was quiet and the shooter was dead. Along with a few girls. Don had finally seen corpses. It was less grandiose than in Don’s fantasies. People were just lying there and no longer existed.