She grabbed her phone from the nightstand. No one had texted her except a joke from a college friend and, randomly, a text from her sister Gwen: Just thinking about you! Weird; had she gotten wind of the Piper thing? The police had promised that their names wouldn’t be released since they weren’t official suspects—yet, they added ominously—so she hadn’t gotten, say, text messages from her mother in an uproar about why her daughter was involved in the assault of a preschool director.

There was an update about Piper, though, on the local news. The details were thin—all it said was that the police were “putting together evidence.” But when she clicked on the Silver Swans Facebook group, there was already a dedicated thread called Poor Piper!

You’d have thought Piper was the Dalai Lama mixed with an Instagram model. People mourned her beauty, the “life and light she radiated”—whatever the fuck that meant—how smart, how resourceful, how giving. Comment after comment offered words and prayers for Piper. A mom named Kelly Mackenzie, who had a kid in the threes, piped in with an essential oil diffuser blend people might want to try if they were super-stressed—she sold them over on her website! More comments were filled with kids’ artwork—sad faces, storm clouds, and, strangely, a picture of a dead bunny with an X over each eye. We should restructure the documentary so that it’s all about HER, Jane Russell wrote. Lauren was pretty sure Jane Russell was the woman with the four-year-old kid named King and whose big-ass Tesla X took up two parking spaces at the breakfast. And then, below that, was another post about where everyone was when it happened. Everyone wanted to chime in on that one. Most of the accounts were the same: a parent (usually a mom) pulled into the parking lot at Silver Swans to see Frank the security guard’s body half out the loft door. He was screaming something on his cell phone. Telling someone inside the hall to stay where they were. I freaked, of course, one mom wrote. I thought: active shooter.

Apparently, that was what had spread like wildfire: Piper had been shot. It seemed as though Carson perpetuated this rumor—one person saw him running heroically toward the hallway only to be barred from entry by the cops. Later, the cops shut down the parking lot, pushing the parents to exit with their kids as quickly as possible. They wouldn’t answer any questions, another mom posted. They were kind of jerks about it. I mean, this is our school, our life! We have a right to know!