Claire also saw the videos, which was how Sarah found out about them, but the way Claire relayed this was absent the gravity Beth would have brought to it, because not only did Claire not take David seriously as a person—when she learned Sarah and David had dated she’d exclaimed, “Him?,” unable to conceal her surprise—but she had also seen one of the videos before, and probably could have found the other two in about thirty seconds; they were shallow internet. This was how she told Sarah, the next day at lunch, in their spot beside the school: “Did you see those videos David posted on Facebook last night? Looks like you got off a sinking ship.”

“What were they?”

“Just cult stuff and gag porn. I think your buddy got hacked.”

“He’s posting porn on Facebook?” Sarah pulled out her phone.

“Shitty porn.”

Her feed was still full of commentary about the mass shooting in Cincinnati two days earlier. She registered it for a few seconds, a beat of idle horror, and then she found David’s account; he’d changed his profile photo to a random arcane symbol on black—she thought vaguely of an ankh, or an abstracted eye—but by this point, only the face-bashing video was left. “I don’t see any porn. What’s Viceroy?”

“Hardcore band,” Claire said. “They’re pretty good.”

Sarah had also received a message via Facebook from David last night at around 2:00 a.m.; she saw part of it in the preview pane, “They never found…” but hesitated before opening it, afraid to acknowledge she’d seen it. Her mind filled the blank: the body. The head. They hadn’t used Messenger since they’d first become friends, before they had each other’s numbers. Like a past David. “He sent me a message,” she said.

“What does it say?”

She thumbed it open because Claire had asked. Her heart fluttered a second. “They never found the bullet. That’s it.”

Claire chewed the inside of her mouth, sifting through her stores of pop- and counterculture for a possible referent. She seemed to come up blank, because she eventually shrugged and stepped off the curb. “I think he got hacked.”