Seconds pass, minutes pass, hours pass. The sun rises. When Trace finally comes in, we are all so much older. His eyes are red and swollen and his face is drained of color. There is blood on him—Grace’s blood stains his shirt, his pants.

Even knowing this, I look for her. I look past him for her. She’s not there. Half of me understands this but half of me refuses to believe it and that half of me is waiting for her so we can talk about this. We can’t talk about her being dead without her being here.

Trace looks at us and no one says anything.

There is nothing any of us can say.

Seeing him makes Harrison cry harder. He covers his mouth and sobs. Grace kissed that mouth when she was alive. Cary’s mouth. It hits me again: Grace is dead. Just like that, there is no Grace. We live in a world without Grace.

“Where is she?” Rhys finally asks.

“I took her to Ms. Yee’s room,” he says. “She’s there.”

My eyes drift to Grace’s mat. Where she should be. Some of her things are still scattered around. The clothes she wore yesterday. Rhys asks if we can see her and Trace tells us no. He crosses the room to Grace’s mat. He picks up her sweater and buries his face in it. He starts to cry and the material can’t muffle the sound. We sit there and watch him uselessly until he raises his head.

“This is real, isn’t it? That happened.” And then he calls her name. “Grace? I—”

There is no answer.

He stares blankly at nothing and then he grabs her blanket, her pillow, and walks out of the auditorium. The air is too heavy to breathe. I can’t breathe. I get to my feet and I leave and I walk down the hall, my hand against the wall to steady myself because the world is moving, it’s moving under my feet until I finally have to stop and just sit on the floor. I don’t know how long I’m there before Rhys is beside me, helping me stand.

We walk back to the auditorium together.

There is a window in the basement we never barricaded.

This window is at the back of the school, facing the athletic field. It’s close to the ground and semi-concealed by boxwood. That’s how Baxter got in. It would be a forgivable oversight except as soon as Cary tells us about it, we all see it in our heads and it is the most painful kind of realization. The next stupid thing: shelves were placed in front of that window, a barricade. Baxter put them there the first time and then fought them down the second but don’t worry, Cary tells us, nothing else found its way in after Baxter came, after Grace died.

We checked that basement and we looked at those shelves.