“He’s right,” I whisper, and Rhys stops looking me over. He sits down and rubs his eyes. Cary pulls Trace to his feet and says something about taking him to the nurse’s office.

Just calm down, let me see how bad it is.

They don’t just put Trace in the nurse’s office. They lock him in it.

I take a shower. At home, the showers after would be so hot, they’d turn my body to mush and I’d wrap myself up in my oversized terrycloth robe and lay on my bed and sometimes Lily would sit on the edge of it and I’d go so quiet, it scared her. She’d stay there, whisper about all the things we’d do when we finally got out, just her and me.

I change back into my clothes. Zip up my jeans. I slip out of the locker rooms and make my way to the nurse’s office. I peer through the window. Trace is on the cot, on his back, staring at the ceiling. I can’t tell if he’s awake or not. I rap my knuckles against the window. He doesn’t move. I think of Grace, laid out on the desks, the exact same position as him and she’s not moving, not seeing, not breathing. Time has stopped for them both. I press my hand to the glass and will his head to turn, for him to sit up, say something.

He stays perfectly still.

I go back to the auditorium and I’m alone for a moment.

And then footsteps. Rhys, Cary, Harrison. I don’t want to see them right now. It’s why I took the shower. I couldn’t stand the way they looked at me, like I was this pathetic weak thing. There’s no time to leave the room, so I climb onstage and slip behind the curtain.

“She wasn’t in the locker rooms—”

Their voices get closer to the stage so I back farther into it, wedging myself between the old out-of-tune piano that’s there and the wall. My hands brush something plastic. I look down.

My phone.

I stare at it for a long time, trying to remember how it got here, trying to remember the last time I was behind here with my phone.

Rhys running his hands all over my back, telling me I’m fine …

“There aren’t many places she can be.”

“We couldn’t even find the fucking way Baxter got in.”

“Let’s just keep looking. Harrison, check the back of the school.”

They leave the room again but I stay where I am. I turn my phone on. It turns on. The last phone in here that works and it’s useless. There’s no signal.

But I have a text message.

I have a text message.

It’s the end of the world and I have a text message.

We’ve been in the school a little over a month but the message is dated three days after the morning it all started. I don’t know what I was doing then. Where exactly we were. We were a group. The Caspers were alive. Grace was alive. Text messages were still going out.