“We are haunted by the what-ifs.”
Note: Names have been changed to protect identities.
“When are you pulling up?” His forced-deep voice crackled through my cell speakerphone as he crunched into another potato chip.
“I get off work Friday at 3:00. What is it, a two-hour drive for normal people?”
I opened my crusted eyes to the blurry morning light and threw my blanket back over my head.
“I’ll be there by 3:30.”
“Wait, for real?”
“Nah, bro. I have better things to do. Gotta sit in my room alone and watch YouTube.”
Bruce choked. “You absolute loser. Yo, Brendan’s actually planning on coming Friday. So if you’re done being an asshole, you should actually come up. Think Steve could come too?”
Steve’s house sits in one of those quaint Massachusetts neighborhoods where the taxes cost more than the homes themselves. I pulled into his driveway, narrowly avoiding the tall stone walls framing the pavement.
I watched him open his home’s front door from on top of a hill. He lugged two bags over two broad shoulders. He flicked black hair from his face, keeping dark eyes on me as he slowly sauntered up to my vehicle. He stopped right before the car, looking me deep in my eyes and smirking.
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He paused. “Did you get fatter?”
I scoffed. “Did you hit puberty yet?”
His smirk became a smile. “Not yet,” he replied. “Some day though.” He threw his bags into the open trunk.
Burrito juice snuck down my forearms as I raised my voice to battle down the pandemonium of early-night college drunks. “So, Bruce.” I devoured a wrapped chunk of beans, chicken, and rice. “I heard you joined a frat?” My strained vocal chords weakly combatted blaring mariachi music.
“Not yet, buddy.” He wiped beans on the sleeve of his gray V-neck. “I’ll be rushing in the Spring.”
“Ah. How fun.” I thought back to high-school Bruce in dorky plaid shorts and bright-colored Under Armor tees. “So you think you’re cool now?”
“You do realize 70% of Dartmouth kids are in frats? If I don’t join a frat, I won’t have any friends at all.”
He picked his burrito up an inch, opened his mouth, and threw the food back down.
“You know Sam, I’m curious how things are going for you with girls recently. Bet you’re getting too many to count over there on that gap year, working at Bertucci’s and playing that cello.” He paused for a moment. “Oh, and how’s your ex doing?”
I choked on a throatful of hot sauce, pausing for a slow drink of water.
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“I appreciate your concern, Bruce,” I said, “but you have bigger things to worry about. Looks like the freshman fifteen is not just a joke; consider switching to light beer, champ.”
Steve laughed and Bruce chuckled. Brendan was still quiet on his side of the table.
“Brendan, how has your freshman year been so far?” Steve licked dripping cheese off his fingers.
“Oh it’s been good,” Brendan replied.
“You have a good crew and everything?”
“Yeah. It’s good.” Brendan ripped a chunk out of his chimichanga.
“Cool. That’s good.” Steve paused for a moment, then returned to his feast.
Bruce reached into his closet and dug out two hats, Mario- and Luigi-themed.
“We’re not getting anywhere on Halloweekend without costumes, boys.”
While Steve and I argued vehemently over which one of us was Mario, Bruce threw on a construction helmet, and Brendan wore his favorite Brady jersey. In a miniscule, darkly-lit, ugly-poster-adorned, dirty-clothes-littered dorm room, we traded jokes, jabs, and drinks. The air reeked of spilled beer and unwashed clothing and our eardrums burst with screamed lyrics of Mo Bamba.
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The pelting rain leaked into my shirt and covered me with a coat of wet cold, but we warmed the night with laughter. Steve and I jokingly commiserated about the solitude of gap year life, and Bruce and Brendan traded freshman stories.
Bruce’s friends guided us left, onto a side street. Bruce walked ahead of Steve and me, and Brendan walked behind us.
“So Bruce, are you going for that brunette girl?” I asked.
“Not just going for – it’s gonna happen, Sam.”
“Quite the confidence there, big man,” Brendan laughed.
I could hear Bruce’s friends laughing ahead of us. One girl turned and smiled back at us.
“You think I have a shot?” Steve asked.
“No chance,” I answered.
My reality shattered only because my senses were relaxed. My ears cracked first when the BANG rang out.
“What was –”
“Ah, FUCK.” Brendan exclaimed. Brendan’s body crumpled to the pavement, his hand clutching his stomach.
My ears rang and my head rushed with blood. The white-trim windows of the blue house across the street were dark and wet. I saw no one there but at the end of the street I watched a man grab a girl’s hand and run with her. Brendan lay crumpled, groaning in the dark rain, curled in the fetal position, alone with his hand on his stomach. Naïve bravery and survivalist cowardice harshly debated one another in time-slowed, primal self-dialogue as I considered whether to help him. I saw Steve dive for cover out of my periphery and I figured he knew better. I dove too. We waited. Brendan lay alone, crumpled, wet, and groaning on the cold pavement. Steve and I flattened ourselves on the dirt floor.
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After a few moments, Steve started towards Brendan. I followed.
Rain pelted my eyes. “What do you think that was?”
“It almost sounded like kickback from a car,” Steve answered. Dark rain pulled his black hair over suddenly sober eyes.
“There was a car?”
“What, you didn’t see it?”
“You see that red leaf on his back?”
We approached Brendan. I knelt down.
“Brendan, you okay?”
Brendan groaned, his body curled fetal, his side to the cold pavement, his face staring down into the muddy sidewalk.
“I’m fine, I’m just gonna lie here for a second.”
I lifted up his jersey around the lower-right side of his back where the red leaf lay. A breach in his skin, puckered and folding over itself, spewed a steady stream of dark red down his pale back and onto the pavement below. I put his Brady jersey back down. I took off my hat.
“We need to put pressure on this – can someone give me their sweatshirt? Or your flannel or something Steve?”
Steve stood in the dark rain with his Mario hat still on and tossed his shoulders out from under his flannel. He passed the crumpled shirt to me and I shoved it underneath Brendan’s jersey.
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“That sounded like kickback from a car,” Bruce said. Apparently he had come back too. His construction helmet rested in his hand.
“That’s what I said,” Steve replied.
“I thought it was a firework.”
Blindly hoping my efforts were having an effect, I flexed my arms hard into his back.
“I’m going to call the police,“ Bruce decided.
“No don’t call the police I’m fine,” Brendan protested.
“Brendan I’ve gotta call—“
“Don’t call the fucking police, I’m fine bro it just hurts a little in my stomach.”
“Brendan, even if it was like, shrapnel from a car or something, we still need to call the cops.”
“I’m fucking fine, I feel nothing don’t call the fucking cops.”
“Can you move?”
“I don’t really want to. Don’t call the cops. It just feels kind of weird in my stomach but don’t call the fucking cops.”
“I’m dialing.”
Silence rang heavily. Bruce’s friends surrounded us as we hovered around Brendan. The smell of fresh rain coated the air. Droplets pelted the pavement around us. Soaked, freezing clothes lay heavy on our backs.
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“God damnit Brendan. I liked that flannel,” Steve joked.
Brendan tried to chuckle, but the breath caught tight in his lungs.
“Could whoever’s putting pressure on my back ease up a little? Really hurts.”
“Shit, yeah, my bad.”
“Hang in there Brendan, ambulance should be here any minute.”
Steve, Bruce, and I spent the next two hours hiding in a nearby sorority as all of Dartmouth campus received a text stating that the school was now in lockdown. Bruce went upstairs to comfort his friends. Steve and I sat on the first floor in an open closet with a direct view of the front door wondering what we would do if they came back.
Eventually we were informed nothing but that there was no reason to be afraid. We were driven to the hospital in the backseat of a police cruiser.
For a few moments of his life, Brendan was tipsy, filled with painkillers, injected with morphine, and slit open with surgical knives. Eventually, the knives found the bullet.
We entered the blinding white room and saw him lying in the bright white bed in a blue-white hospital gown like an angel resting in heaven. I was amazed how quickly they had completed the operation.
“How you feeling, Brendan?” Bruce asked first.
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Brendan’s bulging eyes scanned confusedly around the room.
“Brendan?”
“Oh, yeah. Yeah. I’m good.”
None of us were sure quite how to talk, what to say. All of us were trying to dislodge the tension but none successfully.
Bruce moved in to break the silence.
“The operation fully done?”
“Oh, yeah, it’s all done.”
“And? Any synopsis?” Bruce chose the chair beside Brendan’s bed.
“Oh, apparently I’m lucky. The bullet entered my lower back.” Brendan swallowed. His eyes stared forward, avoiding our gaze. “But I was lucky. The bullet went between fat and muscle. Which means it avoided any bone. If it had hit a quarter inch anywhere else I might have been paralyzed. Or worse.” He straightened his back. “I’m lucky.”
Steve and I drove left-lane down bucolic, forest-bordered New Hampshire roads. The greens and browns of thick evergreens flashed past our passenger windows.
“Dartmouth’s food is shit,” I declared. I pushed the accelerator.
“True. My breakfast sandwich was sandpaper.”
“Facts.”
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Silence sat for a moment.
“Think we’ll be heading back to Dartmouth any time soon?”
I forced a chuckle. “I’m still trying to process what happened.”
“I know. Me too.”
“The odds of Brendan being completely okay are so low.” I swallowed. “I don’t know if lucky is the right word, but the bullet could’ve hit him elsewhere, could’ve gone through him and hit one of us, could’ve—”
“I know, I know. I mean good news, I guess, is statistically speaking, we’ve experienced more than our fair share of random shootings for a lifetime.”
“Isn’t that too bad.” A truck became my rear-view mirror and I tossed us into the lane to our right.
The truck passed and I pulled back left. “I guess we reacted the right way. You giving up your flannel, me putting pressure on the wound, Bruce calling the cops.”
“The odds of so much going randomly right in such a randomly wrong situation. Not just the bullet’s lucky placement, but the fact they caught the guys that same night… and on the other hand, the odds it’s us who get shot at, the odds the kid who gets hit is a visiting student, the odds of a shooting happening at all in Hanover, New Hampshire.”
I decelerated. “Think this will stick with us?”
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“Maybe. Could’ve been far worse though, remember that.”
“Brendan. Of all people. Nicest kid you’d ever meet.”
Steve had no response. The pair of us rode back home alone together.
“During Wednesday’s sentencing, the victim’s mother read an impact statement describing the trauma her family has faced over the past three years. ‘We have cried so many tears,’ she said. ‘Our hearts are broken. Our sense that people are intrinsically good is shattered. Why would these men try to kill our child? We are haunted by the what-ifs.”
– WMUR
Sole Magazine