Silent Alarm

ALSO BY
JENNIFER BANASH

White Lines

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) LLC

375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia

New Zealand | India | South Africa | China

penguin.com

A Penguin Random House Company

Copyright © 2015 by Jennifer Banash.

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Banash, Jennifer.

Silent alarm / Jennifer Banash.

pages cm

Summary: Alys, a Plaineville, Wisconsin, junior who dreams of studying violin at Julliard, must deal with the aftermath of a tragic high school shooting in which her older brother, Luke, was the shooter.

[1. School shootings—Fiction. 2. High schools—Fiction. 3. Schools—Fiction. 4. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 5. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 6. Family problems—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.B2176Sih 2015 [Fic]—dc23 2014004462

ISBN 978-0-698-17343-9

Title page photograph © Getty Images/Bob Cornelis.

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for third-party websites or their content.

Excerpt from
Human Nature
by Alice Anderson (copyright © 1994 by New York University Press) reprinted with permission from the author.

For Story

“For there is no friend like a sister

In calm or stormy weather;

To cheer one on the tedious way,

To fetch one if one goes astray.”

—CHRISTINA ROSSETTI, “GOBLIN MARKET”

“Come into the candlelight. I'm not afraid

to look the dead in the face.”

—RAINER MARIA RILKE, “REQUIEM FOR A FRIEND”

Life
changes in a second. In the time it takes to turn a page, to pull your hair back from your face, everything you think you know can vanish, wiped out in an avalanche, erasing everything in its path.

I was in the library, hunched over my laptop, history notes spread out on the table, the edges crimped from the pressure and heat of my own worried fingertips. Headphones streamed Schubert into the open pink shells of my ears, “Death and the Maiden,” the vibrato hammering through my body, my limbs tingling with electric shocks. I longed to play it with a quartet, four of us working together in unison, the notes so sharp and clear they could punch a hole in the ozone, make you reel back in your chair. But now I'm too advanced of a player to subject my skills to the “corrupting influence” of my peers—or so says Grace, my violin teacher.

It was still technically winter, snow melting on the ground, but in the last few days the green buds had pushed their way onto the branches of the trees, insistent, and now I could barely concentrate. There was that feeling in the air that happens only at the cusp of spring, a kind of restlessness, a quickening of the blood that made me want to put down my pen and sigh. I had a project due in three days—a project I had, as usual, put off till the last minute because I had stayed up most nights that week trying and failing to master the second movement of Brahms's Violin Sonata in D Minor, the tricky mournful bit where the notes seemed to topple over one another like piles of smooth, slippery stones, one clicking against the next so melodiously that you could barely tell when one ended and another began. I'd been working on the piece for months—I had an audition coming up for the summer orchestra program at the University of Wisconsin, a program so competitive that only twenty students were admitted each June. I wanted it so badly, I was afraid to even speak of it aloud. I tilted my head to one side, stretching my cramped neck as I clicked through photographs of Thailand, hypnotized into stillness by images of mountaintop temples, a gold Buddha smiling benevolently before an altar, a series of copper bowls filled with colored powder in shades of vermillion, magenta, and ochre.

I bent down to scratch an itch on my calf, pulling out my earbuds in the process, the cord tangled in a mass beneath my chin. At the first crack, my head came up sharply, my gaze meeting that of the girl across from me. Miranda Stillman, blond hair waving against her pink sweater. What I remember of that moment was my own annoyance. I wasn't doing well in history to begin with, and I had to get this paper done or I could kiss what was left of my grade sayonara. In order to get into any kind of decent university music program (I wanted Juilliard, Berklee, days spent with my neck crooked into the oiled wood of my violin, shoulders aching, fingers stiffened and sore), I needed the grades, and so far this semester, I was failing miserably. I didn't see the point of history. What was past was past. Why not focus on the present? The future even?

“Cherry bomb,” Miranda said authoritatively, but I noticed that her eyes darted back and forth nervously. A few kids got up and drifted toward the double doors of the library, but then stopped, hovering near the circulation desk. I remember feeling nothing but annoyance. The week before, someone had tossed a smoke bomb into the toilet of the girl's bathroom, sending clouds of gray haze billowing out the windows and door, and we had to stand on the football field in the rain until they figured out it was just a prank.

There was a sharp bang. Then another. Staccato. Allegro. A series of small popping noises, and a muffled scream coming from somewhere outside the set of large double doors that led out to the quad. I flinched, my body jerking as if I'd been hit. Reflexively, my feet felt for my violin case, stashed under the table, my pulse thudding as I made contact with the hard black plastic. Miranda and I just sat there staring at each other. I had never said more than ten words to her before that day. I was an orchestra nerd, and she was . . . who? What? I had no real idea. All I knew was that she was a senior, like my brother, Luke, and I was a junior. Close enough in age, but separated by a gulf of experience, friends, cheerleading practice—or whatever it was she did. A gap so wide that it seemed impossible to bridge on a daily basis. So no one did. We kept to ourselves, to our friends, our families, our small, tight circles of familiarity.

With the grind of metal against metal, Keith Rappaport came flying through the double doors, his face flushed tomato red, as if he'd been running a great distance. He was slightly pudgy, a freshman, glasses constantly sliding down the bridge of his nose. I remember he was wearing a soccer jersey—he must've had a game that afternoon. He knocked into the circulation desk, and the librarian, Ms. Parsons, looked up with no small degree of irritation. We were always running through the library to get to the other side of campus, perpetually late, always harried, and she despised the constant noise and disruption. It was only 12:30 p.m., and it was clear from the scowl on her face that her day was already ruined.

“Gunshots,” Keith said, panting. “Somebody has a gun out there. For real.”

Everything seemed to stand motionless, the room freezing into silence, the kind of numbness that creeps up just before terror. I was breathing fast, my fingers tightening around my laptop, which I closed and shoved roughly into my bag. Suddenly, it seemed important to gather my notes and put them back in my binder, to clear the decks. I reached under the table, pulling my violin case to my chest, holding it like a small pet. It was a Matsuda, made in the Cremonese style—which just basically meant that it was a very good copy of an Italian violin called a Stradivarius, which could sell for anywhere from fifty thousand to a few million dollars. Even though the Matsuda was a total bargain compared to a Stradivarius, I'd heard my parents fighting for weeks over whether or not they could swing it, clapping my hands over my ears to block out the shouts that drifted into my room every night. I'd been playing since I was six, and I'd long ago outgrown the violin my father had originally bought me at Sutter's, our town's only music store, the worn aisles lined with guitars, cellos, and violins hanging dejectedly against lime-green walls.

“I don't care
what
Grace says,” my father had shouted. “The bottom line is that we can't afford it.” I could almost see the cords on his neck standing out like taut strips of wire, his cheeks reddening. “Besides, Luke's off to college next year—MIT isn't exactly cheap.”

“I'm well aware of that fact, Paul.” My mother brushed him off with the dry, sarcastic tone I'd heard her use more and more frequently with my father over the past few years. “But I do know that if she's going to be a serious musician, then she can't afford
not
to have it.” Her voice echoed through the house with a sharp sense of finality. And with those words, my father grew quiet and, in the days that followed, folded completely, taking out a loan of thirty thousand dollars to augment the cost—cheap for a performance-level violin, but still more than we could really afford. Every time I removed the Matsuda from its case, the guilt—along with my parents' expectations (concert violinist, Lincoln Center alight with applause as I bent forward at the waist in a graceful bow) hung on me like blocks of concrete until I had to lie down on my bed and close my eyes. It was hard, at moments like those, to separate their desire from my own.

Miranda was suddenly next to me, a glazed look plastered across her nondescript features, an almost blurriness. If you had asked me what she was thinking right then, I would have said nothing. If I was thinking at that point, I wasn't aware of it.

The cracks got louder and closer, moving stealthily toward us. And the screams.

People began running, pushing against one another, bodies flailing. It was lunchtime, and the library was always crowded then with kids rushing to finish homework assignments due that day. I watched bodies dive beneath the round tables, binders and laptops still open on tabletops, pages spilling over in a froth of whiteness. Ms. Parsons waved kids over to the fire exit, but I didn't move.

“What do we do?” Miranda had gone white, her lips barely moving. For the first time I noticed her fingers clutching my arm. She was wearing dark blue nail polish, her manicure precise, expert. I looked down at my own trimmed and filed nails, comparing them, the cuticles a bit ragged and fraying along the edges. A gold ring wrapped around Miranda's index finger, a tiny ruby chip embedded in the center winking in the overhead light.

Before I could answer, the doors burst open again, and a figure dressed in black stepped through them. At that moment, an alarm went off, the same one we heard at least twice a year for fire drills, the shrillness ringing in my ears. There was a rifle in his hands, and I stared at the long barrel, the way it parted the crowd without sound, the menacing weight of it. All I could see was the gun, the way it advanced into the room, a sinuous black snake waiting to strike. Miranda's grip on my arm tightened and she pulled me backward.

“C'mon!” she whispered forcefully. “We've got to move.”

I knocked into the table, banging my hip, wincing as Miranda pulled me to the ground and we crawled underneath, huddling together, her face buried in my shoulder, my violin falling to the floor. When the gun went off, it was deafening, a volley of thunder. My ears were ringing, a high-pitched whine obliterating everything. A guy named T.J., a senior who had said hello to me in the halls a few times, went down, his body hitting the floor with a thud. I watched helplessly as blood began to pool beneath his head. The muscles in his forearms were fairly developed from tennis, and as the blood seeped across the floor, the pool growing wider, my stomach turned sharply. He landed facedown, one arm flung up beside his head as if to ward off the attack. His fingers twitched spasmodically, then abruptly stopped. The air was clotted with the smell of smoke and scorched cloth, a scent I will always associate with panic and death.

Miranda sobbed next to me, her hand gripping my arm tight, her words meaningless and nonsensical in my ear, but strangely musical. She was crying so hard, it almost sounded as if she were stuttering, tripping over the insurmountable obstacle of words. The futility of them. A pair of black-booted feet walked by the table, and I held my breath. Then there was the sound of another shot and the screams began again, louder this time. Paper fell from the sky like rain. Loose leaf. An AP Chemistry test came to rest beneath the table, a large
98%
scrawled at the top in red ink.
Good Job, Tony
was penned in the left-side margin, and a stifled sob escaped my throat. I heard a small gurgling sound nearby, and crawled to the edge of the table, sticking my head as far out from underneath as I dared without exposing myself entirely. I acted on instinct, blindly, before I could second-guess it at all.

“Don't!” Miranda's fingers clutched frantically at my shirt. “He'll see you!”

Ms. Parsons lay on the floor, one hand holding her chest, her white cardigan soaked with blood. Her mouth opened and closed repeatedly, her eyes staring blankly at the ceiling. The sounds she made were guttural and incomprehensible, a language I couldn't decipher. Ms. Parsons had spent hours helping me with my ninth-grade research project on
The Handmaid's Tale,
shown me where my locker was on my first day of freshman year when I was too nervous to ask anyone and risk looking like a loser, put aside the endless stacks of sheet music she thought I might be interested in. Brahms. Beethoven. Ravel. Debussy. The names themselves made me feel calmer, more centered, as if nothing could really be wrong in the world. To one day be good enough to play Ravel, to master those intricate chains of notes like beads on a string . . . My head swam with the thought of it, my hands aching for the bow, the faint pine-tree scent of rosin tickling my nose. Sure, Ms. Parsons was cranky and old, but she also kept butterscotch candies in her desk, let us stay after school to work on projects as long as we were quiet, and covered the walls of her small office behind the circulation desk with handmade quilts and pictures of her grandchildren.

I crawled over to her, my palms skidding away in the slickness of blood, tears that I couldn't feel dripping steadily onto the floor. There were pairs of sneakers running swiftly by my head and jumping over my body, the sound of cries and high-pitched screams, but it was somehow far away, in the hazy distance. I took her slight hand, freckled with age spots, and held it in mine. Her skin was cold and slightly clammy, and I could hear the air moving through her lungs, labored, heavy, and filled with a thick, viscous liquid. I tried not to look at the broken blossom in the center of her chest, the deep red hole of it, the scorched fabric blackened around the stain. Her lips moved soundlessly, and I leaned closer, bending down to her mouth.

“Run,” she whispered over and over again, the words melting together in a single entity.

Runrunrunrunrunrunrunrunrunrunrunrunrunrunrunrun . . .

There was a shadow suddenly above, the light dimming across her face, a sword falling between us, and I turned around and looked up. The fluorescence stung my eyes, wet with salt, and for the first time I saw him: that slightly pointed chin I knew so well, the cheekbones that protruded sharply from the planes of his face. His eyes, usually brown and warm, the color of wet sand, were flat and lifeless. His arms were the first I'd ever crawled toward, my knees wobbly against the kitchen floor, his hands now wrapped around cold metal. The fingers, long and expressive, resting on the trigger, had helped build my first sand castle. My brother, with whom I had always felt safe, falling asleep each night to the sound of music drifting from behind the closed door of his room, the soft, jangling guitars he loved creeping slowly into my dreams.

“Hey.” He nodded his chin at me, his tone casual, as if we were passing each other in the hallway late at night, the house shuddering in sleep around us.