Hey Nostradamus! Read Free

along salads and standing in prayer circles-all of this, at first, just to nab Jason Klaasen and his pink chamois skin.
    And I did-nab him. We were an item within the group itself, and to the rest of the school an attractive but dull couple. And not a day went by where Jason didn’t ask for something more than a kiss, but I held out. I knew he was into religion just deep enough to think losing his virginity meant crossing a line.
    The thing was, I did discover religion during my campaign to catch Jason, and that’s not something I’d expected, as there was nothing in my upbringing that predisposed me to conversion. My family paid lip service to religious convictions. They were fickle-no God being feared there. My family wasn’t so much anti-God as it was pro the world. God got misplaced along the way. Are they lost? Are they damned? I don’t know. I’d be mistrustful of anybody who said they were, and yet here I am, in the calm dark waiting to go off into the Next Place, and I think it’s a different place from where my family’s headed.
    My family didn’t know what to make of my conversion. It’s not as if I was a problem teen who rebounded into faith-the most criminal I ever got was generic teenage girl things like prank phone calls and shoplifting.
    My parents seemed happy for me in a well-at-least-she’s-not-dating-the-entire-basketball-team kind of way, but when I discussed going to heaven or righteousness, they became constrained and a bit sad. My younger brother, Chris, came to a few Alive! meetings but chose team sports instead. Truth be told, I was glad to have religion all to myself.
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    Dear God,
    I’m going to stop believing in you unless you can tell me what possible good could have come from the bloodshed. I can’t see any meaning or evidence of divine logic.
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    I can discuss the killings with the detachment I have from being in this new place. The world is pulling away from me, losing its capacity to hurt.
    For starters, nobody screamed. That’s maybe the oddest component of the killings. All of us thought the first shots were firecrackers-part of a Halloween prank, as firecracker season starts in early October. When the popping got louder, people in the cafeteria looked to its six wide doors with the expectation of being slightly amused by some young kids doing a stunt. And then this kid from the tenth grade, Mark Something, came tottering in, his chest red and purple from what looked like really bad makeup, and there were some nervous laughs in the room. Then he fell and his head landed the wrong way on the corner of a bench, like a bag of gym equipment. We heard some guys yelling, and three grade eleven students walked into the caf wearing duck-hunting outfits-military green fatigues with camouflage patterns, covered with bulging pockets and strips of ammunition-and right away one of them shot out a bank of overhead fluorescent lights. One of the suspension cables broke and a light bank fell down onto a table of food-the not-very-popular photo club and chess club table. The second guy, in sunglasses and a beret, plucked out two grade nine boys and one girl who were standing at the vending machines. These were messy shots that left a mist of blood on the ivory-colored cinder-block walls. A group of maybe ten students tried bolting for the doors, but the gunmen-gun boys, really-turned and showered them with buckshot or bullets, whatever it is that guns and rifles use.
    Two of them got away cleanly and I could hear their footsteps echoing down the corridor. As for the rest of us, there was no escape route, so we clambered underneath the tables, as if in some ancient nuclear drill from the 1960s.
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    In the summer between grades eleven and twelve, after my conversion and after landing Jason, I had a summer job at a concession stand at Ambleside Beach. It was a dry hot summer and the two other girls I worked with were fun-kind of skinny and