“It’s now,” I say back.
“No shit. You could have answered your phone!”
“Ran out of minutes. Couldn’t call you either. Now what?”
“Ohh,” he says. “Crap. I should have thought of that.” He glances over his shoulder. “I texted the tip hotline. Can’t exactly call.”
“We can get out of here. There’s time.”
Sawyer grips my arm. “No, we can’t. It’s changing. The vision. Us being here is changing it. Fewer gunshots, fewer bodies. Down to seven. We have to stay and try to stop it.”
“But what if the bodies are us?”
“Jules,” he says, and he grips my wrist. “Remember how it was with you. You have to trust me.” There’s no time for him to explain—the cute guy clears his throat loudly and announces that it’s well past eight. Sawyer gets a text message and responds quickly as we sit down at the table. I question him with my eyes. “Trey,” he mouths.
My eyes widen, begging for more information. But Sawyer glances at the shooters and shakes his head. He puts his hands below the table and holds out nine fingers, then one, then one again.
“Oh,” I breathe, relieved. Trey’s calling the cops. Everybody continues to make small talk except for the shooters, who sit there, stone-faced.
From the doorway, the cute guy asks the students to finish up their conversations. He looks down the hallway once more and closes the door. “Okay, everybody, settle. Sorry about the last-minute venue change—the green room was too noisy with everybody coming back from break with all their luggage and parents and junk.” He looks around the room and grins.
“If you don’t know me, I’m Ben Galang, freshman, next year’s secretary of the alliance, and this is my first time organizing a charity event, so yeah. Help a guy out, will ya?” He laughs. A few people smile. “Okay, well. Welcome to the choir members, some of whom are already part of the GSA here at UC. It’s great to work with you all and to see some new faces.” He smiles at somebody on the other side of the room, at Sawyer and me, and at the shooters.
I can’t smile back. I don’t dare to turn my head to see who else is in here. I’m freaking out. I can’t even focus on what this guy Ben is saying. All I can do is stare at the shooters in front of me, stare at the girl’s black bag, at the bulge on the blond guy’s hip, under his jacket. I glance at Sawyer and he’s sweating, watching the glass in the door, and I know from experience that, one, he’s watching that vision very closely and, two, all I can do is trust him and follow his lead, because he’s the only one who knows how this is all going down. And if I mess with it, it could change everything. I dare a quick glance around the room at the faces, all these faces that Sawyer has been seeing for weeks with bullet holes in them, but my mind can’t even record them—they are all a blur of one victim’s face.
Sawyer’s elbow touches mine, and I look at him. He points to a clock above the door. “New scene,” he whispers. Does that mean he knows the time this will happen? He points to the table and mimics flipping it. Then he points to the girl and looks at me.
I nod. He scratches his knee and looks at me again. I swallow hard and panic—I don’t know what that means. He points to their legs, his fingers shaking, and finally I understand what he’s trying to say. I nod again. And then he spreads his hand out on his thigh, five fingers, and before I know it he hides his thumb, and then his first finger, and I realize that he’s counting down, and this is happening in two, one . . .
The shooter girl pulls a gun from her little black backpack, stands up, and whirls around, yelling, “All you fags to the back of the room!” The blond guy follows her lead, pulling his gun out and shoving their table out of the way, but at first nobody else in the room moves. Nobody understands what’s happening. They’re in shock.
It all goes in slow motion. Sawyer and I flip our table, trying to give others something to hide behind. Ben, smile fading, turns to see what the commotion is all about. Sawyer springs forward from his chair, stays low, hops over the table, and tackles the blond guy at the back of the thighs, making his knees crumple. A shot rings out, hitting the ceiling light fixture. The whole row of lights goes out, leaving us in semi-darkness, and that wakes me from my frozen state. I dive from my seat and tackle the girl the same way Sawyer tackled the guy. She loses her balance and lands on my back as two more shots pierce the air and shatter my eardrums, along with a chorus of screams.
“Run!” I yell from under the girl, pulling sound from the depths of my lungs. “Go! Get out! Run!” I hear tables and chairs scraping and crashing, people screaming, almost everyone running for the door as a few more shots ring out.
Sawyer gets on top of the blond guy and starts pounding his wrist, trying to get him to let go of the gun, and it goes off again, but I can’t afford to look at what, or who, it hits. I struggle to get the girl off my back, rising quickly to my hands and knees to throw her off balance. I can feel her weight shift, and she teeters, grabbing my hair and yanking it, trying to hold on. I reach deep, finding some other inner strength, and try to buck her off me, digging my cast into the floor like a cane to push me up. The girl’s gun hits me in the head as she loses her grip on my hair and falls to the floor.
I scramble aside and turn to look where she is. She kicks me in the face, and I see stars. As she gets to her feet she starts screaming over and over, “Die, you sick fags!”