White Space Season 1

the stage and back.
    Connie lost her son five years ago, then started the survivors group three years into her grief because she recognized the need for a single harbor to dock the island’s collective grief.
    Connie cleared her throat. “We’ve extended the meeting to survivors and family members of the Hamilton K-12 Shooting. Everyone deserves a place to connect and bond with others suffering through a similar loss.”
    She looked down, probably remembering her Nathan, then invited Suzanne Hawthorne up onto the stage. As Suzanne curled her hands around the front of the podium, slowly breathing her way into an introduction, a short man with thinning hair slipped into Milo’s row and sat six seats away.
    Like the place isn’t big enough?
    Suzanne Hawthorne, ninth grade algebra teacher at Hamilton, told the room about how she saw Mr. Heller a few days before the shooting, and knew something was wrong. She blamed herself, since she knew deep inside, right at that moment, that something was off. Really off. Instead of doing something, she simply ignored it. The format was AA, not Q&A, so it took Mrs. Hawthorne a while to say why. When she did, Milo felt a frost inside his veins.
    She went into Heller’s room, to ask if he happened to know if the Williams brothers were sick, since both boys seemed to have been sporadically absent throughout the week. Heller’s head never budged. He just stared at the TV, the screen full of snow, his eyes wide and jaw swinging low, like he was watching live footage of the end of the world.
    She called three times: “Mr. Heller, Mr. Heller, Roger ,” but it was as if he was in a trance.
    In a trance!
    Mrs. Hawthorne shook it off and figured he must be exhausted. Since the theory matched the red in his eyes, she left. He probably just wanted to be alone, anyway. Ignoring the stir in her gut, she went back to algebra, and didn’t think about Mr. Heller’s red eyes or swinging jaw again, at least until she heard the first gunshot, and found Jimmy Marlowe running through the hallway a half-minute later yelling, “Mr. Heller has a gun!”
    Milo kept hearing her words, “he was in a trance.” Each time, he pictured Beatrice, dazed and staring ahead without blinking, then shoving cold cuts into her handbag a minute later.
    The guy six seats from Milo seemed to be studying his reaction to every story. Milo kept his face straight, and expression fixed. He barely moved except for the occasional itch he had to scratch beneath his bandages.
    The man was in his late 30’s early 40’s, slight and with glasses. Hardly threatening, and certainly not scary. Still, Milo couldn’t ignore the scrutiny, or the creep in his glare.
    Mrs. Hawthorne’s confession about Mr. Heller gave Mrs. Dalquist the confidence to say she saw almost the same exact thing. Except her words rang with a hollow thud. Milo could tell from the room’s expression — she was a regular leach and no one believed a word that she said.
    Milo didn’t think that was true about Sam, a man who had lost his brother three years before. He saw something similar, though different. His brother was playing the same playlist on his iPod repeatedly, over and over, and over. His brother was usually a monkey, always swinging from tree to tree; repetition his foe. That was why he’d been married four times, after all.
    He didn’t listen to playlists, especially when they were two songs long.
    The thing that bothered Sam most, he confessed with a shake of his head, was that he couldn’t for the life of him remember what either of the two songs were.
    Milo wanted to stand up, walk to the front, and tell the room about Beatrice, but he was having a hard time working up the courage. He was about to raise his hand when the guy six seats down whispered, “Don’t say a word.”
    Milo bristled.
    The man stood, crossed four chairs, then sat two seats from Milo.
    “It’s Cody,” he whispered. “Don’t say a word right now, not to these people. We’ll talk when this is over.”
    And here he is, without his tinfoil hat.
    The rest of the sharing took a million years, with no new revelations and the stories mostly sad. “Cody” slipped from the auditorium as the last speaker stepped to the stage.
    Milo went outside and saw Cody standing by the bike rack.
    He looked up at the sky, hating the island for its dark clouds, chilly breeze, and the distant thunder forever rumbling the distance.
    “So you always look for grieving kids to talk