The grief, as it often does, hit Holly in waves. Sometimes she could function close enough to baseline to fool everyone, and sometimes the loss weighed so heavily that she forgot how to breathe.
Her son was gone.
Finding the courage to open the door and sit on his bed had been tangible progress. As she looked around, every poster on the wall, every figurine on the shelfs circling the room carried a story she could not face.
David had been an amazing person. People tend to prop up the reputations of the dead, a kindness for their surviving loved ones more often than not, but David was on a path to become something special.
He had a light in him, one that was stolen by a classmate when he opened fire in a crowded hallway just prior to the homeroom bell.
David had pushed a fellow student into a nearby classroom, and out of the gunman's line of fire. The impact with the floor had dislocated their shoulder, but saved their life. David ended up where they’d been a moment before, and that was where the bullets found him.
Her son died a hero. She could be no more proud of him than she had always been, but the act dovetailed nicely with his character.
The room looked exactly the way he’d left it that morning, rushing out the door, late as always.
She smiled at the thought. It was one of her hard fought concessions over the past three weeks, the ability to smile at good memories of David. The first time she’d managed it, something inside of her felt like she was somehow betraying him, as though any external display of happiness meant that she was not properly respecting the loss of her son.
She scanned his room, her eyes falling on the torn backpack propped against the wall beside his door. It was a blue LL Bean model, one of the ones made of tear-resistant fabric that you could get embroidered. Many parents opted to have them personalized with their child's name, though Holly had read somewhere that it gave potential kidnappers a way to feign familiarity with targets, so she had skipped it.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
All of the measures she had taken to try to protect him, all of the good advice and forward thinking preparation, yet she had failed. She’d spent the first week after David’s death mostly screaming internally, a maelstrom under a sheet of ice. She hated herself for not knowing to keep him home that day, even though there had been no warning, no threat against the school. Three weeks, and she’d only progressed to sitting on his bed, silently sobbing as she stared at his backpack. Through the tears, she noticed for the first time a smear of reddish brown that someone had unsuccessfully tried to wipe away. The fabric was also supposed to be stain resistant and water repellent, but nobody apparently planned for blood.
The fabric might have been tear resistant, but it hadn't been bullet proof. Even from ten feet away, Holly could see the tufted cloth where one of the bullets had punched through. It looked more like a frayed tear than a bullet hole. She thought it strange, the oddities the human brain picked up on when looking for an escape hatch to an uncomfortable reality.
Holly stood, the only certain thing in her life being the knowledge that she was not ready to open that backpack, and started to make her way to the door. Her hip touched the back of David’s computer chair as she passed, swivelling it around, and one of the armrests to strike the edge of his desk. It was a only slight nudge, but the resulting cascade of life from the awakening computer and display startled her. LED fans erupted in color, spilling forth their muted white noise as the various peripherals awoke, clicking and beeping to life.
Pressing one hand to her chest and another atop the back of the chair, she shook her head and gasped to catch her breath. She closed her eyes, as though doing so would help her heart rate return to normal more quickly.
After a few moments of silence, and with no perceptible transition, Holly became aware of faint voices in the room. Her first thought as that her fragile mental state had finally given way into full psychosis, but there were no aberrant visions in the room, no translucent mirage of David moving around as though all was right in the world.
She turned her head left to right, judging the direction of the sound, and settled on the virtual reality headset that she had purchased David for his last birthday. It hadn't been cheap, but the excitement in his voice when he had tried it out –waving electronically tracked hands in the back corner of a local technology convention – made it more than worth the investment. It took her a month and a half to save the money, but she’d managed to get it before his party. The days since David spent mostly in his room, interacting with people online, appearing blissfully insane to anyone that happened to pass by his bedroom door.