He got to the cafeteria at 12:31 and the only open seat he could stand to take was across from Nam-ra.
There were other seats. Whole tables. But the one by the window had two third-years at the end who looked at him like he'd wandered in off the street, and the one by the tray return had a spill on it nobody was cleaning up, and Nam-ra was alone with her tray squared to the table edge and her eyes on nothing. At least he knew her name.
"Is this — " He tipped his tray at the chair. "Sorry. Can I?"
She looked at the chair, then at him. "It's a chair."
He sat.
She went back to eating. Radish, rice, radish, a piece of the pork. Mouth closed, eyes on the middle distance. She didn't check her phone. She didn't look at him. Nobody had ever cared less that he was sitting across from them, and it should have been a relief. Instead he could hear every click his chopsticks made.
He checked his phone under the table. 12:33. Nothing from On-jo, which was fine, she'd said they'd be late. Nothing from his mother. He typed did you charge your phone and sent it. One grey tick. It stayed one.
Twelve percent at 6:40. He did the sum and put the phone away.
The kimchi on his tray was the red kind, the strong kind, and he had a system now. Rice first. Then pork. Then a small piece of kimchi folded inside a bigger piece of rice so it was mostly rice. He'd worked it out on day three. Nobody had ever said anything.
"You don't have to force yourself to eat it."
He looked up. She hadn't. She'd said it to her tray.
"What?"
"The kimchi. You stop before every piece. Half a second." A piece of radish. "Nobody's checking."
"It's — no, I like it. I'm just not used to — " He stopped. He was about to lie to the one person in the school who'd apparently been watching his chopsticks, and there was no point. "That obvious?"
"Yes."
He laughed, one breath through his nose. She didn't. It hadn't been a joke; he'd asked a question and she'd answered it. He was starting to notice she did that.
He ate a piece of kimchi. Straight, no rice. It was fine.
Across the room, by the doors, On-jo came in with Cheong-san behind her and a stack of pink and yellow forms still in her hand. So Ms. Kim had kept them. She scanned the room, found him, lifted the forms in a wave. Cheong-san followed her eyes. Looked at who Ethan was sitting with. Looked away.
They got in line for trays. Ethan watched them and tried to work out whether it was worse to stay put or to move now and make it obvious he'd been waiting, and he was still working on it when the scream came.
—
From the doors. One long scream that broke in the middle and came back higher. The room went quiet in a wave, doors outward, and turned.
A girl came through the double doors at a run. Second-year, from the ribbon. Her hair was down on one side where the tie had gone. She was looking behind her.
Behind her was a boy.
He wasn't running the way she was. Something was wrong with the middle of him. His upper body was ahead of his legs and his head went side to side too fast, and there was blood on his chin and down the front of his shirt in a fan, still wet. It took Ethan a second to understand it wasn't his.
The girl's shoe caught a chair leg. She went down on her hands.
The boy was on her back before she'd finished falling. He put his face into the side of her neck. The sound she made had air going out of it. She got one hand up, across his face, and it did nothing.
Nobody moved. Then a tray hit the floor somewhere and everyone did.
—
He lost the next part.
Not all of it. He kept pieces, later, in the wrong order. A chair going over. A hand on his shoulder, gone before he saw whose. The tray line folding sideways into itself. The PA saying something calm with a word in it he didn't know, twice, and then cutting out mid-syllable. Nam-ra standing, not fast, tray left where it was, and going the other way from everyone — toward the wall, along it, where the crowd wasn't.
More through the doors. Three. Five. One in a teacher's cardigan.
Somebody screamed Run! and he ran and had no idea which direction the word had meant.
He went with the crowd because it was moving, and it took him toward the far exit by the service corridor. He was a body in a pack of bodies. A girl's elbow in his ribs. The back of someone's head against his mouth. Then the pack in front of him stopped dead and he went into it and off it and sideways into a table edge with his hip, and was out, in clear space, on the floor.
And there was On-jo.
Down. One hand and both knees, four feet away. The forms she'd been carrying were scattered around her going brown at the edges where something wet had reached them. Her face was turned up at the crowd going past, and the crowd was going past. Over her. A foot came down on her hand. She pulled it back and another foot came down where it had been.
"On-jo!" Cheong-san, somewhere behind a lot of bodies. "On-jo — "
Ethan got her by the wrist and pulled.
She came up fast. Her other hand found his sleeve. Her eyes were open too wide and she said his name with a question on the end of it, and he said "Yeah, yeah, come on" in English and then again in Korean, and they went.
Along the wall, where Nam-ra had gone. The crowd was jammed into the middle of the room. Along the wall there was space.
A janitor's cart stood by the service door, blue plastic, mop in the bucket. He didn't decide to take the mop. He took it because it was there and his hands wanted something. It came out heavy and dripping, a wet rope on a stick. He swung the handle sideways into the doorframe as hard as he could. It cracked. He swung again and the head came off and skidded, and he was left holding a metre and a bit of wood with a split end.
"Reyes!"
Cheong-san had made it round the far side and was at the exit doors, back against one of them, arm out.
"Here. Here — "
Fifteen feet. Ethan shoved On-jo ahead. Her hand was still on his sleeve and he had to peel it off.
Something came from the left.
A boy. He didn't know him. Uniform, glasses gone, one lens still hooked over an ear. He came in low from between two tables and Ethan swung the mop handle two-handed and missed him completely. The boy was already inside the swing. The wood went over his head and hit a chair, and the boy hit Ethan chest to chest and drove him back into a table, and Ethan felt teeth close on the padded shoulder of his blazer and skid off.
He got his forearm across the boy's throat and pushed. The face was two inches from his. There was nothing in it he recognized. The teeth came again.
Then the boy went sideways, because On-jo had come back and put a cafeteria chair into his ribs with both arms and her whole weight, and he went over the next table, and Ethan was loose.
"Go," she said.
Cheong-san had the door half open with his shoulder. On-jo went through. Ethan was two steps behind when something took the back of his collar and pulled.
He turned with the handle already coming round, and this time there was no missing, the thing was on top of him. The split end went into the side of a face. A man's face. White shirt, name badge. The wood stopped on bone and skidded. The man went down on one knee and Ethan hit him across the top of the head and he stayed down, or seemed to, and Ethan was through the door.
Cheong-san slammed it. There was a bolt. He shot it.
The door jumped in its frame. Then again. Then a lot of blows close together, and through the wood the sound of many people breathing at once.
—
A stairwell. Concrete, painted green to shoulder height. One strip light buzzing on the landing above. The stairs you took when the main ones were full. Bleach and old cigarettes.
Four of them.
Cheong-san with his back flat against the door and both hands still on it. On-jo three steps up, holding the rail, breathing through her mouth. And Nam-ra on the landing above, already there, already standing, fists at her sides and her face no different than it had been over her tray.
Ethan looked at his hands. The mop handle was still in them. His right palm was bleeding where the split wood had gone in and he hadn't felt it happen. He looked at the shoulder of his blazer. A wet crescent on the wool, spit or blood. The fabric wasn't torn.
Wasn't torn.
"Is anyone — " Cheong-san's voice came out wrong. He tried again. "Did anyone get — did it — "
"No," On-jo said.
"No," Ethan said.
Nam-ra said nothing. She looked at each of them in turn, and last at Ethan's shoulder, a second longer than she'd looked at the others.
The door jumped. A screw on the bolt plate had started to back out.
"We have to go somewhere," Ethan said. It came out in English. He heard it and said it again in Korean, and the Korean came out flat and strange, like a recording of him. "Somewhere with a door. A real one."
"The classroom," Cheong-san said. "2-5. Second floor, we can put the desks — "
"Which way?"
Cheong-san looked at him. He hadn't thought about Ethan not knowing. He'd never had to think about that about anyone.
"Up," Nam-ra said, from above. "Then left. I'll go first."
She went. They went after her.