The Outskirts of Grief

"No!!" they remember hearing themselves shout, furious and swearing, then begging. "Please," Jesse remembers imploring, "we'll stand." Didn't they deserve to be in there more than the media, more than townspeople or visiting dignitaries? A guard reopened the door and said there were 40 seats left. Jesse and Scott, joining the stampede, made it through.

Cody watched the speeches on TV from home, hugging his three big dogs close. In the circle of friends, he had the most time invested in Tech, more than six years so far, on his way to a doctorate in aerospace engineering. But he couldn't find comfort in the crowds. "I was really paranoid," he admits later. With President Bush and other VIPs coming, the convocation struck Cody as "the perfect setup" for a more massive attack. "I thought something worse would happen," he says.

"Are you kidding ?" Jesse argues. "I'd rather be around the president with all the security he has. That seemed like the safest place in the whole world to be." They are sitting in a juice joint across the street from the school.

The cold wind and snow flurries of that Monday morning have become the bright sunshine and beckoning warmth of Friday afternoon. Someone has tied gigantic yellow ribbons on the black iron fence surrounding this part of the campus, as if those lost are merely away. Everyone, including Jesse and Cody, is wearing orange and maroon to show the Hokie spirit. The movie theater down the street promises half-price tickets to any Tech students, and a tattoo parlor offering a memorial VT design is doing a bustling business, drilling 4.16.07 forever into flesh that welcomes a pain that at least is tangible. Even the nonchalant rudeness of the young waitress in the juice joint comes as relief.

Cody and Jesse wander toward the Drillfield, stopping on the broad sidewalk between the administrative building and the community pride wall where candles burn and flowers wilt in the memory of 32 strangers slain.

The friends cast a skeptical glance at another one of the freelance huggers on the prowl, a girl looking desperately eager, her sign offering not only an embrace but a Hershey's Kiss as well. No one approaches her. Cody admires all the dogs that pass by, identifying each by breed, and wishes he'd brought his setter and Doberman. Behind them, yellow crime-scene tape still ropes off Norris Hall, but streamers have escaped and tangled in a tree.

A grim little choir is crowding people off the sidewalk as they pass, chanting the same lyric over and over. What were they saying? Cody and Jesse ask each other. It sounded like "We are the ones you've been waiting for." No, Jesse thinks he heard "We are the ones we've been waiting for," but quickly concludes aloud, "that wouldn't make sense, though." Cody dryly states the obvious:

" None of this makes any sense."

On the way back, a girl Jesse has known since freshman year spots him and rushes up to wrap her arms around him.

"Hey, hey, how are you doing?" she cries.

"Good seeing you," Jesse says, hugging back. " Glad seeing you!" He asks the question everyone asks this horrible week. "Did you know anyone?"

She launches into something about Cindy's boss's daughter passing away and someone's stepson and the first pitch at a baseball game tonight, and Jesse nods even though he's lost the thread in this confusing new game, six degrees of survival.