We Can Be Heroes Read online

  Dedication

  For girls who are told that they’re too much for this world.

  Too loud, too opinionated, too sensitive, too angry.

  You are exactly the right amount for the right people.

  Find them and let them love all too much of you.

  And for Andrew, Rowan & Theo.

  Thank you for loving all too much of me.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  We Can Be Heroes: Season 2: Episode 13: “The Sheriff”

  Mural 1

  Beck

  Cassie

  Vivian

  Cassie

  Beck

  Vivian

  We Can Be Heroes: Season 2: Episode 13: “The Sheriff”

  Cassie

  Beck

  Vivian

  Cassie

  We Can Be Heroes: Season 2: Episode 14: “The Firearms Expert”

  Mural 2

  Beck

  Cassie

  Vivian

  Beck

  We Can Be Heroes: Season 2: Episode 15: “The Deputy”

  Vivian

  Cassie

  Mural 3

  Beck

  Cassie

  Vivian

  We Can Be Heroes: Season 2: Episode 16: “The Parents”

  Beck

  Cassie

  Vivian

  Beck

  Mural 4

  Vivian

  Cassie

  Vivian

  Beck

  Cassie

  We Can Be Heroes: Season 2: Episode 17: “The Editor”

  Mural 5

  Cassie

  Beck

  Cassie

  Vivian

  We Can Be Heroes: Season 2: Episode 18: “The Advocate”

  Cassie

  Beck

  Cassie

  Vivian

  Beck

  We Can Be Heroes: Season 2: Episode 19: “The Sheriff”

  Mural 6

  Cassie

  Beck

  Vivian

  Cassie

  We Can Be Heroes: Season 2: Episode 20: “The CEO”

  Mural 7

  Cassie

  Beck

  Vivian

  We Can Be Heroes: Season 3: Episode 25: “The Survivor”

  Cassie

  Acknowledgments

  Resources

  About the Author

  Books by Kyrie McCauley

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  We Can Be Heroes

  Season 2: Episode 13

  “The Sheriff”

  MERIT LOGAN: Welcome, listeners, to We Can Be Heroes, a podcast made for survivors of violence in the tradition of the “Take Back the Night” rallies that began in the 1970s and continue to this day. I’m your host, Merit Logan. This season, we will be aiming our lens at gun violence as it relates to gender-based violence. Really, though, our series begins with the story of one young woman, Cassandra Queen.

  [Audio clip]

  911 Dispatcher: 911. What’s your emergency?

  Caller: Someone has a gun. We heard shots.

  911 Dispatcher: Can you tell me where you are calling from?

  Caller: The high school. We’re at school. There’s someone shooting.

  SHERIFF THOMAS: It was the worst day of my career, bar none. It’s the kind of call we’re all dreading these days. Active shooter. Calls coming from Bell High School. Our operators got overwhelmed in seconds, with all those kids and their cells. Then the panicked parent calls started coming in, too.

  MERIT LOGAN: You just heard from the sheriff of Bell, a town that has been called “the heart of American gun culture”—it happens to be my hometown, and it’s going to serve as a case study for us to look at gun violence these next few weeks. This is the town where Bell Firearms has been owned and operated from for nearly two hundred years. Bell is also the place where just five months ago, Nicolas Bell, heir to Bell Firearms and fortune, took his father’s guns to school and murdered his ex-girlfriend, seventeen-year-old Cassandra Queen.

  MERIT: Sheriff Thomas, do you know how many women are shot to death by current or former intimate partners each month in this country?

  SHERIFF THOMAS: I don’t have those statistics in front of—

  MERIT: Okay, fair enough. In your personal knowledge, then, when you train your officers on responding to domestic disputes—mainly incidents of domestic violence—what do you tell them?

  SHERIFF THOMAS: To never go alone. Be prepared for that violence to turn on them. Domestics are some of the deadliest calls officers can respond to.

  MERIT: Yes, they are. That lines up with national data . . . but you didn’t think Cassie was in imminent danger?

  SHERIFF THOMAS: I had no reason to believe she was in danger.

  MERIT: Did Cassie think she was in danger?

  SHERIFF THOMAS: I can’t speak to that, Ms. Logan. I didn’t know Cassandra Queen. Or Nicolas Bell, for that matter.

  MERIT: But you know his father, Steven Bell.

  SHERIFF THOMAS: No comment, Ms. Logan.

  MERIT: It wasn’t a question, Sheriff Thomas.

  [Long pause]

  MERIT: Okay, then, can you speak to his access to weapons?

  SHERIFF THOMAS: Nico? Everyone has access to guns in this town. It’s not a problem.

  MERIT: Not a problem? When a girl is dead?

  SHERIFF THOMAS: Girls are killed every day, Ms. Logan.

  MERIT: But, Sheriff—

  SHERIFF THOMAS: It’s a terrible tragedy, what happened to Cassie Queen—

  MERIT: What did happen to Cassie? Did she come to you for help—

  SHERIFF THOMAS: But it’s hardly the gun’s fault.

  MERIT: Whose fault is it, sir?

  Mural 1

  TITLE: CASSANDRA

  LOCATION: THE BILLBOARD ON ROUTE 90

  Beck

  BECK USED TO LIE AWAKE AT night and wish aliens would abduct her.

  She would fall asleep on the fire escape, watching the night sky. She was desperate for a break in the smoggy clouds over the city. Eager for a glimpse of the stars. Beck thought that maybe, if she could see the stars, they could see her, too.

  She used to imagine them beaming her up to their ship. Their lights too bright. Their huge glossy eyes staring at her. And she would be the one human. The only one in the entire world they were looking for. They’d comb long fingers through her hair and ask to examine her crooked teeth. They would look past all of the broken parts of her and see one whole and spectacular creature. And in that moment, as she imagined it when she was six, she’d be special. Not just here on Earth, but in a cosmic way. They’d pick her, not despite being forgotten, but because of it.

  Who better to explain an entire species than the young it has abandoned?

  Who better to seek a new home among the stars?

  A drop of sweat reached her eye and Beck blinked at the sting. When that didn’t help, she released one hand from the rusted rung of the ladder she was climbing and wiped her forehead, letting her curling hair catch at the wetness and soak it up.

  Her other hand slipped on the rung, and she reached back again quickly, steadying her grip on the ladder. Halfway there.

  Stop daydreaming, Beck told herself. And don’t look down.

  Beck looked down.

  If there had been another surface to work on, one closer to the ground, Beck would have picked that instead. But Bell only has one billboard on Route 90. And twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, plus one in a leap year, that sign advertises the only thing this town is known for: Bell Firearms.

  Unless you count Cassie.


  But no one wants to talk about that.

  Beck shifted her backpack, heard the clink of metal on metal as the paint canisters inside fell against each other. When she got to the top she paused, dropping the bag and sitting with her back against the image of the billboard, facing the highway. It was empty. Silent this early in the morning. Beck looked up at the night sky. New moon. No clouds. There were a trillion stars above her, and all of a sudden Beck felt six years old again, small and insignificant. Back before Grandpa pulled her into his universe and gave her a soft place to land. Before Cassie lent her a pencil, and a soft smile, on her first day in a new school.

  Beck felt she was back where she had begun. Sitting on a rusty metal grate, staring at the night sky, wondering if there was something—or someone—out there waiting for her. Beck couldn’t help the echo of the words she’d thought as a child, when she longed for some sign that she wasn’t alone in the universe. Maybe someday they’ll come for me.

  And she couldn’t help but wonder if Cassie was out there somewhere now, too.

  Tonight’s plan was a stupid one, even for Beck. She knew that. She would probably end up arrested, to the surprise of absolutely no one. But the billboard was the last thing you saw leaving Bell, and what was covering it now was a travesty.

  Beck craned her neck, taking in the familiar sign with its old typeset font.

  Bell Firearms, Established 1824.

  Her mask fit snugly against her face, and she pinched the nose to secure it. That was Grandpa’s only rule about painting: Be safe. Protect your lungs. Advice that felt like a dagger after his diagnosis.

  Beck could feel the expanse of darkness at her back. Her fear of heights was like a hollowness in the balls of her feet. It was the sensation of falling even though she knew she was still standing there, safe, eighteen inches from the edge.

  That’s the thing about fear, though. You can’t convince yourself it doesn’t make sense. It’s instinct. It’s survival.

  Cassie should have been more afraid.

  The thought tugged Beck’s finger on the paint can’s trigger, and she started to cover the Bell advertisement with white paint, until it was just a blank canvas. Then she exchanged one can of paint for another, and in bold black lines she outlined the shape of a jaw, a nose, tracing the darkness of her curling hair. She added a bit of blue for her eyes. A pink smudge of her cheeks. Beck painted her as the Greek prophetess, Cassandra—Cassie’s namesake—with gold foil leaves feathered in her hair. In the mythology, Cassandra saw what wreckage was coming, but no one listened to her.

  Without meaning to, Beck had painted her with a hint of a smile. Cassie, who loved to laugh.

  Something twisted inside of her at the memory, quick and wrenching, like a rotary ratchet tightening a bolt.

  They said she was smiling when she died.

  Cassie

  You don’t haunt

  the place where you died.

  That’s only in horror movies,

  and Gothic novels.

  Ghosts lingering

  where they were killed—

  where their lives were stolen.

  I hate that.

  Why would I

  ever go back to

  that time,

  that place?

  The one that took

  everything from me.

  Instead I haunt the place

  where I lived,

  where I laughed,

  the place where some part of me—

  a soul? I don’t know.

  I don’t really know

  what I believe anymore,

  but some piece of me

  came back here,

  and for months I’ve been

  trying to speak,

  to be seen or heard.

  But I’m just here, invisible,

  in a strange and soft in-between,

  neither living nor dead

  bored, mostly.

  Welcome to the afterlife

  of Cassandra Queen.

  Vivian

  THERE WAS BLOOD EVERYWHERE.

  Vivian reached for a fresh set of gloves and pulled them so they snapped against her wrists.

  “What a mess,” Matteo said, filling the bucket.

  “It’s late, and you have another shift tomorrow. I can clean up,” Vivian said, reaching for it, but he held it out of reach.

  “Nah, I’ll help. It’ll go faster,” he insisted. He was already rolling the neon-yellow bucket, the one used for hazardous materials. In their line of work, that always meant bodily fluids. Blood.

  The call came in ten minutes before the end of their shift. A car wreck. Not the worst crash either of them had ever responded to, but critical when they’d arrived on the scene.

  Matteo stopped the bleeding. Vivian started the heart.

  Now the back of the ambulance looked like a crime scene instead of the place where someone’s life was just saved.

  Vivian worked quietly, wringing out the mop again and again. The blood didn’t bother her anymore. Not the scent of it, or the slippery feel of it on her gloves. She pretended it was melted metal. Or spilled oil. Some other slick, precious liquid.

  She watched the water as she worked. The way it got less murky brown each time they dumped it, until finally, it ran clean. Washed away as if the night never happened.

  If only.

  Vivian waved goodbye to Matteo in the parking lot, climbing into her mom’s old Civic. She had meant to take the car to college in August. Now she used it to drive to the fire station and back for her shifts.

  Vivian’s whole head ached from the pull of the too-tight French braids she wore the entire shift, and she wanted nothing more than to tug them loose. But she knew as soon as she let her hair down it would stick to her neck and back, clinging with the July heat.

  She ought to cut it off. The same way she’d cut off all the other old parts of her life. Like college. Like her dreams of med school.

  Like Beck.

  The yellow gas light flashed on when she turned the ignition.

  “Dammit,” she said, leaning her head against the steering wheel. She glanced at the clock on the dashboard. All the gas stations in town were closed. The only twenty-four-hour station was down the highway, halfway to Tannersville.

  But she could make it there on one bar. She’d done it before.

  Vivian reached for her phone as she pulled out of the parking lot of the station. She didn’t need her mother’s voice in her head telling her not to play with her phone and drive—she’d seen enough casualties herself as an EMT. But without music there was a good chance she would doze off at the steering wheel on Route 90. And Vivian had seen those casualties, too.

  Vivian used to listen to true-crime podcasts when she drove, but she couldn’t anymore. Instead she scrolled to her loudest playlist, some kind of alt-rock screaming monstrosity. It wasn’t even hers. It was one of Beck’s. Their shared music was usually categorized in her mind as Never play these or you have to feel things, but tonight Vivian was grateful for the option. For the loudness of it. The way it drowned out the other things. It dawned on her that this was probably why Beck loved this music. She’d always had memories she’d rather block out.

  Vivian had only had them since March.

  Either side of the highway was flanked by sunflowers, tall in late summer, with the festival just a few weeks out. Vivian rolled down the windows. The summer heat made the air stagnant and heavy, but she drove fast enough that a slight breeze blew into her car. Even if it wasn’t cool, it was something, and it let her smell the sunflowers. They didn’t smell sweet like other flowers. They just smelled like the earth. They reminded her of Cassie. When they were little, they’d run through those sunflowers as fast as they could, not caring when the paper-thin leaves cut their arms and faces. They ran like that in recent years, too, but usually only after a few drinks stolen from their parents’ liquor cabinets.

  Suddenly Vivian spotted a figure on the billboard platform up ahead,
and nearly swerved off the road.

  Were they going to jump? Even if they weren’t, they could fall, and that height would hurt them badly.

  Vivian pulled off the road. She was out of the car the moment it stopped moving, EMT training kicking in. Training that taught her to use that adrenaline to her advantage. To think and respond faster. Fast enough to save a life.

  Training that was more useful than it should have been at the age of eighteen, when five months ago she talked a classmate through tying a tourniquet on her own leg before she lost consciousness.

  That was the day Vivian learned that you could have all the training in the world. You still can’t save everyone.

  But tonight, when she reached the ground below that billboard, Vivian froze, the adrenaline halted at once by shock. It was like she had summoned her with the memory. Not the jumper, who she realized vaguely wasn’t a jumper at all, but a criminal painting over the billboard.

  It was the mural that stopped her short.

  Vivian recognized the face painted above her immediately. Bold, dark lines of paint shaping her jawline, her ears, her dark hair falling in waves and framed by a gold headband.

  And the eyes were just right—a light, icy blue. That curve of a smile that almost never left her face. And one unshed tear, right in the corner of her eye.

  The other side of the mural was the thing that killed her: thick lines forming the stark outline of a bullet. On the side of the bullet were four letters: B-E-L-L.

  Bell Firearms was gone.

  Covered up by a portrait of Cassie, and the words in script beneath her: Collige Virgo Rosas.

  Vivian knew the phrase, but only because Cassie told them once. It means “Gather, girl, the roses.” Pick your flowers, while you still can.

  Cassie had told them. When they were all together.

  Vivian realized there was only one person who could have done this. Someone she had been avoiding for months.

  What was she thinking? Vandalism? And she knew how much Beck hated heights.

  Only one way to find out.

  “Beck!” Vivian shouted. “What are you doing?”

  The figure above whirled and dropped a paint canister, which rolled off the edge. Vivian stepped aside as it fell, letting it land harmlessly where she’d been standing.

  Beck pulled off her mask and crouched on the platform. “Vivian. You scared the hell out of me. Where did you even come from?”