We Can Be Heroes

by Kyrie McCauley

Genres: YA Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Kyrie McCauley, author of the William C. Morris YA Debut Award winner If These Wings Could Fly, delivers a powerful contemporary YA novel about the lasting bonds of friendship and three girls fighting for each other in the aftermath of a school shooting. Perfect for fans of Laura Ruby and Mindy McGinnis. Beck and Vivian never could stand each other, but they always tried their best for their mutual friend, Cassie. After the town moves on from Cassie’s murder too fast, Beck and Vivian finally find common ground: vengeance. They memorialize Cassie by secretly painting murals of her around town, a message to the world that Cassie won’t be forgotten. But Beck and Vivian are keeping secrets, like the third passenger riding in Beck’s VW bus with them—Cassie’s ghost. When their murals catch the attention of a podcaster covering Cassie’s case, they become the catalyst for a debate that Bell Firearms can no longer ignore. With law enforcement closing in on them, Beck and Vivian hurry to give Cassie the closure she needs—by delivering justice to those responsible for her death.

Release date: September 7, 2021

Publisher: Katherine Tegen Books

Print pages: 368

Sample

 

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?

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.