Diana and Maureen are 17 years old and friends. Great friends. They open their hearts each other, they spend all their free time togheter, they’re inseparable friends.
Diana and Maureen are in girls’ toilets, in front of a mirror. Diana is crying, affected for her friend, Maureen is trying to cheer her up. Side by side to succeed to reflect inside the little mirror of the bathroom they smile, they cry, they comb their hairs. Suddenly, some shots. In the unreal silence that school lives during the lunchtime, the shots ring out in the corridor, reaching also the toilets. The two girls don’t care about them. Then, shots become nearer. Shots of a weapon.
In the little bathroom the silence falls. Side by side, trying to ward off any single noise, Maureen and Diana pray. They pray so that the one that’s doing a real slaughter outside, killing students and teachers, won’t notice them. The one that’s doing the massacre is surely one of their schoolmates, that had announced his intentions some days before without being trusted.
Their prayers soon become unuseful: the door opens and the guy appears, holding a gun in his hand. He plays with them, he teases them and, then, asks a terrible question: which one should him kill first?
More than twenty years have passed from that horrible day and Diana is now a happy wife and a happy mother. Her perfect life develops in the little town where she’s born and has grown up, Briar Hill, a small city where the horror of what had happened in Briar Hill High School still rings out. And, togheter with it, the horror of the answer that Diana gave to her schoolmate inside that bathroom: “Please, don’t kill me. Kill her”.
Diana’s life flows in a perfect harmony. A harmony and a perfection that sometimes could result in some way disappointing, above all when they’re set against woman’s troubled past. Unruly teenager with divorced parents, at the time of the high school Diana was admired for her beauty but blamed for her behaviour. Only Maureen seemed to not care about her continuous stories based just on sex, drugs and alchool, about her continuous transgressions, about her willness of trying everything in her life. Today Diana has changed, she’s a different woman. Since she married Paul, her college’s professor and still professor at Philosophy’s department, since she received the bless of a daughter, Emma, she decided to change her route. Now Diana sees her world as ideal, as the world she’s always dreamt about. Her days go on as a wife, as a mother, with a work, with her travels towards her eight-years-old daughter’s school. Sometimes the horror lived that morning at school, decades before, comes again and becomes even stronger when, from one day to another, strange events start to happen. Unexpectedly, her perfect and spotless life is hurled into chaos. She sees her husband going out for a walk with a young student, living on her skin the distress of being by now getting on in years, even if still pleasant; she finds a post-it in which someone has written something that leads her back to the past, to Briar Hill High School’s massacre; someone else’s action succeds to keep her beloved daughter Emma away from her, incuring suspects of that action on her, even her husband’s; her neighbours, always known by Diana as old, are suddenly young. Diana can’t explain the origin of these little events that seem to be all connected. An inner restlessness tries to suggest her an answer, but she refuses to heed its advice.
Present alternates with past and, thanks to this, today’s and yesterday’s life of Diana starts to come to light. The contrast between the unruly teenager and the lovely mother she’s now goes on until the end, that will disclose how the perfect and spotless life that Diana believes to have led until the present time never existed. In the moment when past and present succeed to meet up again, we’re there again, in that bathroom, with a crying Diana and Maureen still alive. The barrel of the gun takes life, Maureen falls and, with her, Diana too. When rescuers arrive Diana is still alive, and it’s at that point that her dream about an idyllic life starts. A dream in which remembrances of people and events she’s met and lived can appear again, moved in a future and made protagonists of her wife and mother fictional life.
Diana’s adult story develops in really few days. A restricted time that leads to a quite slow development of the plot, without giving a particular interest towards the story itself. But there are some flashbacks that give interest to the narration, flashbacks in which we can find a young Diana and her typical days togheter with Maureen. Thanks to these descriptions we can better and deeply understand the friendship between the two girls and, after this, better understand how selfish and cruel has been Diana’s answer to the killer.
Until the unexpected epilogue, a quite easy and comprehensible story. Fascinating author’s nombreus similitudes.