The first day back at Northgate High felt like attending a funeral.
The month-long grief and reconstruction break had done little to mend the gaping wound in the city's heart, and the school was a microcosm of that sorrow.
The usual chaotic energy of teenagers reuniting after a summer away was gone, replaced by a heavy, somber silence that clung to the hallways like the ever-present dust from the blast zone.
There were empty lockers, their doors hanging slightly ajar as if waiting for owners who would never return. There were empty seats in every classroom, stark, painful voids that teachers tried their best to ignore.
The student body had been decimated. We were a school for ghosts, haunted by the faces of friends and classmates who had been in the wrong part of the city on the wrong day.
My team and I moved through the quiet halls as a single, silent unit. The old social hierarchies had been vaporised along with the downtown core.
No one bothered us.
