Jessie rubbed the corner of her brown notebook cover between her fingers. She had worn out the other corners of the notebook already, and she was afraid to look down in case the brown color had ingrained itself in the grooves of her fingers. Her eyes instead traveled back and forth between the large window in front of her and the other reporters that surrounded her; occasionally she cast a glance at the father and his daughter sitting a few feet away from her. How all these people intended to watch this display was beyond her, but she pushed the puzzle to the back of her mind and tried to quell the growing feeling of nausea crawling up her throat.

“When’s it gonna start?” The man sitting next to her whispered suddenly. Jessie was surprised more by the spark of real conversation than by the question; it wasn’t as if the room had been quiet before, just that the existing noise had mostly consisted of nervous whispers, the scratching of pencils, and an occasional sneeze from a policeman in the front.

Jessie turned to the man, seeing the familiar press lanyard around his neck that she wore around her own. She pushed back the sleeve on her wrist to check her watch. “Two minutes.” She said. The man, seemingly annoyed at her answer, turned back to face the window, now tapping his foot as though he was pressed for time. Jessie decided then that she wished she had picked another seat.

She busied herself by watching the father and daughter next to the policeman in the front row. The girl only looked to be a few years Jessie’s junior, but a few years made all the difference in this kind of situation. The father looked exhausted, and Jessie recognized the twinges of sadness, emptiness, and relief mixing in his eyes as he tightened the grip on his daughter’s hand. The girl must have felt Jessie’s eyes on her because she turned and the two made eye contact.

In her eyes, Jessie saw emotions a girl her age should not know how to feel. The raw redness of the area around the girl’s eyes wasn’t needed to tell that she had been crying. Jessie knew exactly who the girl was and her story, but that wasn’t what she focused on when she looked at her. She studied the girl’s face instead, trying to send to her waves as powerful as speech through the invisible line of their eye contact.

Suddenly a flash of movement was seen on the other side of the window. Two dozen heads snapped forward simultaneously, and everyone silently watched as the man shuffled in, almost confidently. He sat down, crossed his legs, and directed a nonchalant look at the small crowd. The bubble of quiet broke, and the other reporters immediately put pencil to paper. Jessie, however, continued watching him and was disgusted at the smirk that graced his face. She must have had a big enough reaction for him to notice her, because Jessie found herself staring into his eyes.

They were cold, blue, and bone-dry. Jessie searched and searched in them for some semblance of humanity, but found none. While she was sure her eyes were nervous and flicking back and forth, his eyes were still and completely locked in on hers. The moment she saw him, Jessie had decided that no amount of digging was ever going to dredge up anything from inside his soul. He was so deeply unapologetic it was repulsive, and she tried to no avail to break from the eye contact they shared. He was a car on fire to her; so awful, so tragic, and so sickening, yet so mesmerizing that she couldn’t look away.

Jessie heard the girl cry out in the front as the man took his mouth into a full-blown smile. In her peripheral vision, she saw the girl’s father draw her into his chest and shield her eyes. Jessie wished at that moment that her father was there to do the same.

Somewhere nearby in town a church bell rang faintly, and it served as an eerie undertone to the low buzz of the morbid conversations. Jessie wondered if the sound would affect the man at all; if even the reminder of the warmth of fellowship would bring out some sort of remorse. Her feeling of nausea grew when she realized that it wouldn’t, and that his eyes would only change when there was no more light behind them.