Clint Barton had moved to the town back in August, just before his sophomore year in high school, but by February he had, one by one, killed everyone in town. He didn't do it all by himself – Bruce helped with a few, including his best friend Tony– but still, it was no small accomplishment, even if it was a small town.
He captured all of these lives and deaths in fourteen black-jacketed composition notebooks. By the time he had finished, there were more than 1,500 obituaries, on just under 2,800 handwritten pages. The lives he had written about were real, all true, but the deaths were fictions he invented, an average of around eight a day. "I'm not predicting the future." He said, "But it's only a matter of time before everyone catches up to me."
He had known things about people, or had discovered them – the secrets and private information that showed up in his notebooks were things that people who had spent their entire lives in the town didn't know. The funny thing is, during the months when the bodies were piling up in the imagination of Clint Barton, There wasn't a single person who actually died in the town; it was the longest drought for the funeral home that anyone could remember.
The obituaries were private; his friends and a few other people knew that Clint was working on them, but besides Bruce, No one else was allowed to read them. He started the project on his very first day in the town, the day Bruce saw him sitting on the front of his lawn of his new home, writing in one of his notebooks as the rest stood by his parents, watching their belongings parade from the long yellow truck into the house. And after he had written the last page seven months later, he was gone.
Maybe.
He left behind a little more than suggestions, hints, and suspicions. But there were enough of them to make you go crazy trying to figure out what it all meant. But you have to try
Bruce has to change some things – some names, some events – and then there are the things that happened that Bruce didn't see, didn't experience, and that he'll never know. There's stuff he's tried to place together and stuff he's tried to leave alone – he had to rely mostly on what he remembered and what he could find.
There are a few newspaper accounts of some of the events, some TV coverage, and there's the police report (which Bruce wasn't allowed to see), but none of those is really helpful. They all focus on the superficial details, and miss the real story of what happened. They've got their own version of the world to sell. Besides, they only tell what they've been told anyway, and very few of them talked to the person who knew the most about it – Bruce.
This is what Bruce knew that happened, or thought happened. He fell in love with a boy, and then he left, and later he tried to come back, or Bruce thought he did, and Bruce went after him. It should have been simple but in the end it could not have been more complicated, and maybe that was the whole point to begin with, but if love is true and still leaves you lonely, what good does it do? Bruce started to go over everything again, thinking. Bruce might find a way to him, wherever he was, or at least figure out what to do with all the things he left behind.
"You have your whole life ahead of you," his mother told him, "don't spend all your time in the past." Its good advice, Bruce knew it was, but the past has its own ideas. It can follow you around with a life of its own, casting a long shadow.