Standing in the shower, letting the water run over her, washing it away, washing everything away, she realises that what made it the hardest was that it had smelled just like her own high school.
She had walked through the corridors, heart beating raggedly in her chest, smelling that school smell, and it all came back to her.
It was only what, six years, maybe less, since it had been her running from locker to classroom, since she had watched her friends crying and raging and brooding over the taunts and the names and the thousand hurts that plague the powerless.
None of them had ever gone this far.
She found the first body in a stairwell.
That night, after the shower, which could not wash what she had had to do away, not really, she said to her husband, "I'm scared."
"Of what?"
"That this job is making me hard. That it's making me someone else. Someone I don't know any more."
He pulled her close, and held her, and they stayed touching, skin to skin, until dawn.
-- written by Neil Gaiman
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