This Is Where It Ends

This Is Where It Ends is the 2016 young adult novel by Marieke Nijkamp. As Principal Trenton concludes the annual first-day-of-spring-semester speech at Alabama’s Opportunity High School, Tyler Browne locks students inside the auditorium and commits a school shooting that leaves thirty-nine people dead. Narrated in four different first-person accounts, by seniors Autumn, Sylv, Tomas, and Claire, This Is Where It Ends traces the fifty-five minutes, from 10:00 to 10:55 a.m., that encompass moments before, during, and after. Autumn, the shooter's brother, and Sylv, her girlfriend, get trapped in the auditorium. Meanwhile, Tomas and Fareed hear gunshots while they break into Principal Trenton's office to steal a look at Tyler Browne's records. The shooting happens while Claire is safe outside at track practice. By the end of the day, both Autumn and Sylv confront Tyler onstage. Tomas confronts Tyler in the hallway as Tomas and Tyler finish the day among the dead.

As the novel progresses, Nijkamp analyzes each narrators' relationship with Tyler, painting a portrait of a traumatic event that extends beyond the confines of these chaotic moments and serves as commentary on larger social forces, such as family trauma. The novel explores how in the year proceeding the shooting, the Browne family breaks apart in the wake of Tyler's mom's death. Tyler's relationship with his sister, Autumn, disintegrates, because Tyler attacked Autumn's girlfriend Sylv on the night of the junior prom, about a year before the shooting. Earlier that same night, Claire breaks up with Tyler. The next day at school, Tomas pins Tyler to a locker and this is the day Tyler drops out of Opportunity High School. This Is Where It Ends explores how these past incidents lead to tragedy. The day's trajectory causes Claire to undergo a transformation in understanding. By the end of This Is Where It Ends, Claire understands how essential the entire community has been in shaping not only her own life, but also how events that seem separate from the school shooting provide insight into Tyler's motive. Claire realizes each person in the community plays a role in shaping others.

The twenty-six chapters, plus Epilogue, are broken into mostly three- and two-minute, and sometimes one-minute, episodes. In addition, each chapter concludes with either tweets between students and community members or a blog entry from Mei, a student who skipped school the day of the shooting. Nijkamp's narrative strategy of breaking down chapters into smaller moments allows her to pause time and explore the psychological landscape of each narrator. Backstory leading up to the day's tragic event occupies the majority of the novel, suggesting how strongly the past impacts the present moment. The novel explores how understanding a traumatic event means examining the tragedy from different perspectives. As the novel explores Autumn's dreams of studying ballet at Juilliard–for Autumn wants to be a famous ballerina, like her mother–and Sylv's conflict at already being accepted to Brown University, the book attempts to understand how Tyler's relationships with others precipitate such an attack. In this way, This Is Where It Ends is a humanistic book that explores the different layers of struggle, and pain, that cause an individual to take revenge out on an entire student body, and thus an entire community. It's a book about trauma in personal relationships, love, and violence.

Nijkamp builds suspense as the hour unfolds, forcing each narrator to decide how to react in the face of trauma. Autumn and Sylv confront Tyler and survive. But when Tomas confronts Tyler in the hallway, in the novel's closing pages, the meeting proves fatal. The novel ends with an Epilogue that leaps ahead more than twelve hours, to 11:59 p.m. Earlier in the night, Fareed breaks into the school, then contacts students to spread word about a memorial service. Students gather under the moon and stars and light a paper lantern for each student killed that day and speak the student's name aloud.