Like It Was Yesterday

First published on the New English Review

Photo credit of CPR news

Never (Can) Forget: Year 23 

Time: Traveling 

If you want to talk about it, it’s because you want to repeat it. Is it because I’ve talked about it that it’s repeated? Another lap around the track at the center of hell.

By ‘it,’ I mean Columbine, and by ‘it’s, I mean mass shootings.

I didn’t know I was running. That’s partly what’s made it hell. And by this ‘it,’ I mean the last two decades of my life. I just thought I was growing up. I just thought busyness was a virtue with the added bonus that I never had to be still with myself. Everything on my to-do list had a track-meet gun next to it about to go off—I just called that ‘responsible.’ ‘Contributing.’ ‘Earning my existence on the planet.’ ‘Apologizing for that existence.’

I didn’t have to run when Columbine happened. I wasn’t there. I couldn’t have run even if I wanted to—which I did. I wanted to run the opposite direction all the other 7^th graders were running. But I have always been enormously concerned with what other people thought of me. So I ran with the crowd into my school even though my legs and lungs were screaming, “Why would I want to be trapped in a building with a person shooting a gun?” Of course there isn’t. That’s not a thing that would happen in the world.

That was the old world. In the new world, I was in America’s first lockdown at my middle school less than ten minutes away while the world finally revealed itself as the broken son of a bitch it always was.

In the new world, I think they let the kids run now. I think that’s what the active shooter trainings say to do—the last one I attended was through work. As was the first one. Two years ago. We did not do these when I was young. We were sure Columbine was a one-off.

Yes, I’m sure they tell you to run. This is good. This is the only thing I’m good at.

Except that I am not very fast. How has it already been a generation since Columbine, then?

It was safer back then. Or I just didn’t know how patently unsafe the world is, but I didn’t need to know. I was a kid. It was a one-off. I only had to worry about homework and boys and why Marianne or Heather was giving me the silent treatment. Now, I’m stuck just wanting to go back in time and take the last two thirds of my life, which haven’t turned out even close to how I was capable of hoping as a kid they would, with me because being an adult is the fool’s gold of life.

For the first time, I hear about a shooting before the flood of because-of-Columbine-check-in texts. And I am jealous: nineteen elementary schoolers will never have to waste their best years panning for counterfeit not realizing they already had everything until it’s too late.

Shame burns me inside all the way to my outside.

Bullets fly out of elementary schoolers in Uvalde, Texas, who come to life again but  do not start running. They’re too young to let them run. They huddle in quivering bunches, some of them only know to be afraid because their teachers are crying and whispering into their phones as they shoo them into corners in the dark. They step over one of their teachers as her body chugs a huge but shrinking, dark red pool. After so much time that the kids probably think it’s a different day, she finally rises, too, and stands in front of a group of five year olds. She sends bullet after bullet back to the gun with different parts of her body until the shooting stops and she can go back to writing the ABCs on a chalkboard while kids who get to be kids say eyyyyyyyy beeeeee seeeeee deeeee like it was yesterday.

This is the Bottom: Year 20

Touch Down in the Land of the Blues 

I am so glad I went. The dozen other writers at the Writing Spirit retreat on Whidbey Island, what I’ve called The Magic Island since I first visited this place in 2003, felt like family after these eight short days just before Thanksgiving. We get our own little one-bedroom cabins that smell of pine and have cushy beds across from windows looking out over the forest or the labyrinth or the garden. The staff at this enchanted retreat center serve three home-cooked, organic, locally grown meals a day. All we have to do is gather for morning sessions of prayer and lessons taught by my favorite local writing instructor, afternoon sessions for workshop, and optional evening gatherings for yoga, fireside storytelling, or sound bathing.

A few years ago, I would have thought this all sounded way too indulgent to pay a thousand dollars for while the world was on fire and there were starving kids in Africa. As it is, I’m thinking I shouldn’t go. I have to take public transit four hours north, the journey looks really complicated, and I haven’t done a good job metabolizing the physiological feelings of social anxiety—I hate how I feel around new people and my year has already been the worst of my life (Lord God, I hope it stays that way). Maybe I should give myself a break and stay home alone instead of going on vacation with others who share the vocational calling of writing.

Recovering from appendicitis takes so much longer than I’d ever heard it talked about. My parents fly out from Colorado to Seattle again for the second surgery and, even after four days, I still can’t make it the three miles around Green Lake. My body has never failed to do what I ask it to do—sure, the surgeon had to cut through all my abdominal muscles for the second time in three months, but it was laparoscopy. Only I will know I have a scar, which is, it seems, how it is with most scars. Most, but definitely not all.

After my second surgery, which is the day after Labor Day, my parents and I hole up in their hotel room ten minutes from the basement room I’m renting in a rinky-dinky, eight-person house off the highway. We watch Finding Nemo as the first lightning storm in several years blows in, delaying the Huskies game apparently by three hours. The only bolt of lightning in the whole storm strikes the Space Needle, and it down-pours the entire night. It never rains this hard in Seattle and, because I’m with my parents watching a movie on the couch, I forget I’m not in Colorado until I’m counting backwards by threes from a hundred staring into a surgeon’s masked face as he dissolves into bluewhite light before I can get out of the 90s.

Who has two surgeries for appendicitis? People who are overly cautious and think avoiding surgery is always the better option. Or people who’ve been sloppily treated by the medical machine probably because they needed to be on state insurance during a rough patch in their lives. My surgeon explains that, no, in fact, I did not ‘auto-appendectomy’ and I will have to have my appendix removed via a second surgery after all. At my first surgery, which was to remove the abscess formed after my appendix fully ruptured because they didn’t remove it when I first went it, they’d had me sign a release giving permission for three possible options. None of them included everything in my abdomen being too swollen and infected for the surgeon to even find my appendix.

I lose count of the days I’m in the hospital after my friend drops me off. Apparently, it’s six—longest since my stay in the NICU as a preemie in 1986. My parents fly in; they basically turned around after flying home from our cross-country road trip to get me back to Seattle from Columbus, Ohio. I have a stream of visitors. As each walks in, I see a trail of their body as they move around my room. As each walks out, a whale of tingly light swallows them. Most sounds have a tinny ring just underneath their primary pitch. My body is hearty with levitation. My mind blanks for the first time since I can remember. I have, until now, been able to remember everything.

My friend comes over for dinner like we planned a month ago, but by this time, I can’t stand upright again and haven’t had anything to drink for nearly 24 hours because water tastes poisoned. I’ve lost ten pounds since being released from the hospital ten days ago, where a coworker from the job I’d started five days before that, drives me to the ER after she’d recognized symptoms of appendicitis. They’d kept me overnight for observation and sent me home with Vicodin and the strongest antibiotics known to man. I thought appendicitis hurt more than anything—take all the pain you’ve ever felt in your whole life, magnify it ten-fold and shove it in your lower right abdomen. This is worse: I feel like I’d been shot at point-blank range two days ago and have not received any care. But at least I’ve avoided surgery.

“All the more reason to go.” My friend stands and holds her hands toward mine.

“Nurse on the hotline said it was probably just taking a while for the antibiotics to work,” I say between waves of agony. “Besides, if I go to the ER, I know I’m going to get admitted.”

“Why aren’t you already at the ER?” My friend gasps as she helps me to my feet.

I qualify for Medicaid because I have just moved back from Columbus, where I thought I was relocating permanently once it was clear that I was getting divorced. It might be surprising to hear that Columbus is not Mecca, after all. I just have a friend there who was the first person to see my husband’s treatment as abusive and she rescued me. She paid all the shipping fees for my 26 boxes of earthly wares and bought my plane ticket, found a place for me to stay and is going to pay my rent while I job hunt.

She brought me to Jesus when were in college at CU Boulder in 2006 and a week later, helped me move to Seattle, but she is not safe. I still don’t feel safe to expand upon the reasons why. She was the only one who was there for me after my other friend, one who felt completely safe for the decade I knew her, sent me home on my birthday from visiting her in Texas, without telling me why and never to speak to me again.

My Columbus friend is the one I have to call to pick me up from the airport. On my 33^rd birthday the day after my Texas friend and I had a minor disagreement on her birthday, my dear friend sends her new husband to knock on the door of their guest room. They’d changed my ticket and I would be leaving in five hours instead of two days from then. He’ll leave for the airport in 20 minutes. It’s 8:30 in the morning.

I’m visiting a decade-long friend in Texas for her 30^th birthday. When she lived in Seattle, we were housemates with several others the year I graduated from college. She’s the second person who’s actively supported me as a writer; reading all my drafts and giving me feedback, collecting the positive comments on my articles into a shared document so I don’t have to wade through the haters myself. I’ve flown to Houston from Denver to visit her for once after attending my last grandparent’s funeral in the church I grew up in instead of saying goodbye to Nana before she left forever.

I deliberate for months about whether to move to Columbus. I had fled Colorado and it took five years for Seattle to become a place I thought I hated more than snow and darkness. Turns out that it doesn’t matter how much I debate: I am unprepared for the tsunami of physical anxiety and emotional darkness that hits my core once I land in Columbus. But I should I have been. I have never felt safe around the friend I have in Columbus, who moving there forced me to rely on. The only reason I chose to run to Columbus instead of going home to say goodbye to my grandmother I got The Call from my parents was because only she saw what was really happening (or not happening) in my marriage. Yes, I’m still that girl who will run from what bad thing to a less bad thing instead of even looking for a good thing.

At her memorial service, my dad tells the story of Nana’s life, most of which I know in shadows. We didn’t rip the paper unwrapping our Christmas gifts as kids because we needed to save it for Nana to use next year because she lived through the Great Depression. She was a teacher and she put her younger sister through teachers’ college, too. Her second brother “died” in an “accident” when he was very young. She was “given away” to her aunt for a year on her 7^th birthday. I didn’t know that was because she and her family were homeless in the early years of the Depression. I learned that that was because her father drank their meager funds away. He died of alcoholism in his early 40s.

There were so many reasons why Nana was stern and unreachable, why her oldest child—my mother—is emotionally frozen, and why it took me so long realize that I actually, am, too: the only thing I do, even when I freeze, is run.

Nana dies three weeks before my 33^rd birthday in February, less than a month before her 93^rd in March, three days after I touch down in the polar express sweeping through Ohio to start over. Just like what got me to Seattle.

Well, not just like that. Then, it was because I was certain I could outrun myself by starting over in a totally new city where no one knows the old me that has no place in my family and who has no real friends. This time, it’s the beginning of the ending of a marriage that only happened because I have been scared since I was six that I would never find a man who really loved me and thought I needed to settle for one who would tolerate me and I don’t think I have any real friends in the city I fled to 13 years ago. But I haven’t been any more authentically myself in my new city than the one I grew up in.

But, gee, what a relief not to think about Columbine for the first time in 20 years. Apparently, it takes that much shit.

Will things change when the victims are six?: Year 13 

Bands of Silence 

I don’t see the email until my first morning break at work: Hi Megan: I know there’s a ban of silence on me at the moment, but I just saw the news this morning—how are you doing?

Ban of silence? Pastor Dan has done something inappropriate that felt like a deep betrayal. I think I have to leave my church home of five years abruptly because the rest of the people who were my only family in this city I fled to from Colorado are either refusing to talk to me or think Pastor Dan’s sin is actually mine. Needing space to sort things out is a ban of silence on him? The people I have reached out to have not answered. The people I have not reached out to because I now have no idea who to trust anymore have not reached out to me. Just like my family. Don’t cause a scene.

I mean, that church did say we were a family. No wonder this feels familiar.

I have not heard the news this morning, but since I only get checked in on in floods like this when there’s another mass shooting, I can guess what happened. Do people think I’m only not okay on the days we have shootings? That because every single article or reporter talking about every single shooting since the one that trapped me in my childhood mentions Columbine, I instinctively know when they happen now?

The texts trip over each other getting to my inbox at 10 in the morning from friends. Now the church people want to talk. It takes 20 elementary schoolers being shot dead at Sandy Hook for them to lift their ban of silence on me. Are you okay? Are you okay? I just heard the news. Are you okay?

Not “Have you heard the news?” They assume I already know.

They won’t talk to me about the shattered church situation in my life that they are part of. But they’ll check in when there’s a shooting. Columbine was half my life ago. Are they really going to pretend that’s my most recent trauma?

The new worst school shooting: Four day before Year 8 

We Have Learned Nothing 

“Oh, sweetheart. Everyone knows about Columbine.” Dan sounds far, far away.

“How do you know about Columbine?” I squeak.

Dan’s inhale is sharp like surprise. “Because of Columbine?”

“Why me?” Heat rushes to my face. Just like a man to assume a young woman is fragile.

“I’ll reach out to a few people later, but I wanted to talk to you first,” Dan says.

“Are you calling everyone?” How much time do I get to finally talk about this?

The shooting at Virginia tech today is the first mass shooting to take over the news since Columbine. It is more than twice as bad in terms of death. The news gushes endless details about the shooter, where vigils are appearing, that we have learned nothing from Columbine.

We were supposed to learn from Columbine? Pretty sure school stopped when the shots started. Why would we have learned from something that we were convinced—because rationality or denial—was a totally random one-off?

My phone buzzes violently on my work desk and I hit my elbows on its corners in my startle. It’s been a few years since anyone just called to talk. My stomach plummets as I tap the green button dancing around on the screen of my BlackBerry Pearl. “What news?”

“How are you doing, Megan?” It’s my pastor. “I just heard the news.”

This was not supposed to happen. The adults were never to let this happen again. That’s what it means to be an adult.

Also, I fled Colorado eight months ago. I was supposed to be safe now.

The Groundbreaking: Year 5 

Practice Makes Permanent 

Everyone waits until Clinton releases the shovel to see if it will stand on its own. It does, finally, so everyone claps.

Clinton stomps a second time on the shovel, unfamiliar with the strength of Colorado clay. It cannot stand on its own.

Bill Clinton steps triumphantly on the end of the shovel after Hillary hands it to him. The vice president of the Columbine Memorial hands Hillary Clinton a long-handle shovel crafted just for this event by the same person who carved the crosses for the makeshift memorial the week it happened; the April sun slices off the new blade into the eyes of those who forgot their sunglasses like me.

We disperse from the gathering on top of Rebel Hill and follow the freshly forming track spiraling around the hill back down to the field across the parking lot from Columbine. The line we form begins conveying by our honored guests slow enough for each of us meet them. Is this what my mom meant by making history?

Bill Clinton almost crushes my hand as he shakes it. He doesn’t see me wince, but Maya does as Hillary Clinton holds out both her hands to her. When it’s my turn to shake Hillary’s hand, I whisper a question like my mom encouraged me to: “Who is actually in charge here?”

She answers quickly but does not look away from me. “Soon enough, dear, you will be.”

Maya and I process back through the line until it starts forming. We go back to our seats to clap for former President Clinton. He says this doesn’t have to define us. He says he knows we’re not okay and he hopes, though it’s hard to imagine, that someday, we will be. He reassures us that the rest of the world has learned a lot from what happened just down the hill from here five years ago. He says he’s so, so sorry.

Maya and I scurry away from our seats before President-when-it-happened Clinton finishes apologizing. We duck like it’s raining as he leaves the stage because we are late and the only two seats together that are left are in the front row. But it’s not raining. It hasn’t rained since January.

“Ouch.” Maya glares at me and rubs her neck dramatically. I pull into the parking spot too fast and don’t stop in time to avoid hitting the concrete bumper because we are going to be late.

I pick Maya up and go the route Nana used to take to Clement Park because it’s the faster route even though it takes us past the fields and swing sets and monkey bars I grew up playing on and I have realized too late that the adults were right about how damn fast time actually moves and I’m not ready but we are late and you can’t be late for history.

Mom says we have to go to the groundbreaking ceremony for the permanent Columbine shooting memorial to “make history.”

Permanent memorial. That they are going to dig into a hill I grew up rolling down with my siblings under the loving supervision of my grandmother. I need to be a whale so I can have a heart the size of a car if I am going to carry this for the rest of my life, which still, though I’m moving away to college at the end of the summer, doesn’t feel like it’s even started yet. Not because I’m excited about this new thing I’ve waited my whole life for—being a grownup—but because I have no idea how to get started. I’m supposed to know what I want to do with the next forever of my life, which I do—save the world. Well, I have to anyway. Rachel and Cassie[1] and the eleven others I didn’t know no longer can.

And I’m supposed to know how. My life experience consists of four years of marching band and poetry club, three years of swim team and two of track/cross country practice, which I had to stop sophomore year because my doctors said my ligaments aren’t holding my bones in place. So when I run, my bones will slide around and cause all this scar tissue.

So: no more running. I’ll get right on that. 

Anniversary: Year 1

Forward to Normal

I wake up with a book on my face just like every day even though this one shouldn’t have been so normal. Taking the book away doesn’t change that it’s dark. It’s so dark. I get up and push my back against the wall and slink along it until I have to make a break for it. I slide down the balcony past the creaky stair, then tiptoe down the rest until I can get my back against another wall, which I slide along until I make it to the couch. Safe I yell in my head at the dark as my heart pounds the air out of my lungs. I’m safe now.

The night’s last rerun of I Love Lucy on Nickelodeon ends.

My family comes yawning out of their rooms and sits around the sharp-edged coffee table in the living room.

My little brother is instantly in tears. “I said I didn’t want to play Sorry again,” he yells at my sister.

My little sister sticks her chin out and waggles her jaw in my brother’s face as she plucks his red piece from almost being in the safe zone and trades it with her green piece so that he’s more than starting over. “Sa-rreeeee.” She crinkles her nose and sticks out her tongue.

While we kids go get ready for bed, my parents set up the family night’s board game. I get dressed and head to the bathroom I share with my sister. I unbrush my teeth and made my hair tangly and scraggly. How did I go through the day like this I think in my mom’s voice, who comes in to feel the sink to make sure it’s wet.

“Just trying to be nice,” I ask my sister. “We had a minute of silence at 11:19.”

My sister scowls. “We always do stuff at school.” She unbrushes her teeth in the sink next to me.

“Did you do anything at school today?” I dry off my hands and go back to my room to work on homework before dinner. I unwrite most of my essay on rites of passage—all the way up to In three months, I will change schools again and start at the last one before I’m expected to leave home and make something of myself in the world—before the bell rings. 

Copycats already: Month 4 

Roll Call

Today I learn that I am wrong about being safe until high school.

A sheet of paper flutters up from the ground to the podium Mr. Caruso stands at, unsure of how to close this impromptu school-wide assembly. “Mr. Vidal and I are so grateful to the student who was brave enough to come forward after finding this alarming document,” Mr. Caruso says. “It just goes to show that, if the peers of the Columbine shooters had reported suspicious behavior, the horrible tragedy at the end of last school year could have been averted.”

We are packed so closely together that I can feel the heartbeats of the kids on either side of me: it’s not just mine that stops for a minute.

“This is obviously very disturbing,” Mr. Caruso says. “The reason we’re bringing this to your attention as a school is because we want you to know just how important it is that you report anything suspicious you may find or hear or see.” He looks around at all of us again, squinting like he’s at recess. “At the top of this list was handwritten if you thought Columbine was bad, just you wait,” Mr. Caruso says.

I tell myself that Mr. Caruso does not sound scared. He does not. Not scared. “Earlier this week, a sheet of notebook paper with a long list of names of students at this school was turned into my office.” I assume, because I am left out of everything, that I am not on the list and I’m already sad. Is this how it’s going to be for the rest of my life?

Mr. Caruso starts to say something about a list of names, but the computer teacher waves his hands as he jogs toward him to help him switch his mic back on.

Our class is the first of the 8^th graders to enter the gym, so all my other peers are behind me. I try to scan for my friends without moving, but I don’t see any of them directly in front of me. Mr. Caruso’s mic sounds like thunder when he switches it off to talk to the teachers. He calls the teachers one by one to gather them in the middle of the gym with him. Even after they meet and go back to the students they led in here and all the students in the entire school have found a spot, the principal is still silent. Some 7^th graders pass notes, but the 6^th graders and us 8^th graders sit rigid. I have never heard this gym so quiet. It is not supposed to be this quiet. Mr. Caruso stands with a microphone in the middle of the gym, looking at each student as we walk in. Teachers arrange us by grade on the risers; they don’t have to shush us. The principal hasn’t ever called a school-wide assembly in the middle of the first week of classes before.

Mr. Williams stops our class just before the turn to the gym so the rest of the 8^th graders can join us. He leads us to the hallway between Neighborhood C and Neighborhood A, where we wait for all of the 7^th graders to cross before he leads us to follow them through the cafeteria to the gym. Neighborhood. I guess I still feel at home here.

He steps to the front of the line and pokes his head out of the classroom before he calls our names like he’s calling role and we form a line at the classroom door. He waits for the announcement to be repeated before he sets the chalk down and tells us to wait. In the middle of social studies, the principal comes on over the PA system and tells us all to report to the gym immediately.

Division Already: Week 2 

Safety 

My dad doesn’t want my last memory of this protest to be Charlton Heston holding a rifle by the barrel over his head on stage and shouting, “You’re in dereliction of duty if you don’t own a gun” and the small crowd huddled around him yelling back, “you aren’t safe without one!” Or asking my dad what “dereliction of duty” means. Or his answer: “don’t tell your mother I said this, but it’s fucking bullshit.” So he takes me around to twelve different people holding signs, each with a picture of one of the students who was shot to death at school less than ten minutes from here, less than ten days ago.

My last memory of this probably won’t be any of that. It will probably be the sick-yellow color of the sky as it pushed back down the screams and boos and jeers—“protect kids, not guns!”, “no civilian needs a weapon of war!”, “Their right to life is more important than your access to murder!”—of seven thousand people the moment I realize that there actually are adults who don’t care about kids, that they might really let this happen again.

“Hold out your hand,” my dad says as he leads me up to a man who looks like an older, brown-haired version of the kid—Daniel—in the picture on his sign. “Look at them, say your name and listen to their names. Use your superpower memory to remember them.”

I meet them: Tom, Brian, Larry, Misty, Dawn, Darrell.[2] I shake their hands, I say my name, but I cannot look at them. I am, after all, a kid who left for school and came home. I am a kid who is still alive.

Never Again: Week 1

Rebellion       

The whole city had been gathered on the hill behind the high school for three hours. Except my sister and my brother; they are too young, so they stay home with our mom. My dad and me and thousands of other people had all sloshed through thick streams of water from rain that hadn’t stopped since the first spring snow four days earlier. People, shivering and covered in mud, come forward to take soggy bouquets of flowers and soaked stuffed animals out of the little pools at the bases of the 13 crosses. People hammer notes and sopping pictures bleeding their color out of the crosses and shove them back in their coats. Water from the pools, the crosses, jackets, everything but people’s faces, rises in droplets up to the sky, but nothing is drying. Everything dries here; we have never had this much rain.

Columbine Principal Frank DeAngelis speaks for a while, but I can’t hear him because we can’t have sound equipment outside in all this water. Maybe other places know how to pull that off. We don’t even have waterproof clothes: water resistant, today demonstrates, is not the same. The only thing I hear Principal DeAngelis say is “never again.” He repeats it a lot throughout his speech, raising his fist every time. The hundreds of Columbine students who were there do, too, in “rebel pride.”

A girl in front of us elbows her friend next to her when she notices her fist wasn’t raised. “What’s your deal?” she whispers.

“Didn’t Eric nickname himself ‘Reb’?” She keeps her arms and fingers straight down.

How do we already know so much about the shooters?

Two students strum guitars under a blue tarp stretched out between two Aspen near the parking lot as people walk backward to their cars. Peace will come to you in time. Friend of mine, Columbine they sing and it’s only when I hear the music that my legs let me use them again.

A shadow stumbles from a squatting position at the end of the row of crosses as it takes off down the far side of the hill. Suddenly, two small fires erupt somehow. The flames rise with the raindrops into columns, building two crosses before disappearing, leaving dripping-wet crosses covered in words in black Sharpie and carved into the wood: may God forgive you, hate will not win here, your lives were lost before you took so many with yours, shame on you.

The morning of the memorial for the victims of the worst school shooting in American history, my dad, Maya and I arrive early enough to see the sunrise if not for the lightning storm that has been bouncing off the Rockies almost this whole week. In the flashes, it looks like 13 people are running across the top of the hill, back and forth, back and forth like they’re stuck. Every hair on my body stands up so straight it hurts. I plant my foot, water already soaking through my snow boot to my sock, with a squish and stop at the bottom of the hill.

It’s not people running. Fifteen hand-carved crosses had appeared on Rebel Hill, the hill behind Columbine High School, the night before this memorial, and someone had taken two of them down. No one seems to know who or where the crosses came from.

Shrapnel: Day 1

Young People

Surely the adults will never let this happen again.

I turn to my best friend to reassure her. “Surely—” I look at her, my friend who I’ve known since before I had a brother, who is going to be my maid of honor at my wedding someday, but I don’t see her. Someone with angrier eyes that don’t seem to recognize me has stolen her smile.

“Until further notice, friends, please direct all questions to me.” Pastor Austin closes his folder and a long silence begins.

Two columbine-blue chairs sit on the stage, empty. Light shifts from them to Pastor Austin, who rocks back and forth against the podium. “We will never be able to fill their shoes, or their chairs among us, or their futures. Their families will be announcing details for their services in the coming weeks and we here at Christian Crossway will have an official service as a church family after we spend some time talking that through with the families as well.”

My feet are doing their dumb tingling-whenever-I-sit-too-long thing, but if I move, my chair will probably squeak in a way that sounds like a fart and people already think I’m weird. How long has Maya been crying? It feels like my head is moving forward and backward like I’m trying to dance to Walk Like an Egyptian. I don’t think it really is, but there’s no way for me to tell. I bet everyone else can tell, though. Just one more reason for people to think I’m weird. I don’t know what to do. Everyone is crying. Why am I not crying? Those kids aren’t really dead. They can’t be. Maya is crying. Her teeth chatter like it’s cold, which it is, but only outside—it can snow at any moment because we’re so close to the Front Range, my dad says. Is Maya crying?

It seems like Pastor Austin is holding his breath. “Cassie Renée Bernall and Rachel Joy Scott were among the students who lost their lives yesterday. Many of you may already know, but for those that don’t, I will briefly say that there was a shooting at Columbine High School yesterday and 13 innocent people have died. I’ll let your parents go into the details with you as they know you best.”

Tell me what to do no-ow, when I wa-ant yo-ou ba-ack. NSYNC’s best song yet Maya and I can’t wait to sing it at the top of our lungs at the concert this summer. It’s playing from somewhere I can’t locate before I realize it’s in my head. I am a horrible person.

Maya’s cheeks go back to super rosy so fast the color is actually smooth for a second before it goes splotchy like normal when she stands up and grabs my hand to help me. She has a crush on Pastor Austin even though he’s probably 23 and has a girlfriend. Everyone has someone. She skips a little as we squeeze around people trying to get out. People are bumping into each other and apologizing as they look away quickly. People aren’t taking their coats off. There’s snow in lots of girls’ hair. I hate snow, but I hope there’s some in mine right now, too.

Pastor Jeff stops us in the room outside the sanctuary. The high schoolers whisper to each other like a game of telephone and the middle schoolers in between them complain about how friends don’t make secrets and secrets don’t make friends. Like the rest of the middle schoolers, I look harder at the high schoolers, especially the ones who go to Columbine, than I ever have before. Do they know what happened? Did they see it? I can’t even watch Bambi; it gives me nightmares. Pastor Jeff holds up his hands and pats the air like he’s trying to get our voices back inside our mouths.

When we finally get quiet, he says, “As you may have guessed, today is going to be a departure from our normal youth group activities.”

Perfect Suburbia

My mom comes into the building with a bunch of other parents who look like they just watched Poltergeist. Both my parents have been looking like this since yesterday. Everyone find their kids and hugs them and not even the teenage boys are uncomfortable with this. My mom motions for Maya and me to follow her to the car. It’s weird to have all the parents with us, but it doesn’t feel like that’s the only reason we’re all quieter. Maybe they’re going to tell us what happened yesterday, why we weren’t allowed to leave school until the mountains went black.

We walk past the circle where one of our parents usually drops us off and head to a parking spot in the church parking lot. Maya gives me a funny look but I don’t know what my mom’s deal is. I’ve never known that. Why would I know that? Why am I expected to know everything? I don’t even know what happened yesterday, though this time, it feels like no one else knows anything, either. Am I a terrible person for being more afraid of that than the rumors about guns at school?

The door on our minivan doesn’t slide smoothly, even though my dad just got it last year for road trips. Maybe it’s because I slammed my hand in it a week after he brought it home. Maya pulls harder on it, which makes it stick even more. My mom gives her exasperated sigh without saying anything, which makes me not able to say or do anything, which makes her more upset, though she’ll never say. She smiles at Maya and grabs the handle instead of explaining to Maya that all she needs to do is slow down. She smiles politely back at my mom and hands me the note she wrote earlier: ask your mom if you can spend the night.

My mom’s way home is shorter than my dad’s way and doesn’t involve passing by Dairy Queen. Maya would say it’s too cold for ice cream anyway, even though yesterday was probably 100 degrees. But it’s precisely when it’s cold outside that you eat ice cream; it makes the outside feel a lot warmer by comparison. But then, what do I know? I microwave my ice cream because the cold hurts my teeth. My little brother thinks that’s so funny, he says he’ll be laughing at me until I die.

My mom usually has some errand to run or something to just quickly pop in and get whenever we’re going somewhere, but she doesn’t stop on the way home. She doesn’t even slow down at yellow lights or stop signs. I have never seen her break a rule. Maya is too busy writing me a note to see my mom running stop signs, but she wouldn’t think it’s weird. Her dad drives like a teenager.

She pulls into the garage so fast, the garage door gets stuck on the front of the car as it closed and bends the license plate. Before we can get out of the car, she’s up the squeaky wooden stairs my dad built and calling his name into the house. Maya tosses me my backpack and whistles Tearin’ Up My Heart, her favorite NSYNC song, as she walks out of my house.

I follow her all the way to Bailey and Suzie’s house as the streetlights flicker off in rapidly dissipating dusk. As lights in the houses turn on as porch lights go out, we turn up to the main road to go to her house, but I can’t keep up: every time I breathe, I get stabbed in the back. Maya points at the Thompsons’ house at the end of the cul-de-sac. “Ms. Thompson is always home,” she says and remounts her bike. “I’ll come back later!” The streamers on her bike flick and glint like angry magic as she pushes off down the hill.

The Thompson sisters are tracing each other’s bodies with bright blue chalk on their driveway and it looks like they’re a snowflake-looking pattern as they take turns positioning themselves next to where the other one just laid.

“Meggie! Wanna be part of our friendship wheel?” Suzie smiles, revealing yellow and purple chalk on her teeth. This is apparently what they’re doing for the Chalk Contest Jill announced earlier.

You have no how idea how much I want to be part of a friendship wheel.

Before I can say anything, Bailey raises her eyebrows at me. “I think you need to see my mom.” She grabs my wrist. Suzie, watching every move Bailey makes, grabs my other one, and they drag me inside and show their mom. I’m in their bathroom being poked and prodded and eventually wiped with damp gauze that sting really bad up and down my spine before I have time to make up a story about what happened. Which is probably why I said I fell off my bike when Ms. Thompson asks me.

“Be sure to show your mother,” Ms. Johnson says as she rips off the clump of Band-Aids I had on my back and sends me home with a small, open wound chugging blood in my back.

“Hey,” Suzie calls after me as I step on the outlines of heads on their driveway. “Where’s your bike?”

I freeze, avoiding Suzie’s stare and the glare I’m certain is in Bailey’s eyes.

“Suzie,” Bailey says quietly, “once you get to be a teenager, you, too, will understand that sometimes, a girl’s gotta say what a girl’s gotta say.”

I give her thank you eyes and run back to my house. On the way, I wave at Cody and Jenny and Brianna and Kayla and Lance and Mikey running or riding their bikes home.

“When are we meeting tomorrow?” I yell at Lance as he races past me on his dirt bike.

“Probably after breakfast! Ms. Johnson’s fire hydrant this time!” He shouts over his shoulder. Schools are closed for the rest of the week, apparently, so Lance and the other neighborkid leader Jill quickly get some serious games planned for us. I don’t think they know it’s supposed to rain like hell until next week, probably because that’s never happened. They’re both in high school, so it makes sense why they and the other high schoolers are more afraid than us right now. Except me.

I get home to my dad rattling the garage door and the van shaking with it. I don’t know how the whole house isn’t falling over onto the Blue Spruce that may reach my bedroom window by next year. He kicks the bumper and swears, which he rarely does. He paces and runs his fingers along the crates of beans and flour and candles for Y2K until he has an idea. I don’t hear anything for a while, then rummaging, something heavy and metal drops to the floor. The echo covers over anything my dad might have shouted and then there are footsteps.

I push my back against the flagstone I helped my dad add during spring break to the brick on the wall of the third-car garage. If I push hard enough, maybe I can slip into the jagged spaces and see without being seen.  

The edge of one of my dad’s many tools scares me as it hooks onto the outside of the garage door by where the car’s hooked on. It dents the door as my dad is doing whatever he’s doing on the other side, but the door raises, first with the car attached. Then the car unhooks and bounces on its front tires as it starts to roll down the driveway. I know I should stop it, but I’m not allowed behind the wheel of a car yet. Plus, I’m so light-headed, I actually can’t tell if I’m still standing on ground or if I could touch the crazy blue of the sky, so it wouldn’t be safe for me to drive anyway.

My dad shouts words I’ve never heard before as he runs behind the car and braces his shoulder against it. I’m convinced he’s going to see me, so I start pretending to look for something far away in the opposite direction. The garage door screeches until it opens as far as it’s going to, which thankfully is enough for my dad to push the minivan into the garage. The zapper doesn’t work, so he has to manually close it, which means I’m locked outside, just as the coolness of evening is wearing off into bright, dry hot.

I feel liquid crawling up my leg all the way to my back. I touch my fingers to my spine and bring them back red. Not sweat. I press into the ragged flagstone until the pain is gone.

Dinner as a Family

I run home and arrive just as my sister’s opening the front door to call my name.

“Got locked out,” I say, trying to hide being out of breath.

She rolls her eyes and hands me the dish gloves my parents have probably had since the ‘70s. “Coulda rung the doorbell.”

It didn’t occur to me that you could ring the doorbell at your own house. I follow her back to the kitchen where my dad is wiping down the table, my mom is reading on the couch and my brother is dropping dry dishes into the soapy water. My sister stands at the end of the sink, leaving a space between her and my brother for me and holds her hand out flat, slapping a dishtowel over it with her other hand. That makes me the dunker.

I pull the gloves on and start fishing out dishes. I slide each through the water, run them under the faucet and hand them to my sister, who carries three or four at a time off in her gangly arms to set on the table for my dad to arrange properly. I hand off the last dish to my sister, who my brother follows to the table. I wipe off the water we got all over the counter and join my family in piling up food forkful by forkful from our mouths onto our plates.

Tonight is really quiet except for the fidgeting. Are my parents going to explain what’s going on? We’re not allowed to have the TV on at dinner as a rule, but it’s always on at Maya’s house. So it’s not like I didn’t see the police hurl that bleeding boy up into a shattered window over and over again last night.

Normally, we go around and say something about our day, but it seems like we should talk about that boy. I think about what I’m going to say about my day when it’s my turn anyway, just to be prepared: Lance and Jill got street hockey started, and so far, I’m actually pretty good, which is cool? I got to finish the next book in the Misty of Chincoteague series faster than I would have, which is cool—but is it cool to have these days off when we don’t know why? I choke a little trying to get the next bite of pesto veggie pasta up when the thought comes that maybe my parents don’t know what’s going on. But that can’t be possible, I think, shivering off the terrifying thought that you don’t actually know everything when you grew up.

We’re all waiting for my brother to cough up his last bites. My sister sneaks ribbing him so we can all leave the table. “Come on now, Tim-Tim, there’re starving kids in China,” she says in her mock-Mom voice. He glares at her as he spits out the rest of his food slowly, mostly onto her plate.

My mom stands up abruptly, her chair groaning against the hardwood floor my dad just installed and stalks off to the kitchen. Silently, pursing her lips and staring at my dad, she comes around with the big silver bowl my brother dented dropping when she made him help in the kitchen and slops what’s on our plates into it. My dad pours his water into the pitcher on the table and stands up, collecting our water glasses to pour what we’d spit back out into ours, too.

He holds the pitcher under the sink, and the faucet sucks all but the ice cubes up in a thick stream. My mom stirs the pasta to gather the pesto, which she fills its jar with, then the peas and carrots, which she tosses into their can, then the broccoli, which she spreads onto the cutting board and chops it back together with the knife only her, me and Dad are old enough to use. My dad takes the ice cubes out of the pitcher with tongs, puts them in the ice tray, twists it until it cracks all of them into place and puts it on top of the other one in the freezer. My mom tells me to dump the pasta into a pot of steaming water and wait for the steam to die down to put the lid on. She asks my sister to put away all the food and my brother to stack the placemats and put them in the drawer. Only when the kitchen is clean and we’re all hungry are we allowed to go outside.

Serious Games

We had this whole day off from school and it’s not because of the snow. We don’t get a snow day unless the snow knocks the power out and that’s not what’s happening today because we also have tomorrow until Friday and maybe later off, too. Plus, the second snow’s already melted and it’s hot right now. My sister and brother run off to the park for lava tag. I roller blade backwards down my driveway to the end of the hockey game on Ms. Johnson’s cul-de-sac and start clicking sticks with my teammates Kayla, Mikey, and Lance because we won and then with Jill, Cody, Lauren, and Paul to say good game.

“Three to one ain’t too bad at all,” Lance yells as he suddenly skates backward toward our goal. Jill chases him and beats him to the net.

His stick sucks the puck out of the net like a magnet for the third time between Jill’s knees as they rise off the ground. He yells the code word and Mikey scrambles to get away from him and I tuck my arm, covered in street rash, out of the way so I don’t trip him since I can’t get back on my feet fast enough to get open for Lance’s pass. He sweeps his stick backward while I pull myself to my feet. Mikey gets the puck and takes it farther and farther from our net, the hair around his face drying. The scuff on my new purple blade dissolves as I catch a wheel on a pebble trying to block Paul.

Kayla yells something at me from the net as the puck zings over her shoulder from it, the first one to get past her. She sounds mad, but I can’t hear what it is, because that thing where all the sound fades out and then a high-pitched beep that my brain thinks is painful fades in for several seconds and there’s nothing I can do about it except wait for it to stop.

This has been happening for a while, and I can’t figure out what causes it because it happens at random times. But I’ve gotten good at pretending like nothing’s wrong and acting normal, even at reading lips a little bit, because it never lasts for more than a minute. That last thought I remember having is that I’d played street hockey a lot before now and I’d never noticed how much the puck can look like a bullet. 

First Words

I’ve never seen a bullet. I want to ask the other kids if they’ve ever been afraid of the puck before, but parents start calling us in for lunch cleanup. I skate to my yard, clomping on the grass to the splintery gate, and meet Maya and my sister sitting on a picnic blanket with sandwich bags and empty fruit cups and Nutter Butter packages everywhere. My dad had just cut the grass, so it smells like soccer. I sit down with them and pull apple pieces and PBJ bites out of my mouth to fill the wrappers.

“You know the TV at my house?” Maya whispers, keeping an eye on my sister.

I nod.

“It was Columbine High School.”

I keep my eyes on my polka-dot shoelaces that match my slouch socks. I want to shake my head viciously and scream that she’s wrong. But my sister’s only nine, so we have to talk in code, which means I can’t ask what happened or if she even knows.

“Did you get a hold of Rachel?”

Except for pushing her lips together so hard a white ring appears around them, Maya doesn’t move.

“Done!” my sister yells and grabs her brown paper bag.

I fill up my Kiwi CapriSun, pack up my lunch and start helping Maya put her lunch into her bag to take inside. We go in through the sliding glass door Oreo, our crazy, totally untrainable dog keeps running into, and ravenously put our food away. Popping sounds make Maya and me jump and my ears go hot and I’m pretty sure I’m going to throw up until I remember that it’s the foosball table in the basement. That must be where my brother is.

My dad’s in his office with the rattly doors basically made of windows closed, meaning you have to make an appointment if you want to see him. He’s said that his kids can make an appointment “any time,” but I don’t think any of us have ever felt like we really could do that.

“Where’s Mom?” My sister looks at me, pretending not to have been scared by the foosball table, too.

“I think you should go find her,” I shrug. “I’d start with the basement.” When she shrinks into herself, I frown sadly. “Want me to come with you?”

She nods and grabs my hand with one hand and Maya’s hand with the other. We walk backwards down the stairs where our brother’s blasting basketball playoffs and playing foosball against himself.“Where’s Mom?” My sister yells over the TV. Our brother jumps he was so mesmerized by his own skill pinballing a weird, white sphere around a green slab of wood with creepy men on sticks.

“What? I don’t know! Why are you blaming me when you’re the one who can’t find her?”

My sister lets go of our hands and yells back at my brother. They start fighting, so Maya and I escape backward up the hardwood stairs. “It’s about time for our M&M Club Meeting anyway,” Maya says and we run backwards up the carpeted staircase to my room.

The Secret Club

I close my closet door and I wedge the customary towel between the bottom of it and the carpet. Maya stuffs the chosen t-shirt in the hole my sister and I dug in the wall between our two closets when we were still friends. We pull out our club binders covered in Lisa Frank stickers and each other’s signatures, both with our current last names and the ones we’re practicing with the last names of the NSYNC members—JC and Lance—we are each definitely going to marry.

Maya opens to today’s agenda. “Anything else we need to cover?”

I open my binder to the matching page. “Rockies update: they’re in their seventh season, opening day was two weeks ago and they won against the Padres, who went to the World Series but lost to the Yankees, thanks to Blake Street Bombers Vinny Castilla and Dante Bichette.”

Maya crosses off something on her list. “Excellent. How about the Avs?”

We assigned sports—meaning baseball and hockey right now because we don’t care about basketball—to me because that’s pretty much all my dad and my brother talk about, and I have a photographic memory for everything I hear. It sounds like a neat party trick, but it translates to one more reason I’m responsible for everything because other people don’t even try to remember stuff. “The Avalanche are now in their 5^th season, play-offs started last week, and they lost to the Phoenix Coyotes for the first time last night. Series is currently 3 to 1, Avs, with the final game tomorrow.”

Maya crosses another thing off her list. “Cool. I move to add “Baby One More Time” and “She’s So High” to our list.”

“I second.”

“Added. And also “I Want It That Way.”

“Ew, isn’t that a Backstreet Boys song?” I wrinkle my nose.

“So?” Maya wrinkles her nose back at me.

“Do you want JC to think you’re cheating on him?”

Maya’s spine straightens and she looks hurt. “Of course not. I would never do that.”

“Kay, I believe you, but I move we add “I Want You Back” and “Here We Go” instead, just to be safe.”

Maya nods but still looks kind of hurt. “Fine, I second, but we probably need to cut the list down a little. It’s not all going to fit on one cassette.”

“True. Any suggestions?”

Maya keeps her nose scrunched up. “The Thunder Rolls” is probably going to be really hard to dance to. So, move to strike?”

I nod.

“So is that a second?”

“Ye-es.” I glare at her.

“Great.” Maya scratches something else off her list and mock glares back.

“We’ll need to work on the order, too, but I think we should open with “The River.”

“So, like, the whole performance will be like a dream? Genius,” Maya says, holding her hand out for a high five. “Next up is our dance recital song list. I’ve got: “Callin’ Baton Rouge,” “Tearin’ Up My Heart,” “Rodeo,” “Lady Madonna,” “You’re An All Star,”  “Summer Girls,” “Slide,” “That Don’t Impress Me Much,” “Black Balloon,” “Miami,” “Doo Wop,” “Joker,” “Back in the High Life,” and “It’s Not Right, But It’s Okay.”

I pat Maya’s back as she gives me a hug and try to hold my breath until the hug’s over so I don’t give away that her shoulder is jamming into my neck. “I can’t wait.”

Maya has her arms around my shoulders so fast I can’t really return the hug. “It’s going to be so much better with you there. I mean, it was already really good.”

“I’ve already asked my mom and she can even drive us if you want.”

Maya’s smile somehow got bigger. “So you’ll come tomorrow, then?”

“Yeah, I really don’t get the whole Jesus thing, but your youth group is a lot nicer than the one at the church my parents drag me to to make my grandparents happy.”

“Yeah? Even though you don’t really get the whole Jesus thing?” Maya smiles really big and my stomach muscles that I didn’t know had been clenched for so long, relax. She actually wants me around after all.

“Oh, um, the final thing on the friendship check in? I really do want to go to youth group with you if you still want me there.”

“No, I want to, it’s just…” Maya is distracted. She is a lot more okay with silence than I am. I hold my breath for as long as I can because I really don’t like always being the only one to move the conversation forward, especially since she is the secretary, but I can’t outwait her. Probably because she doesn’t even know there’s a competition.

“Totally!” I know I sound like cotton candy when I try this hard, but how else do people have friends?

“Oh yeah, I guess it was my idea.” Maya sounds tired. “I was just thinking it would be cool to show our grandkids someday.”

“I mean, I think it was your idea originally, so I’m good with whatever you were thinking.” I don’t know how to be any more laid back without falling over.

“And were you thinking we’d write the letter at the sleepovers?”

She sounds annoyed, so I act cool. “I mean, the sleepover marathon can happen at either house, or we can trade off or however you want to do it.”

“Okay, first thing as always: friendship check-in,” Maya says. “I have the summer letter, the marathon sleepover and youth group.”

Maya, who we appointed secretary at our first meeting of the M & M Club last year when we started 6^th grade, opens our meeting in prayer. I don’t understand what she’s doing, but I really want her to keep liking me, which wasn’t a problem until middle school, but things are different now. So I bow my head and close my eyes, peaking only to see when she’s done. After she says amen, she whispers “Father, Son and Holy Spirit” three times while she draws a cross with her finger on her body, tapping her shoulders and forehead too fast for me to really imitate. It must be from Catholic School, which she went to after we met in kindergarten since I haven’t seen anyone else do that and I don’t know anyone else who went to Catholic School.

Our parents said we could have a sleepover tonight since there’s no school tomorrow, but I got her to come to my house because her house is so dirty, I can’t breathe when I go over there. I mean, you literally can’t see the floor in any of the upstairs rooms and we’re not allowed in the basement, it’s so cluttered. Also, I think that’s her older half-sister’s bedroom. I could never tell her that, all the sudden, I suffocate when I walk into her house. Of course I find out another way to get her over to my house—she likes my house and my parents better anyway.

I pull away the towel under the door, fold it and shove it under my sweaters in the bottom drawer, which is also where we hide our Club binders. I crack the door and stick my ear out to listen if the coast is clear for us to sneak out without giving our meeting spot away. When it’s safe, we exit my closet like we were never in there and run to the bathroom. I catch out the window that snow is already covering everything as we lock the door to both my side of the bathroom my sister and me share and my sister’s side to start getting ready to wake up.

Day 0

The Boy In the Window

My mom tries for hours to get through. Maya is the first of my friends she calls looking for me. My sister and brother went to school and came back like normal. They are still young enough for the grownups to protect them from knowing about bad things. They have no idea what my problem is.

Maya and I stand in her living room between the sharp-edged coffee table and the TV. The whole room, which feels like a cave even with the curtains still open because it’s that dark out, pulses creepy blue. I’ve slept on that giant, corduroy green couch so many times, but I have to keep turning around to make sure it’s not a huge animal crouching behind us, waiting for the perfect moment to attack. The pictures in the frames on the wall keep changing with every flicker. I’m even in some of them since I’ve had Thanksgiving and Christmas at Maya’s house sometimes—she’s had holidays at my house, too. But I have to study them every five seconds to keep the people that are supposed to be there in them. Otherwise, they go strange and start to crawl their way out of the past they’re locked in. Maya is the middle of three girls with an older half-sister, but her house is silent. Even Muppet, Maya’s black lab, is nowhere to be heard.

Police officers, standing on an ambulance, toss a guy up through a shattered window. One of his legs isn’t moving right and one of his arms isn’t moving at all except with gravity. His leg mops up a streak of blood on the wall of whatever building this is as he reaches the ledge, where he dangles before disappearing. Yeah, this looks like war, I think to myself. Operation Desert Storm, which I saw on the news when I was five, and the Oklahoma City bombing, which I saw on the news when I was nine, flash brightly for a second over the boy in the window, ash and pieces of concrete and jagged slabs of wood falling around Maya and me and the couch and the pictures and the TV. But those were all in the Middle East, wherever that is. They wouldn’t keep us at school and not let us go to lunch and cut recess short because something else happened in the Middle East.

The news shows the police throwing the really injured guy back up into the building over and over.

Finally, Maya says, “Wait, isn’t that Columbine High School?” She points at the pieces of aquamarine glass scattered around the ledge of the window near the bleeding boy and we both freeze.

My grandmother took me and my siblings to Clement Park, the best park in Littleton, all the time before I went to middle school, and you can see Columbine from the top of the slide (and the monkey bars, but we’re technically not allowed to stand on the monkey bars, at least not until we’re older and we can do it without getting caught). There isn’t any other building anywhere I know of that has that color windows. But it can’t be Columbine.

“No,” we say at the same time, kind of laughing. “They don’t have guns at school.”

Getting to Go Home

Maya tries to call Rachel just to be sure. I’m sort of friends with Rachel, too, but Maya is a lot cooler than me, so she fits in better with high schoolers.

“No one’s answering,” Maya says like she’s blaming me and her hands start to shake.

“That doesn’t mean anything,” I say, but, when I hear how shaky my voice is, I don’t expect Maya to believe me.

After a Blackjack Pizza commercial and that stupid one with guys holding beer saying “whassaaaa” really obnoxiously to each other, the boy in the window comes back. Maya’s knees wobble and she starts dialing Rachel’s number again. “Still no answer,” she says and starts pacing.

I grab the phone so I don’t have to keep ducking under the curly cord. “Let me try.” I stare at her until she recited the Scotts’ number. I dial it but it doesn’t even ring. “It’s not even going through,” I say.

“That’s worse than not answering, right?”

I try to say “right” but it comes out as air and kind of a choke.

We stand in the flickery blue cave with the dangerous monster just about to pounce until Maya’s dad calls from the garage that it’s time to go. We climb into the back seat and he starts the car before we have our seatbelts buckled. Not everyone has to go back to school this late; it’s only the ones that are the closest to Columbine. Less than ten minutes away, I think the adults decided. Maya’s dad doesn’t say anything as he drives backward to our school and parks in front of the bus we usually take home to let us out. It’s faster to go with Maya, plus, I know there probably won’t be adults at her house and I do not want to have to tell my parents I’m okay, I’m okay, I’m okay until they’re okay. I can walk home from her house when I’m ready to.

Maya and I walk in together until we have to go down different hallways. I almost grab her hand. I’ve never seen my school, or any school, at night. There are way too many places someone could be hiding.

Language Arts

All the teachers in the school come to get us by class. They walk us like kindergartners to our classrooms even though it’s dinner time. They still don’t tell us why we can’t leave.

Ms. McConnell has us sit in our group-work pods, so I sit between my new boyfriend Justin and his best friend Matt. I’m across from Raul, who keeps kicking my shins and apologizing like it’s not on purpose, and diagonal from Erica, who’s been my friend since she moved to Littleton from North Dakota two years ago when her dad got hired as the Chief of Police. We were going to play with her new guinea pigs Bonnie and Clyde after school, but now there isn’t time. Instead, Ms. McConnell puts on a documentary about lemmings that ends with them all following each other off a cliff.

Raul whispers, “Just like those crazy pigs in the Bible.” Darren snickers. Jordan squeezes my hand.

Before the movie, the whole class is supposed to be reading and working on homework. I finish The Hidden Window Mystery—I love Nancy Drew but I’m not reading them in order because they don’t always have the next one at the library—and pull out my book report on Walkabout to work on. But Raul and Darren start drawing scenes from Lord of the Flies and pushing them in front of Erica, who squirms and tries to shove them back, so I can’t concentrate.

I also can’t concentrate because school is over and we aren’t being let go and no one is telling us why. The country is at war, I think the minute I look at the clock and see 2:56 pm, 11 minutes after the buses come. The Russians are coming for Norad.

“What’s Norad?” I write on the corner of a piece of paper, tear it off, fold it into a heart and pass it to Jordan.

It takes Jordan five minutes to pass the note back, and all it says is, “I think it’s NORAD, and it’s a bunch of radioactive uranium in the mountains.”

That feeling I have right before they shoot that gun at track meets to scare you into running slams into me from both sides. I want to run like I’m holding a baton and my teammates are counting on me, but just now, I look over and see that the door’s locked. All the sudden, my throat is so dry I can’t swallow.

Jordan passes me another note. “What the H-E-double-hockey-sticks is going down, yo?” It’s in Erica’s cursive in sparkly pink gel pen.

“The only thing I can think is that Ms. McConnell is about to do something crazy,” I write back in my purple gel pen. I draw a smiley face because I want to be joking. Something really weird is going on, though.

It’s 12:04pm, exactly 17 minutes after the next period is supposed to begin, which is lunch for Erica, Jordan, and me. It seems like nothing’s happening now that Ms. McConnell has finished the lesson on the different essay structures. I loved it, but it really freaks me out when adults don’t know what to do, so I distract myself and slip out my secret poem notebook that no one else in the world knows about. I fill another five pages with poems about the school field trip to the mountains earlier this year where my crush gave me a piggy-back ride through the snow because I lost my glasses and the two Appaloosas at horse camp I can’t wait to see again when it’s my Girl Scout troop’s turn to go and really bad ones about sunsets and dandelions and how finally getting a boyfriend makes me feel like I’m frolicking through a field of peonies in a dress made of rainbows. And that last line is exactly why no one shall ever know what’s in this notebook.

The Run Gun

Ten minutes before we’re supposed to go to 4^th period, the teachers run backwards away from us as we run backward away from the school. Everything in me wants to do the opposite, but I’ve never had such a strong feeling for no reason before, so I just do what everyone else is doing. Safety in numbers. Jordan, Erica, Darren and I stop at the foursquare courts overlooking the track field. The asphalt is already so hot it’s giving off heat haze. Darren’s about to start the next game when an eighth grader yells, “Gunfire!”

Weird yellow flashes go off right before strange crackling, popping sounds. It’s not fireworks—it’s just a regular Tuesday morning—and I’ve never heard a gun, but I think they’d be louder. My stomach plunges—actually, I have heard a gun before: at the beginning of every race at every track meet. Did I forget there’s supposed to be a meet right now? Am I supposed to be running a race and not at recess?

I’m staring at the track, rehearsing not feeling like I’m going to throw up whenever I see a track, since our practice meet is this weekend and I have to run the two-mile because I’m the slowest one on the track team, but I can run forever.

My dream is that someday, I won’t have to.

[1] Cassie and Rachel refer to real, historical people. All other names, unless otherwise noted, have been changed.

[2] Tom, Brian, Larry, Misty, Dawn, Darrell, Don and Dee, Vonda and Michael, John, Neal and Patty, Al and Phyllis, Ann and Joe refer to real, historical people, all of whom are still living. All other names, unless otherwise noted, have been changed.