by Cate Carlyle
“When Beth turned five years old, she started kindergarten at the local school. She was really excited to start school and knew all her letters and numbers before the first day. She could even print Beth, Mom, Dad and Caesar, the family schnauzer’s name. Beth’s parents always told her she was a very smart girl and that she was the nicest girl they knew. Her first few weeks at school were great. Beth loved it and she loved her teacher, Miss K.
“Then, after about a month, a couple of the kids started to notice when Beth spoke, and they would whisper to each other. Then they started to tease her. ‘Beff, why you t ... t ... t ... talk like ffat?’ You see, Beth stuttered. And Beth didn’t pronounce some sounds right. Th’s came out sounding like f ’s. W’s sounded like r’s. No one had made fun of Beth before. Her parents thought her speech was cute and that it would probably go away on its own. Beth brushed it off. She still loved school and had lots of kids to play with. She liked learning new words and learning how to read books and write sentences. Beth ignored anyone who teased her; she was too busy playing and learning.
“When Beth entered grade one the next year, things started to change. More of the kids noticed her stuttering and started to talk about it.
‘You can’t play with us, you talk weird.’
‘Why, does Beth have to read out loud, it takes too long?’
‘B ... b ... b ... b ... beff is th ... th ... thupid’
“So even though Beth loved school and learning, and she couldn’t have been happier at home with her loving parents and her neighborhood friends, the teasing gradually started to get to her. Beth started to pretend to not know words in class, even though she did, so that the teacher wouldn’t call on her. The happy, chatty, little girl started to speak less and worry about what she wanted to say. The teacher assumed that Beth would rather not speak in class and so she would pull Beth aside to do her reading practice at the teacher’s desk, when the rest of the class was working at their desks. This actually caused more harm than good because the other students thought that Beth was getting special attention from the teacher, and the teasing got worse. Beth would hear the other’s chanting ‘Beff, Beff teather’s pet,’ but she tried not to cry or show that it upset her. She just became quieter and more timid. Happy, outgoing, energetic Beth was disappearing.
“When Beth turned six years old, her parents realized that Beth’s speech was not something that she was going to grow out of quickly, and they were anxious about the changes in Beth since she had started school. Their Beth was still very smart and was reading and writing well above her grade, but she rarely read out loud or spoke or sang anymore. She became very quiet and people thought she was shy. So, when Beth started grade two, her parents asked that she start seeing a therapist who would take her out of class for half an hour each morning and afternoon. They would work on sounds, and how to fix her breathing to help with the stutter, and how to slow down. And Beth had exercises to do at home at night too.
“The other kids teased her even more about being different and getting to leave class, and they would still chase her at recess yelling ‘Wun, Beff, wun.’ Beth got quieter and quieter. Over the years Beth learned how to manage and hide the stutter and she learned how to pronounce her Th’s and her r’s. But the bullying and teasing stuck, and so if you had never met Beth before, you would think she was a very smart, shy girl, who didn’t talk much. But you wouldn’t know she’d ever had speech problems.”
“Damn bullies,” I interrupted.
“Sshhh.” Kayla put her finger to her lips.
“During the summer between grade seven and eight, Beth started taking gymnastics and dance classes. She loved those classes and she was pretty good at them both too. No one in the classes teased her because they didn’t know her; the classes were in another town about a half hour away. Then in between grade eight and nine, Beth’s dad got a new job and they moved to a town where no one knew her.
“When Beth started high school that September; she was starting fresh with new classmates who didn’t know about the teasing and the stuttering. Beth joined clubs, got a job, and slowly started to come back out of her shell, like a beautiful turtle, her mom said. She made new friends and gained confidence and started to become the girl she used to be, who couldn’t wait to jump out of bed and get to school each day ... and she lived happily ever after. The end”
“Until a shooter showed up at her school, right Beth?” I asked.
“Yup. You knew it was my story?” she asked, surprised.
“Pretty much from, ‘There once was a happy little girl,’” I teased. “So, not the blissful early years I had assumed?”
“Nope,” she said. “Gymnastics and dance really saved me and then that got me into cheering, which helped my confidence even more.”
“Hmm, guess you didn’t get into it for the cute skirts and the guys then? Only reasons I’d ever get on someone’s back and yell ‘Rah!’”
“No, and it’s great exercise,” she said. “I got Skylar to join too and it has been great for her confidence. She’s the girl who I volunteer with as a Big Sister. You should really ...”
“Wait, wait, wait, hold up there, Cheer Squad Barbie,” I held up my hand in her face. “If I hear about one more saintly thing you do, or one more hardship you overcame, I will lose my Kit Kat right here at your feet. And I might have to rethink my whole life.”
I was only half-joking. I grabbed the pen and crumpled up paper out of my back pocket and added:
I might not get to every item, and the list might have to change in parts, but it was a start. I held the paper up so Kayla could read it.
She looked it over quickly and then replied, “Proud of you, my friend.”
I don’t take compliments well, and while I was desperately trying to dial up a sarcastic retort, Kayla started quickly scrolling through her phone. She then began typing frantically, thumbs flying.
“Wow. Wow,” Kayla spoke barely above a whisper.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, looking around and noticing that the noise level was rising rapidly in the room and that many others were also intent on their phones, scrolling and typing feverishly.
“One sec.” Kayla kept typing.
I waited patiently, picking up a few excited voices in the room and the sounds of people moving about more, coming back to life.
One one thousandth, two one thousandths, three one thousandths. It wasn’t one sec. I counted out twelve secs. The longest twelve seconds of my life.
Kayla looked me in the eye and placed her hand on top of mine.
“People outside are tweeting that the shooter is dead,” she said.
“Yes!” I said as I punched the air. “That’s awesome. What did they say?”
“Um ... ‘shooter may be down, self-inflicted,’ ‘SWPD take out Southwestern killer,’ ‘SWPD preparing to get students out.’ And then my mom said that some students are already outside, and I haven’t heard from Paul in a while. Maybe he’s already out?”
“I wonder how they will get us all out,” I said. “It’s not like the SWPD have dealt with this before. And how will they know if he really is dead?” I worried.
“I’m sure they know what they’re doing,” Kayla reassured me. “Don’t lose it now, Ginny. Not after all this.”
In that moment, we heard the high-pitched wail of sirens outside and could see flashing red and blue lights reflected in the windows. We could hear vehicles screeching to a stop in the parking lot and the faint hum of a helicopter.
“Things are definitely happening,” Kayla said.
The others in the room seemed to be noticing too. People were inching up and over the window sill to look out at the activity. The noise level continued to rise and we noticed that some had turned the volume back up on their phones and ringtones were going off and pings could be heard as messages were exchanged.
“Shit,” I said to Kayla. “You are going to have to do something. We don’t even know if he’s dead. Could be a false alarm or fake tw
eets or maybe there’s even more than one shooter! We can’t get stupid now!” I could feel myself starting to panic, my heart racing and my breath catching.
“Me? I’m going to have to do something? Why me?” she asked.
“Because they listen to you and you have dealt with this all day like a boss. Home stretch now, Kayla.”
“Ugh,” Kayla groaned, then turned to the class. “I don’t think we should do anything yet, no one has sounded the all clear or contacted anyone in here about getting out.”
Frustrated at the possibility of being so close to freedom but not knowing for sure, I decided to go check on Owen. Since Max’s revelation, I had purposely tried to stay away, for my own sanity and to give Max some space to be with his boyfriend. I crawled over to them, Kayla shadowing right behind me, and found Max propped against the cupboards with Owen’s head in his lap. Max’s eyes were closed but his lips were moving. He didn’t look good.
“Hey Max,” Kayla said. “How’s our boy doing now?”
Max roused and opened his eyes to look at us.
“Not good,” he said. “He did wake up for a few minutes and take some water but then he went back to that deep sleep.” Max shifted a little trying to sit a bit higher and raise Owen’s head a little father up his lap.
“His nose stopped bleeding a while ago, but I think his leg wound is bleeding again,” Max said.
Kayla and I looked down at Max’s legs where Owen had been resting a minute ago. Max’s jeans were wet with blood from the knee down. I could smell the metallic scent and could only guess at how uncomfortable it must have been for Max to be sitting in jeans sopping with blood, especially since it was his boyfriend’s blood.
“Oh,” Kayla said, worry in her voice. “Here Max, we need to try to stop that if we can,” she said whipping off the bloody button-down she’d had on over top of her Southwestern Cheer tee. The shirt was a write-off, spattered with dark splotches of both Miss Jones’s and Kayla’s blood and the hole in the shoulder. “Help me lift Owen’s hips a bit Ginny, so I can try to tie this around his leg,” she said as she turned the shirt inside out and held the sleeves out to use for ties.
Max supported Owen with both hands under his back and I gently lifted Owen’s leg while Kayla swiftly tied a tourniquet around the leg. Max had his head turned to the side and we could see him trying desperately not to gag.
“Sorry,” he said as he lifted his nose up in the air and took a deep breath, “blood makes me barf. I’m a wimp. Sometimes I even pass out.”
“Oh dear, another fainter. Ginny here already passed out on me this morning. You two are sooo delicate!” Kayla teased.
I stared at Max. Not just a pretty boy, are you Max? As much as I wanted to hate Max for taking my Owen, and I really, really wanted to hate him, I just couldn’t. For someone who fainted at the sight of blood, it must have been super hard to spend the morning with the guy he loved bleeding out in his lap and to never leave his side. Impressive. Nothing says love like stepping up when it’s life or death. If Owen had to be with someone else, Max seemed like a strong second choice. I didn’t think that I could have done the same in Max’s shoes.
“You’ve seen the tweets and news online, Max?” Kayla tried to keep him distracted.
“No,” he replied weakly. “I dropped my phone somewhere in here this morning and didn’t want to move to look for it once I was with Owen. What’s the latest?”
“Rumor has it that the shooter might be done and we might be getting out of here soon,” I told him.
“Can’t be soon enough,” Max said sadly.
“Well I think Owen owes you big time after today, Max,” Kayla tried to lighten the mood. “Definitely more than splitting dinner and a movie. You make sure he foots the bill.”
“The only reward I need is for O to be okay,” Max said.
I didn’t know what to say. I was struck by how old and tired Max sounded. Maybe we had all aged in the hours since the shooter had arrived and ripped our lives apart. It seemed like an eternity since Mom had dragged me out of bed and I had been nasty to her, dismissing her worries about my cutting and stalking off. Had that really just been hours ago? It seemed like another lifetime. Wait until I told her about Owen, she wouldn’t believe it. Or maybe she had already guessed? Mom and I hadn’t really talked much lately. I’d been shutting her out, staying in my room more, hiding my cuts from her again. Why had I been such a bitch to her this morning when she was clearly just worried about me? It was just the two of us now, and she was probably outside panicking that she could lose me today too. Kayla tapped me on the shoulder, bringing my pity party to a close.
“I’m just going to check on Miss Jones. You comin’?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said.
We crawled back to Miss Jones. The green mound that was her covered corpse was now surrounded by objects. Origami swans and notes written on paper hearts:
RIP Miss Jones
Never forgotten SWHS 2019
Gone too soon
We will meet again
Love you Miss Jones XO
There were even bracelets and crosses that students had taken off and placed beside her.
“This is so messed up,” I said to Kayla. “Why did this happen? Why us? Why here? Why today? It’s so random and impossible.”
“I can’t answer that, Ginny,” Kayla said. “It makes no sense to me either. Don’t get sucked into those thoughts now. I’ve seen the news coverage of school shootings in the States, but I never really paid attention. Never once did I think for the tiniest fraction of a second that it would ever happen here. But we just have to keep it together a little while longer. You can do this, I know you can.”
I was fed up, and furious, and sad, and confused, all at the same time. I wasn’t so sure that I could keep it together anymore. I entertained the thought of going batshit crazy and throwing a desk through a window and climbing out to safety. Or being the hero and opening the door and just walking out into the hallway and out the front doors. You want a piece of me, well here I am. I’d either end up a hero or dead. I didn’t really want to be either. I just wanted to go home.
As more text messages were exchanged and tweets read, and the news feeds started to pick up on what was unfolding at Southwestern High, the students around me were starting to panic. It was becoming clear from social media that some students had exited the school, either escaped or been rescued. I overheard that most news feeds were also reporting that the shooter was “neutralized.” The whir of helicopters overhead was unmistakable; I guessed they were either medic choppers airlifting the injured or news choppers angling for a closer view. The red and blue lights flashing through the slats in the blinds on the windows had also grown more intense as more teams had arrived outside.
“What the hell?!” Jace could be heard above the quiet chatter.
“They’ve forgotten us!” someone called out, their voice shaking and frantic.
“What do you think?” I whispered to Kayla. “Think we were forgotten in the madness?”
“No way,” she replied. “I’m sure these things just take time. But it can’t be too soon for Owen I don’t think.”
“Or Miss Jones,” I said.
“I just hope that no one does anything stupid now that the end is in sight. I read about a kid getting shot once because he was fleeing from danger somewhere and the police mistook him for the gunman,” she said.
“Do you think they took out the shooter?” I asked. “If they did, I hope no one else got caught in the crossfire.”
“Me too. I’m guessing that they either took him out, or arrested him, or he killed himself. They seem to do that when the police close in.”
My friend Daisy’s dad was a cop. I remember Daisy telling me that he would go into her room at night when he came home after a shift and wake her up to kiss her goodnight. She insisted he do that so she would know he got home safely. He had a safe hanging on the wall in the basement of their house where he kept his gun. Whe
never we had to go in Daisy’s basement to get our scooters or to get a soda from her snack fridge, I would leave extra space to walk around the safe like it could reach out and get me. The safe was locked tight with a huge padlock and a combination lock, but I was terrified of what was inside. I had been raised with a healthy fear of guns, and Daisy and I had been told repeatedly that the safe was off limits. I didn’t even want my arm to brush against it, that’s how terrified I was of what lurked inside.
Now that it felt like any imminent danger might have passed, I was willing to sit tight in Homeroom A as long as necessary to avoid any crossfire or any interactions with the shooter. But others weren’t so patient. They wanted fresh air, and food and water, and to escape from the stench of the tiny bathroom that was now wafting into our bloody sweaty Monday prison.
“Paul just told me that he is being bussed to the hospital to get checked over with a bunch of other students,” she said. “He said he’s not sure whether the shooter is still in here.”
“Is he okay?” I asked her.
“Yes, he’s fine. He’s a big guy with the heart of a teddy bear. I’m sure he took care of whoever was trapped with him.”
“Sounds like you two will make a perfect couple,” I said trying not to sound jealous.
“You will have to meet him,” she said. “I know you would like him.”
“Sure,” I said.
“He’s going to college for vet school next year. His family has a farm with horses and pigs and goats. I know he’s birthed a few of the horses even,” Kayla bragged.
“Great,” I lied. “You too can get cowboy hats and a big old truck with horns on the front and live happily ever after.”