IN THE FALL, THE LOCKDOWN drill had taken place in the middle of fifth period. We’d all been informed about it ahead of time, so it had been no surprise when the announcement had come over the loudspeaker. My history teacher had dutifully locked the door, turned off the lights, closed the blinds, and motioned to us all to huddle behind our desks. None of us had bothered moving all that fast, not even the teacher, and we’d spent less than ten minutes sitting on the floor before we’d gotten the all clear. There had been no urgency, no realism—it had simply been an exercise in following basic protocol.
Apparently, the administration wanted to shake things up, because this time there was no warning, and the intercom came on during lunch, right after I’d tossed the remains of my food into the trash and headed into the hallway.
“This is a lockdown drill,” the principal said. “Please quickly proceed to the nearest location you can secure. This is a drill, but we ask that you take it very seriously.”
I looked around for Sarah, before remembering she’d gone to fill up her water bottle, leaving from a different exit. I studied the cafeteria, unsure whether I should go back in. Could it be secured? Probably, but I couldn’t tell if the doors locked. I swiveled around, searching for another location, even as other people swirled around me, making similar calculations. Then I spotted Brian and Charlie disappearing into the chemistry lab, so I started to make my way toward it, speeding up when Charlie began to pull the door shut behind him.
“Wait,” I called. “I’m coming.”
Charlie paused, leaving the door partway open. I ran the last few steps and slid inside the room.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Not a problem,” he said as he locked the door. “Get the lights.”
I found the switch on the wall and flicked it off.
Charlie stared at the door. “Why doesn’t this window have shades?” He turned and called out over his shoulder. “Brian, can you grab a couple of pieces of paper and some tape so we can cover the window? Right now, they could see right in.”
Brian walked over to the teacher’s desk, which was empty. Mr. Ryers must have still been at lunch.
There was a loud knock on the door. “Hey, open up.”
“Are you the shooter?” Charlie said, craning his head to the window. “Because if so, I’m pretty sure I’m not supposed to let you in.”
“You can see me, Charlie,” the girl said. Her voice was familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. “You can see both of us. Let us in.”
“One of you could have a gun in your backpack,” he said. “Or a machete. I should probably leave you both out there. Better safe than sorry.”
“I promise that neither of us has a damn machete, all right? Let us in.” I placed the voice: Lauren. Lauren, in her natural state: pissed off.
“Let her in,” Brian said, walking over with the paper and a roll of tape. “She’s just going to keep knocking until you do.”
Charlie shrugged. “I was only looking out for you.” He unlocked the door and pulled it open.
Lauren threw Charlie an annoyed look as she walked into the dark room. Mona followed close behind her. She paused when she saw Brian, and for a second it looked like she might turn back. But Charlie was already locking the door again.
“You’re welcome,” Charlie called over his shoulder toward Lauren. “Please don’t murder us all now.”
Lauren rolled her eyes. “Whatever.” Then she looked at Mona and followed her gaze to Brian. “Come on, Mona,” she said. “Let’s go to the back. This will be over in a couple of minutes.”
Brian continued to hold the paper, unmoving, as Lauren steered Mona firmly toward the back of the room.
Charlie shook his head, annoyed. “Brian, forget about that mess and bring over the damn paper,” he said. “I’m not interested in getting a lecture from my dad about how we screwed this up.”
Brian tore his gaze away from Mona. “Okay, I’m coming,” he said. He held the paper up against the glass with one hand and carefully taped it using the other. “There.”
“You should use a second sheet,” I said. “It’s thin paper. You can practically see through it.”
“One is fine,” Charlie said. “All that matters is that we covered it.”
Brian paused, the second sheet of paper in his hands, and that was when we all heard it. The sound of heavy footsteps coming down the empty hallway.
I crouched down against the wall, and Brian silently stepped away from the door, paper still in his hand, and crouched down beside me.
Walking, walking, stop. A pause, a sound of clicking, and then more walking. Doors: he was trying the doors. Last time, there had been yelling, the role of the active shooter played by a community theater volunteer relishing his moment in the spotlight, but this time there was only the footsteps and the turning of knobs. And the sound of Brian’s slow breathing beside me.
I felt exposed sitting there, with nothing but Brian between me and the door. I should have gone to the back of the room. Or behind the teacher’s desk. The footsteps were getting closer, though, so I stayed put. As they echoed down the hall, I couldn’t help but remember the video they’d made us all watch freshman year. In it, the shooter had worn heavy army boots and fatigue pants, and in one chilling frame the shadow of him and the gun he carried had stretched out along the expanse of empty hall. His face registered only as a sketch in my mind, with the wide jaw and unsmiling eyes of an action figure.
It was easier that way, I thought, to think of the shooter as an anonymous outsider, to mute the reality that it was far more likely to be a fellow student. Maybe that was the thing no one really knew how to prepare for, that your life might ultimately depend on how quickly you could switch from seeing the shooter as the person who sat two seats away from you in history—the person who offered you a stick of gum—seeing them as the person who might kill you.
The footsteps grew closer and closer and then they stopped right outside the door. Through the thin sheet of paper covering the glass, I could make out the faint shape of a head. This is not real, I told myself, even as I stopped breathing and closed my eyes, waiting for the sound of them trying the doorknob.
Click, click. He paused and then tried again. Click, click.
It was locked. The room was dark. There was paper over the window.
Please keep walking, I thought. We followed the rules.
For another long, long second there was silence. And then the footsteps started again, this time walking away, toward the gym.
I wondered if they’d been able to secure the doors.
Brian shifted beside me, quietly stretching his legs.
“What were you talking about the other day?” I whispered. “About Anna?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” he said. “Keep quiet.”
“I am being quiet,” I said, still whispering, but pressing my advantage now that he couldn’t just walk off. “You said there was some stuff written about her. What did someone write about her?”
Brian shook his head. “Nothing.”
“It wasn’t nothing. Tell me.”
He looked toward the intercom, as if willing it to come on and release him from this room, this conversation. “Look, some idiot wrote some stuff about her in the bathroom,” he said eventually. “That’s all.”
I took that in, processing it. “Which bathroom?” I asked.
“By the music room,” he said. “But it’s really no big deal. You should just forget about it.”
“Sure,” I said, having no intention whatsoever of doing that. Then I leaned back and listened to the sound of footsteps walking away from the cafeteria, away from the chem lab, heading down the hall to the next room.
It felt like it took a very long time before the intercom crackled on again, telling us all that it was over.
* * *
AFTER TRACK, I TOLD SARAH I’d walk home, that I’d forgotten something in my locker and didn’t want to keep her. She offered to wait but I said no, that I could use the exercise. Which was, perhaps, an odd comment after running for over an hour, but she didn’t ask any follow-up questions.
The hallway was deserted, but I still knocked before entering the bathroom. Two loud, sharp knocks. I waited for a few seconds, listening for a flush, an annoyed response. There was nothing, no sound of life, so I went in.
Inside, there was an old brick for when the door needed to be propped upon. I slid it against the door so that no one else could enter.
The air was stale, and the lone window looked like it hadn’t been opened in a very long time. Each of the stalls featured a handful of scrawls—mostly a call-and-response of expletives with the occasional indecipherable drawing. None of them had anything to do with Anna.
It was only as I was leaving the second stall that I saw what I’d missed before on the opposite wall. There had been an attempt to cover the words with a layer of paint, and from a certain angle the effort had succeeded, but more paint was needed to truly obscure them from straight on.
The words were written in furious capital letters:
ANNA CUTTER IS A WHORE.
What I do know is that he was the first one to initiate contact, to vault across that gulf between us.
When he did, when he touched me in that unmistakable way, I almost stopped breathing.
I want to tell you that I moved away immediately. Instead, it took full, long seconds—ones that stretched like caramel, crackling at the edges like burnt sugar.
ANNA WAS THE GOOD ONE. People had always thought of her that way. The one who wouldn’t cause problems, the one who was kind—considerate. The one who opened doors for people, who bought thoughtful birthday presents and volunteered for food drives.
If someone had told me before, back when she was alive, that someone had called her a whore, had scrawled it across the wall of the boys’ bathroom, I’d have assumed they were making a terrible joke.
But someone had written that about her, had written it out in permanent black ink. Someone who’d seen her with someone? The person she’d been with? I didn’t know.
* * *
—
I WAS STARING OUT THE window in class, still thinking about the graffiti, when I saw a girl sitting on the edge of the roof—legs dangling back and forth, dark hair blowing in the breeze.
I thought it was Anna. Which meant it had happened, that I’d finally, officially lost it—not just momentarily seeing her in someone else, but seeing her in a place where there wasn’t anyone at all.
I closed my eyes tight and then reopened them.
The girl was still there. She wasn’t Anna, but she wasn’t a figment of my imagination either. It was a real girl up there, leaning forward at a dangerous angle.
I got up and ran out of the classroom. The hallway was longer than it had ever been. When I finally reached the stairs that led to the roof, I took them two at a time. I slowed down only right before I reached the door out to the roof, as my only working brain cell warned me against startling the girl perched on the ledge.
As the door closed quietly behind me, I stood and looked for the girl, afraid I might already be too late. I wasn’t. She was still there, her darks curls moving in the wind.
It was Mona, Lauren’s friend. She sat with her back to me, arms at her sides, holding on to the ledge with a troubling lightness.
I walked toward her cautiously, at an angle, so that she could see me before I reached her. She turned as my shadow fell along her back.
“Hey, Mona,” I said.
“Jess?” Her eyes were red, her skin pink and blotchy.
“That’s right,” I said as I kept walking toward her.
With a few more steps, I reached the ledge. I carefully lifted one leg over and then the other, sitting back as far as possible.
Don’t look down, I thought. Don’t look down and don’t think about Anna.
First, my eyes disobeyed me, training themselves on the pavement below, and then my brain disobeyed me, and I thought of Anna. Anna underneath the blue sheet. I clutched the ledge hard, the rough concrete grinding into my palms.
“This isn’t what it looks like,” Mona said.
“Okay.” I didn’t believe her. I thought it was probably exactly what it looked like. I looked down at her hand resting on the ledge. I wondered if I’d be able to grab her in time if I needed to. I moved my hand closer to hers to improve my odds.
“It’s quiet up here,” she said quietly. “It’s a good place to think.”
So is the library, I thought. So is the base of one of the many trees surrounding the school. There were many, many places that were good places to think—good places to cry, even—that were on ground level.
“It’s a nice view,” I said instead, making myself stare out in the distance. Keep talking, I thought. Something neutral, something mundane. “I can almost see my house.” I pointed with my free hand, leaving my other one near hers, tightly grasping the ledge. “I think it’s behind those trees. Where’s yours?”
She skimmed the horizon and then pointed to a spot close to the park. “Over there,” she said. “The one with the reddish roof and the blue siding.”
“I run through that park. There’s a path at the edge that goes out through the fields.”
She nodded. “Yeah, my mom used to go jogging on it—I’d go with her sometimes.”
“She stopped?”
She smiled for the first time since she’d seen me. “Oh yeah—she hates exercise. She just wanted to lose weight—she was always in a terrible mood when she got back. My dad and I practically begged her to stop.” She paused. “I’ve seen you running on the track—it looks like you actually enjoy it.”
I thought about how it felt when I was running. The quiet satisfaction of my body doing what I asked it to. The relief of not being so much in my own head for a while, the tension inside me temporarily loosening its hold. “I do like running,” I said. “I didn’t think I would, but I do. It feels like it makes me…clean, somehow.”
I didn’t know quite what I meant by that, only that it felt right.
Mona nodded like she understood. “That’s how I used to feel about cheerleading,” she said. “I knew exactly what I was supposed to be doing, exactly where I was supposed to be. I had this complete faith in my body that it could do whatever it needed to do, to flip through the air.”
I imagined Mona hurtling through the air, doing a high flip, knowing that she would land perfectly on her feet—and that being all that mattered in that particular moment. I could remember her last year, leaning against her locker, laughing, wearing her cheerleader outfit. She’d looked confident, happy—so sure in her skin that it almost hurt to look at her, even as you couldn’t quite bring yourself to look away.
“What happened?” I asked.
“It didn’t feel the same anymore. I lost that feeling, that sense of ownership over my body. Plus, I couldn’t cheer anymore, not for—” She paused and shook her head. “I don’t know. It’s different. I’m different.”
“Maybe you’ll get that feeling back,” I said.
“Maybe,” she said. “Sometimes I come out on game nights, just sit outside in the parking lot and listen to the music, try to imagine myself doing it again. I can’t, though. I think that version of me, of my life, is gone.”
She sounded so tired, so lost. And I knew it too well, what it felt like to lose a version of yourself. I closed my eyes, overwhelmed. It was all too close to the bone. The sadness. Girls on roofs, girls and windows. Losing their balance. Falling. Jumping.
“You don’t need to stay,” she said. “Really. I promise I’m not going to do anything.”
I wanted to belie
ve her. I wasn’t sure I did. Promises could be so easily broken.
“It really is peaceful up here,” I said. “I think I’ll stay for a while. Until you’re ready to go back inside.”
“Okay,” she said.
And so we sat there together, not speaking.
And I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d prevented something from happening or only delayed it.
ON SUNDAY MORNING, I TOLD myself I wasn’t necessarily expecting Nick to show up at the park again, despite his having mentioned it twice. But there he was, stretching against a tree, right on time. He’d been serious after all. And so had I. Of course, I was always serious.
“I’ve decided not to take it easy on you this time,” he said. “I’ve been practicing.”
“Me too,” I said.
“Good. I like a worthy competitor.” Then he grinned at me and took off.
I managed to keep going until he finally slowed and then flopped down unceremoniously beneath a tall tree with thick branches. I planted myself on a stretch of grass nearby, my lungs burning.
“Running around on the court is going to be nothing after all this,” he said, shaking his head in mock wonderment. “At this rate, I’ll never sit on the bench again.”
I took in a deep breath. “You sit on the bench often?”
“Not really. But it’s awful when I do—not only because I’m not playing, but also because that’s where the coach hangs out for most of the game.”
“That’s a bad thing?”
“It’s definitely not a good thing. The guy yells himself hoarse, and he has one of the worst cases of body odor ever.”
I wasn’t sure I smelled exactly amazing myself, so I clamped my arms tightly to my sides and made a mental note to put on extra deodorant next time. Next time. Funny how I was already assuming (hoping?) there would be a next time. “That’s too bad,” I said.
“Oh, it could be worse,” he said. “He’s all bark and no bite, really. Also, while I could do without all the yelling, it’s hard not to kind of like the guy after you’ve heard him on the phone with his four-year-old daughter. He once read her a bedtime story on the bus when we were coming back late from an away game—did all the voices and everything. Plus, he wears a bracelet she gave him at all the big games—it’s his lucky thing.”
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