This Is Not a Drill

by Beck McDowell

  Jake freezes and looks calmly at Stutts. Either he’s much braver than I am or he’s putting on a really good show for the kids.

  “You’re a bad, bad man!” Mason Mayfield III suddenly yells at Stutts, stomping his foot.

  Stutts’s face turns purple and he takes a menacing step toward Mason.

  Mrs. Campbell moves to Mason’s side at lightning speed. “Mason, no!” She grabs him by the shoulders.

  “Hey, he’s just a little kid,” Jake says. “He doesn’t mean anything. He just talks a lot.”

  “Shut him up!” Stutts shouts. “That kid doesn’t know anything about me—and neither do you.”

  Mason Mayfield III crosses his arms and pouts as Mrs. Campbell talks quietly to him. He’s obviously not getting it.

  “Alla you kids keep your mouths shut and nobody’ll get hurt,” Stutts shouts, glaring at the rest of them.

  Kimberly starts to cry and I move to comfort her. “Don’t worry, sweetheart, it’ll be okay,” I whisper.

  I look back at the other kids. They sit at eighteen small tabletop desks with tiny chairs; Mrs. Campbell usually groups them in pairs or fours. Patrick’s head is ducked so low, his nose almost touches his desk, and Kenji leans over to whisper to him, his almond eyes full of concern. DeQuan is sucking his thumb, Alicia shakes her head slowly, and Lewis pulls his hands inside his sleeves and flaps them nervously. Rose reaches up to tug on a piece of her straight, dark hair, watching Jake through adoring eyes.

  Their faces are puzzled. How can they possibly understand what’s happening? We make sure they use blunt scissors to cut things and stop them from running on the playground. But we never prepared them for this. Even my mother’s obsessive vigilance couldn’t have kept these children safe if the simple act of going to school results in this.

  And I don’t know how to help them. I’m seventeen years old. I just wanted to teach little kids some French. I didn’t sign on for dealing with a psycho.

  I’m praying God’s tuned in on this channel right now. I don’t ask him for a lot; I figure he’s busy. Right now I’m hoping I’ve saved up enough Good Girl Points to trade in for a big favor, because we’re going to need all the help we can get if we’re going to get out of this mess alive.

  CHAPTER 4

  JAKE

  “YOU! DON’T MOVE! DON’T EVEN think about it!” the guy yells in my face. His whiskey breath could melt the metal on that gun.

  “Sir, I’m going to do exactly what you want me to do,” I answer, sending out respect vibes for all I’m worth. “Just don’t hurt the kids.”

  “What I want you to do is stay out of my business,” he practically spits at me. He wheels around to Mrs. Campbell. “You too. Get out of my way.” He shoves her as he passes. She loses her balance and catches herself on Carlos’s desk. A couple more kids start crying.

  “Hey, hey,” I yell at Stutts. My muscles are tensed and primed to fight him, but I don’t dare move. “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “Shut up,” he shouts at me.

  “I’m okay, I’m fine,” Mrs. Campbell says, pushing herself back up quickly.

  Stutts storms over to Patrick’s desk, waving the gun too damn close to the kids’ heads as he passes. DeQuan’s eyes are huge, and Tyler actually ducks. Stutts grabs his son’s arm and yanks him out of his seat. Patrick reaches behind him for his backpack.

  “Leave it,” Stutts orders as he pulls Patrick up the aisle toward the door. He shoves the gun back into his pocket, then they disappear down the hallway. Mrs. Campbell moves to follow them, but I step forward to stop her.

  “I’ll go, Mrs. C. You stay with these guys.” She looks at me, obviously torn between helping Patrick and looking after the others. “Don’t worry; he’s not going to hurt his own kid.” I’m not sure I believe it, but it sounds good, and she pauses.

  I feel a tug at my pants leg, and Simon is there. I never even saw him slip out of his seat. “Stay with us, Gus,” he says, looking up at me, his dead-serious eyes huge behind thick glass.

  It’s a rhyming game Simon and I started the first week we were here. Mrs. C. asked Emery and me to help with Reading Circle, and I wound up reading a book to them about Simple Simon who met a pieman. I started calling him Simon the Pieman, and he called me Jakeman the Cakeman, and it kept going from there.

  Simon grips my leg like a spider monkey so I can’t go out in the hall; I reach down and put my hand on his head. “Have no fear, Cakeman’s here. I’ll be right back, buddy. I promise.”

  He looks up at me without blinking, then lets go.

  Mrs. Campbell gives me a go-ahead nod, and I move toward the door.

  And then—Stutts is back, pushing a white-faced Patrick in front of him.

  “Damn security guard’s out there. Do those guys carry weapons?” he asks.

  “I don’t know, Mr. Stutts. Why don’t you just leave Patrick for now?” Mrs. C. tries again. “I’m sure we can work something out.”

  “Yeah, well, you obviously don’t know my wife. She’s not really into ‘working things out’ these days. I’m taking my boy—soon as that guy leaves.” He glares at the kids. “Everybody sit down.” He jerks his head toward two medium-size chairs near the wall. “You two sit there,” he tells Emery and Mrs. Campbell. Emery sits down, keeping her eyes on Stutts. She reaches up to twirl a piece of her hair; it’s what she does when she’s nervous or upset. Mrs. Campbell scoots her chair closer to the kids before she sits in it.

  I walk to the back and sit on top of a table. Stutts stands near the door. He leaves the gun in his pocket, but we all know it’s there.

  “You,” he says to me, “close those blinds back there.” I move to lower the blinds, keeping a lookout for anyone I can try to signal, but there are no signs of life.

  “The rest of you go on with what you were doing,” he barks at us. “I don’t want anybody staring at me. I gotta think a minute.”

  Mrs. Campbell takes a deep breath and smiles at the kids. “I have a word search puzzle I saved for free time. Why don’t we give our French teachers a break for now?”

  Good thinking, Mrs. C. I wasn’t big on performing in front of G.I. Joe.

  She gets the papers from the tray on her desk and starts handing them out. “Let’s see who can be first to find all the words that have to do with fall,” she says, all chipper like there’s not a crazy guy with a gun watching us. “They’re listed on the bottom of the page. Use your sight skills to match them up.”

  Emery leans over to help Carlos. Her straight hair—dark blond with leftover streaks from summer—swings across her face as she looks down to point to a word.

  Emery always looks great, but she’s not obsessed with her looks. I’ve never seen her pull out a mirror in class or mess with her hair. Her eyelashes are long and dark, and she doesn’t wear tons of makeup or talk about her new shoes or her damn Louie Whoever bag like a lot of girls do. It’s like she knows what’s important and what’s not. I know she’s got some physical stuff going on—she told me about her dizzy spells—but seriously, that girl’s steady as a rock.

  The kids are already working like crazy. Alicia has her tongue out, and Kenji’s studying the puzzle like it’s the freakin’ Declaration of Independence. It’s like their little heads are gonna explode if they don’t have something else to focus on.

  I can relate. I’m wishing like hell I had some kind of plan. I can’t . . . I can’t think straight. It’s like that kid Ralph in Lord of the Flies. Every time he tries to figure out what to do, a curtain comes down in his head. My English teacher said it’s because he’s too young to know how to organize a whole colony of boys into a civilized society. He’s basically on overload, so his brain kinda short-circuits. I didn’t get what she was saying back then, but I do now. I wish these kids had somebody besides a total screwup like me to help them. I used to think of myself as one of the good guys, but after treating Emery like crap and getting hauled down to the jail, I’m not so sure anymore. Maybe the evil stepmother is ri
ght about me.

  “The Christine” definitely doesn’t think much of me. The last time I got in-house suspension, she told me I’m gonna grow up to be a juvenile delinquent. But how can you grow up to be a juvenile anything? And it was a cell phone infraction—not exactly a capital offense. I swear, you can’t fart in our school without getting in-house suspension.

  The Christine butts into every conversation I try to have with my dad. Since they’ve been together, it’s like he doesn’t hear me anymore. The night he picked me up at the police station, I tried to tell him it wasn’t my weed and I hadn’t been smoking. It was clear he didn’t believe me at first—and then he went off on me for not telling the cops it was Cole’s.

  I was so sure Cole would tell them it was his. I get it that you’re assumed to be guilty if you’re caught with somebody who’s smoking; my dad’s warned me about that. But I also knew from other kids’ experiences that I’d have a good chance of getting off if Cole owned up and told the truth. I kept looking at him in the car on the way to the station, but he just looked away. The cop even asked us after he brought us in if anybody had anything else to say, so it wasn’t like Cole didn’t have every opportunity to speak up. I was pretty shocked when he didn’t and all three of us were charged.

  I asked him the next day why he let me take the heat, too, but he didn’t answer. I was so mad, I didn’t speak to him for a couple of weeks—but eventually I let it go. Maybe I did deserve to be punished, too; I could have made him put it away that night, but I didn’t.

  The only thing I can figure is, Cole’s dad’s pretty rough on him, so he might have thought he’d get beat worse if he said it was his. I’ve seen marks on his legs that look like he was hit with a belt, but he won’t talk about that, either.

  It’s hard to stay mad at Cole. He’s more like family to me than my own family. Since my brother, Stephen, left for college, Cole is the one who’s got my back.

  When my mom died and my dad had to go away on business a week later, Cole sat with me for days, watching TV while I drank myself into a stupor. He didn’t say ten words, but he stayed right there with me. Finally he took the whiskey bottle away and said, “Let’s get you some food, Willoughby.”

  I wish Emery could get past Cole’s badass image; honestly, he just keeps that going for fun. They’d get along great if they weren’t so busy judging each other. I mean, I made an effort to get along with her friends. Molly’s pretty easy to like, but Tab is moody as hell. And she hates Cole ’cause he calls her STD. Man, what were her parents thinking when they named her Sarah Tabitha? Didn’t they remember their last name was Deason?

  • • •

  Stutts keeps looking out the door, and Patrick is standing next to him, eyes on the floor. Hell, I can’t stand seeing that kid up there all by himself. I pick up a word search puzzle and pencil, grab his backpack off his chair, walk to the front, and hand them to him. Then I pull out a chair for him at the learning center table nearby. He glances nervously at his dad, but Stutts ignores him, so Patrick takes a seat and looks at the page in front of him.

  I lean down and show him the word pumpkin in the grid and in the word bank below the puzzle. Patrick circles it, and I squeeze his shoulder. He looks up at me and actually smiles a little.

  In a sudden move that catches both of us off guard, Stutts lunges across the table, rips the puzzle out of Patrick’s hands, crumples it up in his fist, and throws it on the floor. “I said don’t tell my boy what to do,” he growls at me.

  I stare back at him. I want to hit him so bad it hurts. Emery looks up in shock at Stutts’s cruelty.

  Alicia interrupts the moment, keeping me from saying something I shouldn’t. “Mrs. Campbell, hey, Mrs. Campbell.” She’s waving her hand like mad in the back of the room. “You said we could go outside for a nature walk today. Can we still go?”

  “Honey, let’s do that tomorrow,” Mrs. C. answers.

  “My grandpa, he fell and broke his big toe,” Olivia announces loudly to no one in particular, “and the doctor says they might cut it off because he’s got Die-BB’s.”

  Okay, maybe the kids don’t completely understand. Just when you think they must be terrified, one of them says something off-the-wall. And maybe it’s a good thing that they’re kind of clueless.

  “I’m sorry about your grandpa, Olivia,” Mrs. C. says. “Now let’s do our work quietly, okay, everyone?”

  I force myself to calm down and try a different tactic—my legendary charm—on Stutts.

  “Hey, man, why don’t you let me walk down the hall and check it out for you?” I say. “I can see where the security guy is and—”

  “Yeah, right, buddy, you’re not goin’ anywhere,” Stutts interrupts.

  “I’m in your camp, sir. You oughta be able to take your kid home from school; that’s what I think. I’m just trying to help you.” That part’s the truth. I really don’t think he’d hurt Patrick, and I figure if we can get this maniac away from the other kids, we can deal with the Patrick situation later. It seems to me like a little cooperation could save a lot of kids today.

  “Nobody leaves this room,” he snaps.

  I walk away without commenting. My eyes drift up to a Kung Fu Panda poster near the door that says WISE TURTLE SAYS, “YESTERDAY IS HISTORY. TOMORROW IS A MYSTERY. BUT TODAY IS A GIFT. THAT IS WHY IT IS CALLED THE PRESENT.” I’m not sure the first graders get that, but I’m feelin’ it right now. I’m definitely focused on the here and now—and I hope to hell my sorry ass’ll still be here tomorrow. Now that I’m faced with the possibility of death, it seems kind of important to try to make up for some of my past mistakes. But that’ll be kinda hard if I have no future.

  CHAPTER 5

  EMERY

  I watch the hallway through the open door while I help Natalie with the word search. Stutts is watching, too. He flexes his shoulders, and when he stretches his neck, the tattooed lizard claws give me the creeps. Had Mrs. Campbell met Patrick’s dad before? Did she know he was unstable?

  “Great job, cutie-pie!” I say to Janita, who holds up her paper from across the aisle. She beams at me.

  “Am I a cutie-pie, too?” Natalie asks, pouting.

  “Most definitely,” I tell her, and she nods happily.

  A kid in a navy blue jacket walks past the door but doesn’t look in. He’s the only person I’ve seen go past.

  I slide my cell phone out of my pocket, barely moving. Simon cuts his eyes over at me, and I shake my head at him to keep quiet. I’m holding it under the desktop, deciding who to text for help, when Stutts looks up. There’s no way he saw me—I was really careful—but he apparently had the same idea at the same time I did.

  “Alla you kids put your hands on top of the tables where I can see ’em.” Thirty-six little hands flatten on top of the desks. “How many of you’ve got cell phones?”

  Alicia’s and Nick’s hands go up. I look at Jake and he raises his. I raise mine reluctantly. Lying to a man with a gun in a room full of children seems like a bad idea. The kids look petrified, and I barely have time to think about how weird it is that first graders have cell phones.

  “Hand ’em over. Nobody’s calling mommy.” He collects the phones and dumps them onto the table where Patrick’s sitting. “Where’s yours, Teach?” He turns to Mrs. Campbell.

  “My phone is broken,” she says evenly. “I dropped it yesterday.”

  “You better not be lying to me.”

  “Mr. Stutts, would you like to search my bag?”

  She reaches under her desk for her purse and holds it out to him, looking him calmly in the eye. He drops his eyes first.

  “Forget it,” he mumbles.

  Alicia’s waving her hand in the back of the room again.

  “Yes, Alicia?” Mrs. Campbell asks.

  “Mrs. Campbell, I can’t find tree anywhere on here.”

  “Just skip to one of the others, Alicia. You don’t have to do them in order.” It’s the first time I’ve heard her sound impatient—ev
er.

  Kenji erases and erases, hard enough to tear a hole in the paper. Lewis slides out of his seat and begins crawling on the floor toward the fish tank again, but Jake stops him and sends him back. The buzz of a leaf blower drifts across the room, an undercurrent to the hum of the minifridge in the back. It seems odd for birds to sing and butterflies to float past when eighteen children are being held at gunpoint by a lunatic.

  I feel paralyzed and helpless. Tab says I’m not good at making decisions because my mom’s always made them for me. Mom’s the queen of passive-aggressive parenting. Her favorite is the rhetorical question: “Is that what you’re wearing today?” she’ll ask me on my way out the door to school. It’s hard to move forward when someone second-guesses everything you do. She always wants to know everything about every aspect of my life, and she loves to call my friends’ moms to share gossip. She had plenty to say about my relationship with Jake. She liked him at first—but she made it clear she didn’t think it would last.

  “Doesn’t it bother you the way he flirts with other girls?” she asked after telling me she saw him at the mall talking with Callie Edwards. She knew very well they used to go out. She watched my reaction like a cat playing with a mouse. I’ve only recently been able to admit to myself that mean might be her natural disposition; it’s almost like hurting other people somehow evens the score for the times she’s been hurt. I love her; she’s my mom. But sometimes I don’t like her.

  “That’s just Jake, Mom. He’s friendly to everybody.” I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of knowing she got to me. “And Callie works there.” Of course, I immediately called Molly in a panic to see if she’d heard anything about Jake hooking up with Callie again; she hadn’t. My mother loves mind games, and she can sniff out your weak spot like a drug dog.