That's Not What Happened

by Kody Keplinger

  So I dug it out, plugged it into my computer, and read everything Lee had compiled: her long letter, interspersed with shorter letters from the others. Stories I hadn’t known. Stories from that day and the days, weeks, years that had followed.

  Lee said I could do whatever I wanted with it. Write my own story, try to release it to the public, or just destroy the damn thing. Hell, I still have no idea which of those is the best choice.

  But … screw it. Whatever. I don’t know that it matters. I don’t know if I’ll ever let anyone else see this, but I can’t get this stupid letter thing out of my head. It’s been nearly a month since I opened the file she gave me, and I’ve opened it a dozen times since. And it’s just going to keep driving me crazy until I write this down so … here you go. Here’s my story.

  * * *

  I spent a lot of time in that particular bathroom. Always skipping class. Sometimes smoking. I hated school. I was that cliché angry girl with no friends and a great pair of combat boots. So I hid in a place where I could interact with as few people as possible. Boy, did that bite me in the ass.

  So March 15, I was in the bathroom, as usual. I’d been in there, smoking in the corner so no one passing by would see, for most of the period. I’d told my geometry teacher I was feeling sick. I don’t think she believed me, but she let me go anyway. I’m sure she disliked me just as much as I disliked her. I’d been in there alone all period, until Ashley Chambers walked in.

  I knew Ashley. She was the kind of self-righteous Christian that I hated. The kind who acted like you had to do things her way or you were headed straight to hell. She was the reason I stayed away from things like the Fellowship of Christian Students. Well, that and my general disdain for most people. I know Lee says she’s better now, and Ashley might have apologized to me in that email, but whatever. I’m not the forgiving sort.

  Anyway, she didn’t see me when she came in the bathroom. She was clearly distracted or else she would have noticed the smell of my cigarette. I was relieved. I didn’t want to deal with her. So I pressed closer into the corner, hoping she’d leave without even acknowledging me.

  But before she came out of the stall, two more girls hurried in. Freshmen freaking out about a hickey. They did notice me, and I expected them to give me a lecture about how I was breaking the rules. They looked like the kind of girls who would. But they didn’t.

  I didn’t know Lee Bauer or Sarah McHale at the time. I mean, I knew their faces. Small school and all. But they were two years behind me and we didn’t have any classes together, so I didn’t know anything about them. Other than that, apparently, Sarah’s getting a hickey was the end of the world and her parents were uptight, overprotective jerks.

  I wasn’t really paying attention to them until Ashley walked out of the bathroom stall and started pulling her holier-than-thou crap.

  “Who needs Jesus when you have boys that’ll suck on your neck?”

  I rolled my eyes. It was so obvious she was jealous because no one wanted to make out with her. Not that I was one to judge. At sixteen, I still hadn’t been kissed. Pretty much all the guys at VCHS thought I was scary, and I thought they were annoying. So no loss there, I guess. But still. Ashley’s bitterness was so apparent it might as well have been written across her forehead.

  By the time she noticed me, all of her snark had been used up on Sarah. She glared and I glared back and then she left.

  “Someone needs to tell her that Jesus likes nice people,” Sarah said.

  Despite myself, I laughed. And I remember that she turned and grinned at me. Like I was in on the joke. People at school didn’t look at me like that very often. But, I don’t know, it was nice. For a second I thought that maybe Sarah McHale was kind of cool. One of the few people in this school I didn’t despise.

  The irony.

  I glanced down at my watch—this clunky old thing that used to belong to my grandfather—and realized the bell was about to ring. I finished off my cigarette and tossed the butt into the nearest toilet, flushed, and headed toward the bathroom door.

  That’s when the world changed.

  I heard the gunshots. It only took me a second to know what I was hearing. The screams made it abundantly clear. In some ways, I think I’d been expecting it. That sounds weird. But we’d been doing lockdown drills since I was in elementary school. I don’t remember a time when I truly believed school was safe.

  I’ve read the other letters. I know that everyone else was surprised or in shock. Maybe I’m just a pessimist or maybe I watched too many true crime documentaries. Either way, I knew it was an active shooter situation immediately. And I knew I didn’t have time to get into a classroom before the school went into lockdown. So I ran back into the bathroom.

  Lee and Sarah were in the doorway, and I shoved them inside. “Hide,” I remember snapping.

  “What?”

  I was running toward a stall when I tripped. The laces on my boot must’ve come undone. I hit the tiles hard, knocking the breath out of me. I gasped and sat up. “Hide,” I told the girls again. I was frustrated that they didn’t seem to understand what I did.

  Sarah must’ve picked up on it right after that, though, because she grabbed Lee by the arm and dragged her off toward another stall.

  I got to my feet and rushed into the stall right ahead of me. I knew that if I locked the door, he’d know someone was in there. It’d be easy to shoot over or under. I also knew that if I didn’t want to be noticed, I’d have to stand with my feet on the toilet so he couldn’t see my boots under the door. Not to sound weird, but I’d thought about this before. In all the lonely hours I’d spent in that bathroom, I’d planned out a dozen nightmare scenarios and how I’d escape.

  My mom calls me morbid. I call me prepared. Not that it did me a lot of good that day.

  As I crouched on the toilet seat, my legs and back already aching, I raised a hand to my chest and reached under the neck of my T-shirt, but the little cross and the thin chain it hung on were gone.

  Yes. You read that right. Cross necklace. The infamous cross necklace. The one that caused so many people to love Sarah McHale and hate me. That necklace was mine. I bought it with birthday money when I was eleven at a crafts fair, and I’d worn it pretty much every day since. Even after my parents split up and my mom stopped going to church. Even after at least three kids in my middle school asked me if I worshipped the devil because of the way I dressed. Even after I met girls like Ashley Chambers and realized why I kind of hated organized religion. I kept that cross on. And yes, despite all of that, I still believe in God. Regardless of whatever rumors you’ve heard.

  But my necklace was gone. The chain must’ve broken when I tripped.

  As stupid as this sounds, I almost went back to get it. I was thinking that if he saw it on the floor, he’d know people were in the bathroom, so I should go get it. But before I could move out of my crouching position, heavy footsteps entered the bathroom. I held my breath, thinking the words as I prayed.

  But it didn’t matter. I don’t know if he saw me through the crack in the door or if he was just shooting at anything. I don’t know if this was calculated or impulsive. I’m sure everyone has theories about why he did it and what his plans were that day, but I’ve tried to tune it all out. Like Lee, I just don’t care.

  Listen, I was an angry, depressed kid with a lot of hate for the people around me. And from what I’ve read in these letters, it sounds like Miles Mason had a messed-up home life. But neither of us ever shot at anyone. So I don’t care how sad this guy’s life was or how mean people supposedly were to him. Sorry, I just don’t. He’s the villain in my story.

  One of them, anyway.

  So he fired a couple of shots, one of which hit the wall and ricocheted back at me. I remember the pain bursting in my shoulder. Blunt and sharp at the same time. I screamed and fell forward, knocking the stall door open on my way down. From the floor, I could see my necklace, just a couple of feet away, but he was there, too. Standin
g over me as I bled onto the tiles.

  And he saw the necklace, too.

  “Whose ugly-ass cross is this?” he asked.

  I gritted my teeth through the pain, but I was worried if I didn’t answer him, he’d either shoot me again or think someone else was in the bathroom and go looking for Lee and Sarah. That sounds like I was trying to be a hero. I wasn’t. I promise you most of my motivation for answering was selfish. I just didn’t know what he wanted to hear.

  “Mine?”

  “Yours?” He sounded shocked and almost amused. Even the kid with the gun didn’t believe I could possibly be the owner of that necklace. What foreshadowing of things to come.

  “Yes,” I gasped.

  “You think Jesus is watching over you right now?”

  What did he want me to say? I didn’t know this kid. I didn’t know if this was some bizarre right-wing Christian terrorism or something. The odds of him killing me if I said no seemed just as high as if I said yes. I wasn’t defending my faith or being a martyr. I just wanted to survive.

  “I … do. Yes.”

  But he wasn’t listening anymore. Something from the other side of the bathroom must’ve caught his attention, because he was walking away, toward one of the other stalls. I crawled back into my stall and curled into a ball, trying not to listen to the next few gunshots. Trying not to think about how the girls I’d just told to hide were probably dead.

  He left the bathroom then, and it wasn’t long after that that the police came. I was rushed to the hospital and told that I was very lucky. The bullet in my shoulder hadn’t done as much damage as it could have, and with some physical therapy and a lot of patience, it would heal. They told me I was going to be okay.

  They didn’t know that the bullet wound was the least of my problems.

  I didn’t tell people right away about what he’d said to me in the bathroom. Ironically, considering where we are now, I didn’t think it mattered. As far as I knew, no one had heard that brief exchange. When there were two teachers and seven teenagers dead in a high school, who cared that I’d lost my necklace? Or that the asshole with the gun had asked me about it?

  I didn’t mention it to anyone until a couple of days after the shooting, when Detective Jenner stood in my hospital room, questioning me about what had happened. When I told him, he frowned and exchanged looks with the other officer.

  “You sure that was your necklace?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said, annoyed. I had a shoulder wound, not a head wound. Of course I was sure. “Did you find it? The necklace?”

  “It’s … still considered evidence,” he said. He left a few minutes later.

  I never got that necklace back. It was buried with Sarah McHale.

  My necklace. The one I’d worn every day. Was in another girl’s coffin. And God, at the time, that made me so angry.

  When I first heard the Sarah Story, I thought it would be easy to correct. It was a misunderstanding. It wouldn’t be a big deal to just tell people the truth. But we know how that ended. With harassment and vandalism and my mother crying because the women in her office were making her life a living hell. My preacher at my church didn’t believe me. My own grandmother died a year later, still sure I was a liar who just wanted attention.

  Meanwhile, there were youth rallies in Sarah’s honor, songs written about her, politicians telling “her” story as they lobbied either for or against whatever was on the agenda for that week. And hey, I get it. Like I told Lee, it’s a great story. The girl who dies for her faith is much more compelling—and useful—than the goth loner who was so scared out of her mind that she would have done or said anything to survive. Plus, I lived. Where was the drama in that?

  If you’ve read everything Lee wrote, then you know the rest. By the time VCHS opened up again, my family couldn’t take it anymore. Mom packed up and moved us to another state, and Dad, along with his new wife, followed shortly after.

  That’s when I started going by my middle name, Renee, and stopped talking about the shooting altogether. They’d never have said it, but I know my parents were relieved. Sometimes, I still wonder if they even believe me.

  I don’t think I want to know.

  * * *

  It’s been a few days now since I wrote that last section. It’s the first time I’ve really explored the shooting in years, outside of my own nightmares. It was painful, yeah, but it also felt good to write it all down. To tell my story and not be screamed at or spat on.

  I don’t know what I’m going to do with this document. I keep thinking about it. Circling the options over and over in my head, weighing the pros and cons. And then I keep coming back to what Lee said in the café last summer, when she gave me the thumb drive. She didn’t care what I did with the letters. It wasn’t about where they ended up, but about letting me have control of the narrative.

  I think I get that now.

  I’ve realized that it’s never going to be okay. The pain of what happened to me—the shooting, the abuse after—it’s not going away, no matter what I do with these letters. I’m never going to be able to forgive some of the people in my hometown. Honestly, I am angrier at some of them—Brother Lloyd, Ashley, the preacher at my old church—than I am at the boy who shot me. I don’t know if that’s rational. But nothing about trauma is rational.

  There’s going to be hurt no matter what I decide to do with these letters. But at least, for the first time in over four years, I have the power over my story. Over all of our stories. Who and how and when and if anyone reads this—it’s up to me. Not a news crew looking for the best story. Not the heartbroken parents of a girl they need to believe was a martyr. Not even the well-meaning survivor determined to set the story straight and make amends.

  It’s my choice.

  And I guess, if you’re reading this, you know what choice I made.

  Sincerely,

  Kellie Renee Gaynor-Marks

  and the survivors

  Writing That’s Not What Happened was one of the most challenging experiences of my career, and I definitely wouldn’t have been able to do it without a lot of incredible people. Without their expertise and support, this book would not be what it is today.

  First, thanks to my agent, Brianne Johnson, and my editor, Jody Corbett. You two are the best team I could have asked for. You’ve been amazing champions of my work, and I will forever be grateful to the both of you.

  Thanks to Stephanie Kuehn, S.E. Sinkhorn, Phoebe North, and Michelle Krys for taking the time to read and brainstorm with me. Your fresh eyes brought a valuable, new perspective to this story.

  A huge thanks also goes out to the many fantastic people at Scholastic who have worked on and supported this book: Mary-Claire Cruz, Maeve Norton, Melissa Schirmer, Priscilla Eakeley, Rachel Feld, Isa Caban, Julia Eisler, Vaishali Nayak, Lizette Serrano, Emily Heddleson, Tracy van Straaten, David Levithan, Alan Smaggler, Elizabeth Whiting, Alexis Lunsford, Nikki Mutch, Sue Flynn, Jackie Rubin, Jody Stigliano, Charlie Young, Chris Satterlund, Roz Hilden, Meaghan Hilton, Tracy Bozentka, Jacqueline Bernacki, Barb Holloway, Barbara Synder, Dan Moser, Betsy Politi, and Alexis Lassiter.

  Thank you as well to the team at Writers House, especially Alexandra Levick, you have all been so wonderful and helpful. And thank you to my colleagues and students at Gotham Writers, for keeping me inspired and passionate about my work.

  Thank you to the friends who have listened patiently to me talk about this book for the past three years and helped me brainstorm or aided me with research. Laurie, Lindsey, Amy, Alexis, Courtney, Debra, Kaitlin, Kara, Kate, Leila, Maurene, Samantha, Somaiya, Kristin, and Veronica, I love you guys.

  Special thanks to Shana Hancock, Kate Lawson, and Wendy Xu for being exactly the sort of friends I needed during this venture. Hanging out with, texting, and skyping you all kept my spirits up even when I was diving into some dark territory with my research. I’m a lucky person to have met you all.

  And, of course, to my family. There are far too many
of you to name, but each and every one of you has supported and encouraged me for the past decade of my career, and I can’t emphasize enough how much it means to me. You’ve been the best sort of cheerleaders a writer can have. Thank you all so, so very much.

  And, finally, thank you. You, my readers, are why I am able to keep doing this, to keep doing the work I love. Whether this is the first book of mine you’ve picked up or you’ve read every one of them since I began publishing in 2010, I appreciate you more than you know. Thank you for your tweets, your emails, your kind words, and your time. I hope I can keep writing books for you for many, many years to come.

  Turn the page for a peek at Run!

  I’m waiting for the sirens.

  I know it don’t make much sense. The police ain’t coming for me—not yet, anyway—but I already feel like a fugitive.

  My flip-flops slap against the muddy ground, and soggy leaves cling to my bare legs. Tree limbs catch and tangle and snap in my hair. I should’ve put it up before I left. But I’d barely had time to pack, let alone think about my damn hair.

  “Slow down, stupid dog.” Utah’s leash cuts into my fingers. She’s running faster than I can, her tail swishing back and forth, like this is some kinda game.

  By the time we reach the edge of the woods, I’m panting harder than the dog is. My chest hurts and my lungs feel like they’re screaming for air, but I ain’t got time to catch my breath.

  She’s waiting for me, standing there behind her parents’ garage. In the moonlight, she looks like some sorta ghost. Her skin is so white it seems to glow, and her long black hair is darker than the night around her. She looks beautiful, and I look feral. Not that she can see me or anything else right now.

  “Agnes,” I whisper so as not to scare her. My voice is ragged. I swallow and say her name again. “Agnes.”

  “Bo?”

  “Right here.”