Prose
11.9.2021 By Anonymous
The bell sounds in the middle of the period. I hear the principal stutter over the loudspeaker that students must move into classrooms and lock the doors immediately. Panic sets in because I’m in the bathroom and what happens if I can’t get back to my class before it’s too late? My rubber soles squeak on linoleum as I run down the hallway and around the corner. There are windows everywhere. Should I crouch? I make it back to my English class and frantically rap on the door, hoping school protocols allow my teacher to let me in (school protocols can be quirky). Today, logic prevails at IHS, at least on this front. The handle clicks and I scramble inside. My teacher is shepherding everyone into the corner around and behind her desk, out of view of the narrow glass window in the door. But we’re right in front of a bay of much larger windows, which seems to kind of defeat the purpose. At least we’re not visible from the hallway, but what good is that going to do if the shooter’s a student and knows the geography of the school? I push the thought aside for now and crawl under an adjacent table, settling next to a friend with our backs to the wall. “I wish I was shorter,” he groans as his head scrapes the bottom of the table. Light teasing about my height (or lack thereof) is a daily occurrence in my life, so I make some kind of dumb joke about it. But once my nervous giggles subside, anxious thoughts swarm inside my head. Are these my last moments on Earth? Will I die in this room, in these clothes, with these people beside me? I try to drink in every detail—the slight itch of the alpaca wool sweater that my great-grandpa brought back from Peru before he died, the normal force of the cold, hard floor against my lower spine (I just had Physics). But something inside me refuses to fully focus, to accept my mortality here and now. Worrying about myself becomes unbearable for a moment, so my racing mind turns to other people. My little sister goes
here too; oh god I hope she’s safe. My friend’s texting someone—his parents? Girlfriend? I wonder if he’s as worried as I am. Oh god, what about my parents? I reach for my phone to tell them where I am and that I’m safe, but my teacher’s already telling my friend to put his away. Am I going to die without saying goodbye to my parents? My sister? Was every interaction with everyone outside this room my last? Does that even matter if my life’s going to end anyway? I don’t want to spend what could be my last moments of consciousness tortured by anxiety, but I can’t dispel the profoundly uncomfortable thoughts crowding my brain. A light touch on my arm brings me back to reality. “Are you okay?” It’s my friend, who feels others’ emotions as his own, who’s always cared about me even when I didn’t care about myself. As I vaguely nod in response to his query, I feel a twinge of guilt for being so locked in my own mind that I’ve barely stopped to consider how the people around me must feel. My friend has a little brother who goes here too. We all have friends and girlfriends and boyfriends in this building, and families outside it who we might never get to say goodbye to. I wonder what people around me are thinking, if they’re praying. And I find myself wishing for a moment that I was religious, because I have no one to pray to and nothing to comfort me but the cold, prickly, inexorable fact that once you die, that’s it. My thoughts drift back to my parents. I barely saw my mom this morning; we were both in a rush, ships in the night. My dad was already at the office. Was that it? Hot tears start to crowd my eyes, and my breathing gets shallower and faster. But then I feel a touch on my arm again, this time a bit more insistent, laden with a bit more concern. I’m clearly not okay. I clearly lied the first time. I usually lie the first time. I don’t need to explain all that out loud, because my friend already knows. His hand slips into mine and our fingers interlace. It’s going to be okay, he tells me without saying a word. And it is.
Music Performance
Beethoven Quartet Op. 95 No. 11 By Anna Cummings, Alice Burke, Zoe Galgoczy, Claire Russell
46
