opening the little locked box

school violence as my steady companion

I’ve sat down to write a few times. Type a line. Delete. Type a fragment. Feel stuck. Walk away and come back. I try to say what I feel, but I can’t because it’s a big swirling mess, and I cannot see the shape of it. 

Do you know how numb I’d become to these stories? How much I have to dissociate to do my job? How I can take my grief and my fear and close them up in a tiny little box inside of me that sits in the pit of my stomach all day hidden behind other feelings the same way we learn to hide children under desks and behind locked doors. Shhhhh. Don’t move. Let’s count the tiles on the ceiling and not talk about it and wait on this drill to pass and pray that we never have to use this moment we are rehearsing in order to confront the real. 

Maybe it’s because Apalachee High is less than an hour from where I teach. Maybe it’s because two of the surviving teachers in that building are people I have worked with before. Maybe it’s because my son, the one who grew in my belly, the one I wake every morning, the one whose laugh I know by heart, is a 14 year old boy. And the student victims were 14 year old boys, and the shooter is 14, too. Maybe it’s because that’s how buried grief always works; you contain it until suddenly for some reason you can’t. I don’t know why, but the little locked box where I hold these feelings has opened, and for days I have not been able to close the lid.

Columbine happened about six weeks before my high school graduation. What I remember: grainy security videos of two boys in black trench coats and large guns, footage of them pacing in the library, our disbelief and total shock. When I walked into school the next day, the flag was at half-mast. We didn’t attempt to learn academic material in any class because how could we? Some sacred contract had been broken, but there was also the feeling that this was an atrocious anomaly, something bizarre and unhinged. Something rare. My Government teacher put the curriculum on hold and we talked about our feelings instead. I sat in the second row. I don’t remember what we talked about, but I remember what it felt like. In art class, we just watched the President speaking on the television while we painted, or pretended to paint. Gun violence has threaded its way into American life, and the imprint is different for each of us, but that is mine. Now it feels like eery symmetry somehow that I graduated a few weeks later, closing the door on my own safe school experience and walking into the wide open space of a changed world.  

I graduated, smiling in my cap and gown, the year that twelve Columbine students didn’t. I went to college. I fell in love with language, and then I went to graduate school and decided I wanted to teach. I remember the first time I walked into a high school as a student teacher. It had only been six years since I’d been a high schooler myself, but the clamor of students in the hallways was jarring and intimidating. I am 5’2 and my voice isn’t very loud or commanding, but soon enough I learned how to shoulder my way through a crowd during class change and how to get a room of students to listen to me, which as it turns out, is not only about rules but about relationships. I learned a lot my first year, as it always goes, when teachers are thrown into the deep end and you sink or swim. I never thought much about school shootings back then. Google tells me there were 47 incidents on school campuses my first year of teaching. Last year there were 198.

I try to trace the line of where school violence started and when it grew and how it grew alongside me, and that’s when I realize that it’s been there as my steady companion all along. It grew as I grew. As my skills sharpened and as I’ve watched more than two thousand kids file in and out of my classrooms over two decades, these events became commonplace. So this is how it is now. You read a novel with them and then you teach them how to write thesis statements and then you grade their work and then you email their parents when they fail an assignment and then you work with colleagues to examine data and design instruction suited for them and then you make yourself stop thinking about how every couple of months in America a teacher walks into a building without walking out. Put the feelings in the box; close the lid. Move on. There is work to do.

Friday morning I walked into school with a heavy police presence after a threat. We were named in an anonymous image on social media, but we weren’t special. Over a dozen arrests happened in North Georgia in the 48 hours after the Apalachee shooting. I hugged my own kids goodbye, poured my coffee, and went to work. I guided my AP kids in their revision efforts, and for my other students, I taught a Ray Bradbury short story about a dystopian future devoid of human connection. Every now and then, as I glanced out the window into the hallway, I’d see a uniformed policeman walk by. 

When I got home, I reached out to an old friend because I knew she wouldn’t judge me when I said Help. I’m ruminating and I can’t stop. I need to get it together. She told me her kindergartener had her first drill last week and she was in the bathroom when it happened. She ran back to class, but the door was locked, and an administrator found her crying in the hallway. Now she knows to run to the closest room you can find, even if that teacher is a stranger, and if you can’t do that, stand on the toilet to hide. Those were the instructions they gave her. She is five. Reimagine yourself at five years old, in school, pencil shavings and fresh crayons. Imagine you go to the bathroom and have to learn how to hide yourself in a stall, how to be smaller and quieter and not make a noise. Imagine your entire worldview if you grow up in a culture like this. 

Last week’s events opened the lid to this tight box of grief, and I know soon enough I will close it again, but right now I cannot sleep. I cannot stop thinking about the details, what my own building looks like, how I’d manage to hide 32 kids in my room when my classroom hardly holds that many of them anyway. How I’d get out. If I’d get out. How I would ever walk back into a high school and do my job again after that happened. How I have two kids of my own at home and a whole life ahead of me with words left to write, and I did not sign up for this.

This time there is something about the gunman (man? Can we even say that?) that haunts me. I saw a courtroom photo of him yesterday. It’s an angle that hides his face and only reveals his shoulder and hair. I know that look and that angle and that posture. I interact everyday with kids who maybe are nothing like him or maybe they are or maybe we are not at all understanding the truth here which is that no one commits a horrific action like that without something horrific happening to them first. What I know is this: I have spent nearly two decades teaching kids who have been failed by the adults in their lives in ways you cannot imagine. They are hungry for guidance, for support, for care, for attention, for influence. They do not need a gun. 

They all have names. It has been nearly twenty years, and I could tell you their names right now because I cannot forget them. The one who confessed to me in her ninth grade essay that her father abused her. The one who was in foster care and his penmanship at 16 looked like a second grader with its shaky lettering and misspelled words. The ones who have been to seven schools in ten years. The one who lived states away from her mother and would miss countless days of school because she didn’t want to be here and never said a word, until one day during a Socratic seminar when she put us all to shame with intellectual commentary about the cultural limitations of Black womanhood. The one who was hands-down the most talented creative writer I’ve ever taught, and she disappeared halfway through the semester and came back two weeks later when I found out she’d been in a full-time facility for severe depression. The one who went to rehab the summer before I had him and wrote in aimless, meandering sentences that mirrored his life plans after graduation. The one who struggled with mental illness and never completed his work but was a brilliant musician, and for his final project, he wrote a song and performed it for the class with his acoustic guitar, and it’s been fifteen years, but I still remember the way the windowless room with cinderblock walls felt like a holy cathedral for a few minutes as we listened. 

It’s the guns. We can stop pretending otherwise. We are the only place this happens, and I am not interested in a conversation about this that does not center itself on common sense gun regulation. But the other thing I cannot un-see is the more subtle violence we perpetuate in other ways that fuels this. People act like the answer is mental health or guns, but they are not a dichotomy. They are related and intimately connected. We are obsessed with guns because we are obsessed with power– both nationally and personally. American life lets these kids fall right through the cracks. We are so consumed with getting what’s ours and protecting and guarding our own that we trample on everyone else. We do not even feed these kids or check on them except in the context of public school. And now we are failing that test. How can schools be the safety net for these troubled kids when it’s not safe for any of us? Life is not fair. It has harmed these children in innumerable ways. Sometimes life and luck have failed them, and sometimes parents have failed them, but that is why we cannot fail them. 

About eight years ago, when I was teaching composition classes on a college campus, we had a cooperative agreement with schools in Afghanistan, and I would occasionally have an Afghan student. This time her name was Husnia. She was brilliant and kind, and I can still see her bright eyes and the flowy blue hijab she wore most often. The tone of her voice sounded like a little girl, but her wisdom told me she’d lived ten lifetimes. She walked into class one day, with a  heavier expression than her usual smile, and I asked her if she was alright. She explained to me that there was a bombing near her neighborhood at home, and she’d read it in the news. Her younger sisters were in an Afghan school for girls, and she knew it was likely the target, but she hadn’t been able to get in touch with her family yet and was worried. As it turns out, her sisters were spared, but I never forgot that day or that story and the overwhelming gratitude I felt inside for the gift of safe education. I saw myself as so separate from her, so different, so lucky and untouchable. 

We are different, no doubt. Husnia went back to Afghanistan after graduation. As Kabul imploded in August of 2021, she was the first thing I thought about. When she graduated, she came to my office and gave me a book by an Afghan writer, and it’s still on my shelf now. Each time I see it, I think about her and wonder if her eyes still shine, if she still loves to read, if she remembers me and remembers what it’s like to sit in a classroom with voices different from your own and learn in a safe space. I wonder if maybe, like me, she has completely forgotten what it was like before.

Imagine a group of people so consumed with an ideology that they forget these are real students and real teachers and real classrooms and hold an entire nation hostage because of their own extremist views. I’m not saying the NRA is just like the Taliban. I’ve studied rhetoric long enough to know that would be a fallacy and a false equivocation. But I’m saying we are kidding ourselves if we think the success of a nation is measured by anything other than how it treats its children. I’m saying walking into a school the day after a shooting happened feels not unlike terrorism. I’m saying teachers are scared. I’m saying it’s not our children’s responsibility to lay down their lives for your right to bear arms.

The word Columbine hurts when I say it. It feels dark and heavy as a stone. Maybe it is the first piece of grief locked in that box in the pit of my stomach, and all the other names are stacked on top of it. Sandy Hook and Parkland and Uvalde and Apalachee, and the 417 school shootings that have happened since 1999.  But can you believe the word Columbine was once just a flower? Double-layered, delicate petals in a little star pattern with a bright center. We took something so beautiful and made it so ugly. I read Hamlet my senior year of high school, months before Columbine happened. In Act 4 as the tragedy gains speed, Ophelia holds a bouquet of flowers, and Columbine is mentioned by name. Most Shakespearean scholars say it was emblematic of faithlessness or forsaken and neglected love. Poor Ophelia, carrying flowers gathered by her own hands before she drowns in her sorrows. I don’t remember noticing that when I read the play for the first time, sitting in an AP Lit class, seventeen-years-old and naive and never once scared of what could happen in my own school. The word went unnoticed, unquestioned, read and forgotten. There was so much I took for granted, so much I didn’t know. I had no idea what was coming and that it would be the last time I read that word without a dark shadow.

I pretend sometimes, when I’m in my classroom with my students, that things are like they used to be. That Columbine is just a flower again, carried by Ophelia as an offering of grief. That we are always safe and forever will be. I pretend that I won’t watch this happen again and again while America wrings her hands but does nothing. That it could never happen to my own children. That it could never happen to me.