what you never see coming

The penetrating smell of my old high school is dangerously familiar, bringing back memories from places I haven’t been since they occurred. I stood in the entryway and peered down the halls that were on my right and left that wound around until they met each other, forming a giant circle. Inside the main halls was another circle that was like a shortcut to certain parts of the school. As I began to walk down one of the inner halls, I automatically led myself to the common area, where all the students talk in between classes. It was another giant circle that had four exits all around it that branched out to the other circles. As I entered the room through one of these exits, I looked down at the white tile as it changes to red. I remember our principal saying that the room needed a fresh start, that the remodeling would help people heal. But everyone knew better. Everyone knew that the red tile was put in because the grout in the old was stained a crimson red, and they couldn’t get it out after what happened. They took out the tile and replaced it with a style that didn’t even show grout. The tiles were just neatly packed together like an easy puzzle, covering up the traces of the horror that they let happen. I walked to the middle of the common area and stood on a tile that was directly under a ceiling light that had a silver metal encasing rather than the old gold colored ones that the others had. This was another thing they had to replace. I looked up at the light’s glass covering and closed my eyes. I began to see it all again. The crowded room, people chatting in groups based on interests or appearance. Teachers moved in and out, irately plowing through students that seemed to be glued to the ground, absorbed in their conversations. I remember I was standing with my friends from the soccer team, discussing a new style of cleat that had just come out.
“It has sand in the bottom that moves as you run, and puts more power on the ball when you strike it.” I told them casually, trying to make it seem like I knew all about it when in truth I had just heard about that from some guy who picked his face acne in my chemistry class. We continued to talk about meaningless garbage that people who are friends by association talk about. We all played soccer; Me, Molly, Sidney, Lauren and Rachel. We were all friends, but only to a certain extent. I knew, and everyone else knew, that after we graduated none of us would keep in touch because none of us were actual heart-to-heart friends. I remember detaching myself from the conversation and watching them. I did this a lot; it was like I was leaving the room and watching through a glass window. It was like my mind was absent; my body was present to make everything look normal. I would read them, pick apart things that they said, or the way that they stood or looked over their shoulders to see who was looking. Then I came back in and laughed at something Lauren had just said. And every time I would do this, go from being bubbly to completely silent and back again, nobody ever noticed.
As we stood talking, I remember someone hitting my backpack really hard in an effort to get by the sea of students. I turned to see my English teacher speeding towards the middle of the room, a black purse slung over her shoulder. Her name was Ms. Groce, and it was pronounced like gross. Ms. Groce was 29 and single, and it wasn’t a mystery why. Now, don’t get me wrong, she was a pretty blonde woman, but she was just so darn weird that it made people either pity or completely loathe her. She was one of those people who you knew never got enough attention when they were a kid. In class she would be in the middle of talking about Julius Caesar and then go off on a funny story about some guy named Luke that wasn’t really funny at all because we had no idea who Luke was. She did this in the hope that someone would ask about this Luke person and she would just “have to” tell us all about him. And she used this technique so that it looked like we were interested in her in the first place. It was really pathetic. Her weirdness meter went up a couple notches as I watched her go to the center of the commons, squeezing in a tight space where there were no kids, and stand there. She had a blank stare on her face and she was clutching her purse strap like it was her life. She scanned the room, and I followed her eyes. Nobody but me was looking at her, as far as I knew. That day I was wearing a blue MTV T-shirt with jeans and white vans. That outfit was destroyed hours later; I had to throw it out because of all the stains. Ms. Groce was wearing black dress pants and a green sweater. Those clothes would too be ruined, but someone else would be taking them off for her in the hours to come. Ms. Groce opened her bag and pulled out a hand gun. She pointed it up at the ceiling light that I was now standing under and fired a shot. Screams and cries echoed throughout the room as lowered the gun and made another scan. I was already running by the time she lifted the gun out of her bag. There was an exit roughly 50 feet away. As I made a break for the double doors that led to safety, I heard more shots ring out and looked back over my shoulder to see the damage. Sometimes, when I wake up sweating in my one bedroom apartment after dreaming that I was drowning in a sea of blood, I wish I hadn’t looked back. I could have left and ran home and saved myself the images of death that are now permanently burned into my brain, but I didn’t. Now, every time I come back to my home town, people who remember me say hello. But they don’t remember me; they remember the year I graduated in, the four class years that were a part of the day that everything went to pieces. They say hello and make eye contact for only a moment, afraid that this loss of innocence inside of me would escape and invade their comfortable lives. The only people who the neighbors offer greetings to that are slightly bright are the seniors of that day. Generally speaking, the seniors in a high school are the lucky ones. They rule over everyone, and they are the ones closest to getting out into the real world. The seniors that were in my school when Ms. Groce snapped were luckier for a reason far beyond the simple concept of freedom. It was May 1st when my English teacher shot twelve people, and after it happened, the school was released for the summer because of all the trauma. The board thought it would be a good idea to give us more time to recover. So those seniors never had to forcibally come back to the school ever again. People relied on them to convince themselves that what happened wasn’t really that bad, because most of them seem to have recovered by now. Everyone is always interested in how that class is doing in college because they need to know that someone has healed. I was a junior when it happened. While everyone else had to try to grasp the idea of going back in September and sitting in a closed room with a teacher they didn’t know well enough to feel safe with, the seniors got to release all of it. They got to leave after the horrific event and never look back. They focused on starting a new life, while we tried to continue our broken one. They threw their haunting memories over their shoulders for us to catch and keep forever.