I LUV U
I texted back TYREE IS FINE, which led to a flurry of more texts: MAKE SURE HE PEES HE HOLDS IT IN HUG HIM CAN U JUST GET HIM OUT OF THERE
Mrs. Reeves looked up.
There, somewhere in the school, was a faint lifting sound, which I realized were screams. Then there was the gunshot somewhere in the school, one, two, sounding just like and unlike a gunshot, a firecracker. I thought my skin was starting to crumble. Mrs. Reeves dropped a package of macaroni, and the pasta skittered across the floor. She looked around the room, picked up the rainbow shag carpet, dragged the large square of it over to the nook, and flapped it over the children. They coughed; the underside smelled like rubber that had fermented in some disheartening way.
“It’s a tent!”
“Smells like shit!”
With the class under the tent, we couldn’t tell who had made this second statement, and usually it would have led to a few minutes sitting in the “office,” aka timeout zone, but right now it seemed that anyone could say anything.
Mrs. Reeves stood, holding the carpet at a slant over the kindergarteners; I went to the door. I peered through the window; there were police in vests and helmets running down the hallway — headed past the first-. Second-. Third-. Fourth-grade classrooms, running. Then right. The fifth grade. The administration. Cafeteria.
Another gunshot.
There was no place we could go.
The children were silent; they huddled under the rainbow rug. People in situations like this sometimes say they stop thinking. That was not true for me. I was thinking of everything: the way Hal had looked at me as he walked out the door, the freckle on his shoulder that I watched when we slept, Darryl’s expression when he sounded out his name on the page, the sweetness of the cinnamon roll I had for breakfast.
Then there was a knock at the door. “Police,” said a loud voice on the other side. “Checking the classrooms. You are okay to open up.”
I looked at Mrs. Reeves, and, slowly, she nodded. I went to the door and unlocked it; it took a minute because my hands were shaking. A policeman came in, a black gun in his hand. The children sat up on their knees, openmouthed. It now felt like we were in a play.
“We have a suspect. One victim, injured.”
We stood there, frozen, unknowing.
His face blank in a practiced way. Oddly handsome for a policeman. Maybe he was an actor. The children peering out under the horrible-smelling rainbow rug. There had been gunshots in our school somewhere. We did not know how to act. The phone buzzed again. He nodded.
“Clear. We can get you out. Everyone, line up.”
We moved the bookshelf and the children, who went, without us asking, to the ordinary actions of their dismissal — putting on their outdoor shoes, hoisting their backpacks onto their shoulders. The policeman watched them line up and said, “This is how we’re going to do it. Put your hands on the person in front of you. Then close your eyes.”
A couple children laughed. A couple cried.
“How am I gonna see anything?” asked Darryl.
“You won’t,” said the policeman.
“But I want to,” said Darryl.
“This is the procedure,” said the policeman. “Hands on shoulders, everyone, now.”
The children were in two lines, and they grabbed each other’s shoulders. They now looked as though they were at a party and about to do a group dance.
“Okay. We’re going. Shut your eyes.”
I watched them squinch their eyes shut, or loosely flutter their eyelashes; they gripped the shoulders of the person in front of them and started to walk. We were in the hallway. There were the pictures of things that began with the letter R; there were the collages made of pine cones from the playground; there were other students marching out the same way, eyes closed. My eyes were not closed. Neither were most of the others’; there was the sound of an adult crying, which instantly meant no one’s eyes were shut; there were some footprints made of blood; there were the fourth-grade’s pastel drawings of their recent trip to the zoo; there were the children, hands on shoulders, most of them with their eyes open, looking at each other, stunned, I think, by the strange quality of the orderliness, the fact their drawings were still on the walls. The footprints. Whose were they? We had to keep walking. We were walking out and out and then through the doors and we were outside.
The air was unspeakably sweet with the scent of jasmine. Today, in addition to the yellow buses parked in front of the school, there were two ambulances and a news truck and police cars and more parents than I had ever seen. It was as though they had fled their workplaces, in their crisp business suits and their green nurses’ scrubs and their bright polyester uniforms from Chick-fil-A and McDonald’s and Hardee’s, and when they saw us come out, a roar came up, kind of a cheer and a shriek, everyone’s names called out at once. It was as though everyone was being named, for the first time, right then, in the parking lot. There was no order to the parents’ grabbing for their children — they surged forward, ignoring the rules of the pickup line, and no one stopped them, which seemed almost weirder than the shooting itself. A sheriff’s car whizzed past the school so fast it left a burned-rubber smell in the air.
The buses roared up, lumbering yellow dinosaurs, and the children jumped onto them, and the ambulance zoomed away, and after the endless wait in the classroom, the strange walk with the eyes no one closed, the footprints, in fifteen minutes everyone seemed to have gone home. A couple teachers were talking to a news crew. There was another small group that had gathered to cry. Some were being met by husbands, wives, assorted loved ones. I stood in the front, and I realized that no one had come for me.
I REMAINED THERE WITH DOLORES JEFFERSON, THIRD-GRADE teacher, who was the repository of all current events. She was heading to her second job; peering into a tiny mirror, she was patting her copper-dyed hair, which was organized into a kind of small obelisk; she was making sure it was all in place. When she saw me, she lowered the mirror.
“You okay?” she asked.
“I guess,” I said. “You?”
“You know who was shot?” she said. “Mrs. Hill.”
My blood lurched. Mrs. Hill.
“Holy shit. Is she okay?”
Mrs. Jefferson looked at me. “Alive. ICU. Hit her in the back.”
Mrs. Hill, with her stacks of tests, parents trailing after her, wanting tips, the way she smiled at them with a bemused expression and said, “This is what they need to do.”
“Is she okay?”
Mrs. Jefferson shrugged.
“Who did it?”
“Trevor Johnson’s dad.”
“Oh,” I said. I’d seen him striding down the hallways a couple times this week, waiting by her office; he was a realtor, a top-20 producer for his company, as the newspaper ads said, his face winking out of the pages, but he could not stand still as he waited for Mrs. Hill — he roamed around the hallway, staring at the fourth grade’s artwork.
“He came here for her?”
“Trevor’s math score didn’t go up.”
“What the hell,” I said, “What the. .”
According to the school handbook, teachers were not supposed to swear, but she did not correct me. “We started a get-well card,” she said, “Angela’s taking contributions for flowers.” We looked at each other, marching through these gestures of sympathy; we did not know what else to do. She checked her watch. “I’m late for work—”
Mrs. Jefferson also worked the evening shift at the Macy’s perfume counter, spraying innocent bystanders and inquiring politely if they wanted to buy Obsession or Happy. She sprayed with more abandon, she said, as we got closer to the EOG tests, particularly if her class was ill-prepared. She had developed a tic in her left eye over the last year, which she confided to me was easy to hide at the fragrance counter because she could pretend she got perfume in her eye. I had spotted the whole sixth-grade faculty hawking shoes after school hours at Shoe Carnival, and the art teacher bussing dishes at Ruby Tuesday.