There's something exhilarating about watching the hero of an action movie soar across the silver screen, thrusting fists into the face of some grotesque, mustached villain. Every time I see a thriller, I am at the edge of my seat, bubbling with excitement.
When the security guard came sprinting into the lunch room shouting, "This is a lockdown." I didn't feel anything even remotely close to excitement. I didn't want to skip through the commercials, didn't want to turn the page. I wanted to close the book, to pause the movie, to curl up in the safety of my own skin and never leave.
It was nothing like the movies. There was no hunky hero waiting in the wings to save us. There were only teachers on the edge of a breakdown, as they slowly realized that they were responsible for the two hundred lives they had just herded into the auditorium.
The villain was invisible. He was a crackle on the radio, a shadow in the corner, a ghost hanging in the forefront of everyone's mind. There wasn't a clear cut solution, no Bruce Wayne to bust in and kick some ***. Just terrified kids, and the teachers who were so much more human than I had ever seen them.
The girl next to me's hands shook in her lap, her voice carrying a note of panic that I'm sure matched my own. My knuckles turned white as I gripped my phone like a lifeline, trying to send words of love through the airwaves to my everything, who was cowering in a corner of the algebra classroom three stories up.
In the movies, goodbyes are always a performance. They are dramatic and gut wrenching. They are sobs into the sky, and screams into the night. What the movies don't prepare you for is the idea that your goodbye could be an eight letter text message, or a whisper no one would ever hear. As I waited for a reply, I wondered what would happen if this was the end. Maybe I'd hear her name on the radio that the teacher was holding, read from a list of casualties from another teen drama. Maybe I'd come home to find her name plastered across tv screens, my best friend's face synonymous with a caricature of tragedy.
If they made a Lifetime movie about this, I wonder who would play her, what glamorous Hollywood actress would dissect her personality and attempt to transform into a pale ghost of the girl I've known since childhood. I wondered how much money she would make for wearing a dead girl's skin.
Somehow, "school shooting" has become a marketable phrase and sold to me with a perfect soundtrack and a dramatic title. I wonder how much money I have given to the same people who wouldn't hesitate to turn my tragedy into a blockbuster for all to see, as they fill fiction with the faces of the nonfictional dead.
The voice on the radio signaled the all clear. The girl next to me breathed the deepest sigh of relief I have ever heard. My best friend sent back a text much longer than eight letters. A happy ending, I suppose. But as I walked out of that auditorium, something shattered inside of me. I will never hear a gunshot without imagining it coming from behind my best friend, never watch the news without wondering why it wasn't us, never see a bullet without feeling it pierce my mind.
I haven't been to a single action movie since.
I've already lived one.
