Folsom and Vallejo were screaming at each other.
Enlai and I were trying in vain to get tabs on where everyone was. Missing in action, confirmed injury, evacuated the premisis, out of the danger zone, and people in between those categories. The worst was that we couldn't contact Ingrid. That was the worst for me. Anza and Tehama were out in the south parking lot. Some teacher had made them evacuate alongside everyone else, wouldn't hear a word to the contrary. She had a talkie now and was on Channel 16 of our available lines, which was a really bad sign in and of itself.
The Safety Patrol, the staff and the heads of various clubs all had talkies. Ten people could be on a line at once before it would switch you over to the next Channel. Normally we operated on three or four channels, six or seven on a busy day. Today everything was filled up to Channel 16, where Ms. Asaji was giving out instructions on repeat, instructions Ndidi Sabisi and Bonita Vasquez were repeating over as many channels as they could manage. There were people calling out for us to come save them. People were trying to find out what was happening. Something was blocking out cellphone access across campus, or at least across three buildings that we knew of. Hysterical rumors of a second shooter abounded, but nothing was confirmed, and it was maddening to even try to think of the possibilites. A few injured students had crammed their way into the Safety Patrol HQ and were huddled in the interrogation room, where Officer Ayulan tried to treat their injuries with a First Aid Kit. He was running out of supplies as people kept coming in and leaving for the nearest tunnel route, escorted by the head of the Architechute Club, who had made three trips so far. The massve size of our school was its own weakness. We were doomed.
People were dead. Not injured, dead, really truly gone, and the bodies were a sore spot; we couldn't get people to leave their classmates, their friends, the dead and dying. Teachers were flooding Folsom's office with calls that all her aides were trying to handle, but she needed that phone line for contacting the police and getting them here before things got any worse. Enlai and I had been trying to keep a list of confirmed casualites, but it was wildly apparent that number was rising, and eventually we settled for mapping out an affected area map with the help of a rookie Patroller named Seqi. If our caculations were correct the shooter was well into their second building in the ths rampage. Possibly a third. Calls from the Archer Building weren't coming in right. I didn't even try to think of what that could mean.
All the while there was the background sound of screaming, two people at the end of the rope refusing to budge an inch. Vallejo wasn't evacuating us. We weren't evacuating, and if he ordered us to we'd have fought it with everything in us. Folsom was screaming that the police were equipped to handle this, to take care of these kinds of situations, and this kind of thing was too much for us. She didn't want us to die. She was actually near tears, the softness in her voice making Vallejo waver, but until we got a signal we were all glued to our respective spots.
I wondered what my mom was going to do to me when this over. She'd be mad I stayed when I was told to leave. She totally would think that; she never approached of anything I did. She'd look at this as yet another act of defiance, an attempt to look grown up. I'd probably be grounded after this for a year. But even if my hands were shaking and my heart was hammering in my chest, I had to stay. There were lots of kids in there who needed help. They needed guidance. They needed someone, anyone, and I could be that person. So what if I was just a seventh grader? I could do this. I was better than no one. Better it be me than silence on that radio, right? Wasn't this the right thing to do? Wasn't that what our parents always told us to do?
"The police are on their way, and then you're leaving, like it or not!" Folsom yelled at Vallejo, causing a slight pause in the office. "Any action you take from this point on will not be supported by the school!"
"At least we're taking action!" Vallejo roared back. "Go back to playing office politics with the superintendant and leave the real work to the real adults!"
She slapped him. Heads turned and people paused even in the chaos. She looked as surprised as anyone else did. Vallejo touched the spot where he'd been hit, and mumbled some kind of apology no one else caught. That was what did it; Principal Folsom broke down. She did something then she had never done before in public, not in a long time. She started crying. Vallejo's words died in his throat. "If you try to handle this you're all going to get killed. I..."
They stared at each other, wordlessly, fists clenched and bloodshot eyes angry, locked on, stubborn. Something in Vallejo's eyes softened briefly. He muttered something in Spanish, which was usually a sign he was furious or at his wits end or just not awake. Everything was surreal. People were staring, watching, and they were locked into their own little world. Neither was big on emotional displays, but today had pushed them over the edge, and now they were at a point of no compromise, neither willing to yield an inch. Things had been said that were damaging, on both sides. Resentments had built up. But for just a moment they connected. For just a second the two most rock solid people in the school were vulnerable. It was uncomfortably private to witness and not just a little surreal. They never, ever wanted to think it, let alone admit to it, but they cared about each other. They couldn't help it. The obvious of it would've been comical under any other circumstances. Vallejo pulled down the blinds on his office door so we couldn't see them.
Somewhere in the hazy mess of Channel 17, an uncertain voice said, "I think a Safety Patroller's been shot."
And chaos errupted anew.
I'm not shaking. I'm not even looking up.
That's profoundly stupid. This whole plan is insanity and stupidity wrapped up all in one, a lowest low in a life spent lower than most people know exists. Jay. The name is unfamiliar and foreign on my tongue, someone such a nobody that when all was said and done I didn't know him any better than anyone else. I'm nobody too. I'm a piece of shit too, in run down rags too with scars just as visible. No one ever came for me either.
It's sick, how much Jay and I are alike. Not physically. I am an Aryan posterchild, a beautiful broken doll with ash blonde hair and dark blue eyes. It's why people like to have their 'fun' with me. The idealistic, cherubic appearance begged for it, compelled them to it. They hurt me and used me because I was born looking like a good target to people who don't care what happens to me. Jay isn't that sickly, disgusting face in the mirror. He's perfect, with wavy, tangled dark hair, the color of the charcoal he used to draw in art class. A snub nose, tanned skin, splatters of blood. Long legs, long fingers, like a painter or a musician, and hazel eyes that burn. They burn into everything in front of him with such intensity it would scare me.
Would. But see, I don't have anything to lose either.
I've been hurt too. I know what it's like to be helpless and little more than a toy, an object to be used. I can see it in his eyes. Someone used him. I don't know who did. I don't know what happened or how long it's been going on, but I know that emptiness. I know that boiling point where you become so angry you go over into a kind of tranquil fury, calm infused with violence and hate. A second ago I couldn't look up, now I can't look away. I see reflected at me someone who I could be, someone who I maybe sometimes deep down wanted to be, a monster. Monsters are feared. They cannot be hurt. They are the infamous, the whispered terrors of X's lockers and classrooms. No one dares hurt them.
Except the nobody. Because that is what I am. I am no one. I am nothing. I have never been worth anything to anyone. Although my transferrence of custody to my great grandfather was supposed to change things, the truth was that I had already been exposed to the truth of who I was. I was violent. Angry. A punk. Nothing more than a piece of garbage even to the other crooks at X, a nameless mook, a human shield to be used to divert attention from the more important criminals. I was never anything important. I was never delicate, innocent, fragile, loving, all the things these kids are. I was never smart or talented enough to count. There is nothing left to threaten me with; they already took my dignity and my humanity, what is Jay going to do? Shoot me?
What's one more physical wound to me? My arms are covered in them. They make each second real. Before they released the pain. When the pain faded and there was nothing left, it became a way to breathe, to live, to remind myself I was alive. Now it's a weapon in my hand, a terribly small, awkwardly shaped one, something that they didn't detect me sneaking in this morning. They never do. People here aren't very smart. I'm standing inside a locker with the world's worst plan formed, ready to do what these idiots should've done a long time ago. Someone should have done this at the beginning. People as drunk on power as Jay is right now can't think someone might challenge them; he has the gun. What idiot would take on someone who's got a gun and a pipebomb on them?
Me. I've never known when to quit. I will never learn that lesson. Stupid, hardheaded stubborn idiot. Everyone knows what a pathetic mess I am. Never did know how to take authority. Never did understand the boundaries between appropriate and inappropriate. We problem children are like wrenches inside a machine, clogging it up and destroyed it from the inside. I wonder if Jay has a great little speech prepared, in his head. Does he think it's all worth it and it'll all be better now? That this will change anything, make anything better, make people remember him? It won't. No one cares. No one has ever cared, or will ever care. You could shoot yourself through the head and they'd step over the body here, too absorbed in their worlds of friendship bracelets and sitcoms and crushes. I hate them too. I know what it's like to hate them.
I will never be them. I will never be able to be like that. I will never be normal or innocent or stupid. I won't ever get butterflies in my stomach because of a girl, I won't ever blush and giggle at Sex Ed or get excited about the sports games. I will never be able to wake up without the pangs of white hot panic that have become so familiar to me. I'm not like Jay. I know why we hate. It's a kind of jealousy so intense it renders you numb after a while. You become numb to their world. It floats above and away from me, foreign and unobtainable. I hate them, the kids who go to church, blush at mini-skirts and try to be cool. The masses, the sheep, the filthy conformist dolts I would give anything to be like, just for a single moment, just for a few precious seconds. I used to cry and scream and hate and rage at them and God and fate and the universe and the human race. I used to grieve what I'd lost, hate what I couldn't have, and secretly dream, fantasies of a purer me.
This morning I was going to kill myself. I came here to clean out my locker, because I didn't want my great grandfather to have to do it or be sent useless junk by the school. My room is still waiting for me at his house, packed up in neat boxes. I spent the night preparing to die, preparing to be forgotten. I planned to die today. Sleeping pills, stolen anti-anxiety meds from a girl in my first period class, stolen over the course of two weeks. Follow down with sufficient amounts of vodka swiped from the locker of a former friend who didn't change his combination, and death would come swiftly. Three hours at most, given my calculations. It would be a beautiful death. I would welcome it with open arms, the quiet, the comfort, the peace. I still want it. Jay hasn't stopped me. He's delayed me.
There's no hope left for me, but those kids out there are still worth something. They're still people. I'm not a person. I will never be. I can want it, but it will never happen, not now. Too much structural damage. My only redeeming feature, the only thing I like myself even slightly for doing, is being too stupid not to fight back.
Were I a better man, this would be the point where I negotiate; talk the villain down, so to speak. I'd rant about morality and right and wrong and all that.
Instead, I just silently slip out of my locker's door and grip my knife tighter.
Time for the nobody to meet the nightmare.
