Exit Signs

by Madison Dettlinger

In the days after, we watch the news. We write names on ribbons and tie them to the fence where Johnny McBride hit a home run. Johnny’s school picture is everywhere. Crossing his arms over a white button-down, he tries to look serious, the way his dad looks in an old photo in his army uniform, but Johnny’s lips can’t resist quirking up a little at the corners, like he knows something you don’t.

Johnny is a hero, they say, because Johnny rushed the shooter before he died, even though it didn’t make a difference. 

We put their names on everything. After a week, we take the ribbons and tie them to balloons and let them go, watching them float away. One of them pops before Connor Rivera can let it go, and his sister, Katie, falls to the ground, taking deep, shuddering breaths, sucking in air and quaking with tears like an ocean tide. We picture the gun in his hands, plucking the balloons from the sky. Pop, pop, pop.

On TV, we watch Annie Chu’s mom crying to one of the reporters. She is unmoored, she says, like an untethered ship. Her life is over. She never thought it would happen, she says, not here.

We go back to school on a Wednesday. The men that line the sidewalk watch us through cameras so big we can’t see their faces, can’t see their eyes, which Mrs. Ellis used to say were the window to the soul. We spray soda at them and flip them off, but they are undeterred. They stay standing there, faceless and silent, lenses round and uncaring like the eyes of some great monster, clicking away at their cameras with a sound like a spider’s pincers. 

A politician on the news blames what happened on video games, another on bullying. There’s talk of arming the teachers, but Dewan McKey becomes so distraught at the sight of the pistol on the hip of an officer welcoming us back that we’re given metal detectors instead, stationed at every entrance. 

We learn to categorize ourselves by where we were when it happened. The kids in Mr. Landry’s class, where it all started, are given a wide berth, like war heroes or celebrities. Solemn respect is given, also, to the 10th grade choir, practicing in the adjacent auditorium when the notes of the piano were punctuated by a sound they thought at first was firecrackers, an explosion from the chem lab a floor above, some other, more logical thing. 

The parents of the fallen haunt the school like ghosts. They come to dances, sports games, fundraisers. There is talk of a foundation, a community action committee. We go to the 5K, and then a meeting with the governor. We watch on TV as the parents beg the men in suits to do something, desperately shoving photos in their faces—Rebecca Squire waving from her seat on the back of a bloodred Cadillac the year she made homecoming court; Sean Avila grinning in his hockey uniform. They have seen it all before, and they are unmoved.

We print out a picture of the shooter from a news report. Mikey Lancelli says he had homeroom with him. Haley Day once drove him home from band practice. Samara Lawson knew it was him as soon as she heard the gunshots. She just knew it. We paste his picture on a dartboard, like something from a movie, and aim for the spot where he shot Alisa McCormack. Then Mikey walks over to the wall, plucks the dart from the shooter’s nostril, and brings it down again, stabbing his photograph over and over, not even noticing when the dart punctures the side of his palm and blood trickles down his wrist. We tear up the photo and burn it instead.

The teachers, too, are damaged beyond repair. Mr. Landry, who was shot in the back of the head and died instantly, is separated from the victims in the news reports. Twelve students and one teacher, they say, as if these distinctions matter anymore. Ms. Nowicki, who ran out of an emergency exit with her honors English class, keeps running and never comes back. We think we see her once, hunched over a shopping cart at the checkout line at the local convenience store, but she’s gone before we can make out the shape of her face. It’s Mrs. Payne who lasts the longest. When she retires, ten years later, there’s a dinner in her honor.

She looks tired, wrinkles pulling at the corner of her lips as she tugs her mouth up in a smile. 

We, too, are tired.

We have nightmares that we wave away in the haze of the morning. We hold our fingers like guns to our temples. We are restless and forlorn and forever searching for exit signs. At twenty-five and thirty and thirty-five, we are still just the kids from that place where that bad thing happened. 

Published October 13, 2019