Detective Jenner was right—people in this town love their stories about Sarah. And after she died, there were a lot of other stories that popped up, too. Stories about the person she was when she was alive. How kind and generous and genuine she was.
There are dozens of stories out there. Almost everyone wants to say they knew Sarah. Everyone wants to claim a piece of her.
And yet, not a single one of those stories includes Richie. Because, as well as people think they knew her, almost no one knew she’d been in love with Richie McMullen since she was eleven. Or that they’d been “officially” dating (secretly) since the eighth grade.
If you google Richie’s obituary, you’ll learn that he had just turned fifteen two weeks before the shooting, that he was survived by both parents and five siblings. That his family is Catholic.
What it won’t tell you is that Richie didn’t own a scrap of clothing that wasn’t camo. Camo pants, camo jacket, camo everything. Sarah used to tease him mercilessly about it. “You know this is a school, not the woods, right?” she’d say. “You really think you’re gonna kill any turkeys in the cafeteria?”
“No,” Richie replied. “Because it’s deer season.”
In his class photos, he had almost-white hair. But you won’t find any pictures online of the time in seventh grade when he dyed it bright orange with Kool-Aid for a Halloween costume. It looked ridiculous, and it took weeks for it to completely wash out. By Thanksgiving, even the teachers were calling him “Carrot” half the time. That nickname stuck around. Sarah never called him that, but a lot of his friends did. He even signed my eighth-grade yearbook as “Carrot McMullen.”
Richie and I weren’t very close. He was dating Sarah, so our paths crossed constantly, but we never really went beyond friendly acquaintances. Most of the time, I was sure I got on his nerves, because I was always around, always the third wheel. Sarah never wanted to leave me behind, which meant Richie didn’t get to, either.
Once, I’d even overheard him complaining to her that he wished I had more friends so that they could spend lunch alone together, seeing as how they didn’t get to spend much time together outside of school. “Don’t you ever want her to just like … go away sometimes?”
Sarah primly told him, “No,” and refused to speak to him for a week.
Even so, when Valentine’s Day came around, just a month before the shooting, Richie showed up at school with a teddy bear for Sarah (one she’d have to lie to her parents about) and a bag of Skittles for me.
“What’s this for?” I’d asked.
He shrugged. “I didn’t want you to feel left out.”
Richie hated that first period computer science class with Ms. Taylor. He complained about it to Sarah constantly. He’d wanted to be in one of the elective Ag classes, but there’d been some sort of schedule issue, so he was stuck. Denny says he was always getting reprimanded by Ms. Taylor for playing games instead of working.
Chances are, that’s what he was doing when the shooter walked into that classroom.
There was so much more to Richie McMullen. Plenty of stories I don’t even know. But I hope this is enough so that, if anyone ever reads this, they won’t remember him as just one of the faceless, nameless victims—one of the nine—of the VCHS massacre.
Instead, maybe you’ll remember him as Carrot.
I think he’d have liked that.