When I think of Kellie Gaynor, two memories flash in my mind. The first is a quick snapshot, her ashen face and wide, dark eyes when she turned around in the bathroom door and told Sarah and me to hide. It was the first word she’d ever said to me.
Hide.
The second memory plays more like a short film. It happened weeks later, at the local grocery store. It was the first time I’d left my house since the shooting. I’d told Mom I wanted to go to the store with her. I didn’t want to be left alone in our house. Not yet. But five minutes in and I already felt panicked. The store wasn’t even that crowded. There were maybe a dozen people with shopping carts. But it was enough that anytime someone came around the corner, my heart started to pound. When someone in the aisle next to mine dropped a can on the ground with a loud thud, I started crying.
“Lee baby,” Mom said, her own voice shaking. She reached out to touch me, but I jerked away. I didn’t want to be crying in the middle of the cereal aisle and I definitely didn’t want her to cry, either. That would just get more people staring at us. And besides, this wasn’t about her. She lowered her hand slowly and said, “You can go wait in the car if you want. I won’t take long.”
“I’m fine,” I snapped. “I can take care of myself.”
But thirty seconds later, I turned around and headed back toward the front of the store, leaving Mom to do the rest of the shopping herself. I wasn’t sure if I was going to wait in the car or just stand near the front of the store, by the exit, so I could see down each of the aisles and make a quick escape at any sign of danger.
But before I could decide, I saw her.
Kellie.
She was emerging from the freezer section, a curtain of dyed-black hair obscuring part of her face, her wounded arm still in a sling. She was staring at her boots and she hadn’t noticed me yet, which was just as well. I wanted to say something to her, but I wasn’t sure what just yet. “Hi” didn’t really seem sufficient given what had happened the last time we saw each other.
I was running through a few possibilities in my head as she got closer and closer to me, when a middle-aged woman in a pink floral dress stepped out from the canned goods aisle and bumped right into Kellie.
Kellie stumbled but caught herself. She turned to look at the woman, and if I’d assumed the collision was an accident, that thought went out the door almost immediately.
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” the pink-floral woman yelled.
I recoiled and wrapped my arms around myself. Even from this distance, I could see Kellie start to shake. Though she didn’t move. She stared back at the woman and turned her chin upward, letting her hair fall back, out of her face. She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t run, either.
“You’re nothing but trash.” The woman’s voice was so loud that everyone in the store seemed to have heard, stopping and staring, but no one doing a thing to intervene. “A lying piece of trash.”
I should be clear: This was before I’d seen those flyers at the pharmacy. Before I’d learned about the Sarah rumors. I had no idea why this woman was screaming at an injured teenager in the middle of the grocery store. And it wasn’t just the one woman in the floral dress, either. There were others gathering around, most glaring, a few hurling curse words at her.
It wasn’t something I’d ever seen before—a group of grown adults surrounding a teenage girl, talking to her like she was a cockroach, a vile thing to be squished by whatever means necessary.
“Kellie.” A sharp voice came from the front of the store. A tall woman with strawberry-blond hair and thick-rimmed glasses was looking back at the scene from the checkout line. Even through her lenses, I could tell she had an expression of anger and shock on her face. “Kellie, honey, let’s go.”
The woman, I realized, was her mother.
Kellie took a few steps, breaking free from the small crowd, but as she moved toward the checkout counter, one of the bystanders spat at her.
“Go to hell,” the man, who must’ve been in his forties, hissed.
“Kellie,” her mother said again, her voice now tinged with a touch of fear.
Kellie kept her head down as she hurried over to her mother, who was grabbing the freshly bagged groceries as fast as she could. She shoved one of the bags into Kellie’s good arm and began steering her toward the exit.
But it’s the moment after that that sticks with me. The moment just before Mrs. Gaynor pushed open the glass door. In that split second, Kellie looked back, and our eyes met. I don’t think she knew I was there until that moment. And as she recognized me, her eyes narrowed and her lips twisted into a sneer.
No one had ever looked at me with the same sort of fury that Kellie Gaynor did in that moment. It was so powerful, so visceral, that I flinched. She could have slapped me and it would have been less startling.
When I think of Kellie, I will always remember that look on her face as she left the grocery store.
And I’ll remember that I stayed quiet, even when I had plenty of chances to speak up.