Dear Reader,
Damn it, I really didn’t want to do this.
When Lee texted me in late August, asking me to meet her at the café on a Saturday afternoon, I almost didn’t reply. I’d hoped our last meeting would be it—the last time I’d ever have to see anyone from that awful town ever again. But in her message, Lee promised that this would be the final time she’d ever contact me, and I don’t know, I guess I was intrigued. So I went.
She was there with Miles, that quiet kid with the beanie. They were sitting side by side, looking at each other’s face in that way that feels disgustingly intimate. When I pulled out the chair across from them, I made sure the legs scraped loudly against the floor, and they both looked up.
“What do you want?” I asked, sitting down and folding my arms over my chest.
Lee didn’t bother with the small talk, which I appreciated. In fact, she didn’t say a thing as she reached into her pocket and removed a small object. When she passed it across the table to me, I realized it was a dark blue USB drive.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Our stories,” she said. “Denny, Ashley, Eden, Miles, and me. They all wrote letters, telling their stories, and I put them all together.”
“And you’re giving this to me why?”
“After I saw you in the spring, I didn’t know what to do,” Lee explained. “I had these letters, because I thought telling the truth would help. But then I talked to you and I realized that … that it maybe wasn’t my decision.” She looked down, shame coloring her cheeks a bright shade of pink. “I was confused, so I decided to figure things out by writing it all down—everything I’d done. I’d hoped putting it on paper would help me figure out what to do. And it did.”
“Spit it out,” I said.
“I figured out that I wasn’t the person to figure it out,” she explained. “You are.”
I rolled my eyes. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Believe me, she’s not,” Miles said. I almost didn’t understand him at first. The kid really doesn’t speak clearly.
“You can destroy it if you want,” Lee said. “Or you can publish it. Or anything. It’s yours now. I asked, and all of the others gave permission for you to use it—or not use it—however you choose.”
“All of them,” I repeated.
“Yes, even Ashley,” she said, answering the question I hadn’t asked. “She’s still upset with me, but … I think she feels bad about what happened to you.”
I rolled the drive between my fingers, watching the light from the café window gleam off its plastic casing. “Why do I get this? Why not someone else?”
“Because,” Lee said, “of all of us, you’re the one who has suffered the most.”
“Don’t pity me.”
“I don’t,” she said. “But I do feel guilty. We all do. We saw you being silenced, we saw your voice get taken away, and we didn’t do anything to help. So this is our way of trying to give you control of your story again. Use it or don’t. We’ll be okay with whatever you decide.”
“Lee, we better get going,” Miles said, checking the time on his cell phone.
“Right.” She stood up, pulling her purse over her shoulder. “We’ve got a long drive ahead of us. We’re making a road trip to California,” she added to me, as if I cared about her plans.
I glanced out the window, at the old pickup truck I recognized from the last time we’d met here. Now the bed appeared to be loaded with what I could only guess were boxes and covered with a blue tarp. “You’re driving across the country in that piece of junk? It looks like it might break down at the next exit.”
Lee smiled. “It’s tougher than you’d think.”
As she and Miles moved toward the door, I called after her. “Lee.” She turned and looked at me. “You said this was the last time you’d contact me.”
She nodded. “I promise.”
“Thank you,” I said. “And … have a safe trip.”
She smiled, waved, and stepped out into the parking lot with Miles at her side. I watched through the glass as her truck pulled away, fading into the distance as it headed west.
* * *
I’d thrown the thumb drive in a drawer when I got home and told myself to forget about it. I considered destroying it, smashing it with a hammer or tossing it into a fire in some symbolic gesture. But I didn’t own a hammer, and I wasn’t sure if a hard drive would burn or how long it would take. So instead, it ended up in the drawer at the bottom of my desk, where the old batteries, unused cables, and slightly cracked cell phone cases went to die (because apparently I’m a hoarder who never remembers to just throw things away).
And I did forget about it. For a while.
Then, several months later, the fourth anniversary came. I’d been at Walmart the night before, buying food that I could stockpile in my dorm room so I wouldn’t have to go out in public the next day. I always skip classes on the anniversary. I tell everyone I have a cold. It’s spring. The weather is changing. Sinuses are the worst. Etc., etc. So far, no one has noticed that my colds coincide with the Ides of March.
Anyway, I was buying groceries for my upcoming anxiety hibernation, and I saw that damn book.
It was there by the cash register, where all of the bestsellers go. Sarah McHale’s face staring out at me. The face I’d seen only seconds before the monster killed her. And, of course, there was the cross.
Not my cross. Not the one they found in the bathroom—the one Sarah McHale had never even seen but somehow ended up being buried with. It was another cross. But that didn’t matter, I guess. It got the point across, it sold the story, who cared if it was accurate?
I stared at that book for a long time. Long enough that the woman in line in front of me noticed.
“Have you read it?” she asked.
I looked at her, and for a minute a bolt of fear shot through me. Did she know who I was? Was she going to lash out at me? Spit on me? Scream at me in the middle of this Walmart checkout line? I could feel my body starting to fold in on itself, but I forced it to be steady.
You’re fine, I thought. She doesn’t know. No one knows. You are Renee now.
The woman was still looking at me, and I had to remind myself of the question she’d just asked. After too long a pause, I managed to shake my head.
“It’s great,” she told me. “The most moving book I ever read. I’ve already read it twice, even though it just came out last week.”
“Just in time for the anniversary,” I said.
The woman must not have heard the note of bitterness in my voice, because she just nodded vigorously. “It’s so hard to believe it was four years ago. It was such a tragedy. I wonder how those other kids are doing. The ones who survived, I mean.”
“Next customer,” the cashier said, and the woman moved forward and began placing her items on the conveyor belt.
“Are you going to buy it?” the woman asked, looking back at me. “You should. It’ll change your life. That girl was such an inspiration. It really reaffirmed my faith.”
“Not today,” I said.
But then, when the woman was gone and the cashier was asking for my items … I don’t know why I did it. Self-destructive behavior. Morbid curiosity. Because part of me wanted to hate-read it. Take your pick. But I reached out, grabbed the copy at the front, and tossed it onto the conveyor belt.
“Glad you changed your mind,” the cashier said as he scanned the book. “You won’t regret it.”
I already knew he was wrong.
When I got home, I barricaded myself in my room and changed into sweatpants.
The next day, I tried to do anything I could to keep my mind off the shooting. I tried listening to the happiest, most annoyingly upbeat music on my iPod. I tried watching some romantic comedy one of my friends had recommended to me. I even tried studying for my organic chemistry midterm. But nothing worked. My thoughts kept circling and circling, always coming back to that day four years ago. That bathroom. Those girls. That gunshot.
And then there was freaking Ashley Chambers.
When I logged into my email, I had a message from her. I don’t know how she got my contact info. From Lee or Eden, I guessed. But she’d decided to reach out to me. On that day of all days. I was so furious, just at the sight of her name in my inbox, that I almost deleted it without reading.
Curiosity beat out indignation, and I opened the email.
It was short. Just a few lines. She said she’d been thinking about me since last year, when Lee started telling people the truth about Sarah. She said she was sorry, and that she wanted to reach out sooner but was nervous. She hoped I was doing okay, and she understood if I didn’t want to write her back.
Well, that was good, because she wasn’t going to get a response from me. I deleted the message and closed my laptop. Maybe it made Ashley feel better to apologize, but it made no difference to me. And I really wished she’d chosen another day to send that email.
I climbed back into bed and pulled the comforter over my head.
Maybe this sounds weird, but my shoulder hurt. A phantom ache left behind from a bullet wound four years old. It was faint, but there. A reminder that no matter how much that physical scar faded, the hurt might never end. I could go by Renee. I could craft a new history for myself. But this was something I could not escape. Not really.
Eventually I gave into the temptation and picked up the book. It was still in the shopping bag next to my door. It was the last thing I wanted or needed to read right then. But the pull was too strong, and I was weaker than I’d let anyone know.
So, yeah, I read it. I read every damn page. And it made me feel just as awful as you’d expect.
I was only brought up in the book a few times. A passing reference to “rumors” that Sarah’s story wasn’t true. No mention of my name. No mention of the abuse my family and I endured. I was barely more than a footnote.
Maybe you’d think that would be a relief. Better than having my name dragged through the mud again, right? But, no. It felt worse. So much worse. At least when people hated me, they heard me. They didn’t believe me, but my voice was out there. They tried so hard to stamp it out, to silence me, but I’d kept yelling.
Until I just couldn’t do it anymore.
But in this book, it’s as if I didn’t exist. As if that day didn’t even happen to me. I’d rather have my name smeared all over those pages, to be condemned as some kind of devil-worshipping monster, than to have Sarah’s parents tell her story as if I don’t exist. As if nothing that I said, nothing that I survived, even registered with them at all.
I had no idea I’d feel that way until I read that book, until I threw it across my dorm room so hard that it bounced off the wall with a loud thud. I thought I’d been telling Lee the truth when I said I wanted to move on, that I didn’t want my name or my story or anything out there. And I still felt that way. Still felt like the truth would bring me nothing but pain that I’d been fighting so hard to put behind me. If I had tried to speak up when she asked, tried to write one of her stupid letters, it just would have gotten me the same abuse I’d dealt with four years ago.
But there I was, being ignored, forgotten, pushed out of my own story entirely. And damn if that didn’t hurt just as much.
I didn’t know what I wanted.
I still don’t know what I want.
For a long time, I just sat on my bed, staring at the book where it lay on my floor. And it was only then that I remembered that USB drive Lee had given me months ago, on her way to California. I’d actually managed to forget for a while. I hadn’t wanted anything to do with it before, but all of a sudden, I had to know what was on there. I had to read another version of this story.
So I dug it out, plugged it into my computer, and read everything Lee had compiled: her long letter, interspersed with shorter letters from the others. Stories I hadn’t known. Stories from that day and the days, weeks, years that had followed.
Lee said I could do whatever I wanted with it. Write my own story, try to release it to the public, or just destroy the damn thing. Hell, I still have no idea which of those is the best choice.
But … screw it. Whatever. I don’t know that it matters. I don’t know if I’ll ever let anyone else see this, but I can’t get this stupid letter thing out of my head. It’s been nearly a month since I opened the file she gave me, and I’ve opened it a dozen times since. And it’s just going to keep driving me crazy until I write this down so … here you go. Here’s my story.
* * *
I spent a lot of time in that particular bathroom. Always skipping class. Sometimes smoking. I hated school. I was that cliché angry girl with no friends and a great pair of combat boots. So I hid in a place where I could interact with as few people as possible. Boy, did that bite me in the ass.
So March 15, I was in the bathroom, as usual. I’d been in there, smoking in the corner so no one passing by would see, for most of the period. I’d told my geometry teacher I was feeling sick. I don’t think she believed me, but she let me go anyway. I’m sure she disliked me just as much as I disliked her. I’d been in there alone all period, until Ashley Chambers walked in.
I knew Ashley. She was the kind of self-righteous Christian that I hated. The kind who acted like you had to do things her way or you were headed straight to hell. She was the reason I stayed away from things like the Fellowship of Christian Students. Well, that and my general disdain for most people. I know Lee says she’s better now, and Ashley might have apologized to me in that email, but whatever. I’m not the forgiving sort.
Anyway, she didn’t see me when she came in the bathroom. She was clearly distracted or else she would have noticed the smell of my cigarette. I was relieved. I didn’t want to deal with her. So I pressed closer into the corner, hoping she’d leave without even acknowledging me.
But before she came out of the stall, two more girls hurried in. Freshmen freaking out about a hickey. They did notice me, and I expected them to give me a lecture about how I was breaking the rules. They looked like the kind of girls who would. But they didn’t.
I didn’t know Lee Bauer or Sarah McHale at the time. I mean, I knew their faces. Small school and all. But they were two years behind me and we didn’t have any classes together, so I didn’t know anything about them. Other than that, apparently, Sarah’s getting a hickey was the end of the world and her parents were uptight, overprotective jerks.
I wasn’t really paying attention to them until Ashley walked out of the bathroom stall and started pulling her holier-than-thou crap.
“Who needs Jesus when you have boys that’ll suck on your neck?”
I rolled my eyes. It was so obvious she was jealous because no one wanted to make out with her. Not that I was one to judge. At sixteen, I still hadn’t been kissed. Pretty much all the guys at VCHS thought I was scary, and I thought they were annoying. So no loss there, I guess. But still. Ashley’s bitterness was so apparent it might as well have been written across her forehead.
By the time she noticed me, all of her snark had been used up on Sarah. She glared and I glared back and then she left.
“Someone needs to tell her that Jesus likes nice people,” Sarah said.
Despite myself, I laughed. And I remember that she turned and grinned at me. Like I was in on the joke. People at school didn’t look at me like that very often. But, I don’t know, it was nice. For a second I thought that maybe Sarah McHale was kind of cool. One of the few people in this school I didn’t despise.
The irony.
I glanced down at my watch—this clunky old thing that used to belong to my grandfather—and realized the bell was about to ring. I finished off my cigarette and tossed the butt into the nearest toilet, flushed, and headed toward the bathroom door.
That’s when the world changed.
I heard the gunshots. It only took me a second to know what I was hearing. The screams made it abundantly clear. In some ways, I think I’d been expecting it. That sounds weird. But we’d been doing lockdown drills since I was in elementary school. I don’t remember a time when I truly believed school was safe.
I’ve read the other letters. I know that everyone else was surprised or in shock. Maybe I’m just a pessimist or maybe I watched too many true crime documentaries. Either way, I knew it was an active shooter situation immediately. And I knew I didn’t have time to get into a classroom before the school went into lockdown. So I ran back into the bathroom.
Lee and Sarah were in the doorway, and I shoved them inside. “Hide,” I remember snapping.
“What?”
I was running toward a stall when I tripped. The laces on my boot must’ve come undone. I hit the tiles hard, knocking the breath out of me. I gasped and sat up. “Hide,” I told the girls again. I was frustrated that they didn’t seem to understand what I did.
Sarah must’ve picked up on it right after that, though, because she grabbed Lee by the arm and dragged her off toward another stall.
I got to my feet and rushed into the stall right ahead of me. I knew that if I locked the door, he’d know someone was in there. It’d be easy to shoot over or under. I also knew that if I didn’t want to be noticed, I’d have to stand with my feet on the toilet so he couldn’t see my boots under the door. Not to sound weird, but I’d thought about this before. In all the lonely hours I’d spent in that bathroom, I’d planned out a dozen nightmare scenarios and how I’d escape.
My mom calls me morbid. I call me prepared. Not that it did me a lot of good that day.
As I crouched on the toilet seat, my legs and back already aching, I raised a hand to my chest and reached under the neck of my T-shirt, but the little cross and the thin chain it hung on were gone.
Yes. You read that right. Cross necklace. The infamous cross necklace. The one that caused so many people to love Sarah McHale and hate me. That necklace was mine. I bought it with birthday money when I was eleven at a crafts fair, and I’d worn it pretty much every day since. Even after my parents split up and my mom stopped going to church. Even after at least three kids in my middle school asked me if I worshipped the devil because of the way I dressed. Even after I met girls like Ashley Chambers and realized why I kind of hated organized religion. I kept that cross on. And yes, despite all of that, I still believe in God. Regardless of whatever rumors you’ve heard.
But my necklace was gone. The chain must’ve broken when I tripped.
As stupid as this sounds, I almost went back to get it. I was thinking that if he saw it on the floor, he’d know people were in the bathroom, so I should go get it. But before I could move out of my crouching position, heavy footsteps entered the bathroom. I held my breath, thinking the words as I prayed.
But it didn’t matter. I don’t know if he saw me through the crack in the door or if he was just shooting at anything. I don’t know if this was calculated or impulsive. I’m sure everyone has theories about why he did it and what his plans were that day, but I’ve tried to tune it all out. Like Lee, I just don’t care.
Listen, I was an angry, depressed kid with a lot of hate for the people around me. And from what I’ve read in these letters, it sounds like Miles Mason had a messed-up home life. But neither of us ever shot at anyone. So I don’t care how sad this guy’s life was or how mean people supposedly were to him. Sorry, I just don’t. He’s the villain in my story.
One of them, anyway.
So he fired a couple of shots, one of which hit the wall and ricocheted back at me. I remember the pain bursting in my shoulder. Blunt and sharp at the same time. I screamed and fell forward, knocking the stall door open on my way down. From the floor, I could see my necklace, just a couple of feet away, but he was there, too. Standing over me as I bled onto the tiles.
And he saw the necklace, too.
“Whose ugly-ass cross is this?” he asked.
I gritted my teeth through the pain, but I was worried if I didn’t answer him, he’d either shoot me again or think someone else was in the bathroom and go looking for Lee and Sarah. That sounds like I was trying to be a hero. I wasn’t. I promise you most of my motivation for answering was selfish. I just didn’t know what he wanted to hear.
“Mine?”
“Yours?” He sounded shocked and almost amused. Even the kid with the gun didn’t believe I could possibly be the owner of that necklace. What foreshadowing of things to come.
“Yes,” I gasped.
“You think Jesus is watching over you right now?”
What did he want me to say? I didn’t know this kid. I didn’t know if this was some bizarre right-wing Christian terrorism or something. The odds of him killing me if I said no seemed just as high as if I said yes. I wasn’t defending my faith or being a martyr. I just wanted to survive.
“I … do. Yes.”
But he wasn’t listening anymore. Something from the other side of the bathroom must’ve caught his attention, because he was walking away, toward one of the other stalls. I crawled back into my stall and curled into a ball, trying not to listen to the next few gunshots. Trying not to think about how the girls I’d just told to hide were probably dead.
He left the bathroom then, and it wasn’t long after that that the police came. I was rushed to the hospital and told that I was very lucky. The bullet in my shoulder hadn’t done as much damage as it could have, and with some physical therapy and a lot of patience, it would heal. They told me I was going to be okay.
They didn’t know that the bullet wound was the least of my problems.
I didn’t tell people right away about what he’d said to me in the bathroom. Ironically, considering where we are now, I didn’t think it mattered. As far as I knew, no one had heard that brief exchange. When there were two teachers and seven teenagers dead in a high school, who cared that I’d lost my necklace? Or that the asshole with the gun had asked me about it?
I didn’t mention it to anyone until a couple of days after the shooting, when Detective Jenner stood in my hospital room, questioning me about what had happened. When I told him, he frowned and exchanged looks with the other officer.
“You sure that was your necklace?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said, annoyed. I had a shoulder wound, not a head wound. Of course I was sure. “Did you find it? The necklace?”
“It’s … still considered evidence,” he said. He left a few minutes later.
I never got that necklace back. It was buried with Sarah McHale.
My necklace. The one I’d worn every day. Was in another girl’s coffin. And God, at the time, that made me so angry.
When I first heard the Sarah Story, I thought it would be easy to correct. It was a misunderstanding. It wouldn’t be a big deal to just tell people the truth. But we know how that ended. With harassment and vandalism and my mother crying because the women in her office were making her life a living hell. My preacher at my church didn’t believe me. My own grandmother died a year later, still sure I was a liar who just wanted attention.
Meanwhile, there were youth rallies in Sarah’s honor, songs written about her, politicians telling “her” story as they lobbied either for or against whatever was on the agenda for that week. And hey, I get it. Like I told Lee, it’s a great story. The girl who dies for her faith is much more compelling—and useful—than the goth loner who was so scared out of her mind that she would have done or said anything to survive. Plus, I lived. Where was the drama in that?
If you’ve read everything Lee wrote, then you know the rest. By the time VCHS opened up again, my family couldn’t take it anymore. Mom packed up and moved us to another state, and Dad, along with his new wife, followed shortly after.
That’s when I started going by my middle name, Renee, and stopped talking about the shooting altogether. They’d never have said it, but I know my parents were relieved. Sometimes, I still wonder if they even believe me.
I don’t think I want to know.
* * *
It’s been a few days now since I wrote that last section. It’s the first time I’ve really explored the shooting in years, outside of my own nightmares. It was painful, yeah, but it also felt good to write it all down. To tell my story and not be screamed at or spat on.
I don’t know what I’m going to do with this document. I keep thinking about it. Circling the options over and over in my head, weighing the pros and cons. And then I keep coming back to what Lee said in the café last summer, when she gave me the thumb drive. She didn’t care what I did with the letters. It wasn’t about where they ended up, but about letting me have control of the narrative.
I think I get that now.
I’ve realized that it’s never going to be okay. The pain of what happened to me—the shooting, the abuse after—it’s not going away, no matter what I do with these letters. I’m never going to be able to forgive some of the people in my hometown. Honestly, I am angrier at some of them—Brother Lloyd, Ashley, the preacher at my old church—than I am at the boy who shot me. I don’t know if that’s rational. But nothing about trauma is rational.
There’s going to be hurt no matter what I decide to do with these letters. But at least, for the first time in over four years, I have the power over my story. Over all of our stories. Who and how and when and if anyone reads this—it’s up to me. Not a news crew looking for the best story. Not the heartbroken parents of a girl they need to believe was a martyr. Not even the well-meaning survivor determined to set the story straight and make amends.
It’s my choice.
And I guess, if you’re reading this, you know what choice I made.
Sincerely,
Kellie Renee Gaynor-Marks
and the survivors