I was in the sixth grade when we heard the helicopter land. My school was on what was then a quiet little country road intersection, with a new interstate about a three-wood off the front lawn. It was a K-12 school then, and it was a school and a community hub in many ways. The only other development there then was on the diagonal lot, where a church was waiting for the exurb to grow, and the extra parishioners to come with it.
I think we were at lunch, and we heard the big thump thump thumping sound. It was a helicopter and it was low. We were due a new principal that day. The place had enjoyed the same woman running the joint for years, she’d become a favorite. (I believe she’s retired and living down at the beach now. Good for her.) This was a WPA school built to look like a prison, or a brutalish battleship, and we got a new chief, one full of fight. Or something. (She’s now a deputy superintendent at the state level.) So we thought this new person must be making a grand arrival. Thump, thump, thump, thump. A little much, we thought. Thump, thump, thump.
Now, we lived out in the suburbs of a suburb. It was quiet and peaceful. Twenty minutes this way, you were in a proper metropolitan city. Just beyond our front yard was the county line and then a whole lot of country. The setup was pretty grand, but on those old county roads you’d see more accidents than sheriffs or police, and we all knew where the helicopter landing plots were for medical emergencies. But that day we’d learned that the church across from the school was one of those pre-determined spots, too.
That helicopter, you see, wasn’t for the new principal, but for the flying ambulance. Across the open field from the lunch room and downstairs beneath the gym, a boy was on the floor just about bleeding out. He’d been changing from his gym clothes when a classmate apparently spun him around and stabbed him with a great big kitchen knife. I can still see the image of it from the television news later that night. A big, ghastly thing of a butcher knife. Meant for pot roasts, not for a 16-year-old boy’s chest. The doctors, we later heard, suggested that the guy was actually. A flinch this way, a hair that way, an entirely different story. The argument had to do with a basketball goal, but there was some longstanding thing going on as well.
Which, heck of a first day for the new woman, right?
The 15-year-old attacker was charged with murder. I’m not sure what happened with him.
And then in my junior or senior year a guy came off the street and onto campus to settle some score with a classmate. I didn’t see it, but the story went that that particular student was also very lucky, as he managed to somehow fight off an armed attacker. The details were always a little murky on that one. But another story was perfectly clear. In a second floor classroom one day that same year some kid was fiddling with a gun in his pocket and it went off. Somehow the bullet came through his pants, didn’t hit him and lodged in the floor. I distinctly remember this because that year I had a class in the room directly below it that semester. This guy apparently sprinted from the classroom, out the nearest door and threw the gun in the bushes. The gun, we heard, was never found.
These are stupid stories. The last two may be full of hearsay, to be honest. The first was very true; I remember it well. I knew the guy’s sister. There were other stories, and we lost classmates to horrible accidents. I was in a math class and heard someone come over the public address system in obvious tears to tell us that a boy in my grade had died from a gunshot wound. We knew he’d been clinging, I’m sure they told us the prognosis wasn’t the best. But we were still stunned. I’d played soccer with him for a year or two. Nice guy, talented kid. And then class carried on and a few days later I went to the funeral home and I’m sure said something foolish to his parents. It seemed like every year there was at least one fatal car accident to hear about, and you’d hear those helicopters every so often.
Ours was, by and large, a good school, a signature piece in the district, but we thought we’d seen and heard a lot. I have a hard time putting myself in those classrooms today, thinking what must it be like to have some story like that coming out of Parkland, Florida flooding the news. I have an impossible time imagining that in my old school, as I remember it. And I looked today at the young men and women I work with daily, just a year or two or four removed from their own high schools, and I am hard pressed to imagine how they would react to what we’ve seen and heard in the last two days. How could anyone know?
And so now we come to it: How does that shape those people? What is to become of them?
