This won’t be on the news.
Ten minutes after the announcement, with the classroom door slammed shut and the desks stacked in front of the door, I realized one important fact about the hard lockdown: it wasn’t a drill.
Six middle-school girls—one from the previous period finishing a test, five working on a quiz for a different class—and two adults, me and my co-teacher, were huddled on the plush purple rug that I’d bought when I signed on to be a literature teacher.
I stared at the door: the small, thin window hastily covered up by shitty motivational posters. One was colorful, something about dreamers on a white background with aggressively pink florals and pastel blues. Another was black with neon lights about journeys and how to make the most of them. They were offerings from other teachers who watched me struggle to make my classroom look cozy and presentable. I stared at the desks blocking the entryway.
There was no lock on the inside for me to twist in case of an emergency. I had no key to lock the door from the outside. HR hadn’t given me anything other than a key card to get in and out of the building. The black gates outside were easily scalable. Any grown person over five feet tall would have no issue jumping the fence and getting inside.
I waited to hear gunshots. I waited for screams.
I’d stacked two desks against the door to create a barrier. I’d built it in a rush, having run from the bathroom just down the hall when I heard the announcement. Now I realized I hadn’t jammed the flat edge of the desk underneath the doorknob to keep it from opening.
If someone comes in here, we’re going to die first.
What can I use as a weapon in case someone comes in? What can I use? What can I use to protect the girls in my classroom? I decided I would use a spare desk.
It took twenty minutes and my co-teacher showing me the GroupMe message to learn that there was a suspicious individual on campus threatening to shoot the modulars where classes were taught. He was on the boys side, opposite of where I was on the girls side of our gender-divided, majority-Black student academy.
Later, the executive director of the girls academy would say she had sent out a message to all the teachers and staff on the girls side about the situation. That was a lie. A thick layer of tension, aggravation, fear, and anger hovered among the teachers after thirty, forty, whatever minutes had passed.
None of this would be on the news.
*
2009. It was two days before Halloween. Obama had been president for barely a year, my mother (not remarried yet) didn’t have to worry about being able to afford groceries, and I was sixteen, in my special topics in U.S. history class, when we went into lockdown for three hours. No one told us why. No one told us to not talk. There was no announcement of a suspected threat: only an order to not leave our classrooms.
There was a letter—a note, a rumor—on the wall of the flat wing of Naperville Central High School supposedly written by a student. The writer threatened to blow up the school or set the wing on fire. I cannot remember which one is true: possibly neither. All I recall is hearsay and hundreds of games of telephone after the fact. When talking to my best friend about our high school days, she remembered it as a bomb threat. She’d been in gym class when the soft lockdown started.
I don’t remember fear. I remember aggravation, annoyance, a desperate need to go to the bathroom but knowing nobody could. If I felt fear, I buried it in my books, in the homework I had on me and our teacher playing music for us. Not once did I consider that Mr. Albiniak was taking great care to make sure we stayed calm.
He was taller than all of us foolish teenagers. Did he lock the door without us noticing? Did he scope out the heavy desks, the ones with baskets at the bottom that held our books and bags, and consider using them as a weapon? They were made of metal, they screeched against the floor: the damage they could do would be significant.
Of one of three high schools in an affluent white district, only the Chicago Tribune and Central Times reported on the bomb threat. It wasn’t on the news.
A little more than a year before the bomb lockdown a former student murdered five others and wounded seventeen at Northern Illinois University before killing himself. Dekalb was almost an hour away, but close enough to put people on edge. Candlelit memorials for the thirty-two people at Virginia Tech was a fresh memory. Columbine was still more of a household name than Sandy Hook.
Parkland was almost ten years away. Santa Fe would be that same year.
Uvdale, thirteen.
The fear of being killed in your own classroom didn’t feel as close in 2009. It didn’t feel normal to be more scared of being shot in a classroom than drowning in the ocean. I am still afraid of the ocean, but I can choose to stay away from it.
When I lived in Milledgeville for graduate school, I used to drive by a pawn shop that proudly sold guns next to mattresses. It just was down the street from a Krispy Kreme. In my first week of teaching I hoped none of my students had guns in their backpacks.
*
It would be easy to murder a bunch of kids when there isn’t a way for teachers to lock their doors, when the teachers without keys outnumber those who do. One teacher grabbed a broom and jammed it against the doorknob to make a barrier. The teacher across the hall used her podium, and her students helped move a bookshelf to barricade the door. Another teacher propped herself against the door and held onto the doorknob so tight the metal dug deep red into her palms. She was right next door. None of us had keys to lock our doors. But the school directors don’t want you to know that. That won’t be on the news.
We were in lockdown for over twenty minutes before the announcement on the intercom told us the situation had become safe. We were to remain in hard lockdown. This meant we could talk and move around but not leave our classrooms. My co-teacher and I looked at each other and retrieved the laptops so the students could have something instead of the empty air of no-information. My co-teacher and I didn’t have much more to give them.
Since it was my planning period my room was often used by teachers and students as a quiet area to finish work. It was the only available room in an over-crowded charter school prone to misallocating its funds, which I was informed of after I’d left the job. I didn’t mind the company. The eighth graders, who I didn’t teach, were familiar with me, even saying hi in the halls. A handful would come up and talk to me during lunch and between classes, as if I were one of their regular teachers. The student finishing her test was one I was deeply fond of, and she later told me in my room she felt safe. Perhaps I was lucky to have so few people in my classroom, because I saw on the GroupMe that several teachers had classrooms full of girls sobbing and crying. It doesn’t need to be said why they were crying. We all know.
My co-teacher prayed as the hard lockdown dragged on, with only a metallic silence to accompany us. She closed her eyes, fingers folded together, cradling her phone in the cup of her hands.
I bounced my leg and looked over the desks, thinking about which one would be the best to grab and start swinging if a shooter came inside. My calf muscles clenched as they always do when my anxiety spikes. I contemplated texting my roommate, my mother, my dad, wondering what should be the last words I ever say to them.
It took over half an hour—forty minutes, however long—for the cops to arrive and arrest the man. One of the teachers called the police. An instructional coach told her not to in a group message. The coach never said why. The teacher was scolded by the executive director for making the phone call:
“Did you see him? Did you hear gunshots? Did you hear screaming? Then why did you call?”
I only started to relax a little when I didn’t hear any screaming. It didn’t tell me we were safe. It just told me there hopefully weren’t any dead children.
The man never entered the building. As far as I know, which is not much, he didn’t have a gun. No one was hurt, no one was killed. The possibility of how he could’ve easily walked into one of our buildings and killed the entire wing before the cops arrived lingers over me, still.
It’s fortunate the students wound up not being in danger, but it didn’t take away from the fear. They all could’ve watched their teachers, peers, friends, and siblings die. Many of my students have siblings in the same building and across the field on the boys side. Many teachers have their own children going to school there. My co-teacher was one of them. As soon as the lockdown was over, she went to see her eight-year-old daughter downstairs. I went to take my student to her next class and found a third of my second period students sobbing in the science room. I held two of them as they cried on my shoulders. It was all I could do. The executive director later had a hall meeting with the girls:
“Tears don’t do anything. They don’t solve anything. You were never in any danger, so enough of these tears.”
*
In February 2019, survivors of the mass murder at NIU came to Aurora, Illinois to mourn with the community after a gunman shot up a valve factory. Two of the five murdered were NIU graduates. Half an hour separates Dekalb and Aurora. The same amount of time between where I lived for most of my life and Aurora.
One of the survivors of the mass shooting at NIU, Patrick Korellis, still has shotgun pellets in his skull and arm that are too dangerous to surgically remove. The gunman shot him in the back of the head. The shooting at the plant re-traumatized him.
In 2021, eight Asian-American women were shot to death in Atlanta, the same city where these children go to school, in an act of violent, racist hatred and misogyny.
*
“You were never in any danger.”
Code: Shut up and stop crying.
If the news didn’t report it, if there weren’t any dead children, teachers, or staff, did it happen?
It’s okay to not be okay. That’s what I told one of my students when she was upset over how the executive director dismissed her feelings, and what I told my colleague who’d called the cops. She had been so afraid she cried in front of her students: an alarming sight to any child. You don’t need to show physical wounds to have experienced trauma. The what-if can be just as lingering as a scar. Carnage didn’t happen. It could have.
This won’t be on the news.
KELLY PIGGOT (she/her) is a lesbian writer and professor based in Atlanta, and holds an MFA in Fiction from Georgia College and State University. Her writing has been published with If There’s Anyone Left, Defunct, Eclectica Magazine, Exist Otherwise, and elsewhere. She can be found on twitter @kellbellhells and Instagram @kellbellhells.
RACHEL COYNE is a painter and writer from Lindstrom, MN.
