Waiting

A short story for Hexagram 5.

Hi! I'm working on a short story cycle where I write a short story for every hexagram of the I Ching. Here is the short story for Hexagram 5.

Like most things that happened in Shannon’s life, it started at the periphery and worked its way towards her. She often thought about the moments before the moments; what happened just before life swung on a hinge. She thought about the pandemic and the way it snuck up on her, the days before school closed. The weeks in late February when everything was normal but for a lingering sense of unease and a few more seconds spent washing hands. Looking out at the expanse of people waiting for the school bus, waiting for their after-school clubs, waiting for the other shoe to drop, she felt that life was a series of waiting rooms ushering her from crisis to crisis. And then it hit, and life wasn’t so awful. But Shannon would look back at that time she came home from school as the universe playing out its own sick form of dramatic irony—they have no clue what’s coming, do they?

So she remembered the shooting in the same way. With the pandemic, she had weeks of lead time; with the shooting, it was minutes. It was an unseasonably warm day. The clouds hung pregnant over the sky, waiting to rain. She was waiting, and what she thought she was waiting for was not the thing she was actually waiting for.

Sitting in the empty chemistry classroom, she thought she had been waiting for her freshman to show up for their tutoring session. Maggie was going to bring friends this time—the poor girl couldn’t balance an equation to save her life, and evidently, neither could her friends. Shannon was a pretty shit tutor, all things considered. She couldn’t explain how to balance the equations; the answer usually just…offered itself up. Move the helium over here, work on one element at a time. That was the extent to which she could teach. But Maggie showed up week after week anyway, probably because she had only ever learned to learn by osmosis. They usually spent time talking more about Maggie’s love interests than chemistry. Shannon was better at older-sistering than tutoring, so she figured that’s what Maggie’s friends wanted too.

Mrs. Lapointe was off running errands around the school, or (more likely) gossiping with Mrs. Nortrup in the biology hallway. Shannon’s free period started a little earlier than Maggie’s lunch did, so she was used to waiting. Scratching out some of her notes, still in the throes of her daily life, she hadn’t known that the first shot had already been fired. Later, she would wonder how she missed it.

A succession of things happened at once. Maggie showed up, then Maggie’s friends showed up, and just as everyone was laying out their lunches and their three-ring binders, the lockdown warning began to blare. They sat, vacantly looking at each other, when the automated voice began to drone: There is an active shooter in the building. This is not a drill. There is an active shooter in the building. This is not a drill. There is an active shooter in the building. This is not a drill.

Of course, the cruel joke of it all was the school had in the past said various events weren’t drills, when in fact they were. Shannon remembered her mom being shocked to hear that, but she had no idea how intense active shooter drills were in the fashionable modern era. Maya, Shannon’s best friend and academic rival, had said that surviving an active shooter drill was more impressive than surviving the actual shooting. She said that after the passing of Mr. Bratsafolis, who had a heart attack during a drill in Shannon’s freshman year.

So while Shannon and the freshmen were concerned, they didn’t perhaps have the all-encompassing survival instinct that would have been warranted in the situation. Friendly bonfires and fireplaces inured them to the real thing. But the alarm kept going, and the voice kept blaring, so Shannon pulled rank and began to go through the motions of a lockdown: lock the door, turn off the lights, close the shades. She considered, and then wedged the doorstop under the door as well.

One of Maggie’s friends, a petite little thing you could mistake for a seventh-grader, whispered, “What if Mrs. Lapointe tries to come back here?”

Shannon unlocked the door and locked it again, something she did occasionally in bathrooms with insecure locks. Just to be sure. Would Mrs. Lapointe try to come back? She considered it, and then shook her head. “No, I don’t think she will. Teachers know to stay put.” It could be a problem that Mrs. Lapointe left students unsupervised, but that would have to be a problem for later. Shannon would lie for her, and she could force the little freshies to lie too.

Maggie and another friend were standing in the center of the classroom, frozen. Though they, being members of the school shooting generation, had had scores of active shooter drills in their school-lives, it wasn’t clear that they knew what to do. Shannon ushered them over to the inset of the wall where they would be out of the line-of-sight, then kneeled down in mimicry. “Guys. We’ll be fine. We don’t even know if it’s real or not.” Once the girls began to settle a bit, Shannon crawled over to Mrs. Lapointe’s desk.

She rifled through the drawers, looking for anything that could be used as a weapon. The options were grim—a stapler, cotton swabs, and a flask, to Shannon’s surprise. Not that Shannon had ever loved the idea of letting teachers carry, but being confronted with the prospect of bringing a box-cutter to a gun fight filled her with despair and rage. She selected the box-cutter and crawled back over when she heard a pop maybe five or so hallways down. The girls by the wall jumped, and Shannon froze, deathly still, until she heard another one further away. She resumed her crawl until she reached the wall. Back into the wall, clutching the box-cutter to her chest, panting.

A succession of pops then, but they sounded more distant than the two that had come before. Maybe he went up the stairs. It was hard to tell just by the sound. The school was big, and thank God for that. Shannon closed her eyes and did two rounds of box breathing, a trick her swim coach had taught her to regulate her breathing. The alarm was not abating; it was hard to think. Hard to sit here. This is not a drill.

Shannon had visualized this moment before, along with most of her classmates. She and Maya had talked about it at length one day. They both confessed they had school shooter dreams. She told Maya that she felt she actually knew what it would be like, to be shot in that way, to feel the bullets slam into her one by one. The dreams always ended with them being blown to pieces, of course. Shannon had not envisioned this part of it as clearly; she had forgotten that most of the students in a shooting would never meet the evil head-on. Most of the students in any given school would be doing just as she was doing—waiting. Waiting for the happy ending or the sad ending.

It didn’t sit right with her. The first thing you learn about surviving a shooting is run-hide-fight. So shouldn’t they be running? There hadn’t been any shots for a while. Would this be the time to run? Why didn’t schools ever teach the run part? The minute she asked herself the question, she knew the answer, grimacing. One kid running is a miracle; a thousand kids running is a logistical nightmare. Large organizations had the survival of the group in mind, and sometimes the survival of the group demanded ritual sacrifice. Maybe the administrators had already gotten out. Shannon’s brother Tyler had always spoken along these lines. “If I’m on a plane that’s going down or I’m in a school shooting, fuck the rules. I’m outta there.” Or he’d bluster about going to confront the shooter, like every young man her age did.

Maggie was having the same intense back-and-forth with her mom over text about whether she should run or hide. Maggie’s friend held a phone up to her face shakily. “I’m on hold with 9-1-1,” she hissed. “How the fuck are they putting us on hold?”

Shannon came back to her senses. Cold linoleum floor, cold sweat down her back, cold vent blasting. “There’s probably so many people calling them. Just hang up and we’ll try again in a bit,” she said, gently prying the phone from her hands and ending the call.

“We can’t do nothing,” the girl whispered, on the verge of tears. “We can’t just sit here. People are dying. We’re gonna die.”

Shannon looked at the girl, chest caving in and out. How had she not gotten dress coded for the tank top she was wearing? “Look. What’s your name?”

The girl’s eyes focused on Shannon. “L-Lexi.” Shannon then asked the other girl, the one who hadn’t made a peep, and asked for her name. Olivia.

“Lexi. All of you. Look. We are not going to die. But we have to sit here and wait. We just do.”

And so they did. Time felt agonizingly slow. Shannon had goosebumps. She felt dry and slippery at the same time. She knew she ought to text her parents some kind of assurance she was okay or an ominous I love you text, but she couldn’t bring herself to unlock her phone. Unlocking her phone was far too ordinary of an action for the situation she was in. And the lights being out would expose the glow of her screen. Was the shooter thinking it through to that extent? Was he calm, or was he rattled? Would he enter a room because he saw a faint blue glow off to the side? If so, it didn’t matter if she had used her phone; every other girl was texting or otherwise looking at things on her phone. She couldn’t do it. She hugged her knees to her chest and placed her head in them.

She could hear the other girls whispering, snatches of I haven’t heard anything in a while and Maybe we should and She can’t help us, look at her. Restlessness. They wouldn’t actually make a plan to leave, would they? Maybe that was the right thing to do. Maggie’s mom thought she should make a break for it. It was hard to stomach what would happen if they ran and then ran into trouble. The more she thought about it, the more it pissed Shannon off. Who was Maggie’s mom to be backseat driving her daughter when she had no clue what was going on?

For the shooter had not been apprehended, the girls whispered, mutating into a Greek chorus. It seemed to them that a catastrophic failure of the police department was the culprit, as it had been time and time again. Even if it wasn’t actually the case, it felt more and more that no one would come to save them. Or maybe they would, if they waited.

It was a true, honest-to-God, life-or-death decision. Shannon felt some measure of responsibility for the girls, being senior to their fresh and youthful optimism. Whatever happened, she alone would be held accountable. At odds with every fiber of her being, she restrained her impulses. It was a herculean feat. She was a runner on the starting block. Everything within her was screaming to run away, to do something. The tension choked her. She could feel the unrest of the other girls; it was palpable. It was hard for her to see her inactivity as anything other than cowardice. But another part of herself, the atavistic part, knew that her inactivity was the smartest thing to do in the situation. She didn’t know how it knew, but it did. She trusted it, arching her back like a coiled up snake or a cat ready to pounce.

In the privacy of her mind, she felt it the greatest test of her strength she had ever had to face. The world dissolved into her and the shooter. He was pressing forward, and she was a sniper willing him towards her. She had never fired a gun, but she imagined she was the gunman, biding her time for the perfect shot. Waiting long past the time when everyone else has acted rashly, waiting for the right opportunity, waiting for the timing to align; it was the most difficult thing someone could do. She couldn’t know her opponent’s mind. She was the president with her finger over the button, waiting to know whether the missile was coming her way.

It wasn’t always how wars were won, but. It was how some wars were won.

Her thoughts were interrupted by perhaps the worst sound she had ever heard—the door handle rattling. Everyone froze, eyes wide. Shannon’s heart was rabbiting. Everyone was still but for their chests, which were moving in time. In out, in out. It was over, it was over and she waited too long. It was over, and she was going to die, and she killed all those other girls too. It was over but it wasn’t over and really she was waiting for it to be over and the waiting was the worst part and if she had her own gun she may have just ended it right there, just to not have to wait one more moment.

Maggie was mouthing a prayer to herself, to her God. Shannon couldn’t think, couldn’t pray, couldn’t move. She was caught in mud and didn’t know how she had gotten there. Then, she could think a little. Surely the gunman would have shot in the glass by now. Right? Was it even possible to shoot through this glass? The vise of fear began to loosen, until it was replaced by the vise of guilt. Because if the gunman wasn’t at the door, it had to be someone else. The cops surely would have said something, right? It was a student or a teacher then.

Maggie’s hand gripped Shannon’s wrist, the wrist that was holding the boxcutter. She mouthed words at her, and it took Shannon a second to understand what she was saying. What if it’s Mrs. Lapointe? Shannon shook her head No. Not No, it isn’t Mrs. Lapointe, but No, she can’t come in right now. Maggie’s face grew slackened and ashened. She looked eighty in an instant. They thought they could hear footsteps walking away, but it was hard to hear over the alarms.

With shaky legs, Olivia got to her feet, holding on to the wall. “I can’t do this,” she whispered tearily. It was the first thing she had said to Shannon. “I have to get out of here. We’re crazy for staying. Jenna got out already. Everyone else got out.” She moved towards the door before Shannon could stop her, stuck in the mud.

“Olivia, please,” Shannon pleaded. “Please don’t do this.” She felt somehow Olivia’s hysteria had become the gunman, and Shannon was begging for her life.

“We’ll be okay,” Olivia responded, fiddling with the lock. Shannon looked at the other two girls, who were thankfully rooted in place. Some people were freezers and some people were flighters.

Shannon had one last gambit, a cruel one. “If you leave, we can’t let you back in.” Olivia locked eyes with her, and nodded that she understood. She opened the door only for it to be caught by the door stop. She jammed it open once more before she realized what had happened, and then kicked it aside and ran off down the hallway. They would never see her again; her shining face in the obituary column, her little body leaking blood everywhere. Dramatic irony.

But in the moment, she was the little bitch who had left the door open in her haste. Shannon scrambled to it, closed it and pressed her back to the door, then realized the danger in that as she re-locked the door and crawled back to her original spot. She faintly noticed that she had left sweaty marks on the cabinet where she had been resting.

Lexi and Maggie were crying, faces buried in each other, and Shannon felt she had doomed them all. Sitting ducks, lambs for the slaughter, babes in the woods. How had this become her responsibility? She cursed Mrs. Lapointe, then thought that she wouldn’t have felt any more safe had a teacher been there. Maybe in a way, a teacher being there would have dulled her senses, made her too secure and dumb and compliant.

The hardest thing in the world was to sit still. Shannon felt brought back to the pandemic, where people constantly failed at doing just that. It was unnatural to sit still in a world that was always vibrating and expanding and going somewhere. It made her feel out of place in her environment.

Then she remembered the flask in Mrs. Lapointe’s desk, and it gave her a North Star. Mrs. Lapointe, that dog, did she drink on the job? She had never noticed her drunk in any way, but she supposed that sometimes Mrs. Lapointe would be quieter than normal, tired maybe, and would put on a movie the whole class period. A series of video essays for each element of the periodic table.

Shannon had never had alcohol before. Was she really going to let herself die without having tried it? So much of her youth had already been stolen. Maybe she could take some of it back. It was incredibly stupid and dangerous of her, but against her higher nature she crawled towards the desk. Maybe it would loosen her up, she justified to herself, give her a little liquid courage to jump the guy during a reload.

“What are you doing?” Maggie whispered, barely audible over the still-blaring sirens. Shannon grabbed the flask and worked her way back to the blind spot. She opened the flask and sniffed it. This was going to be nasty. She took a swig, grimacing at the taste while Maggie and Lexi gaped at her.

“What are you doing?” Maggie whispered a second time, looking like she had been held hostage by a crazy person.

Shannon held out the flask. Maggie stared at it, and then Lexi grabbed it and chugged, swallowing twice. Then she just about gagged. When Maggie whipped her head to stare at Lexi, Lexi had nothing to say but, “Fuck it.” That was enough for Maggie, who took her own pull.

Shannon didn’t know if she was drunk as she felt a warm feeling spreading through her. She didn’t know if that counted as being drunk, if it was the placebo effect or if she had gotten only half-way to drunk.

They sat in silence, if silence involved a droning There is an active shooter in the building, for a while. The tension was there but it wasn’t so heightened, as if a rubber band was still cocked around a finger, just slightly less so than at its zenith. Shannon traced the seam of her jeans with her pointer finger.

“If we die here,” Lexi began, “I just need it to be said that I have a crush on Chris Anderson.”

Shannon, being a senior, had no idea who that was, but Maggie was stunned. “Huh? Chris Anderson? But he’s a Roofer!” Roofers being the name Oakwood High students had for burnouts, stoners, girls who wore Cookie Monster pajamas to school and walked the mile, boys with off-trend floppy hair. They were called Roofers because they had somehow found the custodian entrance to the roof and promptly colonized it. Maybe the Roofers had been spared from the shooting because of it.

Lexi was the last person who ought to have a crush on a Roofer. Eternally preppy, woulda been a VSCO girl in Shannon’s day, loved Alo and Brandy, orange-and-pink Owala sitting on the desk with their long-abandoned lunches. “I knowwwww, but I don’t care! The heart wants what the heart wants,” she said resolutely, grasping her heart necklace.

The conversation felt so out of place, and though the other girls seem to have forgotten their situation as they discussed the implications of Lexi crushing on Chris Anderson, Shannon had one ear on the conversation and one ear on movement outside the hallway. There hadn’t been gunshots for a good long while, but Shannon was now sure that they would not move until there was an all-clear. Her intuition that had been screaming at her began to abate, though she didn’t know if her gut was accurately reporting or if she was just becoming numb.

Maybe the girls felt the fear melting away too, because they just kept going, talking about this that and the other. Shannon allowed her eyes to close. She sat in a reverie, a little detached from the situation, tiredness hitting her like a sack of bricks as the adrenaline faded. She thought about friends she hadn’t thought of before, Maya and April and Kathryn. Had they made it, how many had died? She still felt it a little wrong to check her phone, a little too banal, despite the extremely banal conversation happening next to her. She decided to just have a private moment with herself, meditating on her life and, hopefully, her luck.

Her daze was interrupted by a banging. Her heart leapt in her throat—adrenaline shot her up—tunnel vision, fully braced—

“Police! Open up!” The girls all looked at each other. It was hard to know if it was a trap. They felt safe in the cavern at this point; in many ways they felt they had been there all their lives, cave people. To leave for the light felt wrong. Whoever it was called out again. Shannon thought she could make out more than one voice, but she wouldn’t stake her life on it.

Then, the rattling of the door handle, and Shannon realized in horror that she forgot to set the door stop, before the door creaked open. The three girls pressed their backs against the wall, making themselves small, and three police officers streamed into the room.

“You girls alright?” one of the cops asked, crouching down like an animal control officer. Shannon almost stabbed him in the neck with the box cutter, furious at how long they had left them there. None of the girls said a peep, just staring strangely at their mirror opposites. “Let’s get you out of here,” the man said, trying and failing to give a warm and comforting look.

They walked out of the classroom and then out of the school like baby deer. It wasn’t until Shannon was waiting to find her parents on the football field where she was dumped that she realized she had left the flask sitting there, waiting for someone to find it.