New Normal

Sure it was always on the news. But who watches the news when they are 13 years old? I sure didn’t. So all I heard were the whispers. The teachers in my middle school who would cluster together speaking in hushed voices, their eyes darting nervously around making sure that no students were coming. And if one wandered too close to their huddle they would dart away, picking up whatever task they thought would look the least conspicuous: stapling packets of paper, running to the printer, or calling, “Oh no I must have forgotten my lunch in the fridge, how silly of me!”

So all I heard were wisps of the truth. “Did you hear?” … “those poor kids” … “the parents” … “mourning, grieving community” … “our hearts go out to you.” As though being told the true horrors of these acts was too much weight for our innocent ears to hold. As if shielding us from the horrific reality of school shootings could protect us as we all prepared to enter high school, ready to begin the next chapter of our lives.

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“Pass!”

The sun was shining overhead in a cloudless April sky, a light breeze kissing our skin carrying with it the promise of summer. It was my first year on my high school’s soccer team, and Ava, Meg, and I, the freshmen on the team, were haphazardly passing a ball back and forth while dodging runners in the middle of their workout on the Denver East High School track. We were giddy with excitement, eager to prove ourselves, and hypothesized that the butterflies in our stomach would calm down a bit if we got some touches on the ball as we waited for the JV game to finish on the turf field.

20 minutes left, I thought, looking at the scoreboard. Then we would get to play. I turned away from the clock just in time to see a ball hurtling towards me. I stuck out my leg, barely stopping it from interrupting the game.

10 more minutes. Our coach clapped his hands and we knew it was time to get ready. Shin guards were shoved into socks, hair was tied into ponytails, and earrings were thrown into bags as we walked over to the track, all six lanes empty and waiting for us to warm up.

Five minutes.

“Quad pulls!” one of the senior captains yelled as we began to stretch.

Two minutes.

Time to get in the zone.

One minute.

We finished stretching and walked back over to the field, shaking out whatever felt tight as we waited.

10 seconds.

5 seconds.

Done.

The referee blew his whistle but instead of just the clear, high-pitched tweet, an ugly cacophony invaded our ears. It took a few seconds for us to register the other contrasting noises competing for space among the chaos.

Shouting.

“Get off the field! Get off the field! Everyone go back up to the school. Now!” Our coach was running towards us. He had a sense of urgency in his voice that we had heard many times before and yet it felt different. There was something raw, something untempered, unmodulated. It was as if his voice were a clay pot that lay on its side, abandoned by an artist who was halfway through softening out the sharp edges.

Me and the other girls on my team grabbed our bags and sprinted towards the school, confusion hanging in the air like a dense fog. Nobody knew where we were going, what we were doing; we moved mindlessly towards the school fueled by the terror in our coach’s voice. As we approached we found the doors propped open by some of the deans and assistant principals and the second we entered, we heard the doors slam shut as though they were trying to protect us from the outside world. The sound jerked me awake from the numb confusion that had been mindlessly puppeting my body and I blinked a few times, snapping back to reality. We followed a dean down the hall and stopped at a classroom. “In here,” he said. As I walked inside I looked up and saw the dean’s face clearly for the first time. The crease between his eyebrows made goosebumps stand up on my arms.

“What’s happening? Why are we here?” I asked him, not really wanting to know the answer. He hurried away leaving my question hanging in the air. The rest of my team filed into the desks still in our soccer cleats and haphazardly piled our school and soccer backpacks at our feet. We looked outside, half expecting one of the trees to be on fire or to see an airplane falling from the sky, but everything was still. Abandoned. All of the soccer balls and cones that we had been warming up with just minutes before were strewn across the empty field. One of the balls was swept up by the breeze and began rolling down the field. The longer I stared the easier it became to convince myself that it was a ghost, lightly dribbling the ball towards the open goal on the other side. The net was lifted into the air, blowing gracefully in the wind as if egging the ghost on, daring it to continue its charge.

And then the alarm went off. Not the kind that interrupts your chemistry test, rushing you to the doors because there’s fire drill and we’re all mad because it’s cold outside and we didn’t have time to get our coats so now we’ll just have to grumble in the cold. And not the kind that shortens your lunch break, heralding you into a bathroom because there’s a tornado drill and we need to hunker down and put our hands over our heads and we’re annoyed because our backs hurt.

The alarm that went off this time was different—the one that carries the tune of horror, laced with the realities of being a high school student in America

An alarm that we all have come to know well.

“Attention. This is the Denver Public Schools Department of Safety. Your school has been put on a lockout. No one may exit and no one may enter. Thank you for your cooperation.”

I glanced at my phone. It was already 4:30 p.m. “What’s happening?” I asked with more urgency. But the room stayed quiet. The echoing silence was the only comfort that we received.

An hour passed as slow as years. “Call your parents. When they arrive, you will be escorted to your car. Then go home. Straight home.”

“Mom, are you here?” I asked her for the sixth time in a row, trying to dampen the urgency that swelled inside of me with each call.

“Almost, hold on.” A minute later my phone rang again.

“Here.”

I raise my hand. “My mom is here.”

“Follow me.”

I got up and waved to the rest of my teammates. The color had all but left their faces, and they offered meek goodbyes. Numbly, I followed one of the deans outside to the front door.

“Which car is yours?” I pointed.

“When I open the door, run to your car.” I nodded.

“Go.” I sprinted to my car, opened the door, and hurriedly shoved myself inside.

“What is going on?”

“I don’t know much.” My mom sighed as she started to drive away. Something about a gun threat, I remember her saying. A gun threat? What does that even mean?

That night we received an email from the principal of our high school: “School is canceled tomorrow. If you can avoid it, do not leave your house.” My friends and I called it “the snow day without snow.” It made us feel better about it. It made us forget that if we were at school right now, if we hadn’t gotten a warning, some of us could be dead. And so we all sat inside on our snow day without snow.

Later we found out the whole story. An 18-year-old-woman who was obsessed with the Columbine shooting had legally bought a gun and made threats to shoot up schools across the Denver Metro area. Threats that were taken so seriously, that school districts throughout Colorado canceled school the next day fearing that this woman would target a school, walk inside, and begin shooting students inside of it. As the police searched for the woman who was “armed and highly dangerous,” as the news put it, we sat at home. Sat at home because school wasn’t safe, sat at home to make sure that there was no chance one of us would be killed while we were in school, learning about the hypotenuse of a triangle in ninth grade geometry.

That afternoon they found her. She had died by her own hand in the woods and the next day we all went back to school. Everything was back to normal. But after that, nothing really felt the same. At least not for me.

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We had finally gotten the message. The message that I had hoped for every time I looked at my phone over the last two months: we were going to go back to school. School. One of the only places that I felt safe.

It was January 2021 and for me, online school had been terrible. I thrived off of interaction and staring at a computer screen for months at a time had left me feeling empty and alone. Finally we all got to go back to school—only for three hours a day, four days a week, but I didn’t care. For those three hours I could be with my friends and teachers, learning. At the time, I wouldn’t have traded those hours for anything.

But two weeks in, halfway through a class about how to write an argumentative essay, the alarm rang and the principal hurriedly came over the loudspeaker: “At this time everyone needs to exit the school as quickly and safely as you can. If you have a car, leave. If you don’t, go to the north gym until someone can pick you up.” And so we all left the school, got into our cars and drove away.

Later we found out it was because of bomb threats. Someone had submitted an anonymous threat to the school and so we were told to leave as quickly as possible. But the threats kept coming. Tearing us away from the little in-person learning we all craved so badly. We couldn’t even go to school uninterrupted by violence for three hours a day.

These threats continued throughout my senior year of high school. For a while there was a threat once or twice a week. Every time the alarm rang the principal would come over the loudspeaker and let us know that we needed to stay in our classrooms, even if the bell was to ring. Stay in our classrooms so the police dogs could walk around the school and make sure that there were no bombs in anyone’s lockers or backpacks. Every week we lost more and more class time so that the police and administration could make sure that all the students and teachers in the school weren’t going to be blown up.

It didn’t matter how many times the alarm rang, every time my heart would jump in fear. I would sit, paralyzed in my chair with my teacher’s voices as background noise of my thoughts. Because it wasn’t just me I had to be worried about: by now, my sister had begun high school as well. I always used to think, If I died it would be fine, but if anything happened to her? I could never live with myself. It was my job to protect her and I couldn’t do that anymore. I couldn’t protect her sitting in my classroom during a bomb threat or a lockdown, hidden under my desk with the lights off and the door locked with only the occasional cough to punctuate the sickening silence. A silence that we all hoped would be ended by the sound of another alarm telling us the lockdown was over and not by the sound of gunshots.

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In October of my freshman year of college I got a call. A call from my little sister, the fear in her quivering voice radiating through the speaker on my phone.

“What is it Rosie? Tell me what it is?”

Her voice shaking, she described to me what had happened at school that day. How the school was put on lockdown while she was in Spanish class and how her teacher had locked the door and all the students had crowded together in a corner hidden from view. She told me how slow time seemed to move. How at some point, someone had come and banged on the door and told them to open it. How her teacher had started to cry as they stayed hidden, believing that a shooter was right outside the door trying forcefully to get in. How the banging had turned back into silence, interrupted next by a soft click of the door being unlocked. How she thought she was going to die and all she was able to think about was that she wasn’t able to say goodbye.

Rose told me later how she had closed her eyes tight and begged her body to sink into the ground, anticipating the sound of gunshots but none came, opening her eyes expecting a shooter but was met with men dressed in all black with SWAT emblazoned on their backs. She told me how she was commanded to stand up and put her hands above her head; the officers escorting her and the rest of the students onto the turf soccer field pointing large guns at them all the way down. Rosie told me how relieved she was to still be alive. I pride myself on always having some way to comfort her, some way to make everything okay, but at that moment I couldn’t say anything.

Later I found pictures that students had taken at school that day. Looking at the captured moments of police pointing large guns up the stairs where I used to eat lunch with my friends made me nauseous. Seeing the terror in students’ eyes as they were escorted out of their school at gunpoint, their hands in the air to make sure that none of them were concealing a weapon, made it clear that none of these children will ever see high school in the same light again. That for them, school would no longer be a safe place that they could go to escape the horrors of the world because this pain was now inside of it too.

The school that I had thought of as my home looked less and less familiar as I continued to scroll. Because although I no longer attend East High School, a part of me will always remain there. My friends, my teachers, the people that I love and look up to still walk those halls everyday. My sister is still there, my best friend in the whole world. And I am in college, halfway across the country and I can’t protect her. I can’t shield her from the pain that she has experienced. I can’t even give her a hug and tell her that everything will be okay. But who am I to make that promise anyway?  

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Luis Garcia, a junior at Denver East High School, was shot three weeks ago. Shot in the head as he left school. Last week, after fighting for his life he was taken off life support and died on March 1, 2023. Luis was a player on the varsity soccer team that won the state championship title last fall. He was an incredible student, friend, and athlete and will be missed greatly by everyone who lived alongside him.

Because guns are valued more than children in America, Luis will never graduate from high school. He will never see his family, laugh with his friends, or play soccer again. Because guns are valued more than children in America, Luis is gone. Taken away from all of us. Stripped from the light his future held at the one place every student should be able to feel safe: school.

Denver East High School has had more days off due to gun violence than snow days this year. And now Luis Garcia is dead. And the rest of us will never recover.

So yes, everything is back to normal. Normal in the way that school shootings, the taking of children’s innocent lives, is just “how things are in America.” Normal in the way that the 2,581 students at East High School just lost a classmate, a teammate, a friend. Normal in the way that guns are more important than the lives of children in America. This is our normal.

Is this the normal you want for children in America? Because for me and my grieving community, this isn’t the normal we want to live in anymore.