I graduated just as this shit was starting to get super common, and now I feel lucky not to have dealt with all of this. And it was bad back then, too. When I was in seventh grade, while everyone was on edge a few days after yet another highly publicized shooting, someone set off a string of firecrackers during lunch and the entire thousand-plus people sprinted out of school and into the surrounding neighborhood, jumping fences and scattering. It was one of the strangest things I've ever experienced, and something I never really liked to take seriously-after all, it turned out not to be real, right? But in the moment, nobody knows that, I didnt know that. It was like a shot from a nature documentary of a thousand gazelles all bolting at once from a brush fire. I was eating my lunch heard in the amphitheatre the bangs, I heard many screaming voices, and then I was sprinting with everyone else across the PE field to get to the fence. I ended up at the big double gates, which of course were padlocked as always. So some people went around to hop the fence, some started to squeeze through the gap in the dirt under the gates, and some went over then. I climbed because I'm a large son and it seemed easier than wriggling. While climbing, I got just a tiny taste of what it was like to really feel exposed. The gates were those 10 foot tall chain link ones, and with every step higher my brain and nerves were screaming "you're about to get shot in the back, nowyou're about to get shot in the back, andnow youre-". No 13 year old should have to feel that at school.

Yeah I know this is kind of rambling, but holy shit I literally just processed the seriousness of the experience. Sure there were no real bullets, but you can say the same about a mock execution, and this still torture.