Later, in an assembly, our principal didn’t talk about the new zero-tolerance policy for violence. Or the various civil suits being filed against the school. Instead, he focused on the one positive thing he could find.
He told us that, to the school board’s surprise, every student who had been in the freshman, sophomore, and junior classes the previous year had returned to VCHS, and our incoming freshmen class was the largest in the school’s history. We’d all come back to our school, he said. We weren’t going to let fear or hate win, he said. This was our home, he said.
Here’s what he didn’t say:Almostevery student had come back.
Every student but one.
I spend a lot of time googling the massacre. It’s something like a hobby. Or maybe an addiction.
It started about a month after the shooting, on one of the many nights when the thought of sleeping in my dark bedroom was too frightening to fathom. I’d walked down the hall, to the living room, and logged on to the desktop for the first time in weeks. Mom had mostly kept me away from any media, but I’d picked up things here and there from the other survivors. And I wanted to know what people were saying about Sarah.
One link led to another and another and another. With every article or blog post, I became more anxious, more panicked. My heart was pounding and there were tears pricking my eyes. But I couldn’t stop clicking. I knew I needed to. I knew it wasn’t good for me. But I was in a spiral that I couldn’t break free from.
Eventually I ended up reading a series of message board posts about the shooting and how it was a conspiracy. There were dozens of commenters, trying to show “proof” that none of it had happened. That this was just the government trying to trick us so they could take everyone’s guns away. And all the teenagers running out of the building—including me—were just crisis actors. “It’s so obviously fake,” one comment said. “Use common sense, America.”
… obviously …
… common sense …
My mom found me at six a.m., staring at the monitor with red eyes and tears streaking down my face.
“Lee, what are you doing?” she asked.
“How can they say this?” I asked her, my throat aching. “They say it didn’t happen. How can they say that, Mom? Why would they say that?”
“Oh, Lee baby—”
“Why would they say that?!”I shoved the desk much harder than I meant to, violently enough that the monitor slid back and smacked loudly against the wall. Which only made me start to panic and gasp between sobs.
Mom stayed home from work that day and called my psychiatrist. We decided to up my medication and increase how often I was seeing my therapist. Mom also put a limit on how much time I could spend on the internet and only let me use my phone when I was leaving the house without her, though I usually just snuck on while she was at work or late at night. It made me miserable, but I was obsessed, and I knew how to clear a search history.
If you’re wondering where my dad was for all of this, then we have something in common. My dad was never really in the picture. He got my mom pregnant when she was a teenager and he was in his early twenties. He took off before I was born, and the only contact I ever had with him was the child support checks the court ordered him to send. After the shooting, I’d kind of thought he’d show up. Like maybe hearing that his daughter had been part of something so horrific would spark some sort of paternal instinct. It didn’t happen, though.
My mom has always had to be both parents. Sometimes I wonder if that means she felt the pain of what happened to me twice as much. I think I was angrier at him for that, for not being there to be a partner for her when I was at my lowest, than I was at him for being such a deadbeat in the first place.
Not that it matters anymore. He died two years ago in a car accident. I only know this because he left some money for Mom and me in his will. I guess some part of him did feel guilty. It wasn’t a ton, but enough to help pay for part of my college tuition.
Anyway, my father isn’t important. He wasn’t there. Mom was. But as hard as she tried after that morning, she couldn’t keep me off the internet forever.
Three years later and I still frequently find myself on Tumblr pages and message boards, reading posts about the shooting from people who didn’t have to live it. Most people have stopped talking about it by now. It’s old news. But there are still some dedicated bloggers who write about VCHS almost daily. Some of them are true crime junkies. Others have formed what I can only really call a “fandom” around the shooting.
Fandommay sound like a strong word, but I’m not exaggerating. There are memes and fan art and—I’m not kidding—fan fictionabout the massacre. Sometimes the focus is on Sarah or Miles. Mostly, though, it’s about the shooter.
I’m not going to mention his name anywhere in this letter, by the way, if that’s what you’re waiting for. There’s enough out there about him already. I won’t be adding to it.
Anyway, as angry and disgusted as it all makes me, I still lurk on a few different forums and websites, checking them at least a couple times a week. The more anxious I am, the longer I spend online. And, of course, anniversaries are always the most anxious days. So when I got home on the night of the third anniversary, after spending as long as I could in our secret place in the woods, it was no surprise that I found myself heading straight for the computer, even when I knew I shouldn’t.
It was late. Mom was already in bed. And there was no chance I’d be sleeping that night. So I logged on and went straight for one of the most active VCHS massacre forums.
I expected to see the usual: debates about old conspiracy theories, discussions about why the shooter might have done it, that sort of thing. There hadn’t been any news on the shooting in years, so the same things tended to be discussed over and over again, just by new voices.
This time, though, there was something new.
The top post was from a regular poster with the username VCHS_Obsessed. He’d written a short message, Hey, guys, have you seen this? Below was a link to an article. The headline made my stomach flip over: “School Shooting Victim’s Parents to Pen Daughter’s Inspiring Biography.”
At the top of the article was the picture of Sarah, the one everyone knows. It was her class photo from freshman year, the one printed in the yearbook just two months after she died. The one that still stares out at Main Street from the sign in front of Virgil County Baptist Church.
That picture is the reason I drive home the long way after school. Because I can’t handle seeing my best friend smiling at me, her red hair worn in two braids, making her look even younger than she was, her brown eyes wide and bright and completely unaware of what was to come.
