Lucky Number Seven

    “This is a hard lockdown. This is not a drill. We will come over the PA to announce when all is clear.”
    So it began. The first serious hard lockdown we’d had at our school since the procedure had been adopted, the first legitimate threat to our safety that we had faced. Sure, we’d had lockdown drills and practices before, but no one took them particularly seriously, considering the lack of real danger they had been in at the time. It didn’t appear as though everyone was taking the real thing seriously either.
    For example, during a hard lockdown you’re supposed to lock the door to your classroom, close the blinds, and hide in the corner out of sight of any sociopathic killer that may come meandering by filled with malicious intent and armed with a sawed-off shottie. Our door was locked, but our blinds were wide open and kids were hanging around and peering out them, scanning campus for our schizophrenic angel of death. That’s not something that I felt particularly safe with when your classroom is on the ground level. Sure, the door is locked, but I don’t understand how that’s supposed to stop anyone that decides to blast out the window and climb in that way.
    Apparently other kids felt similarly, calling or text messaging their parents to let them know what was happening. To tell them not to worry or to begin arranging funerals, it depended on how clean anyone’s conscious was. Good people seem to think themselves as being invincible. They figure they’ve got karma on their side or something. Me? I wouldn’t necessarily call myself a good person, but I’m by no means a bad person either. I exist in the moral limbo known as “being a teenager”, the unfortunate consequences of being seventeen years old occupied all of my time, rather than issues of good and evil or any sort of altruism.
    I wasn’t particularly scared, just worried. Worried in the way that I fully understood the realities of what a bullet to the chest meant, I realized that even though bad things supposedly happen to “other people” I could just as easily become one of those other people; I rationally accepted those possibilities, but never thought that it actually could happen to me. Call it the “teenage invincibility syndrome”, call it simple naivety, call it whatever, but I didn’t actually think that I would really be shot.
    My cell phone was in my pocket. I could have called my parents just as easily as anyone else, to at least tell them what was going on, and that I would call them when it was all over to let them know that I was fine. But I didn’t. Perhaps to have called my parents would have been to admit that I might die. Again, I knew that I could…I just never though that I would. Calling my parents seemed like a waste of time when I knew I would see them later in the afternoon and I could tell them everything that had happened.
    I was wrong. My fear of Columbine, Jr. blasting his way into the room through the window was not without grounding in reality. It actually happened. And I took a bullet to the chest, just as I never though I would.
    Seven students were killed that day, and I was the seventh. My young, vibrant, horny, directionless, and confused life was extinguished before I was able to reconcile all of those things in old age. Hell, I was a corpse before I could register that the killer was actually in the same room as me. My parents wouldn’t hear about the killings for several more hours, after the news channels had gotten a hold of the whole thing. They wouldn’t know that I was dead for a bit longer than that. I imagine they must have had the same confidence in my invincibility that I did or they would have been more worried to find out what had happened to their precious little angel.
    I was the seventh killed. The final victim. Lucky number seven. Just as I had been murdered, my murderer had run out of ammunition. He had fled. He is still on the run.