Very many things were better than coming to school scared for your life. Very many things were better than coming to school contemplating how you, and everyone you know, could die that day.
That was how every day started out for me, an endless cycle of fear that we were never pulled out of. Just like what was happening to me in that very moment, sitting in the passenger seat of my mother's 2015 Toyota Prius.
" Janie, pass me the aux, you're the closest." The high pitched nasally voice had emerged from the back seat of the car.
" Bea, lean up and grab it, it's less than a foot away from you." The groan that had just escaped from her lips was priceless as Mom had told my sister off. Normally Mom wasn't this irritable but she had seemed oddly frustrated and bothered by almost everything that had stood between her and dropping her kids off at school.
By the time that we had arrived to the front steps of the school, I was still fighting off the urge to laugh at the disgruntled freshman getting out of the back. Not looking over to Bea, I grabbed my bag up from under the seat and swung it over my shoulder while getting out of the car.
" Bye M-" I had barely closed the door by the time she had driven off. That was a little odd I had to admit but I quickly shook it off and continued up the steps.
Bea had taken almost no time after Mom had driven off to walk over to her 'secret' boyfriend and get all over him. This only elicited a mere eye roll from me . They had been doing this for almost a month and no matter how blatantly obvious it is, Bea still is under the impression that nobody knows.
Despite that I still moved on to my first period class with the hope of being the only person that had made it there thus far. The trip only took me two minutes tops. With no one stopping me to talk, or ask about what I did over the weekend, I weaved my way through the groups with a surprising speed and made it all the way across campus.
Fortunately enough my plans had worked out and I was indeed the first one to make it to the class. With nobody there to watch me, and with thirty minutes still left before class started, I got up and left.
My first ten minutes were spent aimlessly walking around the halls. By then i was already bored and sick of it and decided to take a small detour to the art room.
The art room was the farthest room from the cafeteria, where everyone currently resided for study hall. Not even ten minutes after I had made it into the room, I could hear everyone's worst fear break out.
Shots. They weren't close to me I could tell that just from how distant they sounded. I also knew exactly where the shooters would be, in the cafeteria since the majority of people here this early were there. They had been attacking schools for the past year, in some cases kidnapping kids to get the ransom from their parents. But in the cases where they didn't kidnap people they would kill, or injure, almost any person in sight before leaving. After the first shooting had occurred they had taught us what to do in cases like this. Run. And run I did.
There was no way that I could have even tried using the hallway entrance to the room without getting caught. The window was the only option I could even consider.
There happened to be a problem with that however, the only keys that could open that window were around the art teacher's neck and on the janitor's key ring. There was no way this was going to work...unless I picked the lock. It wasn't completely impossible I'd done it before to open my bedroom door when I had accidently locked myself out. Besides I had bobby pins in my hair at the moment since I had put it up into a messy bun this morning. I fished two of them out of my hair and went to work.
At first I couldn't get the bend on the bottom bobby pin right. But eventually I had gotten through to the seized pin and pushed it up until I heard the click then pushed the other four pins up and had finally gotten the lock up. What had seemed like twenty minutes was only really ten since the morning bell had just rung.
