Yours is the Name above all names / Now and forever God you reign.” They were beautifully backlit by a bank of stadium lights in the distance; their shadows stretched across the field as they raised their arms to the heavens, which were opening just then to sprinkle us with a gentle shower. No umbrellas; no one seemed to notice or care.
The voices were heavenly, as beautiful as their refusal to surrender, for that moment at least, to the pain devouring much of the crowd. A girl staggered by, trembling, other kids sobbing, a few giggling. A Chihuahua pranced by and snapped at a Jack Russell terrier, their owners exchanging smiles, tightening the leashes and hurrying on. A group settled down with hearty plates of stew served up fresh from the Red Cross tent nearby. Every stage of grief.
2
Lightning Strike
1
Jackie was annoyed when the fire alarm sounded. Again? They had already drilled that day. And she had a lot on her plate. Jackie was junior class president, and Valentine’s Day was a fund-raising opportunity. She personally delivered the carnations to freshman classes, and what a joy that was. Some kids were expecting them, but others were overwhelmed. She had hurried back from the freshman building, with just twenty-one minutes left of study hall, which she needed because she had gotten a B plus sophomore year—“My one B plus my entire life”—and she wasn’t going to let that happen again. Valedictorian was out, but she could still graduate in the top 1 percent, and she was going to. She had loaded down her schedule with five AP courses, but she loved a challenge, and learning, and it mattered. She had even given up dancing. God, that had been hard. “Dance was my life and my love,” she told me. She had started at the age of three, with her best friend, Jensen, and they were inseparable: camping, preschool, and dance, dance, dance. “I did everything: musical theater, ballet, lyrical, jazz, tap, hip-hop—it was like my whole world.” They performed Don Quixote and The Nutcracker, and her passion was pointe. But student government forced a reckoning. Jackie ran for class vice president as a freshman, won, and then served as class president every year after. Dance had been her first love, but when she hit sixteen, she had to cut it loose.
The alarm sounded at 2:19, twenty-one minutes before the final bell. Jackie was seventeen. “We ran out to the bus loop and then—We were really far out,” she said. “We were near the gates, towards the far end.” It was two weeks later when Jackie first described this to me, and to that point, she was her typical, deliberate self. Then it all spilled out in a jumble: “Then I turned around and my friend said she heard like— Everyone was screaming and running back inside and I was really confused, and then my friend said she heard a gunshot, and I was like, ‘No, no you didn’t,’ because I didn’t hear it and I usually have good hearing, so I was in denial, and I was in denial for like the first fifteen minutes while we were hiding when we got back into the room, because I had no idea it was real, and my mom is an elementary school teacher down the road. And she wasn’t on lockdown for fifteen minutes! Because they weren’t aware. So I was texting her and she was like, ‘Relax, Jackie, this is not real, we’re not on lockdown, we would have been on lockdown by now.’ And then she texted me after like fifteen minutes, ‘This is real. Active shooter. Just listen to your teacher.’ I was kind of gaining all my information through Twitter. We weren’t supposed to be talking or on our phones, but I couldn’t just sit there in the darkness for two hours, so I didn’t listen, which is really bad. So I was just on my phone on Twitter and I was just getting updates, like from the helicopter view, and I was just watching like kids run out and we were stuck in there until almost five p.m. We were one of the last people the SWAT team broke out. We were sitting in the dark for quite a long time, which was really scary.”
A distressing factor in so many Parkland survivors’ stories is the fact that they ran back inside, toward the danger. For several years now, the Department of Homeland Security has championed the simple