The two shots were exactly how the newscasters described it that day.
There was no sequence of one following the other, nor a riveting minutia whence bullets rang out proper. It just was.
“Rachel?”
What’s strange is I hear my voice being called. “Rachel Morson?”
It’s the sound of my own voice.
I never thought I’d say it out loud in an environment where I can barely speak but here I am, saying it as I crouch low on the ground, both then and now.
“Rachel,” I say. “Rachel,” I say again. “You’re alive, you’re alive,” I say, almost in a whisper, and somehow it irks me that I said this seventeen years later. To me. To myself. I repeat it on my darkest days, when my stomach is cramping from my period and I have to stop preparing dinner to curl up into a ball on the kitchen floor and cry. And then that’s enough to exhume me with relief and then I can get up and get on with my day. However, for the life of me, I cannot remember.
Except I do. Or at least I did at the time.
The gunshots are ringing out, but they grow more and more distant until they become mere background noise, like you finally being able to block out your parents’ fighting in the living room. I allow my head to turn, to Jimmy to my right. I’ve never even spoken to Jimmy, nor even spared a single thought about him in all our classes together, but I pray to God that he’s okay.
I can just make out the pulse of his fingers, twitching and moving, one you would have to be super attuned or alert to see, like I am, my fight-or-flight mode exhausted, chaste. Shooter would probably be able to tell, but if the feeling of my gut instinct is right, I doubt he will come back to get us. As far as all the school shootings I’ve seen on the news, I’ve yet to hear about the shooter coming back to the classroom to do a full-scale check that everyone is gone. That fact seduces me.
Inch by inch, I breathlessly watch as Jimmy cranes his neck, and I almost whimper when I see blood. But then that means there’s blood on my hand too, which there is, and I ease up. It’s neither my blood, nor his. I am relieved by that thought, for only a moment.
I’m carried out by both arms and legs by a SWAT team of men. I say “men,” because, in a complete hindsight and a nonjudgmental way, they were all men. As soon as I’m outside, something takes over me. I make strange howling noises that can’t even be refuted as screams, but I bet you could imagine it if I told you. Something in between jargon and squeals. I immediately feel self-conscious because no matter how self-aggrandizing the situation, I fear I am sounding like a drama queen in wretched distress in need of her crown. I wonder if my male peers, being relieved that they were led out, would call themselves drama queens. I’m feeling fine, I’ve made it out, I’ve got the least to rack my brain over and let everyone know. Nonetheless, I am put on a stretcher, and without a broken bone in my body, I ask the paramedic why.
“You’re wobbling so much,” she says. I tell her I don’t feel anything. No metaphorical feeling of what it would be like to be struck by a bullet like my classmates and professors have, no tingling, no spasm. I don’t even have the desire to cry like most people that are out here, nor do I have the urge to console. My body seems to be in a complete state of being frozen. But I don’t say any of this to her.
“You’re in shock,” she says, and then repeats it four times slowly. Yes, I am in shock, an incel just shot up my school and I’ve lost half my peers and professors and friends, I want to say.
“You’re in shock,” she says, and then I realize, she, too, is in grave shock. “Your mother will meet you at the hospital.”
The rest of what happened in the weeks and months after, I remember bits, but not the entirety of it all, like the shooting. President Bush addresses us. He calls us “brave heroes” and compatriots, as he put it, in the face of unprecedented adversity. It is surreal to see the president, to say the least, knowing that my first and probably last exchange with him will be due to a circumstantial event. As I hear him speak, I notice how his nose is not so pointy as they are in satirical cartoons and his voice is not as warbly as they make it out to be on TV. At the end of the vigil everyone takes the hand of the person next to us. I take Jimmy’s.
It’s not quite ten years later and I am among a group at a shooting range in the foothills of Pennsylvania that is not quite Appalachia. I’m the only woman there. I’m joined by a former Marine with post-traumatic stress disorder, a widowed Black man who thought he lost his wife in the 9/11 attacks that turned out to be a case of False Memory Syndrome; and a schizophrenic former secret service agent who tells us of the stuff of lore: that not long after the Lewinsky scandal broke, during a visit to an army base, Hillary Clinton held a rifle and aimed it at her husband’s crotch.
When it’s my turn, I say, “I’m here because Shooter didn’t kill me,” more abruptly than I’d like. Gasps go around so violently they could ricochet down the almost-Appalachians, and for once I’m glad I’m discussing this in open air rather than in a breathy room, as I have done in numerous counseling sessions previously. Of course, it is not the first time that it has crossed my mind that I am doing Shooter’s victims and their families disrespect by being here; by deciding to pick up a gun for the thrill of it; though not with the intent to harm anyone. I do my best to flush down the overwhelming guilt.
The instructor that will be taking us today is a man named Kyle. He’s a bumbly WASPy man in his sixties with greying curly hair at the sides, slightly more nerdy than what you’d expect from an owner of a gun club. In our opening remarks, I make a joke that he’d fit the brief for a disorderly Republican. “Independent,” he corrects me as the laughter subsides, and I am made aware of my stereotypes.
A young Jewish girl joins us, ten minutes late. Her name is Maisha. Hidden amongst bangs and a freckly face, she laughingly explains she arrived here from Harrisburg but took the wrong exit. Kyle asks if she’s comfortable sharing her story and she says, quite bluntly, that she’s here to kill off her Zionist beliefs, brought on by her layman father.
Of all the stories I’ve heard around the circle, Maisha’s is the most bemusing by far. I watch as she dresses her target in what, upon closer inspection, appears to be a piece of crisscrossed fabric made to look like a keffiyeh. Everyone else is just aiming at plain targets, like me, a simple, round, chequered one, but not Maisha. I ponder the ironic pretense of dressing her target as a Palestinian if she wants to eliminate the ideology of a extreme Zionist. However, she has her own underlying reasons to be here, as I have my own. I decide all the better not for me to ask.
My weapon is a twelve-caliber rifle, and I’m told it is ten times more powerful than what Shooter used. I repress the need to shake, even though it’s so quiet no one could even tell unless they’d taken a real deep evaluation: the way only I could detect how Jimmy’s fingers quivered as we lay on the linoleum. It’s heavy as hell, but Kyle tells me to posit it right above my shoulder, so I won’t get aches and pains later. I know regardless that I will, but nevertheless lift up my pudgy arms and point at the round piece of cardboard used mainly for archery. To this day, despite surviving an attempt on my life by someone else, I still fear arrows more than I do ammunition.
And then I draw my gun up slowly, like I am told to, and pull the trigger.
Pkaow. Maybe not even a pkaow. The gun makes a light, almost indistinguishable, koo.
The sound of the gun strangely comforts me, my distinctly sense of alertness that I haven’t felt since Shooter, that I am now in Lucifer territory. No matter what it’s for, I still classify all guns as weapons, whether it be the Navy, the Marines, or the military designed to protect us. Nothing is ever an act of self-defense. To say someone got shot by mistake is still, indirectly, an act of murder.
With my earplugs in, I can distantly make out Kyle saying to me, “Great job!” I smile a little, relieved more than I am proud of myself, and stand back a little to take my second aim. “That was great,” Kyle said, coming closer so I can hear him. “The only thing I’d suggest is that you drop your shoulders a bit, they’re too high.” I tell him they’re not. “They are,” he repeats. I sag my shoulders a little deliberately, as far as they can go. “That’s better,” he says, with a knowing smile. “But now you’re slouching.”
When I get home, I examine myself in the mirror. Do I look any different now that I spent three hours at a rifle range? Of course, the contrary would cause me to think so. I fumble through my chest of drawers until I find what I need to. A cabinet full of pictures and tapes I haven’t looked at since college.
There are a couple of photographs of me, though I do not refer to her as that. The Rachel Morson of 2007 has long peroxide blond hair, a Britney Spears-like frame slyly concealed by a pink halter top, and a winky smile. She is beautiful. I couldn’t tell you why, but she is not me.
In another photograph is me with my arm around Kaitlin Tubbers, who was my best friend in freshman year. Two broke white girls not ready to pay our college debt but living our best lives. We’re dressed in peak what the young’uns like to call indie sleaze: neon goggles, overwrought bangs on her end and badly-on-purpose applied eyeliner for me.
I certainly don’t reflect the body I was in my late teens and early twenties. Why would I? I am not overweight by any stretch of the imagination, but definitely not meeting the quota of what average or thin looks like for a woman, especially in the modern-day vernacular. When my eleven-year-old niece politely asks why I look like the way I do, I jokingly reply that this is what you get, raised on a mid-late 2000s diet of Paris Hilton, Italian ancestry, Page Six ideals and fraternities, as accurate as the ones portrayed on the middle seasons of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. My niece, however, seems to fare much worse than I. Without her mother and father’s knowledge, she has downloaded TikTok, and is constantly telling me about all the different ways girls in her class use it to implore disturbing eating patterns. One night, filled with dread and anxiety for her, I sit watching the evening news, unable to sleep, and then find out from a stony-faced reporter that the Australian government had passed significant legislation around the use of social networking among preteens that some free-speech absolutists were going as far to call a “social media ban.”
The next day, I wake to the sky already looking swollen with the morning warmth outside, and the dawn shadow casts a sly glint through my bedsheets. I sprawl out of bed and go on my morning walk, as I usually do. I walk past an adorable exchange a college student is having whilst she loads her things into a parked car, waving goodbye to her parents for the first time. I make out the words “catty” and “Yale”. That is when it crosses my mind that gun-related tragedies are unheard of at Ivy League schools. I hope with all my might, that nobody gets any ideas, including my own.
