Lockdown

“Is this actually in the curriculum?” The question shot across the room like a hockey puck.

Chase—one of the hockey boys with the trademark hair: long at the sides and back, flipped out under a perpetually worn trucker cap—balanced his chair on its back legs. The rest of the hockey crew sprawled across the back row, inhaling oversized sandwiches, chomping protein bars, or sucking back smoothies.

Marjory struggled to keep their names and faces straight: Chase, Hunter, Kratos, Rekles (pronounced reckless—a bit too on the nose, she thought). Chase had a talent for derailing lessons and getting under teachers’ skin.

“Yes, critical thinking is in the curriculum, and we can discuss the curriculum at lunch if you would like, Chase,” Marjory intoned in her calm tone. She prided herself on becoming more neutral the more students annoyed her.

“But why can’t we read something new, something relevant to our lives, something that speaks to us,” This child-like whine, wrapped up in the buzzwords of the day, came from Austin and grated on her nerves. Another annoying example of a child named after an American city, Austin was also the cloying girlfriend of Chase. Today she wore what appeared to be a bra as her shirt, with a zip-up hoodie to hide it if an administrator happened by, not that any administrator wanted to address that losing battle.

Marjory felt that creeping sense of bewilderment that overcame her when she was trying something new in the classroom and felt like it would be a colossal failure. The kind of failure where students flat out refused to participate, and parents complained about the teacher’s insensitivity towards their child’s anxiety.

“You see folks, Kafka was asking questions that we still need to ask ourselves. What would happen if all of a sudden you woke up and there was something completely different about you? Something that others would change how others look at you or talk to you? And change how you view yourself?”

She glanced around to see if her works were tracking. Several covertly snuck glances at their phone while some overtly texted. She used to confiscate phones during class assuming students lied when they whined the plaintive cries of “I’m texting my mom.” That was until she realized they really were texting their parents, and a few parents called their children during class. A few had earbuds in and were probably listening to music. Only Alyssa, the grade hoarder, William, the gifted and greatly insecure writer, and Arjo, the Indian exchange student seemed to be paying her much attention. The boys in Austin’s orbit were hypnotized by the cleavage revealed by the bra shirt.

“I have given each of you a new identity on this card. When you take this card, you will be this individual all week. You cannot change this identity with anyone else and I will record the cards you randomly draw. You will write a journal response each week AS this person, not yourself. You will try to become this person and imagine how others would relate to you, and how this might make you feel.”

The idea was based on the identities Marjory saw teens take on every day, and sometimes change on the spot. It was a wondrous thing to catalogue the various identities teens took on throughout their middle and high school career. One week they might be a band nerd. The next week, they could drop that and become a bathroom vaping kid who skipped class. A week after that, they might discover a love for playing guitar and join a band. It was when people became adults that they thought they didn’t have choices and options anymore, that they couldn’t reinvent themselves.

Marjory had stopped teaching The Metamorphosis years ago. She found few students could understand the themes, but as this was her last year in teaching before retirement, Marjory was beyond caring about complaints she would undoubtedly receive. For her own satisfaction, she wanted to feel her legacy had been to encourage students to question their own identity: Are we really who we think we are?

She travelled the small room prodding students to take cards. Katelyn, one of her shy Indigenous students who didn’t talk to other students and attended class infrequently, avoided Marjory’s eyes while taking a card. Marjory could see it: “You come from a wealthy family and your passion in life is playing hockey.” Katelyn turned crimson and Marjory had a sinking feeling that she might make a vulnerable student feel even more of an outsider.

“As we travel through Gregor’s journey, you will be writing journal entries AS this character you have randomly chosen. For this novel study, you will BE this character. Your grade will reflect your effort to take on a different perspective from the one you already hold.”

The threat of grades were more or less meaningless now. If there was no reward of candy or a pizza party at the end of the unit like many other teachers did, her reputation as a heartless battle axe would be further solidified. She may have lost the language battle, but she also hadn’t resorted to spending her own money to bribe students into learning.

“I’m supposed to be a fag?” snorted Kratos? “I don’t think so!” The namesake for the ancient Greek guardian of Zeus’ had just pole-vaulted past Marjory’s line.

The hockey boys and their girlfriends laughed with wild abandon.

“Nope, you do not get to use homophobic language in this room. Go to the office.”

Kratos got up, knocking over an empty chair and then slamming the door as he wandered the halls with other students who had likely been sent to the office as well.

“Now, for your first assignment, I want you to write the following journal response.”

She turned on the projector and read the response: You have just woken up and your previous identity has been replaced with this new one. Nobody knows you as that person anymore. You are, for intents and purposes, a different purpose with a different life. You may have the same friends, family, and acquaintances, but you will appear to them very differently than you have. You might have new vulnerabilities as well as new strengths as this individual. How will your life be different? Write for the next ten minutes whatever thoughts come into your head as you try to navigate this new life.

A few put their heads down and their hands started moving. Most of them just looked dazed and sleepy. Several looked fast asleep, and one was slightly snoring. Wait until she told them this was the story of a man who turned into a giant bug. Maybe short stories were a better option?

Marjory started handing out copies of The Metamorphosis and a piercing alarm rang. A neutral automated voice overlaid the alarm.

“This is a lockdown. This is a lockdown. Find the nearest. Go to the assigned shelter now. Go to the assigned shelter now.”

The class of thirty kids, stripped of their usual bravado or insecurities, all became one pulsing emotion: fear. They knew where to go and what to do. Even Chase had a serious look on his face. The room still had the red light from the photography class more than two decades ago, and smelled faintly of chemicals.

The adolescents filed in, standing along the back cement walls, and the wooden shelves. They stood silently, shoulder to shoulder, listening to the blaring alarm and its voice. Finally, it shut off. The sound of a faint scream came from somewhere in the bowels of the school. This didn’t necessarily mean anything was amiss -- it could be a student having an anxiety attack or a special needs student reacting to the noise. A door slammed. Then dense silence.

Since the staff had not been given prior warning of the lockdown, Marjory knew this was not a drill. Students and staff were always told in advance when a practice would happen. It was too triggering for too many if students were let think a practice lockdown might be real. Also, too many parents would come to collect their children, or try to.

Marjory silently motioned for them to sit on the floor. She had a plastic bag of markers and colouring pages hanging on a hook on the wall for exactly this kind of situation. It wasn’t quite time for that yet, but it was definitely a good thing to have on hand. She saw students looking at each other surreptitiously in a darkness lit only by the faint red light. Austin had zipped up her hoodie, and was shivering. Chase put his arm around Austin but kept silent.

Amber, a girl who wore Nirvana t-shirts and ripped and fingerless fishnet gloves rubbed the small scars along her arms. Arjo kept pushing his glasses back on his nose and glancing nervously at the clock. The second hand was the only noise they could hear.

Marjory, who never prayed except at times like this, said a short and fervent one. Please let this be nothing. She saw thirty pairs of eyes looking at her wide-eyed. They all knew the names and the stories of the students who had died last year in a nearby school district. A 19- year-old former student, a boy, who was “dating” and then not-dating a 14-year-old girl, had come to the school. He was angry. He found the girl in her volleyball uniform in the gym change room and shot her and five of her teammates dead. Many of these children would know someone directly or indirectly impacted by this event.

Marjory also kept small whiteboards and markers in the room for this occasion, along with a bag of chocolate bars and bottles of water. She knew that even if this was a practice drill, it could still go on for as long as an hour. Unknown to anybody, she also kept a bucket and an as-yet unopened bag of cat litter in case a lockdown went on for hours. Marjory had been asked numerous times now about the media firestorm of the supposed idea that schools were accommodating or encouraging students to act like cats and providing cat litter. It was true most teachers had their own emergency supplies like this, including cat litter, but it was not for some so-called “furry” movement the media invented. Even now, she realized the impossibility of students using her makeshift toilet. They were so tightly packed, and the need for silence so great, there would never be any way Marjory would be able to set this up, and a student could use it without suffering great embarrassment.

For the first thirty minutes, they all tried to fold in elbows and knees to find a space on the floor. Everyone had to make themselves into as small a ball as possible to allow space. It was perhaps the only time there was no shoving or pushing in that good natured way that boys did with their friends. It was a smallness that made Marjory realize their collective vulnerability even more.

Marjory wrote on a whiteboard in neon yellow board marker. It was still difficult to read the message. She passed it to the closest student.

“How is everyone?” The first student shrugged his shoulders and passed it to the next. Most passed the board on, but one student, a small and scrawny boy who wore skeleton jewelry on his fingers, and a batman t-shirt and loved to write essays arguing who played Batman the best, wrote How long will this take? The next girl who took the board looked at him and rolled her eyes. How would she know? This isn’t a drill!

I’m worried about my sister. This came from Rekles, one of the hockey boys. Rekles’ sister, Misty, was a Downs Syndrome student who was also his twin. The two were almost never placed in the same class because the parents claimed teachers would overwhelm Rekles by asking him to work with Misty. This explanation was highly dubious, as Misty always had an EA with her and Rekles and Misty seemed to have a fairly typical sibling relationship where neither one seemed terribly interested in the other. But, she had also seen Rekles quickly take offence if anyone made an insinuation about his sister.

The next student, to Marjory’s surprise, Katelyn, wrote. Don’t worry. My cousin is in that class and she looks out for Misty. They’ve been working on a science lab together. Rekles looked at Katelyn gravely and nodded his head in gratitude.

The whiteboard was next passed to Jocelyn, a sporty girl involved in student council, and a kind girl who had friends from several different stratas of school life. She was silently crying as she wrote. I knew Casey.

Casey had been the fourteen-year-old volleyball player shot dead by a young man who claimed she had “ripped his heart into a million pieces” and “used him for his money” according to the murder-suicide note. Apparently delivering pizzas paid much better than anybody knew.

Raven, a shy and studious girl who wrote all her work in pink ink, reached out a tentative hand of comfort and placed it on Jocelyn’s shoulder. Jocelyn looked back into the darkness to see Raven’s white face and smiled almost imperceptibly. These two were from different teen planets and their orbits seldom crossed. They may not have even known each other’s names, but they had now spent almost an hour trapped in a small room within breathing distance of each other.

Marjory lost track of the whiteboard as it travelled back to the outer edges of the rectangular and silent room. She started another whiteboard and wrote at the top, “Just write down any thoughts or comments you have.” The whiteboard started a slightly different path, but seemed to be going to each student as before. Then she started a third, fourth, fifth, and sixth whiteboard just as the first whiteboard came back to her.

The whiteboard was filled with messages, but there wasn’t enough light to see all of them. She saw messages like, “I gotta pee” and “I hope we’re going to get a longer lunch now.” But as the second white board came back, the messages seemed to be changing. “I think this is for real.” and “OMG my mom is gonna be freaking out” and “Fuck.” As each successive whiteboard came back, she saw a couple of messages that showed the rising anxiety and fear. She could also smell a change in the room too. It was like the sharp tang of unwashed teens was mixed with something more potent and sharp. She thought of the example of a cliche she had given the class yesterday: “you could cut the tension with a knife.” Cliches are cliches because they were accurate, and certainly this was a situation for such a cliche.

Yet the whiteboards were showing another thing too -- empathy. Students were writing messages like, “It’s okay guys, we’re gonna be fine,” and “We’re in the safest part of the building. We just have to wait this out” and then a message that made Marjory’s throat catch on something hard and small. “Sorry I’ve been a dick a lot…I don’t know why I’m like that to people.”

Attention was being diverted, especially when Marjory started handing out a bag of candy and students quietly unwrapped and sucked in hard candies. This gave me a moment to consider something else: She had always appreciated this room for its thick cement walls and strange wiring that meant cell phones didn’t work in this room. Most of the time that was a relief -- otherwise she’d have students trying to speak to parents on their phones. As it was, the phones were only useful as flashlights, and students knew better than to give an active shooter any sign they were in the room. However, it also meant that the administration was unable to contact the class. If the lockdown was finished, they would be notified by a school-wide all clear sign. But if they needed to contact her directly, they couldn’t do that. And if the police wanted to contact them, they would have to wait presumably until they were given the all clear message.

At first it sounded like the popping of a plastic bag from a long distance. But the sound became louder, sharper, faster. Marjory didn’t think she’d ever heard the sound of a gun in real life before. Her sense of reality wouldn't let her accept that’s what she was hearing.

The children stopped their small rustling noises. Many children had tears running down their faces and their mouths open slightly as if wanting to scream or cry but knowing they couldn’t.

The popping noise stopped and then there was no sound. Then, they could hear someone trying to turn the outside door of the classroom. When that was unsuccessful, there was a great shattering of metal and wood.

A small scream came from the back of their small storage of safety. Marjory expected more screams; in fact, she expected waterfalls of screams upon screams. Or maybe those were the ones she was hearing in her head. To her astonishment, the children had hands over their mouths or the mouths of their classmates. Some were silently trembling. Others were weeping. The sharp smell of urine clouded the air.

Marjory looked about her for something that could be a weapon. All she could see were whiteboards and candy wrappers.

Then someone was in front of their door. The classroom within a classroom. The place where even cell phone signals would reach, this person had reached.

Marjory held her breath and thought about how funny the word “legacy” really was after all.