As the end of the first semester of my sophomore year approached, I began thinking about transferring to a school with a good writing program, maybe Sarah Lawrence, Wesleyan, or Bard—which students of Simon’s Rock could automatically attend. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t stay, but I couldn’t go. Finals loomed. Break was in a week.
That weekend Galen found me in the Kendrick atrium. He was a terrible mooch of cigarettes, which were always in high demand on campus, since most of us were broke. But I was always happy to give him a smoke in exchange for one of his great, witty philosophies on anything, profound or mundane. I automatically began to shake one out of my pack for him, but he surprised me by holding out two unopened packs of Parliaments.
“I got you back for all of the cigarettes you’ve bummed me,” he said.
I stopped short, stunned, always sure people weren’t really paying attention to me, or what I brought to their lives, whether it was friendship or a smoke.
“Well, that might not be all of the cigarettes I’ve bummed you,” I said.
He laughed, leaning into me as he lit a cigarette for me. I slumped against his body, happy and comfortable around him, as always.
That Monday night, I was studying for my environmental science exam in my room when I heard a strange noise from the direction of the road that led onto campus. It sounded like fireworks, but I didn’t see how that was possible. It was December in the Berkshires. I figured I’d just imagined it. Then I became aware of a flurry of activity in the halls outside my dorm room. I ran into another student’s room and waited there with her. The sound came again. Louder. Closer. What was that? More fireworks? It couldn’t be. I heard yelling outside. More running. I poked my head into the hallway and then stepped out. None of the adults were anywhere to be seen. Someone said it was Wayne Lo. He had a semiautomatic rifle, and people were injured. Another RA, my friend Jay, had told our kids to stay in their rooms. Stunned, I went back into the room, and the girl looked up.
“They’re saying Galen’s been shot,” she said to me, cradling her phone.
“What?”
More frantic movement outside. We looked out her window toward the empty dining hall and saw activity through the glass walls of the student lounge, which also housed the snack bar. I’d begun crying, and I couldn’t stop. It was impossible. Galen was the best of the best.
“It’s just a rumor,” I said. “We don’t know anything.”
We looked out the window. A handful of police officers were advancing up the snowy hill, in classic television poses, guns drawn. As I braced myself for more gunshots, the police officers burst through the door and disappeared into the student lounge. I watched them arrest Wayne. The rumors were true.
chapter seven
ANYWHERE BUT HERE
People called between the dorms, sharing bits of information. Someone had talked to someone in the library, where Galen had died. The person on the other end of the gun was definitely Wayne Lo. Our classmate. Based on his overly aggressive behavior on the basketball court and his stupidly hateful opinions in the classroom, we had thought him an asshole and a homophobe, and we had felt justified in our dislike of him. He had hated us enough to want us dead, and he had done his best to make it so.
Both Galen and Wayne lived in Kendrick, and Wayne had shot into the dorm’s atrium as he’d run by. The bullet holes were clearly visible. After the police took Wayne into custody, they fanned out over campus, dealing with the carnage. We waited, crying, talking, hugging, accounting for friends who were not immediately visible.
Finally, we were given some instructions. We RAs were expected to round up our kids and keep the peace until we were summoned to the dining hall for an informational assembly. As we walked out of Kendrick, police tape already crisscrossed the front of the dorm, hot yellow against the pristine snow. I peered down through the naked trees and the darkness toward the library, spinning red and blue lights flashing frantic through the cold, clear night. I looked over my shoulder, feeling like a gun was trained on me as I crossed the suddenly unfamiliar quad Wayne had sprayed with bullets, my body responding with pure panic and the instinct to flee, my mind unable to weld any logic onto the situation.
I found Matt in the crush of students moving toward the dining hall. He’d been with Maxine, and she’d given him some kind of a muscle relaxant. He was pretty fucked up. I was annoyed with him and with her. I didn’t think it was an appropriate response. I didn’t want him to be out of it; I wanted him to be in it with the rest of us—in the pain of this fucked-up situation that meant life would never be the same.
We all slunk into chairs around the same tables where we’d eaten dinner a few hours earlier. I looked through the glass doors to the balcony where Galen and I had sat on dozens of nights, smoking. I could feel myself still on his lap, the smell of his hair, which usually needed a wash, the bristle of his beard as he kissed me. All gone, all gone. The tears had never completely stopped, but now they came on hard again. I clung to one last hope. The announcement hadn’t been made yet. Maybe there was still some way out of it. I looked at the dean, the provost, his wife, the resident directors. Our Kendrick RDs, Floyd and Trinka, were still nowhere to be seen, which was odd. It was rumored they’d been evacuated earlier in the night.
There was a flurry of movement at the front of the room. The cops and administrators in charge began to speak. It was all facts now, nothing but the coldest, hardest facts. Wayne Lo had gotten a gun, an SKS-47. He had started at the guard shack, where he had shot our security guard Mary. She was alive, but badly wounded. Then he had shot our professor Nacunan Saez as he was driving off campus. Dead. Then he had shot Galen as he exited the library to investigate the disturbance and help out if he could. Dead. Then he had run up the path toward the dorms, shooting three students along the way. His gun had jammed. He had gone to the student lounge and told a student he found there to call the cops. He had surrendered. He was in police custody.
“You are safe now.”
Only, this was our home, and now we would never feel safe again. They were closing Kendrick so they could begin their investigation. Those of us who lived in Kendrick would stay in other dorms. Finals were canceled. Campus was closed. We could leave in the morning if we wanted. We could stay if we chose.
We cried and hugged one another and held on, hysterical or in shock. We talked and talked, but there was nothing to say. It was already past midnight. We were wired. We were exhausted. I was still sixteen but felt a million years old. Finally, after three hellish hours, they dismissed us, and I walked with Claire and Matt to her room. I used Claire’s phone to call my mom. I pictured the phone ringing above the counter in the kitchen, letting it ring and ring to give her time to wake up, get downstairs, and answer.
“Hello?” she said.
Hearing her voice, I started to cry hard again.
“Mom,” I said.
“What is it, Sarah? What’s wrong? Are you okay?”
“There was a shooting, Mom. Wayne Lo got a gun, and Galen is dead. He killed Galen. And our teacher, Nacunan. His gun jammed, so he couldn’t kill the rest of us. And the police have him now. But, Mom, he killed Galen.”
I heard hard plastic hit the wood of the counter, then silence.
“Mom? Mom?” I said, looking from Claire to Matt, panicked.
“Mom? Mom?” I said, desperate.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice slurred and weird. “I fainted.” She paused. “Galen, really?”
I had introduced Galen to Mom and Craig when they’d been at school for parents’ weekend in the fall. He had the kind of sly sparkle people remembered.
“Yeah, Galen,” I said, crying harder.
“But you’re okay?”
How to even begin to answer that question.
“Yeah,” I said, the word more of an exhalation than anything else.
“What’s going to happen now?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “They wouldn’t let us go
back to Kendrick. Matt and I are in Claire’s room. They’re closing campus. Finals are canceled. I don’t know.”
“Okay, try to get some sleep. We’ll talk in the morning. I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
I hung up. Claire and Matt and I looked at one another, the glassed-over, hollowed-out glaze of survivors, hanging on to the in-out of our breath, nothing more. Around dawn, my system thankfully shut down. I slept in Matt’s arms, on the industrial carpet.
The next day, the phone began ringing. Mom and Craig had gotten in the car and started driving, their urge to bring me home stronger than any other thought. They were parked at the arts building across from campus, but the police weren’t letting any of the parents through. I didn’t want to leave my friends, the only people who understood exactly what I was feeling, but campus was a horrible, bloody place.
A small group of us walked down to the library, the sunshine impossibly bright and normal. Police tape covered the entrance to the library, bullet holes visible in the cement walls, broken glass in the snow. A shrine had already gone up featuring notes, photos, CDs, flowers, candles, and Galen’s favorite things: cigarettes, Moxie soda, Taco Bell hot sauce, the tools he used in his beloved job doing lighting and tech for the school’s theater, a plastic chicken in reference to his favorite non sequitur: chicken enchilada. As we watched, hunched together in a small, sad pack, a stretcher topped with a gray body bag was wheeled out of the library. A group of adults stood a respectful distance away, keeping a watchful eye on us, as if they didn’t think it was a good idea but realized everything had gotten so fucked up it wasn’t really their place to say. It was terrible but necessary. Seeing Galen’s covered body made it real.
I went back to Kendrick to pack. When I walked into my room, the red light on my answering machine was flashing. I listened to the messages, hopeful: Mom calling to tell me she and Craig were on the way. Friends from home who had seen the news report. If the story was already in Maine, it had to have reached Boston, which was in the same state as Simon’s Rock, and only three hours away. And yet, my dad hadn’t called.
I climbed into a van that drove us by the place where Nacunan had been shot, and the guard shack. It stopped at Alford Road. Across the street, a throng of parents braved the December weather, eager to catch sight of their children. Fighting them for space was a pack of news reporters and photographers, their TV cameras and telephoto lenses already pointed at us. The sight of the reporters reopened the gash. They didn’t know Galen. They didn’t care about Simon’s Rock. They could never understand what had been lost.
I climbed out of the van and pushed past the microphones and cameras, head down, looking for Mom, wanting that hug. When she hugged me, I felt that intrinsic comfort of Mom. I was able to breathe finally, for what felt like the first time since the shooting. We were jostled in the pandemonium of the parking lot, where students and parents were crying, and journalists were mostly getting snubbed. Nobody seemed to know what was supposed to happen next.
We were allowed back onto campus. Craig backed my car up outside of Kendrick. He took a crate out of my hands to load it for me.
“You got in an accident, huh?” he said, his voice gentler than normal.
I looked at him blankly, having totally forgotten that I’d knocked out my headlight and gotten a shoddy repair job at the cheapest place in town.
“I’m sorry,” I said, panicked I was in trouble. “I got it fixed.”
“It’s okay, Sarah. Don’t worry about it. We’re just glad you’re okay.”
I stood frozen, relieved and stunned. It was probably the nicest thing he’d ever said out loud to me. He had always been there in my life, but I had never felt close to him or had any sense that he saw me as his daughter. Now it hit me: he loved me and would have been sad if I had died. The thought had never occurred to me before. I needed love just then, and I was grateful for his kindness. But I was still so loyal to my dad that I couldn’t really let Craig’s caring touch me. And it didn’t change the fact that my father hadn’t called.
As soon as we got home, I wanted to be back at school. I was obsessed with the news coverage and made Mom buy the Boston Globe every day. I spread it on the floor in front of the wood stove, craving the fire’s comfort, and looked at the picture of Wayne Lo in a Sick of It All T-shirt and handcuffs. In that moment, I wanted him to die. I read partway through the first headline, and then my tears became too thick for me to read anymore.
The story that was unfolding was damning and terrible. Wayne had received ammunition in the mail the day of the shooting. The package had been noticed in the mailroom because the return address belonged to a gun dealer. Wayne had a reputation on campus for being intolerant and hostile. This was clearly troubling, and the dean was called. Apparently, after some administrative discussions and concerns that it would be illegal to tamper with the mail, Wayne was allowed to pick up his package. An RD went to his dorm room, but Wayne wouldn’t open the package in front of her. Quoting the school procedures catalog and claiming they needed two RDs to search his room, he wouldn’t let her proceed further. Wayne apparently also spoke to the dean about the package; he showed him an empty ammo case and some gun parts, and he claimed it was a Christmas present for his dad. Then Wayne took a cab to a nearby town, used his Montana ID to prove he was eighteen, and walked out of the store with an SKS assault rifle. He brought the gun back to his room and modified it to take more of the hundreds of rounds of ammunition he’d received in the mail that day. During this time, one of Wayne’s friends called in an anonymous tip saying Wayne had a gun and had said he was going to shoot the Kendrick RDs. Instead of intervening with Wayne immediately, the school let him attend a dorm meeting I’d been at, as had Galen. Wayne was then allowed to go back to his room, unsupervised. Meanwhile, the other adults in charge helped the Kendrick RDs evacuate with their small children, which was why, when Wayne started shooting, there were no adults in our dorm.
Galen’s funeral was impossible, but at least it was comforting to be around his family and my Simon’s Rock friends, who I was certain were the only ones who would ever understand. Then, it was back home to Maine and the real grief descended.
My dad and I spoke around the holidays, but he didn’t get it: what had happened or what it meant. He hadn’t been paying attention to how much I’d loved Simon’s Rock. I wanted him to do something to make me feel safe. He did not. He didn’t ask about the shooting, and when I brought it up, he barely seemed to register what I was saying. I felt the opposite of what I had with Craig, as if my dad would not have cared if I’d been shot and killed, as if he didn’t love me. He said he would visit me during my vacation, but I didn’t really believe him, and—true to form—he didn’t follow through.
I was desperate to get back to school and be with my friends. But I was afraid to be back on campus. I couldn’t imagine driving past the guard shack, going into the library where Galen’s body had fallen, seeing bullet holes inside Kendrick.
The RAs returned early to attend a two-day crisis management training led by a woman who was brought in when airplanes crashed. We were given a fat manual written by the National Organization for Victim Assistance with the title “Managing the Trauma of Crisis.” As far as we were concerned, it was total bullshit.
It felt spooky to be on campus, and being one of the only people in Kendrick that night felt like sleeping on a ghost ship. I locked my door but knew that wouldn’t deter phantoms. I had dreamed about Galen right after he died, and I wanted him to come back, but I was also afraid. My new room looked out over the dining hall. I lay awake, feeling like the scene of Wayne surrendering was playing on an endless loop outside the window.
Wayne’s trial lasted a month. His lawyers claimed several different psychological explanations, including that he’d been suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, pointing to passages from Revelations he’d copied out and hung on his wall. It was hard to picture this happening in my dorm, impossible to imagine a
scenario in which one of my fellow students behaved like this. I wondered for a moment whether he was, in fact, crazy. But none of us could really believe it. The court-appointed psychiatrist who diagnosed him with narcissistic personality disorder seemed to have it right.
My dark secret was that as much as I hated Wayne, I also felt guilty. I knew we hadn’t been nice to him. I couldn’t help but feel we should have known better after we’d all absorbed so much meanness in our previous lives. We’d helped to create the monster in our midst. But we didn’t deserve to die for this. I’d been raised by liberal parents and was vocal about my liberal beliefs, but they ended with Wayne. When he was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole, I was deeply relieved. I didn’t care if he could be rehabilitated; I didn’t want him to have the opportunity to enjoy his life.
In the wake of the shooting, things got dark. The boys in the freshman class turned to cough syrup. These weren’t the happy hallucinations of our freshman-year cavorts in the Labyrinth. One of my guy friends bumped against a corner in the student union, again and again, like a windup toy that had lost its way. We tried to round him up before he got busted. My kids needed me more than ever, but I had less and less to give.
I started drinking again. My favorite destination was an upperclassman’s off-campus house, where Beth and Claire and our friends snuck away to get drunk. When I had tried to be good, it had all gone bad, so why even try?
As spring dawned, Matt shaved his eyebrows, an outward signal that he was having a hard time coping. He went home at spring break, and it was unclear whether or not he would return. He’d repeatedly asked me to move to Tennessee and marry him, even though I’d just laughed and said I couldn’t get married at seventeen. I felt incredibly guilty that I couldn’t give him even a little bit of everything he wanted from me.
Good Girl : A Memoir (9781476748986) Page 11
