Students our age often theorize on what they would do in a hypothetical school shooting. They come up with plans for each classroom. They find the escape routes, and say that they would run out of the room before anyone could catch them. At 2:04 PM on Wednesday, March 5th, suddenly the scheming of plans for the absolute worst-case scenario in a high school felt very real.

My class quickly huddled up inside a cramped crossover behind the main stage of the theater, where the mood was weirdly calm. That’s not to say that nobody was afraid, but despite the gravity of the situation, there was a somewhat relaxed aura permeating the air. Information dripped into the crevice we hid in like a faucet just starting to leak. Our main source of news was from a factually inaccurate notification by the Citizen Alert app, designed for citizens to report on crime in their specific area, which alerted us to what they described as a “Man with Gun at Jones College Prep”. In spite of that disturbing piece of information, I found that calm truly prevailed in our back alley of the school. At first, it felt nice to see my peers so relaxed about the situation. And then a hollow pit began to fill my stomach. We weren’t relaxed because we knew that there was no real threat, and we truly did not know that, no matter how much we said it. We were relaxed because this was normal.

While this pit began to grow in my stomach, I realized something. Those theories that many of us come up with, about how we would “run out” of an emergency exit and flee the scene before the shooter could get to us did not even come close to materializing. I was a mere 20 feet away from a perfectly usable emergency exit in the crossover, and had the threat been real, which at the time, was not completely out of the question, why didn’t anyone leave? I certainly have thought about what I would do if, God forbid, a shooter entered our building, and I know that I’m not the only one. I had a plan, and I could have executed it at any moment. Anyone of us could have. It would have been an almost comically easy escape, but nobody even thought about it. We stayed together, huddled up. The few students who were really shaken up had joined the rest of us in general peace after about 20 or so minutes. We thought, if something bad would happen, it would have happened already. But that doesn’t change the fact that when the announcement went over the airwaves, we treated it as business as usual. I did not believe, for even a second, that it was simply a drill, and I believe my peers joined me in that assertion. But nonetheless, it was business as usual. 

After 50 minutes, an officer of the Chicago Police Department made himself known to us by yelling through the metal door on my left. It was barricaded with metal drums likely weighing 100 pounds. We had already been briefed on what to do when the cops came in, to keep our hands where they could see them, put our phones in our pockets, and walk in a single file line out of the school. Once again, this was normal to us. We’ve seen this play out on the news. We’ve seen videos of kids walking out, trailed by armed guards and police in riot gear, streets lined with Ford Explorers and Dodge Chargers with flashing lights filling the air, with their hands up. We would just do what we saw them do. The police were relaxed when they came in. At this point, it was pretty clear someone had lodged a false threat of some sort at the school, or that the police had apprehended the “Man with a Gun” Citizen had led us to believe came to our school. Once again, this all seemed somewhat usual. I was the third person to leave the school, around the typical dismissal time, even a little earlier. For all intents and purposes, this was a normal day of school. It may as well have been an untimely fire alarm malfunction, a minor tornado tearing up a farm out in western Cook County, or a school-wide power outage. 

I walked outside to a whipping cold, unlike the unseasonable warmth that took hold earlier in the day. And suddenly, it did not feel normal. There were likely 5 to 6 cameras on my line of kids, and behind them, rows of parents hoping to see their kid alive. It’s true that we’ve seen this play out on TV. We’ve seen those kids walk out with their hands up. But seeing the normally numbingly busy State and Balbo suddenly quiet was different. How could business as usual require 20-30 cop cars to show up, and armed police officers wearing camouflage and brandishing AR-15s? I looked to my left down State, and saw the same Ford Explorers and Dodge Chargers I saw line schools like Parkland High School and Robb Elementary School line State Street. I looked further, and saw a burgundy Mazda parked dead center on the street. Business as usual doesn’t typically mean that you see parents park their car in the middle of the busiest city street in the state, even the entire Midwest region. I walked across the street, notably on a red light, which would get me killed or severely injured by a car, had today been normal. But had today’s threat been real, getting hit by a car would likely land me in the exact same place. By the time I got inside of Art of Pizza, I could see kids waiting in windows, looking out at the street below them. Two thousand kids, waiting to see when they would make it out of the same place they worried they would die, not just today, but every day before it. 

I had driver’s education at Amundsen High School frustratingly soon after I was allowed out. My father agreed to drive me, and lived up to that promise even after the cluster that Wednesday ended up being. I was grateful to see him, but worried about missing my appointment. He said we’d leave in a bit, but he had to respond to the barrage of texts from former colleagues, distant friends, family members, and people who he didn’t even know, saying they had heard and asking if I was alright. I was surprised to see the number of people who had reached out. This, to them, was real. More real than it was to me, and I lived through it. I was nearly late to my appointment, and the mood was the same there. I gingerly drove a beat-up Ford Focus around Ravenswood, while a teacher at Amundsen gave me notes on my somewhat unskilled driving, and talked about how afraid his students were for us. I realized that they were more afraid than we were. They were like us. They theorized about what they would do if, God forbid, a shooter entered their school, as well. But nothing changed for them today. They can still tell themselves that if something as awful as that happened, they would triumphantly run away and make it out alive. My peers and I don’t have that liberty, at least not anymore. Now we know what we would do. Stay together, calm the afraid, and continue business as usual.