Four of Us

by Terrance Wilton

With all that happened, how horrible it was, the four of us decided that we’d always keep in touch. Amy needed it especially; she just hasn’t handled it all very well. Since then, it’s been years, literally years, of sending her memes on Instagram—the beautiful ones, the ones that said just the right thing to help keep her going. And TikToks to laugh at, and Snapchats too. And I guess, for the four of us, we’ve posted for each other so we don’t forget that day, even though, for some strange reason, we never mention it.

I ended up leaving the state to go to school. I could’ve gotten my psych nursing back home at the local college, but I just needed to get out of there. There was a lot to try to leave behind. And because I was away, those vids and memes helped me feel like I still belonged, belonged somewhere, to them I guess.

Jarrett went out to live with his aunt on the West Coast, but he promised he’d come back for the tenth anniversary. I think he thought he’d better because I was going to. Amy and Steven still lived in Harberthen, both of them just blocks away from the school. It was a big deal to them that Jarrett and I were coming back.

If it wasn’t for what happened on June 17th, 2012, the four of us would never have gotten together. Before that, we hardly knew each other. Jarrett was in the grade ahead of me, Amy and Steven in one of the other grade-seven classes. We had like nothing in common, other than going to Harberthen Junior High. It was just that that day we happened to go to get our green bag lunches at the same time, the lunches that the Student Life Committee put out with apples and brown bread sandwiches and a drink.

So, the four of us were in line together. Amy and Steven were flirting, Jarrett and I not connecting in anyway, just standing there—like I said, he was in a grade ahead, so wouldn’t want anything to do with me. And, to this day, we probably wouldn’t remember each other except for Mr. Olivie and his mop closet.

And of course, the shooting.

That was the day when Thomas Sanchez Wesley came through with the assault rifle. Nobody knew anything about him before then. It took an assault rifle and eight dead students for him to be somebody. He was all over the news for weeks. Thomas Sanchez Wesley had a kid brother, Bobby, in grade eight, but in the other class, not the one that Jarrett was in. They hadn’t had their lunch break yet, so his kid brother wasn’t in the line for a green bag. Probably, Thomas planned it that way.

Bobby was bullied a lot; that’s what we heard. People thought that might have been why Thomas did it.

14 minutes.

That’s how long it went on.

We heard the shooting start at the office, just inside the front door of the school. And we all just panicked, confused like, some of us running, some of us just frozen where we stood, not knowing where to go because the shooter drills never had us out in the hall, just in our classrooms.

Mr. Olivie was just the janitor, but he was the best. He didn’t expect kids to mind him, didn’t tell us what to do like the teachers and principal did. As I think back now, and I’d been thinking about Mr. Olivie a lot with going back, I can still picture his face. He was funny and kind, just an old guy with a smile that showed off yellow, broken teeth. He had crinkles around his eyes that jumped at you when he smiled. That’s the picture I have of him in my mind, bad teeth and crinkly eyes. That and his back when I was in his closet.

Of all the kids Mr. Olivie could’ve saved, it was Amy, Steven, Jarrett and me.

His mop closet was just across the hall from where they were giving out the green bags. He’d been mopping up because one of the kids had dropped his bag and there had been a bottle of Snapple in it that broke when it hit the floor. So, Mr. Olivie had rolled his bucket out of the closet and was cleaning up the mess with his mop. I watched him, the way he first picked up the broken glass, careful like, so he wouldn’t get cut. I remember that. Odd that I do because it isn’t really that important.

When he heard the shots, he grabbed the four of us and pushed us into the closet. I remember his coat was hanging on a hook close to the door, and on the other side were more mops and brooms. But there was a space behind, really not big enough for Amy, Steven, Jarrett and me, but we crammed ourselves in there anyway. I think it’s where the bucket usually went when Mr. Olivie put it away. Then, Mr. Olivie stood in front of us in the doorway with the bucket in front of him, his coat and the other mops filling in the rest of the space. It was too crowded to get the door closed. He just stood there looking out into the hall and we couldn’t see around him.

Well, Steven could, the way we were standing. Steven saw Thomas shoot the bucket at Mr. Olivie’s feet and then laugh. He said that to the FBI guy afterwards. The bullet went right through the side of the bucket and out the bottom, hitting the floor about ten inches away from me. Amy said she felt the bullet against her foot, where it finally stopped. Then we were all standing in dirty water from the bucket. It had that smell.

Was it ever friggin’ loud in there, when the bullet hit, the sound of the bucket and the bang from the gun at the same time. Slowly, the ringing in my ears faded enough that I could hear the sound of sobbing coming from the hall. But what amazed me was that when the bullet hit Mr. Olivie didn’t move, not even flinch. If he had’ve moved, maybe Thomas Sanchez Wesley would’ve seen us back in there and that would’ve been it for us. But he didn’t.

And it’s a wonder that Mr. Olivie wasn’t shot, just his bucket. Maybe he smiled at Thomas, you know, the way he did that made us like him more than the other adults in the school. And maybe he’d been kind to Thomas when Thomas went to that school years before and that’s why he wasn’t shot. Mr. Olivie was nice to everybody but always just talked to the boys. He was careful the way he treated us girls so people wouldn’t think he was a perv.

14 minutes.

I was jammed up against Amy. She was crying and shaking like mad. I felt her reach her hand up between our smushed together bodies and put it against her mouth so she wouldn’t make a sound, nothing to attract Thomas back to where we were.

After the shooting stopped, we heard kids crying out in the green-bag line, the ones that didn’t die right away, those that Mr. Olivie couldn't save because his closet was only so big.

When I decided to drive in for the anniversary, I offered to pick Jarrett up at the Newark airport. What a mad house, finding the right terminal where he’d be, driving around to where he was waiting. At first, I didn’t recognize him, he looked older, like older than just the ten years since it all happened.

On the way back to Harberthen, Jarrett and I didn’t talk about why we were coming back, the anniversary of the shooting and all. We just caught up with each other and what each of us had posted on Instagram and TikTok. He was going to be going into Marine Biology at University in Portland once he had saved enough money. For now, he was just painting houses and working weekends at a Starbucks. He’d just completed his SCUBA training at the recreation centre, thought that would help him get in when he applied for the course.

He laughed and said it was weird that I’d gone into psych nursing, dealing with the “crazies” as he called them. I told him that I wanted to help people, and I had looked into social work and psychology both, but each was going to be a long time at university and I didn’t think I could do it, not the way that I was with book learning. But psych nursing was just a two year course and practical and would give me the counseling skills so I could make a difference. I’d already been at a geriatric facility for nearly a year, doing mostly physical care for the dementia patients there. Not counseling really, not yet. But that was okay, it was a place to start.

In the car, I remember thinking that we were talking about everything but what we were there for. Back in my counseling training, we’d been taught how to get to the difficult stuff that a person might need to tell you. I didn’t think I should do that with Jarrett, not about this.

We’d planned to meet at Amy’s house, so Jarrett and I drove directly there. It was getting close to when the anniversary service was going to take place at the school. When Amy saw me, she gave me a big hug and I felt her tremble again. It brought the closet back over me. I noticed it seemed awkward between her and Steven, wondered what that was about—but not for long, the dread of the three-block walk to the school was getting pretty strong and I thought we should get going, to face it like.

The school looked different on the inside. They’d put in new lockers, grey ones, not the two shades of blue I remembered them being. It all looked strange, like it shouldn’t be different like that. When I went into grade eight, the next year after the shooting, some of the locker doors had been replaced, the ones with the bullet holes, I guess. But they didn’t get the right color blue and so you could still tell where the bullets had went. I remember going down those hallways always looking for the lockers that were a different color, counting them, like it was some sort of ritual that I was supposed to go through. When I went back to the anniversary, I felt the urge to do the same counting again, the ritual, but all the lockers were new so I couldn’t. I did find where the bullets had pockmarked the concrete block walls. When they repainted, the bumpy surface of the concrete blocks was smooth where they’d filled in the dents the bullets made, you could still see where they’d patched it.

By this point, Amy was holding my hand. I could feel her tense up as we went toward the hallway where they used to give out the green bags. It’s one of the things we learned in my training, the way the sympathetic nervous system activates the body, not only the organs but the muscles too. Her hand was sweaty but I wasn’t grossed out by it; I just held it tight, snug-like, to comfort her, to let her know that I was there for her.

A different man was standing in front of Mr. Olivie’s mop closet. He had a turban on and darker skin. Not that that bothered me, but he just didn’t belong there, not in my mind anyway. His expression was stern, like he had seen tragedy before and knew how to be when things were serious. Seeing his stern face, I started to cry. I think it was about missing the crinkles around Mr. Olivie’s eyes, that he was the only one I wanted to see.

It being June, and there being a lot of us in the gym, it was pretty hot. I looked and looked for Mr. Olivie, really worried when I couldn’t find him. There were politicians up at the front of the gym; I guess that’s what they were anyway. And a whole bunch of priests or whatever. Mr. Halstead, the principal from when we went to the school, stood beside some other guy who said he was the principal now, and wanted to welcome us. Mr. Halstead was wearing a suit; that seemed odd too. I tried to make eye contact with him from where I was, but I think there were too many people for him to look at and he didn’t notice me.

Amy started to cry and got up to go out, still holding my hand. I gave her a hug and she looked toward the gym door then back at me. I just knew she needed to get out of there, and she wanted me to go with her. Like I said, it was really hot and packed in there, and maybe she was starting to have a panic attack.

It was in the back hall near the girl’s change room that I saw Mr. Olivie. I didn’t recognize him at first, the way he was walking, his body stock straight, pitched slightly forward like he might topple over. Then I remembered the way men with Parkinson’s look; there were lots of patients with it in the geriatric facility where I worked. He was walking with that shuffling gait, one foot barely in front of the other, not like his quick movements mopping up the Snapple, after he’d picked up the broken glass.

Then I saw the expressionless, wooden mask of his face. Those muscles that pull the mouth into a smile and crinkle the eyes, they’d all gone soft … like he wasn’t in there anymore.