I Swear I'll Make It Up to You by Mishka Shubaly Read Free Book Online Page B

sure?” I said. “Did you see him?”
    No, no one had seen him.
    â€œHe’s not dead. He’s fine,” I said. “Maybe he’s been shot and he’s hurt, but he’s not dead. Don’t say it unless you know it’s true.”
    I saw one of the residence directors for Dolliver.
    â€œIs Galen okay?” I said. “I guess he got shot?”
    â€œMishka,” the residence director said, “Galen’s dead.”

    We were ushered into the dining hall. Six people had been shot. Galen and Nacunan, a teacher, were dead. Wayne had only surrendered because his cheap Chinese SKS assault rifle had jammed. He had been carrying enough ammunition to kill us all.
    My friends were stone-faced. A lot of girls were crying, but I’d seen girls cry before. I had never seen my teachers cry. I didn’t cry. I took Wayne’s seat at the head of the hardcore table, a move that creeped out my friends. I refused to leave that seat open, to grant him any kind of legacy out of fear.
    We stayed awake the entire night. My mom arrived in the morning to bring me home to New Hampshire. The campus had been locked down, so my mother had to park beyond the front gate, then check in with police before she was allowed to come and get me. As we were walking off campus to her minivan, a cluster of reporters was waiting just beyond the gates. It was 1992, a long time before Columbine or Virginia Tech or Newtown; the media arrived in droves.
    â€œYou don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to,” my mom said. “And we don’t need to be polite. We can just walk right through them.”
    The minute we stepped off campus, we were surrounded. My mom tried to pull me through, but I stopped her. We had to make some good come of this.
    I told the reporters that everything Wayne had done, right up until he pulled the trigger, was perfectly legal, and that that was wrong. A kid shouldn’t be able to buy an assault weapon, a weapon designed to kill the most human beings in the smallest amount of time possible. Hit with a barrage of questions, I let it slip that I had known it was Wayne the instant I had heard theshots, then climbed into the back of my mom’s Ford Aerostar for the long drive home.
    I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t cry. But as we drove further and further from Simon’s Rock, my body began to realize that I was safe. My heart slowed. The shooting was no longer happening ; it was something that had happened. I tried to sleep. But as the terror of the night before began to dissipate and I began to process what had taken place, horror rose up in its place. My mind raced.
    I had known Wayne was violent. I had known he was looking for a gun. I had even seen him early the night of the shooting. I could have stopped him. I should have stopped him. Why hadn’t I stopped him? I had nearly died. Had I nearly died? I should have died.
    Earlier that semester, we had joked about what we wanted our last words to be. Something juvenile and frustrating, like “The money is buried under . . .” then trailing off. What about just the cryptic and classic “knock knock”? What got the biggest laugh was when someone suggested that the perfect sign-off would be “I’m dying.” As Galen bled out in the library atrium, those had been his final words.
    One day at lunch, we had gotten into a conversation about Charles Whitman, the disaffected college student who had climbed the bell tower at his university, killing sixteen people and wounding thirty-two others before he was killed. Whitman had been a punk, we decided. The way to maximize the body count would be to wait till everyone was gathered in one place—the dining hall at lunch, say—then seal off the exits and kill them all. (Seven years later, this would be the exact approach Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold took at Columbine.)
    Even if I put all that on the irreverent friends I’d