Always on Your Side (NaNoWriMo 2019)

1.

There's a tired joke floating around the Facebook pages made by people in my community: "Living in Antioch means always wondering if you just heard fireworks or gunshots." Maybe fireworks should have been scarier, as the state of California has been catching on fire on an annual basis, and Antioch is full of rolling hills of golden dead grass. But I've been scared of gunshots ever since the ironically-dubbed Great Massacre of 2009, when I arrived at my middle school for zero-period band and found the campus oddly still. I was then lifted under the shoulders and swiftly carried away by the janitor, confused and clutching my flute case as he bodily tossed me into the library, through glass doors which were then slammed shut and locked.

Crouched down beside a shelf of nonfiction, I got a text from my brother Brendon on my hand-me-down flip phone.

Brendon: There were gunshots. We are in lockdown.

You: at ur school??

Brendon: Yes.

You: r u okay???

Brendon: I think so. I'm in PE. We're in the locker rooms. There was a helicopter. I haven't heard any more shots

The entire school district was on lockdown for nearly two hours without a word of explanation, me and my schoolmates packed like Pringles in the library, hidden by transparent glass doors that were most definitely not bulletproof. People murmured about a shooting, and though I knew the shooting had happened at Brendon's school and not mine, I kept thinking about what I would do if the shooter broke the windows to kill us all. Maybe he decided the high schoolers were too intimidating and decided to go after the middle schoolers, easier targets. I used to daydream about being the hero to talk the shooter down and convince him not to go through with it, or to use what I'd learned in a one-day self-defense class to disarm him, twisting the gun out of his hand and then pinning him down while holding his own gun to his head. But in the midst of what felt like actual danger, I could only think about how I might have to use my classmates as human shields to survive until he ran out of bullets.

Turned out, it was not a mass shooting, but an ordinary gang shooting just outside the high school parking lot. No one even died. The victim went to Brendon's school, but Brendon didn't know him.

That didn't mean people didn't make a big deal out of it. My mother dragged Brendon and me to several PTA and town hall meetings in which she and a variety of other angry parents made vague demands that the city "find a solution."

When my mom wasn't around, my stepdad Adam mocked, "It was the Great Massacre of 2009. We gotta ban all the guns because some gangbanger got shot. Ban the straws and save the turtles; ban the guns and save the gangbangers."

He had a point; we were all okay. People were just being melodramatic. It was inconsequential. Except now, any ambiguous pop would bring back that survival-driven part of my brain that considered the best places to hide while the shooter picked off everyone else.

Brendon killed himself on New Year's Eve. A Wednesday night. Brendon was supposed to be flying back for college on New Year's morning, and school for me was supposed to start on Monday. My girlfriend, Marina, was over. We were playing Super Smash Brothers in the living room while Mom and Adam attended a party with their church friends. Brendon came in, stared at us for a minute, then went back to his room without saying anything.

Then we heard a bang.

It was New Year's Eve. It was the only day of the year we weren't worried about it being gunshots.

But it was.