Chapter 5: Lockdown

We slept straight through and woke up starving. We got cleaned up and made love in the shower. It was hard to stop fucking when every glance showed me a new side of Jas that turned me on even more. The little dimple at the base of her spine. The difference in the color of the sole of her foot from the top of her foot. The one slightly crooked tooth on the far right side of her smile. Everything I discovered made me want to have more sex with her. And she seemed to agree. It was only our hunger that got us dressed and out of the house.

We didn’t bother to even greet the parents. We just packed our book bags and ran downstairs and out the door. We drove through Starbucks and got coffee and breakfast sandwiches. Then, of course, we had to stop at Jasmine’s apartment so she could change clothes since she had nothing to change into at my house and didn’t want to do the walk of shame at school.

“Jasmine, honey, I wanted to explain about Ray...” Sondra started as soon as she saw us. She was carrying a huge mug of coffee and looked like she hadn’t slept the night before.

“Not now, Mother,” Jas snapped. “I need to change clothes and get to school. The Calculus final is this morning.”

“But we need to talk,” Sondra whined.

“Later, Mother!” Jas stuffed a nipple in my mouth as I sat on her bed watching her change clothes. “Just a little to tide me over,” she whispered. Then she popped it out of my mouth and wiggled into her bra. In three minutes she had scooped up all her makeup into a bag along with clean underwear, T-shirt, and jeans. We were off.

“We should really talk, Jasmine,” Sondra cried as we closed the door.

“We really should, you know,” Jas said as soon as we were in the Mini. “I just couldn’t do it now. I have to chill first.”

“Calculus final should do that.”

Jas spent Wednesday night with her mother, after we tried to see how many orgasms we could have in an hour after school. We needed a little break anyway and when we Skyped later on, neither of us could get up the energy to masturbate. What I discovered, though, was that I really missed cuddling up to her as we fell asleep. Nobody, in all our sex-ed and online exploration, had said that sex wasn’t the only thing we were missing. For the first time in my life, I wondered if my mom and dad cuddled up to sleep at night. And did my mom bathe him with anti-bacterial wipes before they did?

It was Friday, though, that all hell broke loose. I was in the middle of my Social Sciences final, the last official class of my senior year, when the school went into lockdown.

Fuck!

Our school had lockdown and active shooter drills more often than we had fire drills. It was a way of life. The chances that there would be an active shooter in the school sometime during our education had risen to one in six hundred during our lives. The likelihood for kids born today is one in three hundred. We practice lockdowns four times a year.

Mr. Kennedy calmly walked to the door and locked it. He cross-checked attendance and picked up the room phone.

“Kennedy, room one-one-seven. All twenty-one students enrolled in this class are present and accounted for, as well as the teacher. We’ll stand by.”

We all looked at each other and breathed a sigh of relief.

“We will be under lockdown for at least half an hour. That means you get an extra fifteen minutes to finish your exam. If you feel a need to let your parents know you are safe, please do so now.”

You couldn’t have had a precision drill team work more in unison than twenty-one students reaching for their cell phones. We’d been taught this, too. Send a quick text message to the parents to let them know the school was in lockdown, then silence all alarms, alerts, and ringtones. If there was a shooter, you didn’t want to accidentally clue him in on where you were hiding. Of course, once you had your cell phone in hand, you couldn’t help but check the news, meaning Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram to see what was happening.

“Oh, my God! No!” We all jerked around to look at Sarah Lynn. “It’s Lonnie! He’s going to kill himself.”

“Is that why they have us locked down?” Rick asked. “Lonnie wouldn’t hurt us. We’re his friends. We need to call him and talk him down.”

“I can’t get an answer,” Charmaine wailed.

We all started sending messages to Lonnie asking him to call us and talk. It didn’t help. There was no response.

Fellow graduating classmates. This is it. The end of school. The end of life. Today is my eighteenth and final birthday. You all deserve to know why it has to end this way. So, I’ll tell you.

We’re doomed. If it didn’t happen today, it would happen later. The only thing you could do would be to delay it and I’ve chosen a time and place where you won’t be able to do that. Look around you while you still have time. There is nothing here for you. We can’t afford to live. All those things that our parents and grandparents held out to us as symbols of a successful life are out of our reach. We will never own a home unless there is a total collapse in the real estate market. The only way that a total collapse can occur is if there are more homes than people by a significant margin. Then, perhaps, the value of property would come down far enough that common people could afford to buy. Common people, but not us. We will still be living with our parents because our college debt is so deep a hole that our paychecks, should we be fortunate enough to get a job, is shoveled into it with no hope of ridding ourselves of it. And if we don’t go to college? We will be living in boxes under the abandoned railroad trestle because even entry level positions require a degree.

This is no dystopian romance we’re in. No band of brothers will win this war. No alien invasion will be repelled. No happily ever after awaits us. It’s too late to stop it now. But there is one thing left that I can control. I can decide the way I die. Goodbye.

“We’re standing outside Carney High School where students are just being released from their ordeal of being locked down while their classmate held them in terror,” the newscaster said. “We’ve heard so much about school shootings and the traumatic stress induced by these senseless acts of violence. Were you frightened while you were locked in your classroom?” The reporter shoved a microphone at our group, not really specifying who should answer.

We pretty much all muttered, “No.” I sure didn’t feel like talking about our friend’s suicide.

“You weren’t frightened about this mentally ill man threatening to kill you all?” That did it. Charmaine stepped up to the microphone and laid into the reporter.

“Lonnie never threatened us,” she started. “He was our friend. He didn’t leave a threatening note, he told us why he was committing suicide. We tried to reach him, but he didn’t answer his phone. We’re all just sad we couldn’t help him in a way that would let him live in this tainted world any longer.”

“Our reports say an armed teenager made threats against the entire school.”

“Armed with what? A bedsheet? Lonnie hated guns and was afraid of them. His parents kept all sharp knives in a locked drawer. I’m sure there was no rope. We’ve known Lonnie was suicidal for ten years. We just kept trying to include him with us and be friends. It’s all that was left to do. You should really try doing some research instead of making up your facts to suit the story you want to tell.”

“If what you are saying is true, why wasn’t he under the care of a psychiatrist?” The newscaster wasn’t giving up on this. She was making me pretty pissed.

“Why? Is there another drug they want to experiment on him with? What’s this one supposed to do? Elevate his mood? Even out the swings? Numb his consciousness?” I yelled. “Didn’t you read his note? He sent it to each of us. A copy must have made it to you. What kind of psychiatric counseling is going to cure an economy that is in the toilet? What pills give you hope for the future? What kind of doctor does it take to make gays, trans, women, and minorities feel safe from harassment and discrimination? What kind of fucking pill does it take for you to tell the truth about what we see every day. There is no hope for our generation. No homes and families and two-car garages. My first year of college will cost thirty-five thousand dollars. At a school that’s supposed to be a public state-supported college. Private colleges and the best colleges cost two and three times that. You know why there are so many so-called foreigners coming to our colleges? Because they are the only ones who can afford them. Don’t give us crap about mental health unless you’ve got a healthcare solution. We’re eighteen and out of high school. How many of us are ever going to afford to go to a doctor or a dentist again? Lonnie was just more sensitive to that than most people. He’s seen it coming for years and couldn’t cope with the reality of the world he saw. Everyone has known that one day we’d turn and he wouldn’t be there any longer. Why don’t you go find some news to report on?”