Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: As you’ve likely noticed, our online literary content is of two sorts: the weekly miCRo series for flash and short poems, and samples from our print issues. This once, we’d like to do something a little different, for a piece with particular import for our current moment. Frequent CR contributor Julianna Baggott has constructed a dark and all-too-believable morality tale about gun violence in schools (also the subject of this miCRo story, and this poem and this poem . . . ). The light tone of the young narrator belies the eerie circumstances the schoolchildren experience in the name of safety.
Just weeks after my four-year-old came home talking about a lockdown drill—tame enough that he was just amused that all the boys went into the tiny boys’ bathroom in his classroom, though I’ve heard of local preschoolers coached to yell and throw things at intruders—I’m honored that we at The Cincinnati Review can give a platform to a gripping story.
Cubby Safe
An American Future, Not Unlike our Present
The Cubby Safe in our room already had bullets stuck in it when it was installed, but Miss Armstrong said that was because it was a demo. “The school board decided it was better this way. Cheaper! More money for our little armory.” She patted the gun in her holster, her knuckles all swollen with arthritis. The holster sat on her wide hips, and—I’m not going to lie—me and the girls in my group made fun of her sometimes because of her wide hips and flat butt. Miss Armstrong decorated the cubby with lists of homophones and stuff so people wouldn’t see the bullets so much.
I didn’t care about the Cubby Safe much at first. It was octagonal, had brown carpeting, and included built-in benches with lids that opened up. Inside, there were books. But kids hid weird stuff in the benches too, so when you popped the lids, the whole Cubby Safe smelled like bad Go-Gurt or socks or fish food.
We did drills with the Cubby Safe, lots of them. The drills were all approved by the school board. They loved Cubby Safe. Miss Armstrong said everybody loved Cubby Safe because they were considering our state capital for their HQ, which would have been great for Miss Armstrong’s stepson who needed a good job.
The drills would start this way: Miss Armstrong would say, “Shark’s in the tank! Shark’s in the tank!” which meant there was an active shooter. We were supposed to say “active shooter,” not “killer” or “gunman” or “psycho.” “Active shooter” was a nicer way to put it, and it’s important not to make shooters—and prospective shooters—feel bad about themselves. I mean, active is a good thing. It’s better than a lazy shooter or an awkward shooter or a mean shooter, right?
Miss Armstrong’s voice was all craggy and old, but when she screamed “Shark’s in the tank,” she sounded really scared. It was very realistic. I told her once, “Miss Armstrong, you could have been on TV.”
And she said, “I was a lead in my high school’s production of Our Town. I played Emily. Thank you for noticing.”
And I said, “You’re welcome!” It’s smart to be polite to teachers, especially when they’re armed.
Miss Armstrong would keep shouting, “Shark’s in the tank! Shark’s in the tank!” until all the kids were lined up and walking into the Cubby Safe, then she would push us along. “Hurry up. Go! Get in!”
Except for Marta. Marta was in a wheelchair and spoke to us by pushing light-up squares on the computer attached to her locked-in tray. Marta’s para-pro, Anna Marie, would smile and say, “You all go ahead! We’re just going to work on vocab!”
One time Emma C. said, “Miss Armstrong, Marta needs to practice this too because if she doesn’t, she’ll get shot.”
“It’s okay, children,” Miss Armstrong told all of us, with a smile and one hand resting on her gun handle—a habit of hers ever since she lost her gun privileges and then got them reinstated. “Anna Marie and Marta practice this at other times. They’ve got it down to a science.” But she said this softly, like she didn’t want Marta to hear. After we were all in there, sitting on the benches or criss-cross applesauce on the brown carpeting, there wasn’t really room for Marta’s wheelchair. And I wondered if the makers of Cubby Safe knew about Marta and her wheelchair or thought about other kids like her.
There was also an issue about the teacher-to-student ratio and, to be honest, we were like five kids over the cap. Some parents were really into complaining about that, but my mother was like, “Geez, people, we’ve got bigger fish to fry, amiright?”
So for each drill we’d line up, poking and shoving each other, and Marta would push buttons for homophones. The automated voice on her computer saying, “Heel, heal, vain, vein, cereal, serial . . .” Marta was probably the smartest in our class and always got all the questions right.
Anna Marie would say, “Good! That’s right!”
Once we were all inside, Miss Armstrong would lower the large plastic safety latch and she’d say, “Who’d like to sing a song? We have to sit in here for ten minutes.”
Bernard always wanted to sing “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” so as soon as his hand shot up, we would all groan.
But Miss Armstrong would call on him, like she had dementia and forgot that this was how it always went. Miss Armstrong was really old, by the way. In fact, a lot of people started calling her Miss Alzheimer’s after she lost track of her gun during Math Night and a kindergartner shot it off in the unisex bathroom with the mini toilets. Her gun privileges were suspended indefinitely at first, but she petitioned to get them back, and the school board caved immediately, not wanting a lawsuit—that’s what my mom said.
Anyway, we would sing “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” and Bernard was sometimes a little wild in his singing. He’d stand up and pogo or wave his arms in the air over his head. This was if his parents forgot to slip his meds into his morning shake. If they remembered, Bernard would just put his hands on his knees and grip the fabric of his cords and let it go, and grip it and let it go. And he wouldn’t sing at all. He was an awful singer, but sometimes it felt worse when he didn’t join in.
If no one had any suggestions, Miss Armstrong made us sing babyish songs with hand gestures. And one of the girls in my group—J. J.—would poke me and show me her middle finger like, I’ve got a hand gesture for you, Miss Armstrong! And we would laugh.
With all of our singing, all that hot air, the too-many students in that teacher-to-student ratio, and it being spring, the Cubby Safe got stuffy fast. And ten minutes felt like forever. And we stank. Miss Armstrong gave the deodorant speech, but the kids who needed to hear it just didn’t listen.
Then one of us had a great idea—how about Anna Marie storms around out there and shouts things like an active shooter with a gun? So we could get the real experience.
Miss Armstrong shrugged and bellowed to Anna Marie to holler and carry on.
“I don’t really want to!” Anna Marie shouted back. “If that’s okay.”
“Do it!” Miss Armstrong said. “These drills are supposed to be lifelike!”
Then we heard Anna Marie clomp over near the Cubby Safe in her clogs, and she said, “I think it might be upsetting for Darlene. She’s already so shook up.”
So, okay, I forgot to tell you about Darlene. In addition to Anna Marie and Marta, Darlene didn’t do the drills. She wouldn’t say why. In fact, she pretty much stopped talking altogether a little after we came back from winter break. There was a rumor that Mr. Pace had invited some of the kids into the Cubby Safe, one-on-one, for private drills during aftercare. Some say that he was inappropriate with Darlene inside the latched Cubby Safe. Mr. Pace, the aftercare coordinator, is one of a few administrators with AK-15s strapped to their backs. He’s the one with the belly that fits under the strap across his chest. That rumor, though? It’s probably not true, because Mr. Pace is really funny and high-fives all the boys and started Free Hug Day so that no kid—especially not the ones who might turn into shooters—would feel left out.
He was on Channel 5 News. “A hug can really turn a kid around,” he told the broadcaster woman. And now lots of schools do Free Hug Day, and it’s especially important to hug white boys because they’re most at risk to become shooters if we don’t show them, all the time, how much we like them. Mr. Pace has put all of this in a brochure—like, how it’s really important for pretty girls to be nice to white boys. I might be a pretty girl one day. Right now I’m just mediocre. But by being extra nice to boys, I might be able to save lives. Still and all, I’d like a gun too.
So yes, along with Marta, in her wheelchair pushing vocab buttons on her screen, and Anna Marie, who seemed to really hate the drills, there was Darlene, who read books or stared out the window, saying zip. There weren’t enough funds for her to see a therapist, but she went to the free NRA Empowerment Camp on weekends for kids who needed that kind of thing. They shot at targets and mannequins to help them feel better about themselves.
“I don’t care about Darlene!” Miss Armstrong shouted, and she really didn’t. Darlene pissed her off. “Her parents can opt her out all they want, but I’m not going to put all the other kids at risk because she can’t deal!” Miss Armstrong then muttered under her breath, “Mr. Pace is a lovely man.” Then just so Anna Marie was clear on the matter, Miss Armstrong added, “Do it, Anna Marie!”
And so this became part of the whole experience. Anna Marie banged on the outside of the Cubby Safe with her fists and screamed things like “Die! Die, scum! I hate you! You deserve to die!”
She did this until her voice choked a little, like she was crying or just got exhausted from the pounding. “Is that enough?”
“More!” we all shouted, and I was one of the shouters. “More! More! More!”
*
My mother wasn’t a big believer in the Cubby Safe actually working. “I’ve been the parent volunteer in your classroom,” she said. “I’ve seen you all try to line up for gym. You’re a disaster. There’s no way you’ll all make it.”
“I know,” I said, thinking of Marta, Anna Marie, and Darlene, dead for sure. Also our fish and the hamster. The active shooter would definitely hit the tanks.
“And it didn’t go well at the high school,” my mother said.
“Nope,” I said. “It really didn’t.” The high school had bought a few megasized Cubby Safes, but it turned out that the active shooter studied the flow of traffic during the drills—because he was part of the drills—and realized that the flow was perfect for getting the highest death toll. After that, a lot of the high schoolers in town shot themselves, but each of those cases were completely unrelated to the incident. People on TV were super clear on that. Just bad coincidences.
“When will they let the good students carry guns?” I asked for the millionth time. I wanted a gun so bad.
“After the incident at the community college, it’s hard to say,” my mother told me. “Those idiots!” There’d been a shooting at the community college too, and the cops shot three students with guns before they shot the actual active shooter. It was a real shame, because the three students with guns were really nice and had done volunteer work, and two of the three had even gone through the Live Shooter College program, which is now under review but seems to be moving forward. My mom heard about it on the news.
“I’d be good with a gun,” I told her.
“I know,” she said. “Sometimes there’s only one question when your kiddo heads out that door to the bus stop. Do you want them to shoot someone or get shot at?”
“I definitely want to shoot someone,” I said.
She looked at me, suddenly all afraid. Her face was like, You’re not going to turn out to be an active shooter, are you?
And so I said, “Wait, wait. I want to get shot at.”
But this didn’t seem to make her feel any better.
“I don’t know!” I said, and I shrugged as hard as I could.
“Here’s the problem right now,” she said. “You might just not be on the inside of the Cubby Safe, you know? So . . . wherever the kids on the outside kind of huddle together, push your way to the middle. Like in a herd of cattle, get right in the center, if you can. And if the other kids get shot, find a dead one, and pull their body on top of yourself and play dead. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
*
So, okay. You know what I’m getting at. The day it all went down.
We were talking about the US Constitution. We weren’t reading it. Miss Armstrong told us that it was way too boring, but she liked to explain it to us, all the bits that were fair and unfair and how politicians should change the unfair parts.
The vice principal’s voice came over the loudspeaker, announcing a lockdown. She had this way of speaking like her nose was always stuffed up, and it sounded extra pinched.
Miss Armstrong said, “Wait! Today isn’t a drill day!” And for no reason I can understand, she consulted her Fitbit, as if it were going to turn into a weekly planner.
“She didn’t say it was a drill,” J. J. said.
Miss Armstrong looked up at all of us. Her eyes wide. Her face blank—like she was onstage in high school all over again but this time forgot her lines.
“Shark’s in the tank,” Anna Marie whispered. Anna Marie was gripping the handles of Marta’s wheelchair.
“Shark’s in the tank!” Miss Armstrong started shouting. “Shark’s in the tank!”
We got kind of serious but also giddy. Of course, Bernard’s parents had not slipped his meds into his morning shake—today of all days—so he was pogo-ing around.
“Bernard!” Miss Armstrong shouted. She raced toward him and pulled him to the Cubby Safe.
“What about Marta?” Emma C. said. “She’s got to come with us this time!”
“Of course!” Miss Armstrong shouted, and then she nodded at Anna Marie—but not a full nod, just a little nod. And Anna Marie and Marta headed toward the Cubby Safe door.
Meanwhile we couldn’t make a line at all. We were a jagged mess, just like my mom had said. I pushed J. J., and she pushed me back. I fell down. Then I shouted, “What about Sergio and Mickey Mouse?”—our class pets, the fish and hamster.
“There’s no time!” Miss Armstrong said. “The shark is already in the tank!”
I got on my hands and knees and crawled into the Cubby Safe. I sat down criss-cross applesauce. I was inside. Inside! My mother would be proud of me. I wouldn’t have to get to the middle of some herd of kids or pull a dead kid on top of myself.
We were packed in now and the door was still open and there was shouting coming from the hallway. And from where I sat, I could see Marta’s wheels.
I looked up at Miss Armstrong. She locked eyes with Anna Marie. “Are you coming?” she said.
Anna Marie said nothing. She tilted her head like she didn’t understand. But she did. We all did. Miss Armstrong was asking Anna Marie if she was coming, alone, leaving Marta behind.
Marta knew it too. She pushed a button on her screen. “Let’s get in,” the automated voice said.
But Anna Marie didn’t move.
Marta pressed it again and again—though her hand was shaking and it wasn’t easy for her to be precise. “Go, go, go,” the automated voice said.
Anna Marie started working Marta’s straps. She was going to pick her up and carry her in. We all knew it.
“Come on!” we cheered. “Hurry!”
But just as she had gotten Marta out and was lifting her small frame up from the chair, there was louder shouting in the hall.
Miss Armstrong grabbed the door and pulled its lock. Anna Marie put her hand on the door frame, but Miss Armstrong clawed her fingers loose and shut the door. It clanked into place and she locked it.
“I had to! I had to!” Miss Armstrong was saying, breathlessly. “You all saw it! You heard the shooter getting closer! I had no choice! She was taking too long!”
We could all hear the automated voice on Marta’s handheld, saying, “Go, go, go . . .” And then it changed to, “Help, help, help.” Finally, it faded away.
I looked down and picked at the carpeting.
“I feel like I might throw up,” J. J. said.
“Don’t you dare,” Miss Armstrong said.
And then inside the Cubby Safe everything went silent and still.
Finally, Bernard stood up. He was scanning all of us like he was taking a head count. “Darlene,” he said.
No one said a word.
Miss Armstrong put her hand on her pistol, and then she realized it wasn’t there. She realized that she’d lost it again. “Damn it!” she whispered. “Quiet, just everyone be quiet!”
No one sang. No one moved.
We all just waited, staring up at where the octagonal walls met the Cubby Safe’s ceiling.
And then after what seemed like a very long time, we heard a single gunshot. This was weird. We’d been expecting rat-a-tats. Honestly, I’d really been expecting Anna Marie’s fists banging on the outside while she told us to die. Some things are hard to shake.
But just one shot? That wasn’t like on the news.
Then fifteen seconds later—we learned the amount of time afterward—there was another shot.
It went quiet again.
“Let’s go see what happened,” J. J. said.
“No, hush!” Miss Armstrong said, but her face was contorted and she was breathing weird.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Fine!”
But she wasn’t fine. Turns out, she was having a heart attack and wasn’t ready to admit it. She slid down the octagonal wall, and she was the one to throw up, which smelled really bad in the shut-in space. We were already clammy and gross.
After the barfing, it was so quiet kids started to panic. We were afraid we’d been forgotten.
Someone screamed, “We’ll run out of oxygen and die!” And that caught on like wildfire.
The latch was kid proof, and Miss Armstrong could no longer give clear-headed directions on how to open it.
We all started banging to get out. We banged and banged until our fists were bruised.
Finally, someone worked the override system, and a cop opened the door. “Hey, kiddos!” He smiled through the dark shade of his riot-gear mask. “It’s still a little messy out in the hallway, so we’re going to ask you to stay in here a while longer.”
“Who’s dead?” the kids shouted. “Who’s dead? Who died?”
But I got down low, and I peered between the cop’s boots, and I saw Darlene. She was sitting in Miss Armstrong’s chair at Miss Armstrong’s desk.
And she was smiling.
*
You can read about the rest online.
You can read about how we were all just crisis actors. This was a load of b.s. We lived it. And, I mean, Miss Armstrong was a good actress, but not that good.
And you can read about how we were victims. It’s the truth, but there were so many thoughts and prayers that if you imagined them as something like cake—which I did—you were choking on cake.
You can read about the unhinged boyfriend of one of the secretaries in the main office and how he shot her. That was too far away for us to hear inside of the Cubby Safe. He’d been going through an anger-management antistalking program, but it didn’t work out for him. Everyone totally got why he shot his girlfriend; he thought she was cheating on him so, you know, people were like, “Of course. That’s how it goes sometimes!”
You won’t read about how Miss Armstrong nearly died in the Cubby Safe or how she had to retire. Trauma—like having a heart attack in a Cubby Safe with twenty-some kids—can really take dementia up a notch.
You won’t read about Marta either. When we had school assembly, she wanted to give a speech, and the administration was like, Oh, okay, I didn’t know she could do that. And they let her. Anna Marie rolled her out on the stage, and Marta’s computer was outfitted with a mic. Anna Marie explained that Marta had written the speech and that the auto-voice was going to read it to us. We all thought it might be about our hamster or something. Nope. It started like this, “Instead of the Cubby Safe and NRA camps and metal detectors and being nice to fragile white boys, how about we put in some smart laws about guns and not have guns everywhere all the time?” She looked at all of us while the voice spoke. Her eyes were shiny and fierce. I swear she stared directly at me for a second, but later when I told people that, they said that they were sure she looked directly at them.
She didn’t get to say much more about smart gun laws. Her mic cut out.
Anna Marie had the speech on paper, like she expected the mic to go out, and so she read it loudly until the gym teacher escorted her offstage and the vice principal wheeled Marta off too.
At a birthday party Marta told J. J. the speech was her idea and that Anna Marie helped her with it. And she said that if she had the chance, she’d do it again. Marta goes to some other school now, “for kids like her.” But I don’t know if that means kids in wheelchairs or kids who give speeches about gun laws.
Everyone in my class thinks that Anna Marie got canned because we never saw her again.
But Darlene. That’s what you really want to know about. What really happened is hard to figure out. It was chaos. But this is what I think went down.
Darlene helped wheel Marta into the storage closet with Anna Marie, and—being brave—Darlene took Miss Armstrong’s gun from her purse. Miss Armstrong had forgotten to put it in her holster that morning.
Darlene went looking for the active shooter. She moved through the quiet, empty halls. And she ended up circling back, close to our classroom, where she came across a man with an AK-15 strapped to his back.
She must have made some kind of noise or said something because the man turned around and it was Mr. Pace. He seemed to be moving toward the Cubby Safe that was in the teacher’s lounge.
Now why did Mr. Pace still have his AK-15 on his back instead of pulled around and ready to shoot? Some say he was being cautious, some say he was being cowardly. A lot of people who saw him day in and day out were pretty sure that he’d gained weight but refused to let loose a notch of the strap, so it was stuck like that.
It doesn’t matter now. He turned, and in that split second, Darlene thought he was the active shooter, so she shot him.
All those weekends at camp, she hadn’t seemed to get any better, psychologically, but she’d become an excellent marksman. She popped him right in the chest.
He had a Kevlar vest on, so he just staggered back and fell. I guess Darlene still wasn’t sure it was Mr. Pace, though, because she fired again—fifteen seconds later—and the bullet shattered his right arm.
He’s fine and all, but he had to take some time off to get his head straight. I saw him at the Dollar Store though, like a few weeks ago. He didn’t have a gun on him at all. His arm was in a sling, and he was just staring at spray bottles, the kind you fill with water and spray at your cat when it does something naughty. And he just stared and stared. His head was shaking a little, like he was a bobblehead version of himself.
*
We were all pretty messed up by the whole thing. And there still wasn’t any money for therapy. I mean, the requests for more guns and Cubby Safes were really sucking up the whole budget. That’s what my mom thinks about it.
But we still had the trauma to deal with, so my whole school goes to camp to be empowered. There are so many kids, in fact, that we can’t all fit on the weekends, so we rotate days of the week.
I go on Tuesdays.
There’s this field, and all these kids line up with their ear-protection headphones on, and we stand with our feet spread, and we aim at these targets. And I point the gun and I fire and fire and fire. And the shock of it jolts up my arm and into my heart. And it’s scary, so I hum, “You’re a grand old flag, you’re a high-flying flag . . .” I sing it real loud.
But then the smell of the gun firing gets in my nose, and I feel like I can’t breathe. I think, Do you want to shoot or get shot? And then I feel like I’m back in the Cubby Safe and there are no airholes and I’m going to run out of oxygen and die. I get so breathless that I feel like I’m suffocating . . . like I’m trying to breathe under the weight of dead bodies, kids in my class that I’ve pulled on top of me, like my mother said to, and I’m alive, but just barely and only for so long.
Julianna Baggott has published over twenty books, including two New York Times Notable Books of the Year—Pure and Harriet Wolf’s Seventh Book of Wonders (Hachette, 2012 and 2015). Her work has appeared in Agni, Best American Poetry, and on NPR. She teaches screenwriting at Florida State University’s Film School.
