Page 29 of Ugly Duckling (Content Advisory #6)

Twenty-Three

I do not do bugs. You could literally rob me with a roach.

—Sutton to Gunner

GUNNER

I was irritated.

I missed my kid.

I missed my girl.

And I hated snooty know-it-alls that didn’t take the children’s lives under their care seriously.

“I just don’t see why we should use our hard earned…”

I held up my hand. “It’s not all of the money that I laid out here in this proposal.

There are also grants that you can get. The State of Texas allocates these funds to schools for the improvement of security on campuses.

I can help you get them, but it’s not going to cover it all.

However, you raise those funds is up to you, but I would highly suggest taking the security of your campus seriously. ”

I was at a town hall meeting for the school to approve spending on the security budget that would allow us to make the school a safer place.

However, there was one member on the school board who was vehemently against the proposal to help secure the school districts, and he’d brought his cronies with him to the meeting.

They’d been heckling the members that did approve of it for an hour now, and I was losing patience.

Maybe it was time to pull out the big guns.

“I just don’t see why we need this!” the board member, Lewis, cried as he threw up his hands in frustration. “It’s a waste of money!”

Big guns it was.

I made sure to have a presentation ready for when I had to show them the why.

Standing up, I took the podium and said, “I guess it’s time for you to see why I do what I do.”

I then keyed up the slide show on my computer.

One that I added to every year as I updated their ages that they’d be right now if they had the type of security that I offered.

The slideshow popped up, and the breath left my body for a long moment as I looked at the photo of my smiling little boy.

It was the last picture I’d ever taken of him.

That morning, the day before his party, he’d been so mad at me because I’d forgotten about his party and didn’t bake the cookies the night before like he’d asked me to.

I’d been so exhausted the night before that I hadn’t had the energy to do much of anything besides take a shower and fall into bed.

The next morning when my alarm had gone off, I’d asked my Uncle Parker if he could stop for a fruit tray for the party since I’d dropped the ball.

Just as I’d been hanging up with Parker, Jett had come storming into the room mad because “fruit sucked” and “cookies were superior.”

He’d been pissed, and rightfully so.

I should’ve made the cookies.

Why hadn’t I made the cookies?

I asked myself that all the time.

If I’d made the cookies, Parker wouldn’t have had to drop him off at school. He would’ve just walked with him into class and hung out there setting up for the party like I’d volunteered him to do.

If he’d been there, he would’ve protected Jett with his life.

“This was my son,” I said quietly. The chatter died down. “He’d be fifteen right now. We’d be thinking about colleges. What he wanted to do with his life. I’d probably be touring colleges with him as he tried to figure out which school he wanted a full ride to for baseball.”

I’d said the same things so many times to so many people. Given the same story to everyone who needed to know why I did it.

Jett was always my why.

He’d forever be my why.

“He loved baseball,” I went on. “Loved it so damn much that he slept with his hand in a glove, and a ball under his pillow. From the moment he learned to walk, he was out on a baseball field with me. He fell asleep to the sharp ting of my bat cracking against a ball. He lived, breathed, and slept baseball. He was my little sidekick. My confidant. My encouragement. My breath.”

My voice cracked on the last word.

“Sometimes, I wake up, and I can’t breathe.

I panic because it’s such a horrible feeling.

While I’m asleep, I can forget that I lost him.

But when I’m awake, it’s like I have this piece of my heart that will forever ache, because that piece was ripped away from me the day that my little boy was shot along with thirty-three other little boys and girls in their elementary school. ”

I looked around at the room, taking in all the men who had been so opposed earlier.

I had their attention now.

“That day was supposed to be a day of celebration. One hundred days of school. Their first one hundred days of school.” I smiled as I remembered making that stupid shirt with a hundred dots of paint on it.

“The day before, I’d picked him up early from school so we could go grab a t-shirt from Hobby Lobby.

When we got home, we made a shirt for him to wear.

A hundred dots to mark each of his first one hundred days. ”

A woman in the crowd covered her mouth as tears began gathering in her eyes.

“He couldn’t stand the feel of it that morning that he died. He shoved it into his backpack, though. His plan was to slip it on over his t-shirt when the party started.”

I flipped to the next photo. It was the picture of his face as he wore the shirt.

“We got a little heavy-handed with the paint. He could feel it through the fabric, and he was so particular about his clothes.” I skipped to the next photo. It was of Jett ripping it off in disgust, his hair a curly, wild mess around his cherubic face.

“My Uncle Parker took him to school that day,” I said. “The last time I ever saw my son was when I was getting into my Jeep and leaving. I waved at him and told him to be good.”

The next photo was of the classroom.

“This was my son’s classroom,” I said softly.

“His teacher, Mrs. White? This was her first year teaching. She was so freakin’ excited.

She loved her kids.” I smiled. “She made all of them their own little desk nameplates. For Jett. For Kyle, Allen, Jacob, Merena, Rainie, Marren, Carly, Alex, Honor, Nevaeh. Sixteen of the sweetest, most innocent souls.”

There was a sharp inhalation, and I looked over at the one man who was holding this meeting up with his denial of the budget.

I switched to the next slide, and everyone inhaled sharply then.

The photo that was displayed on the screen was of all the desk plates scattered throughout the room. There was so much blood on the floor that the carpet was stained a dull red. Jett’s shoes were in the middle of the floor.

I knew they were his because they had little baseballs on them. His favorite.

“Eleven little bodies were carried out of that classroom after a gunman opened fire in the school,” I said.

“They started in the west wing. Aiming for a class that was at PE. Or trying to. The PE teacher was a former Green Beret. He knew what to do. He lost one child before he barricaded himself in the locker room, then went even further to barricade the equipment room.”

I switched to the photos of what the coach had been able to do.

“He had to pile eighteen bags of balls between the door and himself and the kids,” I said. “How do you think those balls held up to a bullet ripping through them?”

I switched to the next photo of all the balls.

There wasn’t a single inflated one left after the bullets had ripped through them.

“The gunman, once he’d shot up that door, unloading a whole magazine of .223, stepped over the body of Darren, the first little boy that he killed, and into the hallway. There he shot three more children. Peter, Paul, and Alcede. They were heading to the office to say the Pledge of Allegiance.

“The final act of violence before the shooter moved to my son’s classroom was Corrine. She was in my son’s class, but had asked to use the restroom,” I said softly. “She was gunned down in the hallway outside of her classroom before the gunman came around the corner.

“And I want you to take into account that the school was put into lockdown after the shooting was heard in the gym,” I said.

“But the problem was, just like your school, my son’s school wasn’t prepared.

They had opened the front doors to anyone and everyone who wanted to come in that day.

When the shooting started, protocols were enacted, but it didn’t matter.

Everything was utter chaos. No one knew who was doing the shooting.

Classes went into lockdown with a bunch of random people.

That day, Mrs. White let the shooter into her classroom because she thought he was just a scared kid.

A teenager who was terrified. She let him into the classroom, thinking that she was doing the right thing.

And in the end, it would be the one thing that got her entire class of five-year-olds killed.

“She was the first one shot the moment he got into the room.” I switched to the photo of her.

The little board in her hand, so much like Jett’s first day of school picture, read: first day of teaching kindergarten.

I am five foot six. I want to be a teacher when I grow up.

“She was shot in the belly and had to watch as the shooter killed every single one of the kids in her room. Starting with Jett. Then Kyle, Allen, Jacob, Merena, Rainie, Marren, Carly, Alex, Honor. And ending with Nevaeh.”

I switched to the crime scene photo of all eleven bodies covered in white sheets.

“This is the reality of life right now. We have some really sick individuals in our world right now, and they don’t have consciences. They maim the most innocent, and don’t. Freaking. Care.”

The entire audience, even the cop who’d come to do crowd control, was weeping silently.

I wasn’t crying.

I had no tears left to cry.

Just a permanent ache in my heart that was always there. Always pulsing and reminding me of what I’d lost.

“You may think it’ll never happen to you. To your kids,” I said softly. “But it does. It happened to mine. It could happen to yours. And that’s why I created this company. I wanted to make it to where no other parent had to go through what I did go—and am still going through.”

“I, uh, I…”