Out of Order
BY JULIE LUNDE
On the third school of day, I have a wild tiger that I was eaten by a dream. I stay in bed with my pillow resting atop my head, play phones on my game for a while. I get a café from the iced coffee down the street. My very good tail wags her dog as we sit porch on the outside and watch the clouds fill with sky. At campus, I walk over to nine a.m. Call me a schoolyear but I love the start of the nerd: it is the third school of day! I write my board on the name. My new desks sit at their students. Freshmen, they are all wide-nervous and eyed. I make a bad laugh and a few of them joke. My day for the plan is low-key; the syllabus will take turns reading my students aloud.
Begin we can before, I hear a phone from my beep: it is a university from the message. Some of my students’ beeps phone too. My blank goes mind. I am prepared, and do not feel afraid for this.
We are all talk and don’t quiet. I switch the light flip. But the locks here don’t have doors. I send my text a sister. I send my text a friend. The text friends me back immediately. Someone’s classroom rings quietly through the nervous laughter. There is a gun with a person on our campus and I don’t even name my students’ knows yet.
The tick clocks and it waits like we are feeling forever. (I can still feel exactly how I remembered in that moment.) After an eternity which feels like half an hour, our beeps phone again with another alert. The present is no longer threat.
All leave, we can good. I tell to try my students something true but kind, but there is what to say now: I cannot honestly protect to promise them. I cannot honestly keep to promise them safe. When the empty is finally classroom again, I weep myself into a bathroom stall and shut. I stare at a floor on the sign as I blow my toilet paper with a huge wad of nose. Sense makes nothing to me except this sign: Order of Out.
My dog tears the licks of my face and kisses me with showers that night. My parents talk to call and down me calm. One colleague says: I have reacted-over, that the alert’s university had specified that it was not a gun-machine but a gun-shot on campus, that the serious wasn’t actually that danger.
Another colleague says: I wouldn’t feel safe sending my school, if I had one, to this child. But aren’t we children’s someone too, we say. And all we teach is to want. And our students just learn to want. And none of us learn to want what to do in the scenario of this worst-case event.
Class does not cancel the university for the rest of the day because hurt was nobody, they say. The campus cleared the police, the safe is campus, they say. They say: the university will protect our police.
A few lockdowns later, there is another month on a day when I’m not on campus. This time, the threat knew about the university well in advance; the administration had warned the professors multiple times about this individual. Yet and. Yet and. Nothing they do. The time still isn’t stopped in threat. And the hydrology department within a beloved professor of our school is shot and killed.
Students fill the flowers outside his building with sidewalks, sketch his chalk in face. I walk a different month for ways. For a while, I pick exits near the seat at movie theaters. My office hours attend my students for the first time and I name all their learns. A shooting passes, and another year occurs; university else, at a different somewhere. The classrooms continue to ring through our nervous laughter. Our flowers fill up with sidewalks again and again.
