Ms. Steven’s rabbit is missing

“Ms. Steven’s rabbit is missing.” 

The loudspeaker shut off with a deafening click. A name and three words is all it took to dig a pit in my stomach. 

Teacher stood at the front of the classroom, looking down at our adolescent faces in neat little rows on the alphabet carpet. A stranger on campus, he said. It’s like a fire or earthquake drill. To practice what to do if a stranger were to try to get inside and hurt us. 

A stranger? Why would a total stranger want to hurt people who have done nothing wrong? 

These questions warped my tiny 6-year-old mind as I pulled my limbs close, wrapping little arms around little legs. All around me were my classmates, tiny bodies I’d grown to know and play with. Innocent, ignorant, and infuriating in the number of times someone sniffed or whispered, breaking the silence ordered upon us. Backs pressed against each other, huddled beside the one windowless wall, we breathed together. In – out. It was just a drill. But in my mind, if we were going down, it would be as a group. 

Teacher wouldn’t let that happen, though. He had a bat, long and slender. It glinted silver. He gripped it casually, tucked under his arm as he worked his way around the room, testing to see how quickly he could close the blinds. One window at a time, Teacher systematically shut out all the sunlight, the opposing wall stretching further and further into oblivion. Out of reach. 

I’d snatched scissors off a table as our small mass of bodies moved from the exposed carpet to the back wall behind Teacher’s desk.

Eyes darting between the door and fellow nervous faces, I wrapped my fingers around the scissors and hid them against my chest. They weren’t much, tiny red craft scissors so dulled they struggled to cut paper, but an assurance nonetheless. If Teacher went down. 

If anyone knew I worried enough to have scissors, they’d say I was overreacting. Nothing bad would ever actually happen. 

That’s when I realized that I’d never felt afraid at school before. It was a safe space. I kept telling myself that this was a drill. Just a drill. 

The stranger can’t get inside. 

◻

Five years later, I eagerly stepped onto the bus headed for camp, the one that the fifth-grade classes went on every year. I remember grinning so widely for so long that my cheeks hurt. But I didn’t care, throwing my overnight bag under the bus and plopping down into a window seat. My parents had bought me a disposable camera, the kind in the yellow wrapping that needed a few seconds to warm up, and I took so many pictures of the drive to the camp that I had to ration out what little film remained once I actually got there. I loved it. The idea of freedom, of creation, of self-discovery, of community. 

Community. That’s what I thought I had at that school. Looking back, I really didn’t. 

My elementary school was incredibly white, with the second largest group consisting of Latine kids. A few mixed Asians like myself, and that was about all the racial diversity we had at the time. I didn’t really notice it, though. I liked my classmates. I thought we were all the same then. I thought we all liked the same things, heard the same stories, and got the same kind of love from the same kind of parents. 

No.

But I looked white enough. My dad describes his experience as people knowing he’s something, but that they just can’t put their finger on it. Can’t pick the proper label. So, I blended in. Just another kid on the bus. Accepted enough.

It was the last night at camp, and my friend was desperately trying to teach me Crazy Eights when Teacher knocked, popping her head into our little room. 

The 2016 election results were in. 

She could’ve waited until morning to tell us. Could’ve forgone the mention entirely, handing the responsibility off to our parents. But she felt the need to tell us that night. In hindsight, I’m glad she did. 

At the time, I was only 10, and I didn’t watch the news. I had no idea what politics really was, nothing more than what I overheard my parents discuss. But my friend knew. 

I still remember the despair I saw on their face when the result was said aloud. The name I would come to hear over and over again in rapid succession. The name I would grow to hate. 

I had no understanding of the consequences to come, but that face alone told me everything I had to know. This was very, very, very bad. Probably not for us, no – that look of despair was for someone else. 

Teacher asked if we were okay, to which we replied with a solemn and uncertain yes, and turned to tell the next room. We went back to Crazy Eights. 

Over the next several months, we graduated, summer flew by, and we entered the dangerous halls of middle school. A nesting ground for awful, and occasionally less awful, teenagers to grow. 

It wasn’t hard to notice that friend groups were largely made up of people who attended the same elementary school. Given that those schools were largely made up of one ethnic group, Latine or white, that didn’t make for a lot of mingling. That racial divide grew in the classroom too as we advanced through grade levels. 

I looked around my AP classes and missed the friends I’d made in middle school. The distance grew wider every year. Resources, the polarized wealth divide, and parental pressure influenced the students in the system, hoisting some up while bogging others down. The hour-long walks home, or the lack of a home entirely, laid traps on the track. If you didn’t break into a sprint from the start, it’s difficult to imagine closing the distance while also trying not to trip. 

High school smacked me in the face with the fact that the systems in place aren’t fair. That it puts most at a disadvantage to lift up the few. Race, class, gender, etc. they were just categories shoved onto us and then used to divide. 

I hated that. It wasn’t the kind of world I wanted for anyone. 

◻

During my first year at college, I turned eighteen. 

I was finally out of the divided town I grew up in, now surrounded by students with backgrounds vastly and excitingly different from mine. A community open to discovering, learning, and growing now equipped with the resources to do so. Everyone was figuring things out, everyone had a different story, and everyone was aware of it. Upperclassmen accepted the little freshmen trying to get their footing and empathized because they experienced the same. It was a space to learn. A space that finally felt safe. A space that was closer to legitimate equality than I had ever experienced. That’s what I have now. 

As my first election season neared, I still hated watching the news. I hated the depressive, anxious spiral the headlines sent me into every time I looked for too long. But still, I tried my best to keep up with the polls, with the props and bills. I remember sitting on the floor of my tiny dorm, filling out my ballot to the music of Twenty-One Pilots, Rihanna, and the Mamma Mia soundtrack. 

That ballot gave me hope. That, and my faith in the thousands of other students around me (and across the nation) with the collective potential to incite change. I thought that maybe, just maybe, things would turn out the way I wanted. That soothed my anxiety for a while. 

Until the votes started pouring in.

I didn’t watch the news, couldn’t really. No, I could have. That’s an excuse. Regardless of if I watched it, the outcome would remain unchanged. 

A childhood friend, after watching the ballot count tick higher on live TV with her college friends, called me, trying not to have a panic attack. She felt isolated and powerless, despite having dear friends in the next room over. It was the weight of the outcome, the consequences to be reaped, that terrified her to her core. A shadow was starting to block out our stars. 

I did my best to support her while fighting off an attack of my own. 

What could I say? I’d already failed to calm myself.

That call was less of a conversation and more like a conduit for mutual despair. The community we thought we had across the country was in shambles. The politics, the fake news, and the racial prejudice were all put into play, and now the pieces named hope, rights, and empathy were getting knocked from the board. 

UCLA knew it too. You could just feel the difference in atmosphere. 

I was living in Rieber Hall at the time, on the 3rd floor, my window facing the turnaround. Few people lingered between buildings, darting into Rende West and then hurrying back to their rooms. The windows were dim, and the usual quiet hum of chatter had fallen silent. This wasn’t like last time, where we’d go back to playing Crazy Eights. No, everyone knew the significance. The polls weren’t closed yet, but the numbers couldn’t lie. Red spread like hives across the States, the blue growing smaller and smaller in comparison. He was going to win. 

Phone pressed to my ear, I paced up and down the hallway of my dorm, my boyfriend on the line doing his best to slow the spiral. Wind howled outside, and the tan-yellow, papery walls of the hallway were spinning around me. Reaching the hallway window for the seventeenth time, I flipped the handle and pushed open the pane as far as the safety stopper would allow. The air outside was lukewarm and dry. 

I exhaled a shaky breath when a popping sound echoed up the hill from the apartments, through the gap between Reiber Hall and Reiber Vista, echoing across the turnaround and amplifying the sound louder and louder, evolving into terrifying booms. 

I froze, my heart racing, looking to the sky and praying for thunder, only to find a clear sky instead. 

Gunshots.

Fellow students poked heads out of doors and windows, exchanging nervous glances, all looking for the source of the noise and anything that could become a comfort. A reassurance. Finding nothing, I watched as blinds closed one by one, forming a wall of darkness beyond my window. I did the same, wielding the plastic draw-stick like a blade and sliding the curtain shut. 

Gunshots, and I am transported back to my kindergarten classroom, grown arms around grown legs, telling myself that it’s going to be okay. 

There’s no one left to shield us anymore. There is no safe word. There is no code. 

The difference is I know it was not a stranger-danger drill that had us kindergarten kids huddled in a corner, but a shooter. That’s what we were training for. To protect ourselves from a person with the power to enact real violence. 

I’m once again afraid. The difference is that now my school is much larger. More space, more people, more influence. The differences that worked to bridge us together here are being used to tear the rest of the nation apart. 

The shooter is inside, and I am afraid. 

Shaking, I stand, my eyes trained on the door, gripping my sharpened, shining scissors tighter. 

Ms. Steven’s rabbit is missing.