Behind us, Kellie stepped into a stall and tossed the remainder of her cigarette in the toilet before flushing. Then she turned and started toward the bathroom door.
The next section of the memory feels like slow motion. Kellie walked out, Sarah zipped her purse, and then we heard the gunshots.
We didn’t know what it was at first. My initial thought was firecrackers. I assumed some senior was pulling a prank. Sarah and I glanced at each other, then moved, together, to the door to see what was going on. By then, there was screaming.
We hadn’t even taken a step out into the hallway when Kellie came rushing back in. She shoved us back into the bathroom with both hands. “Hide,” she said.
“What?” Sarah asked.
But Kellie was already moving toward a stall. She was in such a panic that she hadn’t even noticed one of her boots had come untied. She tripped on the string, landing hard on the floor. Both Sarah and I hurried to her, but she shook her head and pushed herself up. “Hide,” she said again. “Now.”
The gunshots had gotten closer. And the combination of the popping and the screams and the terrified look in Kellie’s eyes finally registered with me. Something was wrong. Very wrong.
Sarah figured it out first. She grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me into a stall, locking the door behind us.
I don’t know how long it was before he came into the bathroom. Realistically I know it was likely just a minute or two after we hid. But it felt like an eternity. Sarah and I stood facing each other, trying not to breathe. My heart started pounding so hard I could hear it in my ears. Sarah’s fingers wrapped around mine and squeezed.
I heard him walk into the bathroom. Heard his heavy step on the tiles. Heard the creak of another stall door, a single gunshot, a yell.
And that’s where the sound shifts again. Everything outside of the stall is muffled in my memory. I heard the shooter say something, heard someone—Kellie, obviously—respond, but their words were slurred and garbled. Instead, all I can remember hearing is Sarah. She was barely making a sound, her whisper so silent I probably wouldn’t have heard it normally. Her eyes were squeezed shut as her lips mouthed a prayer.
I knew what was happening by that point, but it didn’t feel real. It felt like a dream. Or like I was trapped in a video game. The most real part, the scariest thing of all, was the way Sarah’s hands shook. She didn’t get scared often. And when she did, she was the type to screech and run in the opposite direction, laughing at herself along the way. I’d never seen her face this white. Never heard her pray this desperately.
I don’t want to go into the details of what happened next. You know them already. The short version is that he found us and shot twice over the edge of the stall. One bullet hit the wall, near my head, and the other hit Sarah, who was killed instantly, her limp body collapsing into my arms. He left the bathroom, leaving me unscathed. Physically, at least.
A minute later, the police arrived, and I heard more gunshots as he took his own life.
Things speed up again after that. The movie goes on fast-forward. An officer came into the bathroom and pulled me away from Sarah’s body. Another officer was assisting Kellie, who was gasping. She’d been shot in the shoulder. In the hallway, EMTs were tending to people, but I couldn’t see who. I remember asking about Sarah, asking over and over where she was and who was taking care of her, even though I think I knew she was gone.
Somehow, I ended up at the police station. Walking out of the school, riding in a cop car—those moments are gone. Because, in the next, I’m being questioned, still drenched in my friend’s blood, and Mom bursts into the room and rushes to me. I’ll never forget the way she hugged me. Like I was her life raft. Like holding me was the only thing keeping her from drowning.
And in her arms, I finally started crying. Because I knew for sure that Sarah—my best friend, my sister—wasn’t going home. She’d never be held like this by her mother again.
I loved Sarah. I love her more than I’ll probably ever love anyone else. And I hate that some of you reading this will think I’m just trying to tarnish her memory somehow by telling the truth. That is the last thing I want to do. I want Sarah to be remembered, but I want her to be remembered for the person she truly was, not the person the world wants her to be.
So, just in case I haven’t made it clear enough: Sarah was not wearing a cross necklace that day; her last moments were not brave or heroic, we were scared little girls in a bathroom stall, and that does not change how much her life mattered; Kellie Gaynor was the one who spoke to the shooter, the cross the police found on the bathroom floor belonged to her.
She arrived at the café twenty minutes late. I didn’t even recognize her at first. Not until she sat down at my table and pulled a pack of cigarettes from her purse in place of a greeting.
“Okay,” she said, lighting one, right in the middle of the café. “So what do you want?”
It took me a minute to find my words. Her once long blue-black hair was now cut into a chin-length bob, bleached into an almost white blond. She’d replaced her thick eyeliner with a pair of black square-framed glasses. Her lips were painted a dark purple, and the black lines of a tattoo poked out from under the collar of her T-shirt. It also looked like she’d gained about thirty pounds, mostly noticeable in the new roundness of her face and fullness of her chest.
No one who had watched the news three years ago or reading the true crime message boards today would recognize this woman as Kellie Gaynor of Virgil County Massacre fame. And maybe, I thought, that was the point.
“Hi,” I finally managed, once my surprise had worn off.
“Hi,” she repeated, a hint of mocking in her voice. “Now what do you want, Lee?”
“Oh, I, um … I wanted to see how you’re doing.”
She took a drag from her cigarette, then narrowed her eyes at me as she let out a puff of smoke. “You sent me a dozen emails and left five voice mails—and I don’t even want to count all of the text messages—so you could find out how I was doing? Really?”
I coughed and tried to wave the smoke away. Honestly, I don’t know how she can still smoke those things. The smell reminds me too much of the bathroom. Of the moments right before the shooting started. Before the world changed. Sitting in that café, I could already feel my heart rate speeding up, and my skin began to itch as every movement out of the corner of my eye turned into something sinister.
When an employee came over to our table, it startled me so much that I nearly jumped out of my chair and bolted for the doors. I managed to keep calm, though, and I was relieved when he said, “Miss, you’ll have to put that out. There’s no smoking in here.”
She sighed, took one last drag, and put it out without a word to the man, who glanced at me with an is-she-serious? expression. I wondered if he’d ever had to tell someone to put out a cigarette before. Smoking in restaurants had been illegal for so long, I couldn’t even believe she’d tried it.
