Lyric’s P.O.V
“Crimes in schools?” I asked my classmate, George as he vigorously nodded his head.
“Yes.” George said nervously. “That’s what all of us got. The Professor said to be creative and think outside the box.”
In preparation for the match and healing my wounds, I had missed out on school and thus, I’d failed to get my assignment for the month. Thankfully, little nerdy boy George was my backup plan and he was always scared shitless of me to ever complain about anything I asked him to do.
And honestly, that’s all I did, just ask him if he could pick up my assignment for me. I’d never threatened or touched him in my entire life but I guess my reputation precedes me here as well. But it was a blessing in disguise if I ever missed school because I was too beat up after a match to go through all the hustle of collecting my assignments from the Professors themselves because then I’d have to sit through hours long lectures on why bunking school was a bad thing.
“Thanks, Georgy.” I ruffled his already messy mane of dirty blonde hair and send him on his merry way, but not before handing him a twenty dollar bill. I guess the boy deserved a treat for always getting the job done. It’ll be enough to buy a meal at Starbucks.
So I collected my stuff from the locker and headed to the library. I had to start my assignment and the sooner I get done with my school work, the sooner I can get back to focusing on my match.
“Crimes at school, huh?” I scratched my head, trying to figure out what to choose.
I mean, there were thousands of things I could write about. Bullying, illegal drug selling, stealing, illegal student-teacher relationships, students selling their bodies for better grades, teachers taking advantage of minors…you get the drift. But I also knew that the majority of the students will eventually be choosing one of these topics. So what could I write that’ll be better and original?
Without wasting any time, I decided to Google it instead.
The college library was a place I rarely visited but I decided today was as good a time to visit that place if I wanted to get print outs and start on my assignment. Once I was all set up on one of the computer cabins, I immediately typed for crimes at school. I then began going though the list that popped up on the screen. The topics that I’d thought of before were usually the first ones to pop up so I went further down the list to get something better.
12. School shootings.
The topic immediately caught my attention.
“Interesting.” I said to myself. “Not a lot of people are going to come this far.”
So, I started searching for shooting incidents in nearby states. Since Rosewater was located at the border of Kansas and Colorado, I decided to search for Colorado first and then Kansas. At Colorado there were a total of two shootings between 2015 and 2017, so I printed those out and went to find the list for Kansas which had three shootings between 2000 and 2017.
But as I was going through the third and final shooting incident, I noticed something strange. As I looked at the pictures of the students in the school that were affected, I recognized instantly that I knew one of the students in the picture.
The picture looked so different and yet, I had not a single doubt in my mind that this was the same Lydia McKenzie that was studying at Uni with me.
No one would be able to tell at first glance that this woman was truly the same one that I knew and loved to banter with. Everything about her seemed different, like these two women belonged to two completely different times.
The Lydia in the picture had really long hair in delicate curls around her face with dark red highlights. There was a softness to her features that wasn’t there anymore. Even her blue eyes were bright and innocent and help so much hope. She wore a cheerleading outfit in pink and black and was sitting right in the centre of the group with pom poms in her hand. Was she the cheerleading captain? It certainly seemed so from the pictures.
But the most striking feature about her was her smile. It was bright and luminating and contagious. Seeing her smile made my lips tug up at the corners. She looked so beautiful and vibrant in this picture.
So what happened to her that made her so different? And why was her picture on the Rivercreek High School register on school shooting?
But the answer became clear a few seconds later when I scrolled down the webpage and found another picture of Lydia; this time only a photograph of her alone in a pink cardigan and her hair tied in a loose ponytail and under the picture, written in clear italics were the words:
Rivercreek Shooting survivor Lydia McKenzie.
“Shooting survivor?” My eyes widened in shock as I looked at the picture once again.
And there was that smile again. Vibrant and radiant and beautiful. It transformed her face completely. But why would anyone want to shoot at her? Desperately wanting to know more about her, I kept scrolling down and completed the entire article in record time. That wasn’t the only article I searched, though. I searched by her name on the browser and clicked on several articles that sounded legit.
At the end of my research all that I could gather was that a boy named Roy Harris had open fired at school with his dad’s gun and the bullet had hit Lydia’s head. She wasn’t supposed to survive the ordeal but somehow she had and the boy, Roy Harris had been so shocked after seeing all the blood that he had turned the gun on himself and shot another bullet. Roy hadn’t been lucky enough to survive however and the bullet had gone right through his head, killing him instantly.
There were some accusations that Lydia had been the boy’s lover and had cheated on him, while some other article had romanticized the entire story saying that Lydia had rejected the dude and since he couldn’t handle the rejection, he had shot first her and then himself so that they could frolic in the afterlife. I don’t know where they got that notion from but I refused to believe that Lydia and Roy were remotely romantically related. But there were other articles that had suggested at her being a bully and I had instantly rejected the notion. Someone doesn’t pick fights with others over bullying if they had been a bully themselves.
You can scare away people all you want, Lyric. It doesn’t just make you strong, it makes you a bully.
Lydia’s earlier words reverberated in my head and I knew in my heart that she would never be a bully. Call it gut instinct but I knew that Lydia didn’t have it in her to bully others for her own gain. But then, what was the real reason for Roy to shoot her? And why has that experience changed her so much?
Yes, PTSD was very normal in this case. And even though it’s been three years since that incident, most of which, I’m guessing, she had to have spent recovering and in therapy, but shutting off her emotions? Was that even possible? And if it was, why hasn’t something triggered it back up?
Her eyes were very expressive though, that’s one thing I had found out by observing her these past couple days, but her face never showed any emotions. Everything was just…blank.
“So, why?” I asked myself. “Why are you so expressionless?” I thought to myself as I printed out these files and folded them into a neat pile.
I guess it was time to find out…directly from the source.