The Locker Casket

Written by Buffy Torres

In memoriam to the victims of the FSU shooting, and the countless other lives lost surrounding gun violence and mass shootings.

Danica had lied about her stomach ache. It was easy to fake compared to a headache or even chest pain. She didn’t do this often; just often enough to skip most of the class and spend fifteen minutes in the library every other week. She almost always did it during her anatomy class. By the time the clock hit eleven-thirty, she would slip into class after spending a chunk of her library time forging the school nurse’s signature. Only sometimes would her teacher send someone out to find her or check up on her if a lot of time had passed. Danica would also walk as slowly as possible, her fingers grazing past the full-body lockers that rested by the senior wing of her high school. And between texting her friends on Facebook and using her iPod, she made the most out of her fake free period. 

There were times when Danica would see people get shoved in the lockers; during her freshman year of high school, a couple of years after the Virginia Tech shooting that happened a few hours up north, she watched as a couple of lacrosse guys stuff Jason Hampton, captain of the AV club, in the last full body locker after rumor went around that he tutored one of their girlfriends; Typical high school bullshit Danica felt like she was above. The summer of the Aurora theater shooting, they found termites decaying the walls behind the full-body lockers. In the winter of the Sandy Hook shooting, the school board in Atlanta gave the school a pension to remove the dated full-body lockers in exchange for the regular half-body ones. The lockers were from the forties, the only original piece left from the school besides the wooden beams and the nails that rusted over time. They were to be uprooted in the summer of 2014 when Danica would already have graduated. Regardless, no one paid attention to the lockers; they were barely used and never had locks. 

Danica found herself becoming friends with the school halls. This trophy case elegantly stood at the entrance, and the lockers, which had become more reliable than administrators and school police officers, something that became law for every school. It took a lot of work to adapt to the change initially; she was accustomed to crossing guards and social workers. But now, Danica can’t imagine not sharing the halls with first-year students, sophomores, juniors, and school police officers. 

Danica had lied about her stomach ache and walked around the library for the hundredth time, but returning to the hallway where the full body lockers lined up perfectly, was a challenge she couldn’t have seen coming. Of course, who would worry about such a thing other than a paranoid freak? The intercom came on halfway through her walk; she stopped as the front office lady’s voice engulfed the hallway once depleted of noise. The front office lady was named Gladys, and she would always let Danica stay in the front office whenever her mother was late from picking her up. Hearing her voice boldly stating that an intruder was on campus, wavering a little as if one slip-up could make Gladys break sent a chill through Danica that she could still feel in her sleep. Before Danica had time to think about whether or not she should run to the exit at the end of the hall; which was intercepted with another hallway, or hide in the bathrooms; shots and screams echoed throughout the hallways. They sounded like war zones between the school’s trenches and the shooter’s trenches; The bathrooms were a death sentence like the beaches of Normandy. 

Danica had watched plenty of infomercials about what to do in case of an active shooter, yet, the situation itself was alien. She was only a toddler when Columbine happened. Her teacher talked about it briefly once in her eighth-grade criminal justice class, but that was all. Mr. Woods spoke more about 9/11 than Columbine, yet those planes never targeted a school the same way the guns pointed at Danica, and her classmates were. 

In a frenzy, Danica nearly tripped over herself as she sped down the hallway with the lockers, trying to open one after the other; most of them jammed shut after the lacrosse boys stuffed too many people in them. Danica came across locker 784. Locker 784 had graffiti, like most full-body lockers down the hall. She pulled and pried it open, her fingers turning shades of yellow and red and nails bending back as it finally swung open. There was no room, or at least, that’s what locker 784 presented itself as. Danica wasn’t exactly thin, but she wasn’t thick either. She was called out on it for her size throughout her middle and high school years. Local mean girls didn’t know how to categorize her, so they bullied her for other things; intellect and quirks; Danica was always and continues to be a strange young girl.

She wedged her shoulders in the locker, her arm shaking in pain as she grappled the door and tried to close it, but it refused. “Fuck” she whimpered, her clammy fingers slipping as she confined herself to the tight space, holding the door close. 

The shots stopped for two minutes, two minutes of hearing the classrooms upstairs barricading the door with anything they could, knowing it was fruitless.

The locker struggled to stay closed, having Danica used the adrenaline pumping to her hands to hold the locker the way a lock would. Crying wasn’t the first thing to come to mind, so Danica didn’t. Instead, her heavy breaths bounced off the condensed walls of the locker and wafted back to her face. God, her breath stunk. 

Her fingers began to turn purple once shots rang out the junior wing of her school, three or so hallways to where she was. She could risk it. She could run out the front doors, hop the fence, and run to the nearby 7/11. Instead of being claustrophobic, hide in a rack of chips and candy. Or she could go knocking door to door, hoping someone had the heart, or was dumb enough to let her in. Yet, her school did shooter drills once every two months, and she knew none of her classmates or teachers would let her in. 

Realizing she was stuck where she was, an idea grazed her head like a stray bullet. She looked down at her shoes, dirty pink converse that she had for a year or two. She moved sideways, giving herself more room so she could take one shoe off, the locker had slightly opened, and if the shooter had walked down the hallway, the fluorescent lights would’ve reflected on her blonde hair, and she would’ve been a goner. She pulled the laces off her shoes, disemboweling them before tying them around the locker door. She swore under her breath again, hearing the locker slam and echo throughout the hallway. Her sore and nimble fingers tied the knot she learned from her brief time at girl scouts. As a child, Danica often dreamed of having girl scout sleepovers and camping with other cadets. She wanted to sell cookies and do archery, though the archery sets at the church the girl scout meetings were held were reserved for the boy scouts. 

Danica had managed to turn her body aside, giving herself more room, but subsequently, a bent metal piece of the locker’s vent left a clean slice on her arm. Every urge to scream and wince in pain was held back, biting her tongue so hard it could fall off as she slid down. Her hands, now visibly shaking from pain and fear, held the gash as blood oozed out like a crack in the fault lines of Danica’s skin. Her head rested on her knees as she pulled her bloody hand close. Was it worth it? Was it worth skipping twenty minutes of class? 

It could’ve been worse. It was an idea that Danica’s mother had drilled in her head. It could always be worse. Despite the fear coursing through her veins, Danica had slowly grown familiar with violence. Her mother always told stories about her childhood that felt like feature films. Her mother had come to this country in the eighties after escaping the Soviet Union. She immigrated from Saint Petersburg to New York City to Atlanta, because New York was too crowded. Her mother grew very sick from all the stress she endured as a child, especially after she married Danica’s father, a purebred American who was, coincidentally, caught in the crossfire Centennial Olympic Park bombing. Her parents were engaged, pregnant, and in college at the time of the bombing, where a nail from the pipe bomb had damaged her father’s nerves, the leg on the right. Danica couldn’t remember a time in her life when her father didn’t have a cane or didn’t go to physical therapy. 

Danica’s father would always try not to leave Danica in the dark about his condition. When she was younger, he let her turn his physical therapy exercises into something fun, always letting her play whichever NSYNC or Britney Spears song was popular as they did them together. He would tell her stories about a time before the bombing, how he played Boy Scouts and enjoyed high school and as much of college as he could. Yet, Danica came to an age where she could see the pain in his eyes whenever he repeated the same stories. They maintained a good father-daughter relationship until this year when Danica quit softball. When Danica was thirteen, her father’s condition worsened; his body became frail after receiving a lupus diagnosis that very same week he collapsed at her birthday party from pain. The exercises stopped, the dance parties stopped, and softball soon stopped. Their relationship consisted of him asking her to fetch his pain medication and a beer as he spends most days watching Monday night football or working from home. Prepping a fantasy football team instead of Danica’s college fund. And then, of course, the occasional fight about Danica quitting softball and how her father lived vicariously through her because he used to be great, too, like her. Danica likes to think her father has daughter issues, not the other way around. She also found solace in the idea that she wasn’t like her father, and she sure wasn’t like her mother either, the mother who was starved and had witnessed violence since birth and the father who almost banged against death’s door from an explosion. 

Yet now, she can’t help but feel like she inherited the unfortunate gene and truth of being her parent's daughter. The guilt settled in like the sweat that lined her head, like a crown of thorns. How? How could this happen? How could this happen to me? She can see it now; Daughter of a man who survived a bombing and a woman who survived escaping the Soviet Union found shot to death in a locker at a local high school; a tragic American waste.

“Danica?” a whisper called out.

Danica lifted her head from her knees, Sweat gathering as blood canvased her arm like it was renting the space. The worst-case scenario came to mind; it’s the shooter. The shooter saw me, knows I’m in here, and is baiting me. I saw the episode on American Horror Story where this happened - ’m not stupid. Yet, something in her gut told her the opposite.

“Danica?! I’m next to you.” the familiar voice began to cry. “It’s Evie from anatomy.”

Evie from anatomy. She and Danica weren’t friends, but they were always friendly. They never had a problem with each other and had mutual friends on the softball team. She was someone Danica noticed but was not consciously aware of. Danica’s eyes slowly turned to the small vent that connected the lockers. “Evie? What the fuck.” Danica whispered. “You’re supposed to be in class; Nobel never lets two students out at once.” unless…

“She told me to look for you.”

Fuck. Danica slowly hit her head against the wall and huffed. Evie continued to buzz, “she-she said you were taking too long and Janet Xhu had to go to the-the nurse too because she was about to blow chunks and I knew that because she looked so sick during youth group last night so she told me to-to look for you and I was at the Junior wing when I-I saw this guy-you had to see him Danica He had this military-grade gun-and so I ran and I saw you get in here and-and-” “-Evie, it’s okay, I don’t need to know the play-by-play.” Danica tried to calm her down, not because she cared; Danica couldn’t care right now, but because if she didn’t, Evie would give them away. “Danica I don’t want to die.” her voice croaked as she broke down. Her muffled cries echoed down the hallway as the girl wept. Danica froze in fear of what could happen if she was even louder. Yet, Danica knew she wanted the same, and she didn’t want to die so soon, not now, not like this. 

“Hey, we won't-”

“We’re stuck in the fucking lockers-and they’re going to bury me in this-this fucking locker and I haven’t even finished Lost yet-!”

Is that what she was really worried about? The ending of the hit american drama television show Lost? It was a surreal moment, but like a mother’s instinct, Danica quickly sprung into action, trying to silence her. “You…haven’t finished it yet?”

“No!” She sounded as if mascara was running down her cheeks, Danica could already picture Evie’s maple hair sticking to her face with her syrup tears and her sleeves covered in snot and saliva. “I’m never go-going to know-”

“Evie-” “-The worst part is that I borrowed the CD collection from my creep neighbor Phil and if I die while having his CD collection, he’s going to become this annoying martyr-calling me ‘mature for my age’ or-or ‘a promising young woman’ at my funeral god gross gross gross-”

“Eve.” Danica whispered-yelled, cutting off her rambling as the cheerleader grew silent. “That won’t happen-” “-how do you e-even know-?!” “-Because I just do! We are not going to die here. I’ll…” her mind wandered as shots rang out in the hallway next to them as if she was just trying to stream her following thoughts while pop-up ad after pop-up ad interrupted her. “I’ll tell you how Lost ends, but you must do exactly as I say.”

Evie sniffled. “...you’d do that for me?”

Danica held her arms close as she rested her frustration aside, the survivor genes having to be tranquilized by the idea of having to protect instead of fight. “Yes, we have to be quick, okay?” Danica’s voice dipped, and she tried to keep herself together as the popping came closer and closer; she felt herself get dizzy as blood from the cut started to seep into her brand-new shirt. Fucking Abercrombie & Fitch. “You don’t sound well-” Evie interjected.

“Is your locker closing?” she muttered, ignoring the question.

“N-No, I’m holding it.” 

Danica tried to take a deep breath from the recycled air. But she couldn’t stop nausea plaguing her or the adrenaline pushing her body to limits she couldn’t extend to. “Take off your shoelaces and tie them where the combination lock should be, do a figure eight knot, and turn the laces inside so they can’t see it-” she breathlessly spoke.

“But I'm wearing sandals-”

“Break your sandals.”

“They’re Jimmy Choo’s-”

A terrified scream came from the room just down the hall as Danica’s eyes clouded up with stars and dots. She didn’t realize how hungry she was. Next to her, though, she could hear Evie ripping the floral fabric from her skirt. She could listen to Evie’s grunts of frustration as a small pool of blood began to leak out through the bottom crack of Danica’s locker. “Evie?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m hurt.” she began to slur.

Evie didn’t ask questions; there wasn’t time to get the logistics of her wound's severity or what exactly it was. Another rip came from locker 783 as Evie’s calloused and bruised fingers slid a long piece of fabric through the interconnected vents. Danica used her teeth and a free hand to tie the fabric around her wound, like some fucked up present for cannibal Christmas. Then, her whole body froze as footsteps echoed down their hallway. 

“Danica-” Evie’s voice quivered.

Danica shushed quietly as she firmly pressed her back against the metal wall, her eyes squeezed shut from the pain and the situation; she could hear Evie trying to control her dense breaths, both of them taking shallow ones as heavy shoes began to stroll by slowly. The sound of chains following right behind the irregular breathing of the intruder. Starting from the end of the hallway, the shooter began to drag the barrel of his rifle among the doors of the lockers. Danica’s saliva started to stain the end of the fabric she held in her mouth as she tried to stay deadly silent. It was almost like the intruder knew someone was in there, playing with his prey before going for the kill shot. Evie’s muffled whimpers stopped when the intruder's barrel hit Danica’s door. The blonde’s hands started to shake as the intruder's shadow reflected on the back wall of the locker, almost like he was staring into it. Not like this, not right now.

Then, like that, he left. 

Danica waited until she couldn’t hear him walk before finally bandaging herself up. Her face turned several shades of crimson as she breathed. “Is he gone?” Evie croaked out; she must’ve been silently crying to herself. “Yes. Yes. He is.” Danica tried to avoid the same reaction that Evie was displaying. “He’s gone,” she reassured herself. 

“I prayed for us.”

Without hesitation, Danica gulped. “I did too.” She doesn’t believe in god.

A few moments of silence passed them; even the occasional gunshots stopped for a second as the girls grounded themselves; Danica couldn’t imagine it now, but then, those few seconds of silence were the most peaceful moments of the attack. Evie finally spoke up. “How does it end?”

“Lost?” 

“No, Secret Life of An American Teenager.” Evie hummed. “Yes, Lost.” 

Danica pursed her lips as she looked down at her legs. Should she break it to her? She did promise her, but they were probably in the clear now. Evie could have a chance to go home and see it for herself. But I did promise her. 

“They were dead the entire time.” 

Evie stayed quiet. Processing what the end was. Of course, there were other factors, such as some being alive for a while, but in the end, they all died. Everyone dies.

“Are you joking?”

“Not really, no.”

“...That’s so fucking corny.” 

A small smile cracked on Danica's lips as she brushed her hair behind her ear as Evie continued. “I can’t believe I watched this show for a boy,” she commented. “But I guess I had to know so bad that it saved you. “Saved you too,” Danica added. 

“...Thank you, Danica. You made it easy for me. I wish I had spoken to you more. I wish we were friends; this could be a great story for you to tell someday. Maybe. One day.”

Danica felt her heart sink, and her heart was splashing around in Evie’s words. She couldn’t tell what was causing it. Nevertheless, she chopped it all to adrenaline and endorphins.

Like fireworks, multiple guns went off as the sounds of sirens and police officers crept closer; Danica was yanked back into survival mode as she let out a small screech from shock, covering her ears from the noise of stray bullets hitting the lockers around her. She must've drawn attention to herself as the voices of men began to echo; instructions to check the second floor and clear classrooms, to be cautious of a second shooter, and to check the lockers. Danica slowly stumbled up from the base of her hiding spot, her eyes looking through the metal blinds as swat and police ran past her. She couldn’t remember how long she had been in the locker. Ten minutes felt like three hours. She began pounding on the locker with her bloody fists. “I’m in here!” her voice broke. “Get me out of here, Please!!” she began to choke as two policemen sprinted to the locker. The older officer told the other to grab a firefighter, then turned to Danica. “Okay, we are going to get you out of there. What’s your name?”

“Danica, my name is Danica Sonnenfeld! I lied! I said I was sick, but I was skipping class-” “-Danica, we are going to get you out of there, okay? You are not in trouble.” He tried to calm her down as other officers tried flagging him down to tell him about the body in the bathroom, the body in the front office, and the body just down the hall. A firefighter came swinging with a crowbar, the type of firefighter who had just graduated from fire college. “There’s someone next to me!” She tried to tell them, but the firefighter was only focused on her, finally prying it open but seeing the knot, Danica did to keep it closed. “You’re quite the survivor.” The fireman spoke softly, almost impressed with the knot as he struggled to undo it. “I was in girl scouts.” She breathlessly heaped as the locker finally swung open. The sight of blood all over her jeans and arm was prominent as Danica struggled to stand. “I need an EMT!” The fireman yelled. “She’s about to faint!” 

Without hesitation, a short woman and a taller man ran in with red bags that matched the blood that painted the tile. The lady noticed the gash on her arm with the makeshift bandage and turned to her partner. “She has a five-inch-long laceration that almost nicked one of her arteries. Get the gurney!” her voice began to sound blurry as she placed a mask over Danica’s mouth, but Danica, sitting up on the lockers, snatched it from her mouth. “There was someone next to me. It’s Evie from anatomy-” “-It’s okay, you lost a lot of blood.” She placed the mask back on her as the fireman looked at locker 783, putting the crowbar between the wedge and, with one swift move, having it open to nothing.

A cold chill ran through Danica. She slipped off the mask again and looked up at the fireman. “She…she was right there, she-she was right there-I’m not lying, I swear Evie was right next to me I-I-I had my back facing towards her-” “try locker 785.” the EMT told the fireman, and in the same fashion, he opened it up to no one there. Dumbfounded, Danica stared at the locker as the other EMT brought over the gurney. “W-Where’s-?” “It looks like you lost several pints of blood. Do you know your blood type?” the male EMT asked. She shifted her attention over to him. “I-I dunno.” “We'll figure it out when we get to the hospital, okay?” he went behind her as the world around Danica slowly turned blue and gray, a stark contrast to the fluorescent lighting and orange sunlight that peered into their lockers. She turned one last time to the female EMT standing right next to her. “But my friend-” “-we will try to find her, okay, Danica? Sometimes…” the woman paused, then continued. “...sometimes our mind tries to save us.” she looked at her colleague. “Check for head trauma.”

Only for the gurney to reach the end of the hallway, where Evie’s bloodied sandal rested. 

In the days following the attack, the school district hosted a vigil for all seven victims while the shooter's identity rested in irrelevancy. Danica had skipped the vigil as she became reclusive. Surprisingly, her father supported the idea of therapy, whereas her mother vetoed it; her daughter was not sick, not yet, at least. This clash was the topic that was brought up under the same breath as divorce, and Danica couldn’t care, not even a little bit, not even at all. 

The school district had resumed classes three days after the shooting; day four, really. The smell of bleach and degreaser burned Danica’s nostrils as her classmates mourned and noticed her bandage; are you okay? Were you shot? We heard you were not in class when it all went down. One jock even told his buddies that he wouldn’t have been dumb enough to stay in the lockers, considering that they had mold. Danica just gave a million questions with the same answer; does it matter? So much so that rumors began to swirl that maybe, Danica had fought off the shooter or was suicidal; typical high school bullshit Danica felt like she was above that now cut deep. It wasn’t like they were entirely wrong. Danica didn’t see the point of her surviving if she was going to be living in a world where her town became a hashtag. Her experience, the only experience different from hiding in a classroom, became a spectacle, while she became a pariah. Danica was even stranger now; she was not seen as a modern-day final girl, someone strong, but someone who made it out and who shouldn’t have made it out with the given circumstances. It bothered people. 

 The only thing that ran through her mind a week afterward, on day seven, was Evie, her funeral, her mother, her youth group, the cheer squad, and her brother; she pre-gamed the funeral and booed creepy Phil off strange as he mentioned Evie being a ‘promising young woman who was mature for her age’ in the same sentence. Evie’s mother crucified her for it, but Evie said she didn’t want him there. Strangers in life, friends in death. Everyone missed Evie, but Danica yearned for her; All she could muster up was; she saved my life; why couldn’t I save hers?

Or better yet, ‘she saved my life, only for the girl I was had died in that locker.’

People held on to the tragedy for two weeks, day 16, not even a full month. The twenty-four-hour news cycle had its debates that half of the town slipped into, tearing families and friends apart over political views that don’t amount to the lives lost. Everyone standing for nothing; Fucking Obama. Fucking NRA. Fucking Columbine. Fuck this. Fuck everything. Every time Danica switched on the television and the news was on, she would be reminded of the thick air that suffocated her in that locker, and if she just so happened to switch to ABC, she would find herself watching a rerun of Lost. 

As days turned weeks and weeks to months, Danica could not watch her old team play baseball. The sound of the ball hitting the bat made her jump. Every time the intercom came on, the girl would flinch or internally panic, even just for the morning announcements. As everyone around her tried to move on, she would find herself stuck in her night terrors, screaming in her sleep as she rolled past Evie’s sandal repeatedly. In her daydreams, she’d save her class and receive a medal from Obama, save Evie, go on a date with Evie, die trying to save her class, see Evie attend her funeral, and so on. The pessimist in Danica would’ve rather had it that way. By day 87, the guilt of surviving tainted the last few parts of herself before she became a shell. She lost herself to the worst parts of her. On day 92, she started to drink heavily. 

Danica had lost nearly three liters of blood; she only had the laceration to worry about, which is why her reaction to it all felt so minuscule; at least you weren’t shot in the leg like Pam Vittiano. Or in the torso like Avery Pais. or in the head like Evie Mcnamara. Her mother ensured Danica knew every day that she made it out with only a scratch. To Sabine Sonnenfeld, her daughter had no reason to be so upset.

On the day of Graduation, Danica called her school and told them that she did not want to attend. The principal, who rejected the free grief counselors the state had provided, tried to talk some sense into her, but there was no use. Danica was free from the shackles of american high school. She wanted to return to campus only if, of course, the principal did the favor of removing the number plaques of lockers 784 and 783 right before they took the lockers to the junkyard and had them buried six feet under tires and trash. Strange request, but Danica was the strangest of the young girls. She only showed up that day, hungover and already wasted, with smudged glitter, eyeliner, and tan lines, to receive the diploma; and the number of plaques tucked under it. Graduation was a bore; only half of the room stood for the national anthem, and no one dared sit in the three empty seats with the names of each of the senior victims; Jordan Berthal, Mikaela (Mikey) Phillips, and Eve McNamara.

Danica was the only one to visit Evie’s grave on graduation day. The cloudy skies that weren’t there the morning of casted bleak sunlight as Danica shakily placed the plaque that read ‘Locker 783’ right at the foot of her grave. The dead leaves her parents haven't cleaned off since late autumn still rested on Eve’s grave. Her family moved from Forsyth County to the west coast, and her grave had become neglected. A light breeze shook the big oak leaves from the tree that was next to the McNamara girl’s gravestone.

And for the first time in 198 days, Danica cried.