Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul on Tough Stuff (16 page)

A month later, I was at my house watching them rebuild it. But this time it was different—I wasn't alone. I was with two of my new friends from school. It took a fire for me to stop focusing on my feelings of insecurity and open up to all the wonderful people around me. Now I was sitting there watching my house being rebuilt when I realized my life was doing the same thing.

While we sat there on the curb, planning my new bedroom, I heard someone walk up to me from behind and say, “Does this belong to you?” When I turned around to see who it was, I couldn't believe my eyes. A woman was standing there holding my cat! I leapt up and grabbed her out of the woman's arms. I held her close to me and cried into that beautiful orange fur. She purred happily. My friends were hugging me, hugging the cat and jumping around.

Apparently, my cat had been so freaked by the fire that she ran over a mile away. Her collar had our phone number on it, but our phones had been destroyed and disconnected. This wonderful woman took her in and worked hard to find out whose cat it was. Somehow, she knew this cat was loved and sorely missed.

As I sat there with my friends and my cat curled up in my lap, all the overwhelming feelings of loss and tragedy seemed to diminish. I felt gratitude for my life, my new friends, the kindness of a stranger and the loud purr of my beloved cat. My cat was back and so was I.

Zan Gaudioso

Building Bridges

W
hen written in Chinese, the word “crisis”
is composed of two characters. One represents
danger and the other represents opportunity.

John F. Kennedy

The day started out just like most other Tuesdays. I'm in a show choir called “Unclaimed Freight” at Columbine High School; we rehearse in the mornings before school. I got to school at 6:50 A.M., saw friends and said hello on my way in.

We went through the day normally until fifth period, which for me is Concert Choir. We were starting our warm-ups when a student in the choir came into the room and said there was a guy downstairs with a gun.

This student was known to be a jokester. But he had a pretty serious look on his face, and I saw kids running by when I looked out the window. The choir director told us all to chill out. He didn't want us to panic—there were 114 choir members. He was walking toward the door near the stairwell when two girls opened the door, and we heard two shotgun bursts. Half the choir hit the ground.

My first instinct was to run. I went out the opposite door that the two girls had come in, into a corridor that leads to the auditorium.

I saw a stampede of people running down the hallways. I heard screams. I decided I wasn't going to try and join the mob, so I ran into the auditorium. I stood at the back of the auditorium, wondering what refuge kids were finding behind plastic chairs. Then I heard the semi-automatic fire. At some point, somebody pulled the fire alarm down, so lots of kids in the east end of the school got out without a notion of what was happening.

I headed out the north door. I saw the fire doors at the north hallway—the main hallway—were closed, so I turned and ran for the front door. As I got closer I saw there were already bullet holes in the glass.

Seeing the bullet holes made me run even faster. I reached the front door and pushed it open. The bullets had weakened the glass, and shattered glass came showering out of the door all over me. I just kept running. I didn't even notice the blood all over me until much later. I later went to the hospital for stitches.

About fifteen kids followed me and got out the front door. I learned later that we barely made it out. Seconds later one of the shooters, Dylan, came into the main office and started spraying bullets.

I saw a friend, and we ran to her house. From her house we could see the front of the school. We watched the police, the firefighters, the paramedics, the SWAT teams from Denver and other areas, and the National Guard as they showed up. State patrolmen and sheriffs pulled up and got out of their cars with their guns. They stood behind trees and told kids to run.

The next few hours seemed to last forever. At first I thought a kid was in the school with a gun and that he may have shot a few kids, maybe injuring somebody, but I hoped he hadn't caused much harm. As I watched the different teams of police show up and heard on the radio there were two gunmen, possibly three, I started to realize how big this really was.

A group of police drove a fire truck close to the building. They jumped out and ran inside. I found out later that lots of those guys weren't trained to be in the positions they were leading. They went in and risked their lives—they didn't even think about it, they just did it to save lives.

It scared me to death when later reports on the radio said that twenty-five kids were killed. I hadn't seen my best friend, Dustin, come out. I prayed he was all right. I didn't find out he was safe until much later. He had hidden in a bathroom in the kitchen and was evacuated with other kids who hid nearby.

It was a living nightmare. It was a bad daymultiplied by the biggest number you can think of. The day seemed to go on for years—hours were days; everything was wrong.

The night of the shootings a lot of us went to a service at St. Francis Cabrini Catholic Church. It was really emotional for all of us because we knew our friends who should be there were gone forever. I couldn't even imagine that friends of mine—Cory, Rachel, Isaiah, Cassie—wouldn't be back at school. How could their lives end so violently? How could Eric's and Dylan's minds get so messed up?

For the longest time I didn't know what day it was, the day of the week, the date—it all just kind of ran together. I didn't eat anything for three days—I had a sick feeling inside. I kept crying. Every emotion ran through my head. I was sad, mad, confused, helpless and lost.

I spent a little time with my parents. I hugged them a lot and told them I loved them. But I needed to be with my friends, the people who had experienced this with me. People can say, “I know how you feel,” but it's not true if you weren't there.

There were lots of counselors around. Media were everywhere. People showed up trying to get kids to come to their church. What touched me most were the people who came just to be available for us. They were there if we needed someone to talk to. They didn't force themselves on us at all.

We had lots of get-togethers on private property where the media couldn't get to us. We would just go and be together—the first week that's all we did. We didn't have to speak to each other—it was enough to share the silence with each other.

The first place that the faculty and students got back together was at a community church. The student body was sitting together waiting for the faculty. The choir decided we wanted to sing because before the tragedy we were practicing some very spiritual, very touching songs that had a high level of difficulty. We got up together and went up on the stage. The faculty still hadn't made it in, so I was “volunteered” to conduct.

We started singing “Ave Maria.” I had chills and the hair on the back of my neck was standing up. We hadn't warmed up and the song has some very high notes for females. But they were just ripping them out—the sound was unbelievable.

As we sang “The Lord's Prayer,” the faculty came into the sanctuary and started singing with us. Then the whole student body joined in. Here we were, together for the first time after a living nightmare, singing “The Lord's Prayer.” As I conducted and heard the most beautiful sounds ever, I felt the love in that room. At that moment I knew we would be all right.

Charlie Simmons

6
ABUSE

T
he untold truths
Of wisdom lie
Solely in the beating
Of the heart of an
Ill-treated child
Whose wounds will
Heal and heart will seal, but
Memory will never die.

Savannah Marion

Losing Myself

R
emember that the road to healing winds
through pain, anguish, sickness and many tears.

Amanda Ford

I was like any other average ninth-grader. I was active in sports, had my circle of friends and got good grades. Until the day I was introduced to
him.
There was something in his eyes that attracted me. Somehow I thought that he needed me, just as much as I needed to be loved. After flirting for months, we finally became a couple. We were together every single moment from that day on. Slowly, day-by-day, my family and friends saw me changing. I was in love.

After about two months, however, he started to try to control me and even raise his voice to me. I told myself it was okay because he really did love me. Or so I thought. The first time he ever hurt me, we were skiing with friends and had lost each other on the slopes. When he found me, he said it was my fault. He proceeded to push me and call me nasty names, while people just stared at us. I ran into the bathroom with my best friend and cried my eyes out. The next thing I knew, he was in the bathroom hugging me, overflowing with kisses and saying how sorry he was. So I forgave him and put that day in the back of my mind.

Things did not go back to normal, though. He became possessive and jealous. He made rules stating I could no longer wear my hair down, wear shorts in the summertime or have any sign of another boy in my room. If another boy even glanced at me in school, he would yell at me. My grades dropped, I lost my ambition for sports, I started losing my friends, and my family became my worst enemy. I didn't want to listen to what they thought about my relationship or how much I had changed. I cried every single night because of the way I was beginning to feel about myself. He would yell at me or blame me for everything. A couple of times, I tried hurting myself because I felt I wasn't good enough for him and that there wasn't any other reason to be alive. I tried to justify his actions by believing they showed how much he cared about me. As a ninth-grader, it made me feel important to be in love and have a steady boyfriend.

My parents tried taking me to counseling and talked to all my teachers about my relationship. I started skipping school. The violence escalated. He tried to choke me on several occasions, and once he tried to break my arm because his brother looked at me in my swimsuit. I felt hopeless and depressed. He had so much control over my mind that I could not accept anyone else's opinion of him. I told myself that they just didn't understand how much he loved me. He only did what he did because he cared.

The physical abuse continued to get worse. He forced me to do sexual things with him. He also hit, choked and pushed me around. He tried drowning me once. Fortunately, I fell on some rocks before he had the chance to get me under the water. He also cut
my
wrists because
his
life was in the dumps. This went on for nine months.

Finally, my parents took me on a trip for a week. While I was on vacation, he cheated on me, and I built up enough courage to break up with him. One night I lay in bed and thought of everything he had done to me. It was clear what I had to do.

I spent the last two weeks of summer break trying to get my old friends back before returning to school. When I went back to school, he was in my gym class. I was nice to him because I still feared him. When I got up the nerve to tell him that it was over for good, he went psycho, pushed me to the ground and kicked me several times. Nobody came to help me. The next day, I discovered an eight-inch bruise on my leg.

It took me three days to show the bruise to my parents. To my surprise, after everything I had put them through, they helped me. They took me straight to the police station to file charges. I wanted to just let it go, but I was also determined that this should not and would not happen to anyone he “loved” in the future. At home, I continued to receive threatening phone calls from him saying that he was going to kill me. He told my parents that he would hurt me if he got the chance.

My court experience took over a year and was horribly painful. I found out that he had a violent past and that it wasn't the first time that he had abuse charges brought against him. I was never notified about the final court hearing, so it happened without me and, to my knowledge, nothing severe happened to him. The justice system let me down, but I chose to go on with my life.

I am very lucky to be where I am today. I am nineteen years old, and I have grown and healed a lot. It took me over three years to tell my parents everything that he did to me. My parents and I are very close now. The healing process may continue for years to come, but I deal with my pain by sharing my story with other young teens, hoping to help prevent this from happening to anybody else. I do not wake up every day hating him. I feel bad for him, and I know he needs help, wherever he is. I have learned instead to focus on living my life to the fullest and cherishing the people I truly love.

Jenny Deyo

Help Me

I hear your loud screaming
As I scramble down under my duvet.
Your angry, hateful obscenities are getting louder.
I try to cover my ears.

Your footsteps stop outside my door.
Suddenly, the door opens up.
I shake in terror in the dark
As you shove me violently down to the floor.