school shooting fairy tales
gina tron
School Shooting Fairy Tale - Take 20189
My first full time day at Vermont’s CBS station was marked by a school shooting. Of course there was a school shooting. What better way to kick off my first day at a station that once featured rumors of me wanting to shoot up my school than to help create a report on a real one?
A man was pissed at his girlfriend, so he killed her mom and then went to the school that she was employed at and shot her too. I was one of the few people at the studio when we got word of the shooting. I overheard my boss tell one of my co-workers, “We are gonna need a school shooting map.”
He instructed me to run cameras and prompter alone in the studio with the main news anchor. This made me uncomfortable as I had yet to have a solid conversation with this man that I had grown up making fun of. He had once delivered the news about me where I was a suspected school shooter. On a narcissistic paranoid level I felt that he knew that it was me, and I was timid about talking to him. I’m sure he did not recall the story, and even if he did it was at the back burner of his mind. He reported on dozens of local stories on the daily and surely would not connect this young polite co-worker to a story from nearly a decade prior.
Despite the fact that he would not connect that, (and even if he had, who cares?!), I felt disturbingly connected to the school shooter. Not on the murderous level, but on a car buying level. Ahh, that was nice: almost buying a beat-up car, and subsequently losing a hundred bucks to the woman who potentially prompted this school shooter to go on a rampage.
The same week I was looking into purchasing a car. I wanted a Subaru for some reason. It was a pretty popular car in Vermont so I was forced to look at the model a lot. I guess that made me decide that I wanted it. One woman was selling a 2001 Forester at a reasonable rate. I travelled an hour to check it out. I liked it. I gave her money to hold it. As I got into my car to leave, she informed me that the school shooter guy tried buying the very same car from her but they got into an argument. She informed me that “he was a jerk.”
I ended up not buying the car. I opted out for a 2001 Honda Civic instead. I called her back and tried to get my deposit. She was passive aggressive as fuck. I was tempted to drive that hour and kill her myself. It wasn’t that I expected the money back. I just expected to be treated with the common decency that any slave would receive. That awkward moment when once again you can relate to a school shooter. Darkness. End of school shooting fairy tale.
School Shooting Fairy Tale - Take 37298
I met up with my friend Carol in Williamsburg. As per usual I desired to only drink a few beers and go home. Keep it mild, ya know; I had writing to do, writing about terrible things. While in some wannabe dive-bar, a girl came up to us to ask for a cigarette. We began chatting, and she looked kind of familiar. I tried to gauge why by asking the usual questions.
“Where are you from?” I asked.
“Colorado,” she answered. Then she added, much quieter. “…Littleton.”
I asked her age. “29.”
I immediately felt bad for asking her age. I feared she would assume I was asking to see if she was from one of the graduating classes that would have been present during the Columbine shootings. And she would be right to assume this. I could almost see the PTSD dripping down her face. I don’t even know why I asked. I guess it was to solidify my suspicions: that I recognized her from the news footage of the Columbine shootings. She was one of the girls crying to the cameras.
She looked nervous that I would pry more, I think. That was how I read it anyhow. I did not. She went on to babble, and when I say babble I don’t mean it in a condescending manner but it seems as if she was trying desperately to distract from that topic by keeping on a similar topic. “One of the South Park writers grew up in my town. A lot of the characters, like Mr. Hat were based on real people. Mr Hat is actually a teacher with a deformed hand, but of course they try to be a little more discreet with the show.”
Little did she know that not only was she talking to two girls that were accused of wanting to shoot up their schools, but that one of us was actually in a school shooting. Carol was enrolled at Montreal’s Dawson College when it got shot up in 2006 and she’s a prominent fleer in some of the news footage.
“It’s crazy how at the time the most important thing to me was looking good,” she had remarked to me many times. She was referencing the absurdity of her running past the cameras, aware of the media and her potential portrayal through it to society.
Carol was a fun girl, and she invoked my inner sociopathic tendencies. And I probably did to her. I’m like that. I feel like I am the perfect Ying to a certain type of Yang; our two minds coming together to form a dangerous duo. Naturally we ended up on a binge that night. We met a few skinny run of the mill attractive Brooklyn boys that night and brought them back to my house. Carol and I basically ignored them and just chatted about horrible shit, inspired by our Columbine run-in.
“During my school shooting…”
“Can we not talk about this?” one of our male hoes asked.
“Shut up bitch,” I can recall thinking. “We didn’t bring you here to talk.”
And apparently we didn’t bring them there for anything. I got bored and kicked them out. I can be such an asshole sometimes. Why oh why do I have to be this mix between a pushover and pushy bitch? It’s so dependent on who I’m hanging out with. Sometimes I wonder if the receivers of my shit treatment are those I can assess are worthy of it. That’s a pompous statement for sure, but I feel like I have a pretty good read on people. My intuition, it ain’t never wrong. I usually can’t help but be nice, but sometimes I just can’t help but toy with people; with the ones that I feel would toy with me. Darkness. End of school shooting fairy tale.
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