Within seconds of stepping through the front door, the receptionist came to the front from one of the side news and said that they had just gotten some horrible news. I didn't know what knews they could be referring to as I was in the _dentist's_ office, not a place where I am typically the recipient of bad news.

She shook her head and told me that there had been a "shoot-out" at one of our local high schools - Thurston, which is in Springfield, Eugene's next-door neighbour. Students were sitting in the cafeteria chatting before first period and it was just as they were getting ready to leave for first period that a student who had been expelled for bringing a gun to school only the day before came in and opened fire. The student who had been expelled had three guns with him, one of which was a rifle.

As of one hour ago, one student was dead and six were in critical condition, one having been shot in the head and one other in the abdomen. Other students were wounded superficially - though I don't know that the non-physical damage that they have now suffered could be called "superficial" - some by bullets and some in the panic that followed hearing shots and _seeing_ other students shot.

I was assailed by images, the kind that we cannot see but can feel, and emotions as my jaw hung open on the dentist's chair.

It is minutes before eight o'clock and parents are driving to work. They are singing songs or whistling or thinking of work, dinner, one of any number of things. They are contemplating flipping the bird to the irresponsible drivers on the road. If the radio is on, their thoughts are interrupted by the news that someone has just fired shots into the cafeteria at their child's school.

They are stuck in traffic with no way of knowing whether their child was in the cafeteria or one of their children's friends was there with their friends. One student dead. Which student? It can't be theirs, their baby, their daughter, their son. This while watching others drive by, oblivious.

Those who are already at work and not listening to the radio are going about their daily routines, not knowing that their cousin, son, niece, nephew, friend might have been shot numerous times and killed, no mother or father there to hold him or rock him as he died, not as a result of an ACCIDENT but because some maladjusted FREAK knew no other way to deal with the situation than to take people's LIVES or at least to give it his best effort. They will find out only when the phone rings innocently enough and when a hospital or police employee phones, or when a screaming relative calls and is so incoherent with pain that even though the words aren't clear the message is: something devastating has just happened.

For at least one parent out there, the goodbye that they said this morning was their _last_, the last goodbye to their child. They didn't know it, would never have guessed it by the way the Corn Flakes fell into the bowl at breakfast. There was nothing that would tell them that in less than an hour, less than two hours, their child would be DEAD.

Then there are the students who were sitting at the cafeteria. Just another day at school - for many of them, seniors, one of the last. Let's make it through, then we can go do something cool. There's a movie that I want to watch and Josie - - invited me over to her house. As they put their backpacks on, someone that they very likely knew was walking through the corridor preparing to open fire on them for some reason that they will probably never understand.

And when shots blasted through the cafeteria, students saw their classmates fall...
fall...

In a year, I might look at what I have typed now and wonder why it moved me so much. I might not remember this feeling of frustration and sadness that wants to pull me into a ball and leave me there until... until I understand, which I know will never happen.

I can understand anger - I have been there many other times before. I can understand the feeling of a need for retribution - I have also been there before, felt that feeling so many times in high school. I can understand that he is young, thirteen or fourteen, perhaps fifteen, and that he probably felt alone or inept, unable to do anything to change whatever it was that was frustrating him.

What I can't understand instinctually - though I can sense some things intellectually - is why a gun, death, shooting, equalled a solution to the boy who shot at his classmates. Perhaps at this age the sense of permanency isn't as well-developed as it becomes later. Perhaps he was just so angry that he wasn't thinking about the consequences, or he thought that he was prepared for them without knowing, fully KNOWING, what they really would be.

It feels wrong to call the perpetrator a "freak" in this instance, even though on the one hand - the side ruled by the hillbilly me - I firmly believe that. This side of me points out that no matter how angry he was, there are always CALMER ways to deal with a situation. This side of me wants to break out a noose and, well, I don't think I need to explain what a noose is for.

On the other hand, I realise that it has been done. We cannot rewind and say, "Oops, he's come to his senses and wants to take it all back." His friends will suffer for what he has done and his parents will also take quite a bit of heat. And why shouldn't they? There was something going wrong there, but at some point the choices are no longer theirs to make. It was his choice to take the guns, his choice to haul them to school, his choice to pull the trigger, regardless of the choices they made that brought him to that point. I can only look on with sadness and know that it is already past... if only hours past. Something prompted him to do this, something I could try to analyse for hours and still not grasp, unlike most human-made puzzles. It was more than being expelled from school, the expellation only the catalyst.

As much as I want to, there's nothing that I can do save for feel sick and sad and to hope that the pain gradually fades away so that as his family looks at his picture as time passes they still feel sad but not torn apart, not like they're being pulled into darkness.

I just don't know what to do, how to deal with the enormity of what has happened, and so all I can do is write and try to make sense of the things that I'm feeling.

Now, to wait.