A Little Too Close to Home
As I was walking into the building of the high school I teach at, I got a text from my mother. "Your brother is okay. His school is on lockdown due to a shooting at STEM." I nearly couldn't believe what I was reading. The anxiety of how close it was to everything I knew, the grief for STEM. I worked at a swim school not even three blocks away, a two minute walk, on the same street for nearly two years. Students from STEM would come by to swim at our school, both after school, and during for PE. The STEM parking lot is where my dad taught me how to drive, and where my dad and I taught my brother to drive. My old high school, where my brother currently attends, was on a lock out due to the situation, because we didn't know what was going to happen next. My old high school, in fact, was a seven minute drive. And a five minute drive from the home my brother and I grew up in.