Tales from the Trash

I hovered over the trash can, jeans and underwear bunched around my knees, wondering how exactly I’d gotten to the point where peeing in a trash can was necessary.

It was surprisingly difficult to start…

Maybe it was the makeshift toilet beneath me, or the cabinet door that had become a bathroom stall door, or the knowledge that my French teacher was about a foot away from me...whatever the reason, I couldn’t quite get going. I hovered there, thinking about how spectacular the irony was.

I closed my eyes and begged my body to comply. Just moments before, I was squirming, praying I could make it.

Well, actually, I had spent the last three hours praying that I would make it; waiting for the voice of God to come over the PA system and give the “all clear.” Except...the familiar ding and static followed by the command, never came.

An hour before fixing myself over the trash can, I had to drag my miserable self over to my French teacher and beg her to email somebody - anybody. “Tell them I really have to go,” I punctuated the last of the four words, trying to convey my absolute desperation.

She didn’t seem to get the urgency - not at all. The fact that she was out of touch with reality didn’t exactly come as a surprise to me. She just told me to, “hang in there,” as if I was the bladder-whisperer and could simply ask my body if it wouldn’t mind waiting a little longer. The problem was - I had no idea how much longer, and neither did she.

I’m thirty now, and can’t remember her name (either that or I blacked it out due to sheer embarrassment), but I remember everything else about that day with crystal-cut clarity.

It was October 21, 2006. Not that this fact matters to you. Neither does the fact that I sat with Amy at lunch, talking about the All-American Rejects as I inhaled my PB&J and chased it with a cherry Gatorade. It also doesn’t matter that it was another sunny, 80-degree day in the Houston suburbs.

All that mattered was that I was trapped in a 14’ x 14’ room with 31 kids and a teacher. The majority of those kids were assholes. I’m allowed to say that because I had to put up with them for an entire grueling year of French II.

Physically, I was sixteen. Mentally, I had already reached my mid-thirties. Needless to say, I already didn’t fit in with my peers.

Now, as I paced a divot into the floor, those peers were playing hangman on the board and joking about how we were all about to die.

I didn’t find the joking very funny.

It was a serious situation, one in which I genuinely feared for my life.

As soon as class started, the PA clicked on and a shaking male voice floated into the room. “This is a lockdown,” it informed us. “This is not a drill. I repeat, we are in a lockdown situation and it is not a drill.”

A cold shiver descended the stairway of my spine and my mouth instantly dried. I listened for there to be more...more something...more instructions? More information? But none came.

I sucked in a breath, huge eyes darting to my teacher in the near blackness who was urging us to stay calm. She moved to secure the door and flip the lights off.

In the darkness, my heart pounded, mind going straight to the videos of Columbine. I was ten when that tragedy happened. Ten when I realized that I could be sitting in class one day, minding my own business, and death could come for me. I wondered if this was it, if this shitty French class would be my last experience on Earth, if terror was already stalking the hallways, passing the navy blue lockers on it’s way to me.

The urge to hyperventilate was overwhelming, and I probably did exactly that. I looked around, expecting the same stunned look of fear on my peers’ faces, but it wasn’t there. Some smiled, others looked bored. The consensus was...they didn’t care. Not at all. They weren’t scared. No... they were flipping their French books closed, getting out iPod’s and Walkman’s and moving around the room to talk to their friends.

I recall pulling in breaths, trying to remember how to swallow and breathe and blink. I think my French teacher told them...us...that we could listen to music. My Walkman was in my backpack, but I couldn’t focus enough to care about Fall Out Boy. I couldn’t close the short distance to where my sunny yellow Walkman sat entangled in my headphones, a New Found Glory CD unmoving within.

I couldn’t have a conversation, I couldn’t draw or do school work. My fleshy computer brain had gone to sleep, stuck on a screensaver or terror. Even the teacher didn’t seem to bat an eye at the unfolding events.

She stayed at her computer mostly. I think she was studying for something because there was a textbook sprawled out next to her keyboard. I caught a glimpse of it during one of my many pacing sessions, and my eyebrows knitted in confusion.

The book had a scientific diagram of a...well...of a male part inside of a female part. Was I in a Twilight Zone episode? Was this a bad dream? It couldn't be, because with every passing moment, my bladder screamed that it was going to burst. At least it distracted me for a solid two minutes as I wondered what exactly she was studying and why she was insane enough to leave a book open to that page in a room filled with fourteen, fifteen and sixteen-year-olds.

I very nearly laughed. Then I asked her how long she thought this would last.

“I really don’t know Liz,” was her answer.

My brown eyes trained on that door. The teacher had covered the window with some paper, but light still crawled in beneath the door.

I wondered if it would be an hour or two or three and my mind flashed back to my experiences as a kid, riding in the car from PA to TX or visa versa.

You know how, as a kid, you might go on a road trip with your family? And your parent would say something like… “Welp, it’s three hours until the next town,” and all of a sudden, you had to pee like mad? That’s what this situation was.

Just knowing that I couldn’t leave the room made the Gatorade sitting in my stomach instantly flee to my bladder. I think all the rest of the liquid in my body went with it. I willed all of this to be over, but it simply wasn’t ending. If anything, time stretched and pulled like taffy, contorting until each minute dragged its heels as if it were an hour.

I didn’t care about my weird teacher and her weird studies, I just needed her to get on her computer and send an SOS out for me. I told her as much, begging that she tell the office I really...really...had to go.

She moved with the same speed you’d observe at the DMV or at the Post Office on a holiday. Her attitude was nothing short of, “you’re weird and this isn’t my problem,” and I wanted to cry, but as I’ve said previously, all of the liquid in my body had gone south.

She did get on her computer. Her fingers moved and the keys clacked as she scripted whatever lame nonsense that I knew would not sufficiently convey the urgency of my situation. “I don’t think anyone will come Liz,” she informed me. The words clearly meant to soothe.

She clicked send, then began opening other emails. I strolled away.

Apparently, checking her email had been beneficial though. Being a little less asleep at the wheel, she stood a few minutes later and informed the class that we weren’t allowed to use our phones to text or call out. No communicating with our parents or other students.

This was also the age before social media. Facebook existed, but not many people had it, and Twitter was founded only seven months prior. So, my burgundy Razr sat in my backpack, turned off.

I squirmed and paced and prayed. My jaw was snapped shut so tight that I was probably in danger of cracking a tooth. “Any word?” I asked her about forty minutes later.

“No, nothing,” she said with no emotion.

“Can’t I just go? The bathroom’s right down the hall,” I gritted.

“No, Liz! Someone could be out there with a weapon.”

I tilted my head and clicked my tongue against the roof of my mouth. Suddenly, the prospect of dying had taken a backseat to the need to pee. Interesting. I’d have to talk to my psychology teacher about all of this later.

“God,” I paced a tight circle, arms folded around over my aching body. I considered my options with growing horror.

I could pee my pants. That seemed the most obvious answer, but also the most humiliating. I was already the Editor in Chief and founder of the newspaper, so I didn’t need any more marks against me in the ‘cool’ department.

It was also a brand-new school, built and opened just the year before. So yes, being the weirdo I was, I did consider how terrible it would be to ruin the carpet as well.

I shouldn’t have been, it was a bizarre carpet. Some random conglomerate of nuggets of color; oranges and teals and reds and blues that, from afar, just appeared blue. But it was still new, and relatively nice, and I abhorred the idea of the poor janitor having to steam clean a urine stain from a sixteen-year-old out of the floor.

In an Ally McBeal moment, I could just picture a shrine being built and tours conducted. “And if you enter this room and turn to your right,” the dead-eyed tour guide would say, “you’ll see the spot where Liz’s high school nightmare culminated in her urinating on the floor during a lockdown in a room filled with 31 of her peers. To immortalize this moment for eternity, you will note the life-sized statue of Liz,” waves hand towards a b-level bronze abomination. The group would stare at it; my unmoving bronze eyes staring back with a pained look, knees pulled together, toes in a triangle.

“Liz!” she dragged me back to reality. “What do you want to do?

I bit my lip so hard that I could feel my pulse jumping beneath my teeth. It was time to get inventive. No one was coming to help me.

I looked around the darkened room like a female, teenage version of MacGyver. Surrounding me were desks...books...chairs...a trash can. A trash can. But I’d need privacy.

I considered some shielding options, but there only seemed to be one. Going over to the wall of faux-wood cabinets next to the teacher’s desk, I grabbed the little metal handle and yanked. Nothing happened. It was locked.

“Can you open this? I need to see something…”

The teacher rose from writing her dissertation or solving world hunger or whatever the hell she was doing and pulled out a tiny silver key. She unlocked the cabinet and I pulled open the farthest, seven-foot-tall door.

Just as I had suspected, once the faux wood panel was opened, it created a sort of triangular private space in the 90-degree wedge of cinder block that the room was made of.

Time was running out. I was between a trashcan and a hard place and there was no getting around what I had to do.

Of course, looking back on this total disaster, I can be nothing short of furious. Now that I’m older, I realize just what an iron grip the school had on me. I was a ‘good kid,’ a compliant one. When they said there was no calling out, no leaving the room, I followed orders.

But I wish I could be back there now, standing next to my scared teenage self, telling her that their control was an illusion. Telling her that I could, in fact, break the rules and the world wouldn’t crumble around me.

I would tell my younger self the truth of what I later came to know about that lockdown. That a kid had brought a gun. Rumor had it - he had rather nefarious and deadly plans for it - but he got cornered by our Assistant Principal. That AP had risked his life, backing the kid out of the cafeteria doors and along the sidewalk that hugged the backside of the building.

The school was all windows, bright and beautiful, framed in navy blue to match our colors. The assistant principal had tried to talk the kid down. He’s lucky the kid didn’t shoot him. No, instead, the kid had harmed himself.

The students in the nearest classroom got a life-scarring, PTSD-inducing eyeful, as did the assistant principal I’m sure.

Teenage me didn’t know any of this. I didn’t know that these events had taken place about twenty minutes into the lockdown. I didn’t know that there was no immediate danger to me. That I could have easily pushed past my asshole teacher, unlocked the door and strolled down the hall towards the bathroom without any danger whatsoever.

The school could have done so many things differently. But they didn’t.

They let me sit in a room for four hours, picturing Columbine, wondering if a group of disgruntled students - tired of being pushed to their limit - was about to break into my French class and slaughter us.

What would I say if that happened? If I was staring up at the barrel of a gun? “Sorry, but this is French class, so in the spirit of historical accuracy, you’ll need to trade your shotgun for a guillotine?” Would I be the same smart ass jerk I was? Or I would I take a shot in the dark, throwing a kick to the bad guy’s knee (I was a purple belt after all). Or would I just...put my hands up in front of my face and brace for it?

I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to find out.

I also wondered how this could be happening in a nice neighborhood like ours.

Even brand new, the school already had a burgeoning positive reputation in an already esteemed district. Great, though, required greatness in equal measure. It was a student-eat-student environment where kids scrabbled to be the best.

The only reason the salutatorian didn’t make valedictorian was because she took P.E. during the school year. Physical education, being only a 4.0 class, not having been taken in the summer, brought down her GPA. She missed the mark by mere hundredths of a point.

You want to talk about competition? This was a competitive school. The kind where you took six hours of homework home after an eight hour day of school and two hours of whatever extra-curricular you did. This was a - wake up at 4:30 am and try to go take over the academic world - kind of environment.

‘And for what?’ I wondered as I dragged the trash can to my little corner. Was any of this worth it? Doing well in school, just to get into another school, just to hope for a good job? Was I learning anything in high school that would help me in a real job? Would I in college? Or was it all about tests and points and the ability to brag? Where did the urge to be the best end? When your life skidded to a halt against a headstone?

Was this supposed to be part of my quest to get into a good college? Being trapped in a room for four hours wondering if I was going to die?

It was psychological warfare.

Avoidable at that.

All the school had to do was get on the PA, say something to the effect of, “the situation has been contained, but we need students to remain in lockdown in their classroom. There is no immediate danger to your lives, but you need to stay in place to let the police do their job.”

That’s all it would have taken. A few sentences. A handful of seconds.

They didn’t give that to me. They gave me PTSD instead. They gave me panic attacks for the rest of the school year. An inability to walk into my French class ever again without hyperventilating and spiraling into a panic attack. I was diagnosed with sinus tachycardia that same year. My heartbeat, race-horse fast, galloping wildly as it skipped beats - the need for a cardiologist for life. They gave me a dread that settled in the pit of my stomach any time the PA would come on. A terrifying ‘what if,’ any time I passed a kid with his hood up, earphones in, bags under his eyes as he popped Adderall, looking like he was barely hanging on to the fraying thread of his sanity. Would this happen again? And again?

I put the trash can in place.

“What do you want me to tell the other students?” she asked me, as if I were the grown up.

I licked my cracked lips and took in the sight before me. Carefree kids, playing games, gossiping in the dark. None looked back at me.

I hung my head and stared at my shoes. They were a shiny rose gold with scalloped edges. I woke up that morning with the rare and fleeting desire to… ‘look cute’...for once. After this day, I’d never wear those shoes again. Maybe it was some weird superstition thing, but I never wore any of it again, not my pants or my shirt or even the jewelry I had on.

That morning I had prayed for a good day.

That morning. I had prayed. For a good day.

“Liz?”

I sucked in a breath and shook my head. “I don’t know what to do about them,” I said sadly. I really didn’t care at that point. “Can’t you distract them somehow?”

She considered this with the speed of a turtle and a snail going out for margaritas. I could hear the gears turning, groaning and coughing. “Ah, I have an idea,” she said finally, walking away from me.

“Wait - what’s your…”

“Alright class,” she clasped her hands together. “I need you all to line up against the wall, over there,” she pointed to the upper left wall, the one furthest away from the right bottom corner I was wedged in.

‘Was she insane?’ my brain sputtered. They were going to ask questions, they were going to wonder why they were being lined up, execution style, facing the cinder blocks. Had she lost it? I asked her to distract them, not make all of them simultaneously ask what the hell was going on.

Heat crept into my face as my heart did that ‘skippy’ thing. I didn’t know it was palpitations. I wouldn’t know that until much later.

Miraculously, the kids did as they were told. She gave them some lame excuse about having gotten an email telling teachers to tell their kids to do this.

Liar.

Was that what teachers were? What adults were? Was I following orders from a group of people who had no greater ability than I to deal with situations? They were supposed to have the answers. They were supposed to keep us safe.

They didn’t have answers.

If my childhood hadn’t already ended at age twelve, it certainly would be crashing to it’s demise at this moment, at this realization. Even though I had grown up faster than the majority of my peers, what little ‘trust’ I had left in others - in adults - in the system - had fractured.

The only person looking out for me was me.

The trash can was in place, I pulled the door open and back to give myself privacy.

“Alright, go ahead,” she said with a pitying smile that made me think of Mortal Kombat. It made me want to go home and get that controller in my hands so that I could beat the crap out of villainous, smiling airheads...virtually of course.

She left me to my own devices.

I gulped, popped the button and slid down the zipper. I hovered there, pleading with my body to relax. All I could think about were those 31 faces against the wall. Were they talking loud enough? Were they distracted enough?

At last, I began to go. And gratefully, it was a rather large trash can.

Then, mid-stream, I heard a knock at the door.

The world tilted off its axis and took me with it. Reality wobbled, skidding sideways in a jarring moment that had become a facsimile of reality.

I knew who was at that door.

I heard my teacher open it, the glow from the hallway lights spilled into the cavernous classroom. Muffled whispering followed. Then gaining footsteps.

The teacher approached my little door and I prayed that she wouldn’t peek around it.

“Someone from the office is here to take you to the restroom,” she said.

Hysterical laughter threatened to bubble up my throat and spill from my lips. I wanted to scream. This couldn’t be real, could it?

Two minutes. If he had just gotten here two minutes earlier.

“It’s too late,” I finally told her.

“So you don’t want him to take you?”

“No,” I grit.

She sighed, then walked away.

More mumbled words were exchanged. I caught parts of the conversation. I heard him say…”right now?” “The trashcan?” “Oh.”

Yeah dumb dumb. OH.

I wanted it to be over. To rip the bandaid off this entire day and just let it bleed. My bladder though, being excruciatingly full, continued to empty. And continued. And continued.

The door shut. She locked it once more. And after an eon, I was done and pulling my pants back up.

I should have felt the same relief that my bladder did. But I didn’t.

With the pressing need to pee negated, now I just thought about the situation we were all still in. I emerged from my corner as shame and disgust dragging their slimy hands down my back.

“Okay, you can all resume what you were doing,” the teacher said chipperly. I slipped back into the makeshift corner and hid, eyes screwed shut, hands behind my back, nails dragging against the painted cinder block.

I wanted out.

If someone from the office could traipse through the halls, that had to mean there was no danger right? They still hadn’t told us, I still didn’t know.

“I heard they could keep us here all night,” one kid said to the teacher. “Did you hear about that other lockdown at XYZ, they kept the kids there until 10pm.”

Fear spiked and rolled in my chest, barbs dragging against my insides. I was already hungry and tired and humiliated to the core of my soul. This kid was talking about being trapped like it was a fun opportunity for a sleepover. I, on the other hand, was starting to wonder if death would be easier.

Eventually, I slid from my corner and tried to mix in with the rest of my class. I slinked to my desk and poured my body into the chair.

One particularly obnoxious boy, a few grades younger than me, plopped down behind me, hands gripping the desk’s edge as he leaned forward.

“Did you just pee in the trash can, Rector?” he giggled.

I slowly closed my eyes and dug my nails into my own arms where they were crossed. “No,” I lied. “Get lost.”

“I think you did,” he chuckled.

The door to the classroom opened and all of our heads snapped towards it. It was another office lackey. The teacher called for a student - a girl - and she got up and went over. They told her to get her stuff, that her mom was here for her.

She did as she was told, and in a moment, she was passing through the doorway out into the light of day.

“What?” I whispered to myself.

“Some parents are waiting in the library,” the teacher informed us. “They’re coming to pick up kids. So, if someone comes for you, you’ll be taken to the library by someone from the office.”

I twisted back to facing forward and wondered if my mom would be one of them. She was a stay-at-home mom at this point, so I certainly hoped so.

Two kids later and the door clicked open once again. “Liz,” my teacher called.

I shoved my stuff together, stood, and slung my backpack over my shoulder to walk towards the door. I was alive, and in one piece, and dry.

From afar, I looked - coming out of class - just as I had going into it. And yet, there were now deep, lancing scars etched into me.

Even as I walked down the orange and blue tiled hallways, I still had no idea what had happened or if I was ever really in clear and present danger. I didn’t know about the kid who had died or his plans to take others with him. I could only put one foot in front of the other and listen to the echo of my footsteps in the eerily empty hallways.

In a school built to hold 4,000, when it’s just a handful of people in the hall, the building felt alive and monumental; as if it had swallowed me whole and was finally about to vomit me up. I kept my gaze forward and saw my AP Psych teacher walking towards me.

She was one of the bubbliest people I knew, always with a smile on her face. But the corners of her mouth were not upturned. There was no shimmering light of humor in her sharp eyes. Just the shock and dismay that I felt, reflected back at me on someone else’s face.

We passed one another silently.

I think I made it to the library, I don’t even know. The next thing I recall was sitting in my mom’s forest green Camry. I was in the back seat, waiting for the second of my two friends.

We carpooled.

She said she was coming.

So me and my mom and my one friend just sat in the car waiting.

“I didn’t even know what was going on,” my mom said. “Your aunt (who lives in PA) called me and told me to turn on the news,” my mom said. “I came as soon as I knew…”

“I’m glad you did,” I knotted my hands together until the flesh pulled taut over my knuckles was paper white.

I was no stranger to trauma. This was not my first taste of it, and it certainly wouldn’t be my last. However, this was a different type of trauma, a new brand, and it slid down my throat with a sharp bitterness I couldn’t quite get out of my mouth.

I went home that day and sat on my bed, listening to music and staring blankly through my dresser.

I didn’t even know the kid, but I mourned for him and cursed whatever had pushed him to that point.

I too felt that insurmountable pressure to be something extraordinary. It gripped me around my neck and whispered into my ear all the ways that I couldn’t measure up.

I was in that cafeteria with him. I could have been there as a target. What if the assistant principal hadn’t gotten to him? What if more people had tried to be his friend and stopped this entirely? What if whoever’s gun that belonged to had kept it locked up and away from this boy?

I rose and walked towards my closet. I twisted the handle and stepped inside. The Fray was singing something poignantly sad through my navy blue, sticker-clad boombox, the song becoming muted as I shut myself in the closet.

Looking down, I remembered coming in here for the first time four years ago, when I found out my Dad was going to die. I could still stare down and see myself, twelve, curled into a ball on my closet floor crying.

I wished with a rage-filled heart that I wasn’t an only child. I wished I could sit next to my twelve-year-old self and put my arm around her. I wished she could wrap an arm around me.

Instead, I sat alone and cried beneath the Abercrombie & Fitch and Hollister bullshit I had bought to try and fit in. I stayed there for a while. Not nearly as long as I had when I was twelve, but just long enough to be able to cobble together a mask of normalcy. I sucked in shuddering breaths and wiped at my eyes before slipping on that facade, eventually standing on wobbly, pin-pricked legs and letting myself out.

My throat was screwed shut and my lungs hurt. I didn’t want to go to school the next day, but that wasn’t an option. Tomorrow was the PSAT’s.

It was bizarre, those coming days. The way that the school didn’t really acknowledge it, the way the students didn’t really seem to care. The way that we all got our room assignments for the PSAT test the next day and shuffled to our places like puppets dragged along on a string.

Taking a seat in the unfamiliar room, I wrote my name into the space, waited for the clock to start, and questioned why any of this mattered. Here I was again...in a room I couldn’t leave...wondering what was next and praying that it wouldn’t be as bad as what had already passed.

The day after that, I was again sitting in French class. The lesson had droned on endlessly, and the forty-five minutes felt like those four hours all over again. When it was over, my teacher came over to me with a smile.

“You’re the editor-in-chief of the newspaper, right?” she asked chirpily. I looked up at her with what must have been a confused glare.

“Yes.”

“You should write an article on what happened,” she giggled, the sound tinny and grating.

Nice try lady, but I had already tried. The school had shut me down. Free speech was apparently not a thing when it came to students. What First Amendment, right? Just another example of adults commandeering my freedom.

She laughed. “And in the article, you should write about you peeing in the trash can.”

My heart squeezed like a vice in my chest and my lips pursed together tightly. I felt the air leave my lungs but tried not to convey the panic I felt at hearing her utter my secret with abandon.

Had she just seriously said that out loud? Loudly aloud?

That same asshole kid who had seated himself behind me during the lockdown turned to face us. “I knew it,” he beamed. I can’t believe you peed in the trash can,” he continued giggling as I considered the hue and viscosity of blood and just how much trouble I’d get into if I punched him as hard as humanly possible and split that laughing lip wide open. But alas, it was only one of those fleeting Ally McBeal daydreams.

“You should!” she went on. “Write about it, I mean. You could write your own story. It’d be hilarious,” she smiled broadly, hands clapped together. “Editor-in-Chief Pees in Trash Can,” she started throwing out terrible headlines between laughs.

I just took a steadying breath and wondered how to say, “I hate you all,” in French. Turns out, it’s, “Je vous hais.”