Bulletproof Backpacks

 

“Did you buy the boys bulletproof backpacks?”

It’s 10:00 the night before school starts and my aunt has clearly forgotten about the house-wide chaos on theses nights, the agonizing over whether they know where to go, who’s in their classes, if we have purchased the right snacks.

I used to make a big deal of the last day of summer. There were shopping trips and s’mores and we were always the last ones out of the pool. My mom insists that I gift them a little chocolate every First Day of School morning, “for a sweet school year.” They don’t hear her sentimentality over the joy of Peanut M&M’s. Even during the pandemic, their desks had jars of Peanut M&M’s on them that first, weird, morning.

This year, I have COVID, so all the fun crap was replaced by my sixteen-year-old taking the fifteen- and twelve-year-old brothers to Food Lion for some junk food I would NEVER purchase. That seemed to make them at least as happy as being the last ones out of the pool.

And my husband had to work tonight. And the boys didn’t make anything decent to eat for dinner. And I’m not sure what they are packing for tomorrow, what they are wearing tomorrow, who they will encounter.

Maybe that is why I’m so annoyed.

I reply, “Do you think before you write something like that?”

Radio silence.

This is a woman of more than seventy, who would die that I hinted at her age, and who never had to put a six-year-old on the bus after Sandy Hook. She sent her child to schools that didn’t have metal detectors. Friends schools. Safe places that cost a ton of money. She never had to have conversations with her child about what their role might be in a school shooting.

Let me tell you what mine have planned.

My sixteen-year-old will be a hero. He plans to take out the shooter, protect his classmates at all costs. I beg him to run. He insists that he can’t. It’s just not how he’s made. I look at his too-large pants and the shoes with crease-preventing pieces of hard plastic in the toe and I pray that he will run but I don’t know how he will get away. I have thought about making him wear practical clothing to school, comfortable, easy to move in clothing.

“You know what I’ll do,” he says.

“Come home to Mommy?” I whisper. I beg.  

My youngest is a runner. All heart and a runner. My husband made him promise to get out of the school and run until he is home. No saving anyone. Just running. That was their talk when he was in third grade. Right after the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas shooting. Run home. His classroom was near an exit and we lived a mile from the school. It made the most sense.

We probably need to update now that he’s at a school a few miles away.

But not tonight.

The middle child stays quiet. He goes through the motions during school lockdowns. Hears his father’s warnings and insistence that he run. He’s noncommittal. I worry because I think a plan would be helpful. He ran track but he also knows all of the hiding places in the school. Maybe he would play dead?

Is this a conversation we should have? 

“Please, boys, stay alive.”

We are a family that knows life is tenuous. One of us goes to work in a bullet-proof vest. We have held one lifeless child. We know that there are no promises. We have lost and we plan for it.

I have visualized the horror with such clarity that it is like a prayer.

Blood.

My children’s broken bodies.

Maybe, if I just think of every possible scenario, they will be protected.

I have raised them to be kind. Because it matters. I hope they make someone isolated feel a little less so.

I hope, if they are kind, that they are less likely to be targets.

Victims.

Dead.

I will not buy bulletproof gimmicks to assuage my terror over school shootings. I will not line the pockets of the opportunists gorging on the fear of parents.

I will talk to them. I will cast magical webs of protection over them while they sleep. 

I will yell, “Be kind. Make good choices. Stay safe!” every time they leave for school.

And I will sign petitions. I will march and I will vote. I will donate to causes trying to reign in terror.

And maybe those things are just my bulletproof backpack.