He Saved My Life and Ruined It at the Same Time

I only talked to Andrew once. My English teacher split the class into groups of four and told us to discuss a chapter from Frankenstein. Andrew spoke last; it was the first time I had ever seen him do anything in class other than sleep on his desk. His voice was low, and his words were mushed together so that I had to concentrate hard to pick apart the words. Amanda and Greg, the other two in our group, gave up after a while, but I continued to listen.

"This is not a drill." I usually hated Mr. Piligra's voice. He always sounded like his mouth was full of food. The worst was when he stepped up to the podium after a dragged-out assembly, smiling at our sweaty faces and garbling on about how proud he was to be our principal. As he recited the lockdown procedure, I remember looking for a place to hide and wishing to hear his mess of a voice tell us that he has everything in control.

I didn't even think. As soon as I heard the first gunshot, my body crawled with pure fear. Classmates grabbed other students; there were clumps of people holding onto each other but I didn't join them. Huddled under a desk, I watched the pile of students across the room, glistening from their tears and pulsing with the need to survive.

Andrew's black curls bounced as he shivered in fear. He and I were the only two students in the room apart from the clump of people, but the clump didn’t seem to notice. I thought about reaching out to him, connecting our shaking hands and pulling him close, but he seemed too far away.

Andrew's arms and legs were skinny and straight like pencils, but they never did anything worth writing about. I can remember my eyes flickering to his jeans and t-shirt clad body in the cafeteria on my way to the table where I sat with my friends. He sat with the video-game addicts and I sat with the theatre kids and that's all I remember.

I could pick up the sound of footsteps leading to our class, heavy and slow, laced with hope and terror. Was it someone to save us or slaughter us? The doorknob jiggled and the sound of a body slamming against the door confirmed it was the latter. I tucked my knees to my stomach and curled into a ball, making myself as small as possible. A smaller target. I didn't watch what Andrew did.

“Run,” I whispered to myself. I was closest to the door, but I could not move. I told my body to go, to join the clump of students or crawl to the back of the room, but it did nothing. I had lost the ability to move; I was like one of the desks stuck in the middle of the room.

The man fell into the room from a final shove on the door. We locked eyes and I felt the blood in my veins freeze. A girl from the back of the room screamed, and people shook her arm and told her to be quiet, as if the man couldn't tell we were hiding from him.

If I wanted to, I could have observed Andrew from the corner of my eye. I wish I did, but I could not rip my eyes off of the gun that the man held up. His hands weren't even shaking.

Hours later, the police had dealt with the shooter and parents raced into the school, grabbing their children and pulling them close. Students sobbed, their skin covered in marks where their friends' fingernails had dug in fear.

I did not think about my parents. I saw a couple with black curls running into the school on pencil legs. I ran to them, grabbed them, and pulled them to the floor with me. My pants were stained with blood. It rubbed off onto the woman's beige dress.

Andrew was a boy whom I only ever talked to once, under my teacher's instruction. The thud of Andrew's body landing on top of mine rang in my ears. I shook my head but it would not stop. My lungs felt too big inside my body; I gulped for air but I never seemed to get enough. I knew that I was alive and that I should not be.

Andrew's parents listened to me while I told them, I could see them focus hard to pick out the words from my trembling voice. I didn't know what I was telling them, if it was a confession or a story or a nightmare.

"I don't know why, but he jumped in front of the gun and took the bullet for me," I said. "I didn't know him."

Someone gave me a journal and told me that writing would help me cope. The cover was cold, black leather, and inside I filled the blank pages with everything I knew about Andrew. I asked his friends, interviewed his family, tried to connect the facts about him to figure out why he died for me. I wrote poems about the torment of being alive while knowing that I shouldn't be. I described lying underneath Andrew’s bleeding body, pretending to be dead.

The nights were the worst. I would lay in the dark under a fog of guilt and confusion, pleading with my brain to remember more about Andrew. I longed to hear his mushed up words again, telling me about himself and why he gave his life for mine. The knowledge that I should not be alive ripped me apart, limb by limb, until all that was left was a beating heart.

I'll never know how Andrew managed to save my life and ruin it all at the same time.