We are all "Americans"
"Born in the USA, I was born in the USA, I was born in the USA."
("Born in the USA", Bruce Springsteen)
All that had to happen already had, and all there was left now were fear, a vague sense of dizziness and the incredible feeling of being still alive, graced for a mysterious reason by God or by chance. Sara and Andrea looked incredulous at each other, from opposite sides of the classroom, not daring to move or say a word. Their classroom had been crossed by a cyclone, a tornado that brought death and now had suddenly stopped, leaving only devastation. The scream of sirens coming from the outside was deafening, it bounced on the skin, hit them like a slap in the face, leaving only desolation.
All that had to happen already had, Sara repeated like a refrain. She could again stand up, walk, run, eat, go to the bathroom, pray, curse, dance, kiss a boy, be kissed, cry or laugh. She brushed her face. She was alive, she was sure, once again. She slid out from under the desk and stood up, gently, careful not to make noise, as she heard excited voices in the corridor, moving away. She took a step, then another, clambering over the dead bodies next to her with her eyes half-closed. She didn’t want to look at the bodies, they scared her. She just wanted out of that room.
Sara stood as dazed in the doorway, looking. Again. There no longer was anything to laugh about. She felt the urge to vomit. Eleonora, with her cascade of red curls, and Luca, the stewed fish who was always next to her, begging for a kiss he never got, were there, lying on the floor, in an unnatural position, covered in blood and inseparably joined, not for their choice. Alessandro was not far away, his jeans for once in the right place, but he had taken away his Roman dialect, his fingers in his nose, his roller skates and irreverent jokes. They would not be back. Alessia was curled up next to Eleonora, her chest and hands still bleeding, eyes wide and staring. Sara took her left hand to her mouth to suppress a cry. It was not a game. They were really dead. What had made the difference between her and them? Why was she now watching them instead of being stretched sprawling on the floor? There was no explanation. The girl did not know whether her classmates had surrendered to death immediately, surprised by the ferocity of the shots, or had still lived for a moment, struggling not to give themselves to Charon, listening and understanding what had happened, even suffering physically. She had only heard the voices, then the screams, the gunshots and the threats, and she had thrown herself to the floor, trying to make herself smaller and smaller and covering her ears with her hands, crouching under the desk as much as possible. She could do like a contortionist and overcome anxiety. She knew how to control fear.
She had learned from an early age, under the pretext of controlling her breathing. It was her Achilles heel. She had noticed that the first time in the yard, while playing with the neighbours’ children. Sometimes her breath stopped in her throat, closed her mouth. It happened even at night, in bed. Running and playing had become a nightmare. "Asthma", this was the terrible word that hung in her house, only whispered when she was there. Her parents had started chasing specialists and medicines, then, in this order, analysis of food allergies and homeopathy had come. She was allergic to milk and all of its by-products, never a cookie or a piece of cake. When she was about ten, everything had subsided altogether. She no longer emitted that mysterious whistle. She began to breathe like everyone else. The doctor said that it was normal, that allergies subside with growth, and problems disappear. Occasionally, however, when she was scared or upset, when she had some concern, she still had a fit, the devastating feeling of losing control of her breath. Then she stopped still and waited for it to pass, her body shaken by a vibrating motion. She had chosen to control her breathing with the power of thought, with yoga classes, two afternoons a week, lying on a mat. She wanted to learn to concentrate, focus her thoughts, find herself. Strong, she wanted to be strong to face life and events. That’s why she had stood motionless in the classroom while shots echoed one another. She had controlled her breathing and anxiety. Maybe it was this that had saved her.
She usually sat in the back row, because she hated to speak or be questioned, and she was also tall, too tall for a fifteen-year-old girl. Or so she thought when the doctor measured her.
"Five feet ten, Sara", her mother said, proud.
"I will become taller and taller and no one will ever want to hang out with me", she replied, annoyed.
No more now. After everything that had happened in the classroom, she would no longer ask her mother, "Tell me, am I so ugly?" Now she would be content to live and feel her long body on her, without wounds or signs of violence. She only had to watch her hands and feet and bless the choice of the back row and yoga that had saved her present and her tomorrow, the days to come and the memories of past ones.
"Andrea", she said softly but firmly, "why don’t you move? Come on, let’s get out."
He was there, not far away, his hair gone crazy on his head and his glasses half-crooked on his nose. He was crying.
"Please, Andrea, come on, let’s get out of here, I can’t stay. I can’t stand it."
She was moving her arms forward as if to call him, but it seemed to her to be speaking to a deaf man. Her classmate was motionless, petrified.
"I wetted myself", the boy whispered eventually, in shock. Sara crossed the classroom and reached him, firmly, shaking his arm.
"We must go away from here, you understand? Don’t give up right now, please. We must live!"
He would never change, she thought with contempt and, in a split second, she saw him again as a child in first grade, when they had met. Andrea had always needed a hand to drag him, it didn’t matter if it was that of his mother, a teacher or even a friend. He needed to be towed. Growing up he had kept his shyness in dealing with life, his indecision, his fear, intact, and his friends had taken to call him "rabbit", sometimes in secret, other times openly, especially if he called himself out of a joke or a game of the class.
"Whiner, rabbit, are you connected or are you out? You’re still in the stone age!" Alessandro thundered like a chant, and everyone else laughed heartily. Andrea the rabbit looked down and didn’t say a word. Sara had a nickname too, she had known for some time. She was "spindle-shanks", because of her height. She would rather be "the giraffe", it seemed more feminine and romantic, but for sure she could not suggest it.
What she could and should do was leave the classroom/morgue as soon as possible. She roughly grabbed Andrea and dragged him behind like a mother running away with her son by the hand after an earthquake. She saw Silvia and Deborah on the floor, one on top of the other, their blood around them. She closed her eyes in anger. There was no reason to rejoice in their death. She held tighter the hand of the rabbit and tried to look elsewhere. She only saw pain. In front of the next classroom there was professor Rossigni, who no longer looked like the composed and smiling math teacher, only like a poor woman killed for no reason. Sara jumped, surprised and stunned. Those two had killed the professor too. It wasn’t possible it had happened for real, she thought, it wasn’t possible. She wanted to scream and run, but she regained control. She looked at Andrea, dazed at her side, and walked on. The corridor in front of them was empty, spooky, the classroom doors were all open, but no living being was coming out of the rooms. Spindle-shanks and the rabbit were walking as if they were Neil Armstrong and his companions on the day of the conquest of the moon. Small hesitant steps toward life. There was the stairs, leading down to the exit, the incoherent voices, life, freedom. On a normal day, at that time, the boys would be on break, out in the square smoking a cigarette, and she would have found a place right there, looking at Marco with her eyes and her heart in the hope of being reciprocated in the game of looks preceding love. But not now, it wasn’t a day like any other. They had to invent gestures and answers, write everything from scratch, for better or for worse.
They came to the door as if by a miracle, they passed the ford. For a long mom
ent they found themselves invisible. No one noticed them. The survivors, their classmates, were outside, in tears, hugging, comforting one another, talking about themselves. There was also Marco. Alive. Professor Boschi, in tears, was talking to a policeman, but actually she was in despair, screaming, she seemed on the verge of a panic attack. Don Silvio, the religion teacher, ran spirited among students, waving a Bible. Anna, Marina, Giulia, Simone and the other refugees of fifth E eventually saw them and ran to meet them. Sara abandoned Andrea to his fate and the game of hugs started wearily. She was destroyed. Stretchers covered with white sheets came out on pilgrimage from the door of the school. On each of those, the girl told herself with terror, there could have been her. She counted them; one, two, three... she saw six of them, not seven, and it seemed she was living in a wrong nightmare. Maybe she was just dreaming, imagining. Maybe.
She had already seen something like that on the news, but she had always thought that it would never happen in Rome, go figure in her school... She had never believed the words of Silvia, her murderous plans. Not in Marco Polo high, no one would shoot. Some petty theft at worst, a few euro slipped away from the pockets of coats or backpacks. At worst a bit of drug, quietly sold in the courtyard and smoked not far away, in the gardens of Mole Adriana. What had happened that day belonged only to the Americans, to their culture marred by war movies. Americans, yes, they knew the twin towers and the bombings, Al Qaeda and Vietnam. Yes, they would know what to do with all those dead. "Born in the USA, born in the USA", sang the legendary Bruce, the boss, but she was different, she was born in Italy, she was born in Rome and belonged to another culture.
Sara left the group and stood watching the scene from afar, like at the cinema, discovering that parents were starting to arrive, in shock. There were ambulances parked along the sidewalk in front of the cops, who sought words and witnesses, with the assault of reporters cameras. She half-saw a good-looking lady watch the scene then threw herself on the ground as if desperate. The woman, maybe the mother of one of the victims, stayed sitting on the pavement, as if waiting for a verdict. Could Silvia and Deborah had done this, might they have taken two guns and fired in the classroom against other classmates? Silvia had always hated Eleonora, she knew, from the very first time they had met, but from this to killing her! God, killing someone, and how you feel afterwards, and what happens to your hands, your head, your body? How does it feel to die? How does it feel to kill? Would there still be school after all this? Would it be possible to go through that door again? Would they ever be able to go back to that classroom, open their backpacks, pull out their diaries, their books, read and study, forgetting the blood, the words, the tears, Eleonora, Luca, Alessandro, Alessia, the nicknames they had given one another, the pranks, the jokes, the antipathies, the sympathies, the years spent together? Forget, this was the refrain that would accompany their days for the days to come. And what would have happened if she had really understood what Silvia wanted to do? If she had told someone about the confidence she had made her, saying that she wanted to kill Eleonora? If she had really listened to her and looked inside her, not in the shallow way in which you live human relationships? Sara started to cry. First a tear, then another, then many, sobs, jerks.
She felt guilty for all the times she hadn’t understood, she hadn’t intervened, she hadn’t reported or said a word in defence of Eleonora, when Silvia called her the "Leaguer", when Deborah made fun of her. And now their deranged hatred had become a real thing, from which they would never turn back. She too was guilty, she knew and she had said nothing, she had never suspected that the insanity would became reality, not once had she dared to say to those two crazies that they were exaggerating, that they were not alone, that there is also the right to be different and study. She should have talked to someone, she thought, explained to her parents that things were not going too well at school. But she was poised. Silvia and Deborah were her excuse for not studying too much, for not taking responsibilities. They were the ones calling the shots and she did not obey neither object. Indeed at times, when she could, she helped them, handing them the answers to their class assignments, laughing at their jokes, stupidly, so not to have problems. She liked them, she even loved Silvia for how she was always boldly sincere, and now Silvia had forced her to be accomplice to a mass murder. She would forever bear the burden of her silence. She stared at her hands, long, lanky, girlish, and realized that they were stained with blood. Then she went home, her breath gradually becoming more laboured.