Lock Down

Just this week our school district initiated a lockdown. It wasn’t a drill; it was the real deal, well kind of. Some whack job decided to go to the junior high and try to checkout kids, offering free haircuts. Well okay, that’s not weird at all. It happened at approximately 2:29. All schools were locked down, baseball was to get released at 2:30 and it lasted around fifteen minutes. I was pissed to say the least, but I kept my cool and treated it as if it were real, although at the time I had no idea it was, I still treated it as such. Every year our schools perform numerous lockdown procedures to make sure we are ready when something really happens; the only problem is that the majority of the students don’t take it seriously. They should, and here’s why:

            It was a new experience for me, living here and going to school with new kids, trying to make new friends again, I really didn’t like relocating. But San Antonio was such a beautiful place. I walked about fifteen minutes to school every morning, not being used to a big city you could imagine this wasn’t the easiest of things, especially when you didn’t know the names of like any of the streets! There was no breakfast program like Holbrook, but oh boy was the lunch amazing but everyone had to pay. It had grades six through eight just like Holbrook Junior High, except this one had nine hundred students in it. This way of life was way different than what I had been accustomed to, to say the least.

            I didn’t have many friends; I was pretty lousy at making them. My best friend had to have been a guy named Mauricio. Mauricio was a blood, and not a fake one either. I guess you could say I was a recruit, because I hung out with his crew, who were even more intimidating than him and he was like six foot and a solid two hundred pounds. He had a wound from a bullet that went through his right abdomen and punctured his kidney. He was shot at during a drive by while he was at his homies house. He had the scar to match on the front and the back. I knew these guys were legit pretty quick, the first thing Mauricio asked me when he saw me was: “what you reppin’?”  A little caught off guard I just said “nothing man.” Later I realized he was trying to figure out what gang I was repping; Crip or blood, rival or bud.

            The people here were serious. Everything was serious, gangs were serious and they weren’t afraid to let their guns rip on a rival gang at any time, including school time. Yeah, it happened. I had been attending Zachary Middle School for a short few weeks. It was in the morning, we were all out in the quad hanging out, waiting for the morning bell to ring, and a kid was making fun of my socks because they were really faded. Next thing you know there was just a deafening blat! blat! Followed by brrrrrrrrrrrap!! Everyone was screaming and everything was just complete chaos. No bullets hit their target, but that wasn’t the end of it. The school was in lock down all day long. Police all around the school, everything was like a dream.

There was another shooting supposed to happen after school got out, and I had to walk home. Luckily they didn’t let us go right after school. No one was allowed to walk home, so my mom had to get me. She would have anyway, but the point is there was a planned shooting after school and we were all still here! What if I got shot? It could happen, it could have happened that morning. Anything seemed possible during that time. That’s the thing, everything seemed possible.

During these lock down drills people act like nothing is possible. They don’t act like anything could happen to them. It could, and it might, or it might not. I’ve been through it, I know what it’s like to be in lock down and be genuinely scared. Maybe that’s what people need to make them take these drills seriously instead of being annoyed by it. We all need to take these drills seriously, it could happen.