At first, I thought it was a stupid trend. One of those TikTok things that catches rapid fire and before you know it, everyone is doing it and they don’t even know why.
It started with a student in my first-hour eighth-grade science class, Marlee—a prolific talker and one of the more popular students in the class. But last Monday, Marlee seemed different. She shuffled into the brightly lit classroom, eyes darting from side to side, shoulders slumped. Her cosmic-print Jansport backpack sagged off one shoulder. Gingerly, she took her seat, and I noticed she was shivering.
“Marlee honey, are you okay?” I asked. The typically outspoken student and I sometimes bumped heads, but I was still her teacher and cared about her.
She barely raised her head to look at me. “Mm-hmm,” she murmured, pulling a pen out of her backpack. It was then that I noticed her notebook, which was open to a page covered in what looked like tally marks. Marlee saw me looking, and protectively drew her arm around the notebook, as if I were another student who was trying to cheat. Before I could ask what she was doing, she was already recording more tally marks. There was something feverish and urgent in her writing. However, I decided to let it go and start the day’s lesson. Adolescents could be strange and unpredictable, a truth that has endured since the beginning of time.
During class, Marlee’s friends tried to talk to her, whispering and not-so-discreetly trying to show her stuff on their phones. It was to no avail. Marlee kept her head down and continued to scratch tally marks into her notebook.
Halfway through the lesson, she abruptly stopped tallying and typed something on her phone, eyes wide and brow furrowed. Shortly after, several of her friends pulled out their phones, no doubt reading the text that Marlee had just sent. Jenn’s chin started to wobble ever so slightly. Maddie looked like she was going to cry. Emilio bit his lip. Jackson raised a fist to his mouth.
Then they all turned to another page in their notebooks, and started tallying too.
Though I was thrown off guard, I let it go and decided to ask them about it after class. But Olivia—who was the type of kid that tended to ask if there was any homework, much to the dismay of other students—came up to my desk with some questions, and the others left before I could say anything to them. Still, while Olivia spoke, I peeked at them out of the corner of my eye and noticed that they were all still writing in their notebooks while walking out the door.
Normally Emilio and Jackson would be punching each other in the shoulders and running their mouths, trying to impress Marlee, Maddie, and Jenn. To see them with their heads buried in their notebooks, consumed with the tally marks they were recording—well, it was puzzling as hell. Then it dawned on me, as I mentioned above, that this was probably some sort of TikTok crap. Tallying the number of times they thought about their crush and then giving it to their crush at the end of the day, or something else that would fit an eighth-grader’s definition of “romantic” or “daring.” I immediately felt better about their strange behavior.
As the day went on, more and more of my students—regardless of class period, personality, social status, academic standing, gender, race, and so on—were partaking in this strange game. And it appeared to be linked to their phones, too. Invariably, a student would get a text message, their eyes would cloud over with worry—or could it be fear? No way; I was reading into it—and they would turn to another page in their notebook and begin making tally marks.
I rolled my eyes at myself. Why was I putting so much thought into a teenage trend? I was a 43-year-old married woman with a teenager myself. Still, it tugged at my mind. I figured I would ask my sixteen-year-old, Caroline, about it when I got home.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mom,” Caroline said when I asked her during dinner if she had heard of this new tallying trend. “You know I don’t use TikTok.” For her age, Caroline held very strong opinions about the negative aspects of social media.
“But none of your friends have texted you about it?” I asked. “I feel like it’s going around like crazy.”
Caroline shrugged. “No idea,” she said. “Sounds stupid, though. Very juvenile.”
I suppressed a smile. Leave it to Caroline to make me feel better about all this.
The next morning, before the first class started, I received an email to my school inbox, and almost fell out of my chair.
Olivia had been found dead in her bedroom earlier that morning. Authorities were currently investigating her death. The cause of death was not mentioned in the email.
My trachea felt like it was collapsing in on itself. Olivia? The well-pressed girl who made all A’s and was the captain of the school golf team, who spoke endlessly about going to engineering camp at the University of Michigan last summer? Had she hurt herself? If so, how could I have missed the signs? Had someone else hurt her?
The school held a moment of silence for Olivia during the first class period. Tears spilled out of my eyes as I remembered the girl fondly and grieved her untimely death. I thought of Caroline. I thought of my other students, most of whom continued to furiously tally away during the moment of silence.
My train of thought was interrupted by a loud crash. I looked up, startled. Then a girl screamed.
One of my students, a boy named Elliott, lay on the floor with his stool overturned on the ground. Torrential blood spilled out of his mouth. His eyes were frozen wide open in a snapshot of glazed terror. My hand flew to my mouth. “Call 911,” I sputtered to Amanda, the only student who wasn’t still absorbed in their tallying. She was the girl who had screamed. She pulled out her phone to call 911 and her arm bumped her tallying notebook, sending it flying off the table. It landed in the pool of Elliott’s blood.
I knelt down on the other side of Elliott and felt for a pulse, checked for breath. He had neither. At least blood had stopped pouring out of his mouth, and was now beginning to dry on his chin. I began administering CPR, counting compressions. When I placed my mouth upon his to administer breaths, I could taste the metallic tang of his blood. In the background, I heard Amanda shrieking to the emergency dispatcher on the phone and gesturing wildly.
Then she stopped talking, and a millisecond later, I heard a crack.
Amanda was also on the floor now, blood pouring from both her mouth and her head. It was then I screamed at the top of my lungs—a distant, primal sound I didn’t even recognize as my own. By then, other teachers had run into the classroom. “CPR!” I shouted. “She needs CPR—he needs CPR—oh my god—”
Mr. Mahoney and Mrs. Rogers performed CPR on the students, switching off with Mrs. Jankowicz and Ms. Ellmont when they grew too tired. Soon, EMS arrived and took over.
In the midst of all the chaos, I didn’t realize that none of my other students had looked up.
Their heads were still buried in their notebooks.
“WHAT IS GOING ON?!” I screamed at them after EMS carted Elliott and Amanda away. “WHY CAN’T YOU TAKE YOUR EYES OFF OF YOUR GODDAMN NOTEBOOKS?!”
No one answered. Then I heard another crash and a scream, this time in a different classroom. Then another. Then another.
Sirens wailed outside of the school. EMS swarmed the hallways, pushing stretchers full of dead and dying students. Blood painted the floors of hallways and classrooms.
In the pandemonium, the principal had managed to send out an emergency email for parents to pick up students immediately. Any student whose parents did not arrive within fifteen minutes was loaded onto a bus and driven home. Kids ran out of the school, sobbing, still writing in their notebooks. After the school was empty of children, the teachers were dismissed as well. The superintendent had sent out an email to the entire district calling off school for the rest of the week.
When I arrived home, Caroline was already there, sitting at the kitchen table. She’d been dropped off by bus, despite the fact that her car was at the school.
In front of her lay an open notebook.
The notebook was filled with vertical lines.
I sat down slowly, afraid to speak. Caroline continued tallying.
“Baby,” I finally said, my voice just a whisper. “Please, for the love of God, tell me what’s going on.”
She looked at me as if she was seeing me for the first time. There was a strangeness in her eyes, a mix of horror and sadness.
Then she put down her pen, picked up her phone, and texted something. My own phone buzzed.
Caroline immediately began tallying again. “Look at your phone,” she said, sadly.
“No,” I said.
“Please look at it,” she said. “For my sake, look at it.”
I pulled out my phone. There was an unread message from Caroline.
She said, “Look at the picture. Every time you think of it, write down a tally mark. Look at it and pass it on, Mom. It’s the only way. They’ll never stop.”
“And never,” she said, “Never, ever delete it.”
At that moment, my husband appeared at the front door. I had forgotten I’d asked him to come home early.
Caroline looked up at him, picked up her phone, and sent a text. My husband’s phone buzzed as he came into the kitchen.
“Are you okay, loves?” he asked me and Caroline. “What’s this, baby, you have to text your old man while you’re in the room with him now?”
Then he looked at his phone, took a deep breath, and dug into his briefcase.
“What are you doing?” I asked him. I was hoping against hope he wasn’t getting out what I thought he was getting out.
When I saw the legal pad and the first tally, I said to my husband, “Whatever you do, send that text to someone at your work. Don’t send it to me. One of us needs to be able to solve this.”
I went upstairs to write this. I have no idea how to proceed. I am plagued by visions of Caroline or my husband falling onto the ground, crimson staining the floor around them. I am plagued by the fear that life will never be the same.
But most of us, I am plagued by the unread message from Caroline on my phone.