I (15f) experienced the fear of being put on lockdown a few years ago, and sometimes I think about it, and how lucky I am.
When I was in 5th grade (4y ago) my school was put on lockdown. My classmates and I were there for 5 hours, huddled up, terrified, some even crying.
For context, when I was in 5th grade my friends and I would walk to a train tunnel nearby our school and graffiti all over the walls. It was a very hidden place, so of course, there was usually a lot of sketchy shit that happened there with drug dealers, gang bangers, etc., but we never ran into them. One particular day, we were doing the normal asshole kid routine and drawing penises all over the walls when we saw a guy lurking around at the end of the tunnel. My friends didn’t care, but I was scared shitless. It’s not that we could’ve been caught, it’s that the dude looked so terrifying. He looked dirty. Almost sort of homeless. He had a slouched posture, he was wearing a white tank top, and some jeans with a chain around his neck. I freaked out and started telling my friends “I want to go home, this doesn’t feel right, I’m scared” over and over but again, they didn’t care.
Eventually I begged them enough to come back home with me, and we didn’t go back. Fast forward to like 4 days later, I was sitting in class when the teacher put her phone down and calmly told the class to huddle together behind her desk. She turned the lights off and got next to us. We immediately recognized what was going on but didn’t know what was causing us to go on lockdown. Rumors and theories started spreading fast. Some were talking about how there’s a shooter outside, and some were saying it’s just a school shooting drill, though, we all knew it wasn’t. We were all there for like 5 hours freaking out until the police told my teacher it’s okay to continue class. After about 45 minutes later we were told some guy was outside with a knife, and his partner had a gun, and we’re planning to kill as many kids in the school as they could. They said he was in a white tank top, jeans, and wore a chain, but he had also been wearing a mask.
I immediately recognized that description, and my heart dropped. He was probably planning to kill us the moment he saw us, otherwise, why would he have been stalking us? Either way, my friends and I never went back after that.
Bonus(?): Fast forward 4 years, I ended up falling in love with one of the guys I did graffiti with. A stoner and pretty overall trashy. He’s also a lot older than me, so that’s fucking weird but I didn’t see it at the time. I ended up being abused by him. Yay.