We Built Barricades in Class Today

Being a student at Florida State University during the shooting.

This is not normal. This never has been, and it never will be. Make it stop.

We heard about the shooting before the school emergency alert texts started coming in. We turned off the lights and barricaded the door with our desks. We tied belts around the door hinge. We took the flag off the wall and used it to cover the window.

Growing up in Tallahassee, I was taught what to do during a hurricane, during a tornado, and during a shooting. I’ve had school days cancelled by storms and school days cancelled by bomb threats. I’ve been in lockdowns before.

Today, I focused on numbers. Six closest to the barricade. Me. The professor. Four boys. One metal water bottle in each of our hands, six total. If anyone did manage to get through the barricade, we wanted to be ready. I guessed about twenty-five-ish more people were up against the walls of the room. I didn’t know who had shown up today and who hadn’t. We ended up doing a headcount — thirty-four total.

I was routinely texting and calling my dad. I’m forever grateful for him. He’s a first responder and was giving me as much information as he could. I was relaying what I knew to my classmates because I hoped that if we all knew as much as possible, it might just make things a little bit easier. At one point, I handed the phone to my professor so my dad could give her direct updates.

The silence was what I remember the most. You could hear every breath. Every sniffle. The slightest shift of weight felt like the noisiest thing you could do. Staying still was the worst part. I rocked back and forth on my feet. The majority of the class was huddled against the walls. But the six of us at the front remained standing, getting updates on our phones and holding our bottles. As the minutes marched on, we grew tired. We started sitting down. Unconsciously, though, we seemed to have unspoken turns and began alternating between who would sit and who would stand. To always be ready.

A girl in the room spoke on her phone in a language I didn’t recognize. What I did recognize was the fear in her voice as she spoke to who was undoubtedly a loved one she didn’t know she’d see again. The boy who sits next to me was texting his friends who worked at the Union. It was his birthday. I wished him happy birthday at the start of class and twenty minutes later it was probably the shittiest one he’s had.

We have an older British woman in our class. She got a phone call, maybe an hour into the lockdown. At that point, we were hearing noises above us — what we now know were probably other students moving their own barricades. She answered at full volume and was immediately hushed. She kept talking at full volume, telling her son that she was safe and okay. Our professor and another student went and told her to be quiet, that we needed to act like no one was in the room. Doing otherwise was endangering us. She ended up resorting to texting her son.

We saw lights in the hallway go on and off every few minutes. The noises continued. There were loud bangs. Scraping sounds. Muffled shouting. One of the four boys at the front joked about the use of the cinderblock walls during this situation. Our professor commented on the pros of the motion sensor light in the hallway. I kept the campus police department number entered into my phone. I alternated my glances between the hallway lights and the green button on the screen.

We were reading news reports and refreshing the pages for updates. We were sharing details that we were getting from other parts of campus. But we didn’t know how many shooters there were. We didn’t know if there was still active gunfire. We didn’t know if the shooter was a student.

There was a safe word that campus police would say when evacuating rooms, but it was sent to the entire university through FSU Alert texts. We were scared, we were anxious, and we wanted to survive. What would happen if a shooter knew the safe word?

“The flag is falling.”

The flag we’d taped up had started to fall, exposing the window pane. I remember thinking something about it being poetic before jumping up to try and block the view of the classroom again. Our professor was able to find and rip off some tape attached to a classroom essentials box, and we used that to reinforce the setup.

As the noises got closer, people got restless. The six of us closest to the barricade thought we heard radio chatter on top of the banging and the shouting. My professor told me to call and confirm they were evacuating our building. I did, but the line was busy, and so my call was denied. Six times.

I went around with one of the others from the front to tell everyone that we were likely about to be evacuated. We told the other twenty-or-so students to grab only their essentials and to be ready to put their hands in the air.

On the seventh try, the call went through. When I asked to confirm that our building was being evacuated, the only answer they were able to give was that all buildings were being evacuated and to listen for the safe word. I asked if we could ask for a badge number. “You can try,” they said.

After two hours of sitting in the dark, the banging reached our door. The safe word was said. We were told to put our hands up. We responded that we had a barricade that needed to come down.

We started moving desks away from the door, haphazardly throwing them into no particular formation. We untied the belts from the hinge. The door opened. I know that I looked at the men telling us what to do, but I can’t remember their faces. Only their guns.

Single file. Hands up. Out the door. Up against the wall. Across from me was a girl I grew up doing ballet with. Her eyes were red and her face was stained with tears.

This was not my first lockdown. This was not my friends’ first barricade. This is not the first tragedy. Politicians say that these things are “horrible.” That their thoughts and prayers are with us.

But thoughts and prayers don’t prevent shootings. They don’t prevent deaths. They don’t prevent families from grieving. They mean nothing coming from people with the power to stop this. If you really care, you’d do something. Your empty words mean nothing until people stop dying. Your inaction is complacency. You are making us hide in our classrooms. You are killing us. You are letting us die. And you will be remembered for it.

You will either change or not. But either way, we will not be silent. You will hear our cries. You will hear our screams. You will hear our shouts. You will hear us.