The Kids Are Alright

by Hannah Rome

When someone asks me where I’m from, I try to remain vague. I deliver my answer like the beginning shots of a film. It starts with the wide angle, Florida. The frame tightens as the cameraman’s  face contorts with images of Florida men and banned books. “I know,” I punctuate. Damage control. At this point, I’m still hopeful that we can leave it at that and move on to more meaningful conversation like how long have I been in New York. More often, since everyone knows someone in Florida, the inquirer will push in towards an answer they won’t much enjoy, like a close up of a sunsetting starlet with too much facial filler. “South Florida,” I offer. “About an hour north of Miami.” If I’m particularly karmically fucked that day, they’ll have a cousin or grandparent too close to my hometown for me to hide. “I’m from Parkland,” I finally relent. I’ll watch as their glazed eyes sharpen, and disquieted understanding washes over. “That’s where the shooting was,” they’ll say, as if it’s news to me. “Yeah,” I reply. “That was my high school.”

We wear our  hometowns like a rack of military ribbons, the story of conditions that brought us to the present. The Parkland sigil is a ribbon of green to signify a Tree City USA and cachet of exorbitant wealth, and red for being home to one of the deadliest school shootings in our country’s history. Parkland is a suburban community of almost 37,000, nestled between the interstate and the alligatored arteries of the Everglades National Park. The town is bisected by one main thoroughfare, boasts 5 traffic lights, and not a single chain restaurant. The inhabitants of Parkland are mostly wealthy, White, and Jewish. It’s a landing pad for expats from Long Island and Philadelphia, those who clip their wings at the southern tip of the snowbird journey, citing how nice the weather is as they count their millions in tax breaks. As kids we would ride bikes around the culs-de-sac, catch lizards in our yards, and play How many of us, how many doctor parents. Every morning, caravans of German sedans siphon out of communities gated by gardens, iron, and security guards armed with AKs. A few hours later, German SUVs head towards workout classes and grocery stores that call themselves markets. Their children are groomed and dressed in designer clothing that they will outgrow next year. The teenagers smoke weed in private parks and drive German two-doors. It’s a town under a dome, impervious to poverty, addiction, and other impediments of the outside world. Of course bad things happen, they’ll say over steaming lobsters and wine that gives notes. Just not in our backyard.

I was bred to be a blue-blooded Parkland kid. Doctor and lawyer parents, we had a beautiful ranch style home on a full acre in a respected neighborhood. I wore the right clothes, went to sleepaway camp in the Catskills, and tested into the Gifted program by kindergarten. I was trotting along on the right path to end up back in Parkland or a place just like it, my family’s class and status uncompromised. My friends were smart, pretty, and well-bred. They had silken hair tied in bows and smelled of fresh laundry and French toast breakfasts. They were on the path too, like 8-bit avatars of their moms and dads that came into stronger focus with each passing year. By middle school, the doctors’ kids (⅘ in a room) wanted to be doctors, the lawyers’ kids, lawyers. They all had dream schools and were on track to get there, their single-use extracurriculars designed to bolster their college applications and be promptly discarded after admission. 

I was a theater kid, which was different. I probably would have been embarrassed by it if I weren’t somewhat of a child prodigy. I was a big belter and navigated both comedic and dramatic roles with acuity and pizzazz. I had a 103° fever during my marquee performance in You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown, and even still my take on the sagacious child psychiatrist Lucy is referenced in some circles today. I was a consummate professional by the age of 10, living and breathing the show must go on. Still, theater felt deviant. I worried my friends would leave me behind, would spend all of dance class talking about the one girl who wasn’t enrolled. We may have all been wearing the same flesh-colored jazz shoes, but dance didn’t define them the way theater defined me. Staring out at the muddled faces of the crowd, I saw an entire life laid out before me. The other girls were only in dance until they found something more upwardly mobile, like debate club or tennis. When I tried to think practically about a future in the arts, I didn’t see any examples of what that could look like. The only adult who could have fit that description was the director of my children’s theater program, but if I ever had to sit through another tech week for Seussical, I knew it would be my last.

At best, I was ambivalent about where my life was headed. At 14, that shouldn’t be cause for concern, but this was Parkland. We were steered with a heavy hand, and dissuaded through underfunding and underappreciation from anything without a guaranteed payoff. Instead, we were encouraged to participate in DECA, a business/entrepreneurial program where high schoolers studied the stock market, came up with fake business plans, and still learned nothing about personal finances. Even Model UN seemed fanciful (a war between Luxembourg and Guam? As if.) I gave up theater because I got the message. It was an unrealistic, unprofitable waste of time. As long as I stuck with it, I would only prove to myself what I couldn’t yet admit: this world, this environment wasn’t made for me. By the time I got to high school, I had no passion or drive to speak of. I anemically tried my hand at other art forms. I started writing short stories, which I loved but did infrequently due to my inability to see the fucking point. I couldn’t switch gears; couldn’t pretend to care about the culture of achievement that to all of my peers was like water to a fish. I started to gain a reputation for being a ‘smart slacker.’ I thought it may be the highest I could aspire to be. 

Parkland was like Plato’s cave. I thought the world was the shadow puppets I saw in front of me. As I got older I felt more confused, left behind, and invalid. I was different from the kids I grew up with, from the town I grew up in. As we all went off to college and the friends that had become the only thing going for me branched off into their pre-med, pre-law, and accounting tracks, that difference became more pronounced. I felt rejected for my lack of direction, imagining my parents’ reticence as they told their friends how I was still “figuring it out.” I was stuck in no man’s land: not on the path prescribed, too afraid to commit to what I really wanted. I blamed Parkland for both.

Despite weak extracurriculars and unremarkable grades, I managed my way into the University of Florida: a school that some of my classmates dreamed their whole lives of matriculating to. My parents had tried guiding me towards small, ivy-clad liberal arts schools in the Northeast, where I could have escaped the tar pit of creative decay that I called home. But, those schools favored applicants who were proactive in their interests, rather than disdainful in their absence, and so I was rejected everywhere else I applied. At Stoneman Douglas, we wryly referred to the University of Florida as “13th grade.” Parkland kids entered a freshman class where they already knew dozens of their classmates and acted clannish upon arrival. I was despondent about being at UF, and so I lazily followed suit. College could have been my chance to come into my own, to embody my inner nonconformist. Instead, my environment was like a funhouse mirror of my hometown: all of its failings in deformed plurality.

Junior year, I had the opportunity to leave UF, leave the coterie, and leave Florida altogether. I chose to study abroad in Ireland because no one I knew would be there. I landed in Dublin, instantly charmed by the buildings made of pearlized stones and the cab driver’s delightfully unintelligible accent. My seven flatmates for the next several months were three Irish girls, a lad from Limerick, a Belgian boy with eyes like cenotes, and two Americans with dual citizenship. When I arrived at the flat, their faces were knotted in a way that suggested someone had just told them the new girl was from Florida. But, despite my flatmates not knowing what to expect, and despite the first thirty minutes after meeting when I pranked them by acting like the Red Hat, gunslinging type of Floridian, I melted into that little family like butter in a pan.

After a few weeks living abroad I’d all but forgotten Parkland existed. It was easy enough -- no one in Ireland would push the “where ye from,” query past “Florida.” I savored Dublin’s difference from my hometown. Instead of an unflinching sun was rain so pregnant, so obtrusive, and so quotidian that no one even talked about it. I bought a twee, yolk-yellow raincoat and imagined myself on postcards. Every day the rain washed over me, wiping the slate cleaner. Florida smelt like sweat and the condensation from air conditioners. In Dublin, the sour barley scent of Guinness wafted all throughout the city, running like a current through the cobbled streets. The people I knew from back home pursued whatever guaranteed the life their parents had given them. My friends in Ireland were artists, musicians, and academics engagé. With them, I called myself a writer and almost believed it. I negotiated how to keep my new life, wondering if I could redact my whole 20 years prior and become a girl from nowhere. Then, when I was living enchantedly 4,000 miles away, 17 people, including 14 students, were murdered in my high school. I couldn’t escape my hometown, now. Everyone was watching.

The shooting was on Valentine’s Day. It was the morning in Parkland, the evening in Dublin. My flatmates, my boyfriend, Jacob, and I were congregated in our kitchen, cooking our dinners of under-seasoned chicken breast and over-seasoned vegetables, sharing sweet red wine that came in liter bottles. Hard, frozen hail pellets beat against the window panes like a cursed drumroll. My phone buzzed. It was my rarely-active high school group text. My friend Noah, who had a little brother at Stoneman Douglas, said there were rumors of an active shooter on campus. There was a litany of threats and false alarms when we were students ourselves, so we wrote it off as crying wolf. Noah told us that his brother had fled the school, along with a frenzied stampede. Then came the confirmations. Shooter. Gunshots. Casualties. We waited for familiar names, familiar surnames. I lay awake all night, shaking in the bed next to Jacob, whose long, sinewy arms that I’d known for a month were the closest thing I felt to home.

The day after the shooting, I sat in a cab and listened to newscasters talk about my hometown on Irish radio. I almost didn’t recognize the name “Parkland” in that context. It wasn’t my home, but some strange, brutal place in a foreign country. My consciousness was shoved into a quiet, dark corner of my mind. I couldn’t keep time or place and showed up to class an hour late. Numbers, letters, everything that was once understandable morphed into unintelligible symbols. What was once inherent became meaningless. I opened the door to class in session, students sitting in their unassailable rows and the professor in front of them as if anything he taught mattered at all. He and the class turned to me in uniformed derision. “What are you doing here?” he spat at me, pinching his chalk like a throwing star. I have no idea why my coming into class late was so upsetting to him, perhaps he thought I was just a rude American, coming and going as I pleased, but I mumbled a wooden “sorry” and hurried to my seat. He resumed his lecture for a moment, then decided to scold me in front of the entire class instead. He paused class two more times to remind everyone of what an idiot I was, as if it were part of the lesson plan.

The public humiliation broke through my fugue state. The town on the radio was my town. The school in the news was my school. In my mind I wandered through the halls of Marjory Stoneman Douglas. The freshman building that was soaked in blood was where I had my first taste of adolescence, where I read my writing to a room for the first time. The central courtyard where children ran for their lives was where my best friends became my best friends. I imagined myself there the day before, where I would’ve been and how I would’ve fled. Who I would’ve lost. If I would have been killed myself.

By the end of class I was shaking and sweaty, caught somewhere between dissociation and too much reality. My attention returned to the tiny Irish prick at the front of the room. Being king of the classroom won’t get you past a gun, I thought. I walked up to him, nails dug into my clammy hands. I cleared the hollowness from my throat and told him that I was sorry for being late, that the shooting that happened in Florida the day before was in my hometown, at my high school. His face drained of all ruddy Irish sanguinity and his eyes widened into two great billboards that read “I’M A” “DUMBASS.” He apologized to me profusely, each sorry galvanizing my ultimate vindication against him, at least one bully of the world. “Did you know anyone there?” he asked, finally, in his skittish lilt. I told him the truth, his final comeuppance: “It’s too soon to tell.”

I didn’t know any of the victims personally, but in a community the size of Parkland no one’s more than a degree of separation away. One fourteen year old victim was a member of my synagogue. Another was the little sister of someone in my grade. In my favorite teacher’s classroom, two students were murdered. I was fortunate that tragedy didn’t hit closer to home. I grieved for the families to whom it did. I grieved for the survivors, who saw and heard and experienced a horror I could not imagine. Still, something was lost in the physical distance between me and my hometown. I witnessed the aftermath of the shooting the same as anyone else without roots there. My alienation was never more apparent.

Parkland was no longer the place I was from, it was a candlelight vigil on TV, a name I skipped over in the headlines, a haunted house where a bad thing happened. I shielded myself from what occurred there, clutching onto what I knew about my town from Before. Through the glow of sanctity society shines on the bereaved, I still saw Parkland for what it was. I saw it for its self-seclusion and plutocracy; a factory that produced predictable paths and spit out dreamers like me. When some MSD students rose as gun control activists, I doubled down on my cynicism. Instead of shock, sympathy, and disbelief that they met someone from the seat of American terror, people would praise the precocious teens, praise Stoneman Douglas for educating them so impressively, and praise Parkland for having bred them right. I wanted to scream, to point to the elitism and entitlement and teenage shitheads in BMWs. The town was predicated on fear, on protection against the outside. Of course a tragedy of this magnitude would occur there; it’s perfect Shakespearean irony. Of course the kids were impressive and high achieving; that was their pedigree. 

Anytime I’d returned home from a long trip in the past, I was always surprised how everything looked the same. When I returned from Ireland a few months later, the whole town was a memorial altar. Maroon ribbons marked every streetlamp. Roses littered the ground and perfumed the air, as if every sidewalk led to a honeymoon suite. The workout class women now wore dryweave tank tops branded with #ParklandStrong; the German cars sported bumper stickers of the like. The property value in Parkland exploded; every upper middle class parent wanted their kid at the school that produced the ones marching on Congress. The activists that emerged from the shooting became a point of pride, hometown heroes. Maybe as a collective manner of coping with immeasurable tragedy, maybe because Parklanders frothed for acclaim. 

When people ask me where I’m from, I try to remain vague. It’s too hard to explain that the place that’s had so much taken, took so much from me. I can’t mourn what I’ve lost, the years, the self-esteem, a sense of belonging and hometown pride, without feeling like I’m disrespecting the dead. And yet I grieve for the families, the survivors, the community, my community. It’s a grief I don’t deserve, but feel all the same. My ambivalence is estranged. I am estranged. Maybe I always was.