The Short Life of Raven Monroe

By Shan Wee

Annabelle Collins' world is devastated when her 6-year-old daughter dies in a Missouri school shooting.

The shooter is the first of its kind - a black female.

16-year-old Raven Monroe.

Annabelle's grief mutates into an obsessive relationship with Raven, who dwells behind bars, unremorseful.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Atmosphere Press
• Release date: Dec 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9781636495835

Book preview

1

If he had looked down, he would have seen seven or eight small hands clutching at his, squeezing tightly on to one finger each. But he wasn’t looking down. He was peering up at the clock on the wall. He was guessing at how many minutes had passed since the first gunshot.

It was a frigid silence for the 29-year-old, and the 23 children huddled around him. They were sitting on the linoleum floor underneath the one remaining wall desk. It was ten feet long, and every single child could squeeze together and fit below it. He didn’t breathe as his eyes darted from the clock to the doorway, which was hastily barricaded with the other loose desks that the classroom contained. The breath and sweat and tears he might have normally produced seemed sucked from his body, stolen by fear and replaced with a frantic tensing of every sinew of his muscles. There are pages and pages of protocol written, but none of the memos had told him what it would actually feel like when a school shooting occurred.

Are we safe here…

SHHHHHH shut up, shut up! was the best reply his lips could muster, his tongue rolled and taut like a python facing two scorpions. Jenny Goodhall began to whimper a soft despair, as any five-year-old would after receiving a whispered yell from her adult guardian. This locked room had become their entire world for the past 15 minutes. The only time he had felt like this before was in his childhood barn.

The barn where he and his elder brother and next-door neighbor Jed would build enormous forts and catacombs. Bale upon bale, block upon block of frayed straw. Tunnels were forged and deep chambers constructed—it was a labyrinth of musty-scented, dampened hay, where rural children would crawl and forage like the rats that were their very real companions at times. It was dark and forbidding and terribly thrilling for a boy of seven—the most excitement the Missouri countryside could provide. But there were times when the bales would fall.

Just as quickly, the boyish adrenaline would flash to total fear. Blackness pushing in, the weight of maybe half a dozen solid hay bales forcing you down, crushing the air from your gasping lungs. It was the kind of panic that stayed in your veins, that you could still recall in your muscles, years later. The same panic that now gripped him, here in St. Agatha’s Elementary School in Blake City, Missouri.

Under the plastic-legged, wood top table, he found himself noticing the surprising quiet of the children. Save for Jenny’s hushed sobbing and perhaps two or three like her, the classmates were remarkably silent, perhaps engulfed in the same primal instinct that would have kept cavemen offspring quiet when faced with the nearby padded paws of a predator.

He glanced at the classroom clock with the outstretched arms of a smiling clown against dark green numbers; 9:40, perhaps 9:41. Hunched over with his arms clutching his brown corduroy pants, he realized that the numbers were meaningless to his frame of mind. His anxiety had pushed all memory or spatial awareness out the door and replaced it with flashes of gloom, and silent prayers of rescue to God, to his priest, to his mother, to his father in heaven. With a sharp intake of cool September air, he painfully tried to align his recollection of the past half an hour. Lessons would have begun as normal at 9:15 with the first shot ringing out only minutes later, so they would have been locked inside this blessed cage for perhaps twenty minutes? The school was not isolated from the town (it was flanked on three sides by detached middle-America houses) so surely by now the word had got out to the authorities.

The first gunshots had come from the western side of the school, from the playground. Ten seconds of surprise and a baffled sense that That’s not what I think it is, is it? quickly gave way to lightning-fast orders to the children. With hardly any cries and sobs, they gathered under the longest table and instinctively held hands. At that moment, he was shoving tables and chairs up against the now locked door. Everything loose and large became part of the barricade, something he remembered from the advisory session with that security consultant last year.

He even remembered to turn off the room light switch, although at this time of the morning it barely made a difference as the strong sunlight glanced in past the white window blinds. He remembered a second school training session, which suggested spreading the children out around the room for safety. But as he slid back under the wooden table, he felt their collective pressure, driven by fear and a clamoring for adult reassurance, and he knew this was not going to be an option.

More gun blasts had been heard, this time closer to the cafeteria side, which led to the corridor they were on. They were located at the furthest end. In theory, they were the last classroom that would be reached. Since the second volley of gunfire, there had been no sound. He had never known the school to feel so muted, even at the end of school hours, when everyone had gone home. Then, it happened. A bang. Not the crack of a gun. But a single metallic thud. His fingers instinctively tightened on the small, soft fingers of his students. His palms were clammy now, as a bead of sweat appeared at the right side of his neck.

Was it a footstep? The closing of a locker? The opening of a door? He had never been in a real fight in his life, and would never have pegged himself anywhere near the category of hero. But as he glanced left and right at the tiny, terrified faces, he suddenly felt the overwhelming urge to protect. He wasn’t a father yet, but a distinctly paternal urge swelled across his shoulders. He gently loosened his grip on the children’s hands. A few of them whined a desperate protest, as he slid forward while hissing a plea of quiet to the kids. He slowly and soundlessly crept towards the barricade and laid his full weight against the sizeable bookshelves that formed the heart of their wall.

His eyes feverishly darted left and right in search of any item that could be described as a weapon, but to no avail. Another thud. This time it was closer. He was almost certain it was a footstep. Another thud. It was at their end of the corridor. It had reached them.

There came a rap on the door.

It’s me. It’s Ira.

At that precise moment, a siren blared outside.

Just as his fear had been instinctive and uncontrolled, so was his relief. The muffled voice of a familiar name and the whirr of that siren combined to make the sweetest sound his ears had ever known. It was a hand plunging into the frozen ocean to pull him up to oxygen. Every active shooter manual will tell you not to poke your head up at an exposed window, but that’s exactly what he had the rushing urge to do. The children stayed put with the wide-eyed expectation that the good guys had arrived, while he sprung and crawled like a rabid dog to the near wall, adorned with pastel-colored crayon drawings, and just above those, the windowsill. His hands and face slithered up the vertical wallpaper until the sunlight edged on to his reddish-brown hairline. He slowly inched his line of sight to include the soft white clouds, then the resilient sycamore trees, and finally the red and blue flash of three, four…at least seven patrol cars, and at a guess, 15 serious policemen, each with a gun cocked, all aimed to a focal point. Their guns were trained on a slender, stooped figure, clad in a gray hooded top, dark blue jeans, and brownish boots. As the tethered police officers gripped their pistols with whitened knuckles and barked orders, the drooping figure slumped further down, eventually with knees crunching on to the black tarmac of the school entrance driveway. From inside the classroom, the teacher gazed on with an edgy, fidgety blink as the shooter slowly raised their hands to the back of their head. The slender, smooth fingers crept into long, dark, dry, curly hair. It was a girl.

2

She leaned back against the wall of the bridge; her small hiking backpack squeezed against the bricks of light and dark gray. Really, the manmade bridge was probably unnecessary given the small expanse that the brook occupied. Anybody who was capable of walking this far along the path would be able to leap across the gushing water easily enough. She popped open her trusty water bottle and took a long smooth drink of the cold beverage. Pure water was always her favorite. She always recoiled a tiny amount when restaurants dropped extra garnish into their jugs. Cucumber, or lemon, or lime, or mint. Some hip cafes seemed to think dropping in an entire garden was necessary for their H2O to be pleasing to the tongue.

Total nonsense! She chuckled to herself out loud at the thought. Annabelle Collins had the habit of vocalizing herself when no one was around. Perhaps it was a hangover from her early twenties when she transitioned from being chair of the college debating society, to her first and only job as a newspaper reporter. Her colleagues at the St. Louis Tribune would often glance over and smirk as she orated her article before putting pen to paper (or more accurately finger to keyboard). It was probably at her childhood dinner table where the zest for discussion was born—energetically debating with her father and brother while her mom fondly smiled on from the kitchen as she busied herself with drying the dishes.

Her father (her late father, sadly) devoted his time to the local town council, and Annabelle’s primary memory of him was seeing his neatly pressed blue suit march out the front door every morning as she ate cereal before the school bus arrived. Her second, and more cherished memory, were the dinner table debates, the one time when her daddy’s eyes sparkled with energy and he was eager to hear what she had to say, alongside her elder brother Phillip, who would invariably counter whatever argument she was making. Their father’s favorite sayings were usually only enthusiastically bestowed upon the clerks and secretaries down at the town council office, but some nights at the dinner table Annabelle would have the fortune of receiving Better to stay silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt, or "My darling daughter, do not raise your voice, improve your argument."

And with each article she wrote at the Tribune, she did refine and improve her arguments. By the age of 26, she was a highly prized member of the team and even had pieces published in the big nationals, especially those articles concerning the Half Moon Peak project. That’s why she loved this particular hiking trail so much. It was no small exaggeration to say that without her pressing the issue for over two years in print and on local radio and her tireless blog (when blogs were a brand new thing too) there would be no trees surrounding her now. McKinley Logging & Drilling Co. would have happily scorched Half Moon Peak if not for the environmental dangers and financial irregularities uncovered by Miss Annabelle Collins. Delivering those articles to the press truly made her feel alive. A feeling she went searching for in these long morning hikes.

The trees flanking her were so tall that the morning sun was still much too low to bring any warmth to her pale skin. She had her mousey brown, shoulder-length hair pinned back with a bright orange wrap that was multi-purpose—it could be a sensible hairband or a ponytail tie or even a bandana. She had Oakley-style cycling glasses in her backpack, but there was no need for them at this time of day, as her hazel eyes surveyed the deserted path, accompanied by the wrinkles that more insecure women would have battled against with Botox or collagen. She knelt down and adjusted the laces on her right boot, a brown, almost mustard-colored pair of Caterpillars that were an impulse buy on one of the days following her divorce papers coming through, when she was searching for new ways to feel alive. Writing a blog on cooking; buying an easel and paints to pursue the art she had last tried in middle school; wakeboarding, an exercise she decided was not the ideal choice for a woman in her mid-40s with the arm strength of a baby T-Rex; and of course hiking in the woods, like today. She consistently found joy in the peaceful silence of the hordes of conifers, standing idly around, interrupted only by the occasional crow call or this babbling stream. The feeling that you were the only human left alive in the world was simultaneously horrifying and liberating. It was a freedom that she constantly looked forward to. A freedom that she had to admit had always been tempered when she had a boyfriend, or finally got married, and it was a freedom that had been permanently altered with the birth of Megan.

Of course, the arrival of Megan brought a different kind of feeling alive. Annabelle had reached her late thirties perfectly content with the fact that she had never settled down. She was an assistant editor by that stage and loved burning the midnight oil, working on deadlines, and reformatting the front cover, and she was so focused on maintaining the quality of the articles that she was quite oblivious to the quantity of the readers. But the numbers arrived one day and brought with it the stark realization that people were not reading newspapers like before, certainly not in the same way as when she graduated from the University of Missouri and raced into her first mailroom internship with similes to craft and minds to change. It was during this period that Annabelle began feeling that maybe a solitary life of industry and printed word was not a legacy at all. People would forget her words, as they had forgotten many of the magazines she loved as a teen. And it was during this search for legacy that she met Bryan.

They met at a mutual friend’s dinner party and hit it off right away. A successful construction business owner, Bryan Clarkson, ticked a lot of boxes for a woman who, at the age of 39, had mentally just drawn up her first-ever marriage material questionnaire, with boxes to tick. Annabelle’s life swiftly changed direction after they married and moved out of the city to a slower suburban pace of life just as she finished her first trimester. Megan was their unexpected treasure, and both parents showered her with extravagant affection and attention as only older first-time parents do. Annabelle would create elaborate pack lunch designs even when Megan’s daycare class finished at 11:30. Bryan would rush out to buy her soft toys at the slightest sign that she was fond of rabbits, or horses, or doggies.

But slowly and before they realized, all their parental love was flowing down one channel, and they forgot to save some for each other, and after a few years, the cracks began to show. What had started as a convenient life partnership faded away to passing ships in the night, with little of real substance in common. Both Bryan and Annabelle had lived all their life as independent contractors, and the truth was, neither of them needed or benefitted from co-founding this new company. Distance became irritation, and irritation became fights and