Another Day, Another Bomb Threat

October 31st, 2022: Halloween

I realize my assistant principal’s soft-spoken voice is muffling through the intercom, mixing into the Oaxacan music, drowning in children’s joyful chatter. The tone is too calm to draw my attention; I figure I’ll just get class started and check my email at the same time in case I missed something. 

I’m reading Octavio Paz’s death poem when they tell me we have to get out. “Do we take our stuff, Profe Klein?” students ask, their eager eyes looking to me for direction. “Nope, we just go,” I reply matter-of-factly, stupidly leaving all of my stuff behind as well – phone, jacket, keys. I do remember to grab the red emergency backpack, which contains a ziplock baggy stuffed with gauze and literally nothing else.

The kids line up alphabetically, and those of us without a class to supervise huddle up idly in the middle of the field, shivering and waiting to learn more. 

Bomb threat. 

Our mental health specialist and I chat about our kids’ Halloween plans for that evening. She’s dressed as a pay phone, and we chuckle when another pay phone saunters by. It’s mildly amusing to watch a dreadlocked hippie and a giraffe with her hair in two adorable half-buns directing their classes to stay in line and keep quiet. 

Amidst it all, there’s the very tiny, unspoken possibility that our school could blow up – which no one actually believes – but it’s still hanging there invisibly in the cold fall air. It’s not fear, really, but rather the unsettling realization that we all expected this day to come – because it’s all we ever see on the news.

I feel like we’re all standing closer together than we normally would, maybe from the cold, maybe for comfort. Maybe it’s my imagination.

We receive directions from an administrator that register as words in my ear drums, but my brain doesn’t process them. I’m relieved when my colleague says, “Wait, can you say all that again?” I’m not frightened, but my brain is floating in some kind of unfamiliar adrenaline. 

The biology teacher shows up, in costume, smiling and looking relaxed. 

“How’d you get here? They let you in?” She is just arriving to school after attending her daughter’s preschool Halloween parade.

“Yeah, they let me through! I guess I wasn’t a security threat.” She’s dressed as a pepperoni pizza.

Our principal confidently explains the next steps over the loudspeaker. It turns out we are sending 950 students home. The gravity of the situation hits us, but it seems as though everyone is most disoriented by the disruption of Halloween. Because it’s been three years since we’ve celebrated Halloween at our school, and today everyone has gone full-out with makeup and costumes and props, finally reviving a bit of our school’s normalcy and pre-pandemic holiday magic. Now, here we are shivering on the football field dressed as zombies, bananas and anime characters, assuming there’s not actually a bomb inside our school. 

I’m now fidgeting from foot to foot, feeling useless as half the students make their way off the field to evacuate to the elementary school for parent pick-up. 

“Ms. Klein!” My Ukrainian student’s face lights up as she sees me. She’s all dolled up in an adorable costume dress with no jacket, and she’s waving her hands as she tries to express her question. “Do I go?” she asks, pointing to the hoard of kids streaming off the field.

I follow her and another student from our English Language Development class, who is from Costa Rica. 

“Ms. Klein! My phone… is in classroom!” she exclaims. “How I can call my dad?” she asks, pronouncing each word with emphasis and accompanying hand gestures. I assure her we’ll find a way to contact her family once we get across the street to the elementary school.

We wait for an extraordinarily long time on the sidewalk just outside our school building, as the evacuation plans change. I stand with a group of very loud and cheerful students who keep dropping their costume prop – a red party cup – onto the sidewalk. It’s soon splitting and cracking plastic pieces all over the ground, and I suggest whoever the owner of the cup is consider cleaning it up. They all look around and pretend the cup doesn’t belong to them. 

One of them, presumably tired of hearing from me, finally yells at her friend: “Pick up your beer cup!”

“What is your costume?” I finally ask.

“I’m a frat boy,” she responds.

“Oh.”

Students don’t officially know the reason for the evacuation – only that there has been a threat to our school and we are responding out of “an abundance of caution.” We have been instructed not to share details with the kids at this time.

But there are security and police walking all over campus with uniforms and dogs that leave little to the imagination.

A quiet student who has special needs is standing with her paraeducator, observing the scene. “That says BOMB,” she notes, referring to the big, bold lettering across the back of their jackets. 

Yes, yes it does.

There’s a great deal of confusion over who should and should not be boarding the buses at this time. I sprint from the bus to my principal to triple check, then back to the bus to give the driver a final clarification. 

There’s a girl at the front of the bus in a full-blown panic attack, a classmate by her side – not saying much – simply accompanying her in a gentle gesture of, I’ve got you.

“Profe Klein!!” yell two of my goofball students when they see I’ve boarded the bus with them. I sit with my Ukrainian student, borrow the counselor’s cell phone and look up her dad’s phone number, writing it shakily on a scrap of paper as the bus bounces out of the parking lot. 

After my student talks to her dad, she hands me the phone to help clarify the situation. I let him know his daughter is safe and confirm where to pick her up.

“Are you already at the elementary school?” I ask.

“No. I… how to say… I am driving now, and I will arrive there in a few minutes,” he says, emphasizing his words to get his message across as best as he can in English, just as his daughter does.

We walk past elementary kids bouncing rubber balls on the blacktop. They smile and wave at us. We pass more groups of tiny children jumping rope and chasing around, joyous and carefree. The elementary school staff have prepared a path for us to the gym and are directing us at each step of the way with confident smiles. I feel some kind of feeling at that.

There’s no protocol, but we are making it up as we go. Some guy in a yellow-green safety vest whom I remember as being named “Beans” (surely that’s not accurate) starts calling out names of students who need to be located in an impressively booming voice. 

A mom, with hidden desperation, tells me she’s got a diabetic kid in the car and begs me to find her son so she can get them home. I run to “Beans,” tap him on the shoulder and ask him to call out the name. In that moment, there’s something touching about the fact that he can yell louder than I can, and together we can make this work. 

It soon becomes clear that we are literally going to get these kids out of the gym and reunited with their parents one by one. We jog up and down the little hill from the parking lot, where parents crowd the tiny entrance through the fence, urgently but respectfully. We take names, jog back up to the gym and call for the students. At a certain point, I think to myself that there has to be a better way to do this. But we aren’t emergency responders, so why would we know a better way?

I see a man I recognize, but my brain takes a moment to place him. It’s the father of my brand-new student from China, who speaks a beginning level of English, and I realize I haven’t seen her. We attempt to communicate, and I assure her dad we will find her. 

I ask if he has connected with his daughter by cellphone, and he shows me a translation from Chinese that’s got the pronouns all screwed up and says something like, “He said she was supposed to be on the bus but is not going the bus left and is at the school.” 

Squinting at his phone, I read the text and try to decipher the meaning. “Ugh!” he exclaims, mildly exasperated. “Google translate so bad!”

“Stay here, we will find her,” I assure him and dart to my principal, who calls over to our school.

A few minutes later, one of our math teachers appears on the path like a celebrity, escorting the student, who at every step threatens to wander the wrong direction. 

“This way!” I coax her multiple times as she floats away from me, resisting the urge to grab her around the shoulders and physically guide her. “Your daddy’s over here!” 

Back to the gym… “Anissa Smith!” Beans’ voice booms, threatening to bust windows. He suddenly grabs his knees and bursts into laughter, realizing there are only about ten kids left in the gym. “I guess I don’t need to scream so loud anymore.” We are all on autopilot. 

Some decisions have come razor sharp on instinct and adrenaline; others, we’ll realize later, made absolutely no sense as we muddled through with cloudy, overstimulated brains.

All of a sudden, it’s done. We’ve gotten 950 kids home to their families. We have a short staff meetup in the elementary gym. My principal is as calm as a deep crystal lake undisturbed by so much as an idly thrown pebble. 

“Just because it felt chaotic in the moment, doesn’t mean it wasn’t successful,” she says of our evacuation. We realize we’ve done a fine job.

They bring us pizza. The counseling intern keeps pouring everyone tiny cups of water, and we devour a huge box of cracker and cookie snack packs.

I borrow my colleague’s phone to let my husband know everything is safe. As I’m texting, the unfamiliar phone keeps autocorrecting every word, and at a certain point one substituted word changes the entire meaning of the sentence into something slightly naughty. I burst into a giggle fit and can’t stop laughing. It’s not that funny, which is my first clue that my adrenaline is still on fire. 

My second clue is the fact that I’m ready to evacuate 950 more kids. I have this twisted feeling in my stomach that what we just did was fun. It wasn’t. 

There are one or two kids with us still who are waiting to be picked up. They are invited to grab a slice of pizza. “Excuse me,” one asks me politely. “Do you know if any of the pizzas have olives?” The question is so endearing I almost want to cry.

My colleague in the pepperoni pizza costume is eating a slice of cheese pizza. 

“Not pepperoni?” I ask.

“I don’t like pepperoni!” she responds peppily. Again, everything that’s not funny is hilarious to me.

They move us into some portable classrooms to wait while the bomb squad finishes searching our school across the street. 

I tap my foot anxiously, wondering if we’ll be allowed back in so I can retrieve my keys and phone. What’s really making me restless, if I’m being honest, is the thought of not being able to play the piano, which I’ve begun doing obsessively every day after sixth period. 

In the portable, a couple teachers immediately scope out the board games, while a few others start up a game of air hockey. Our counselor, the most calm and centered person I know, is revved up showing a card trick to Pizza Slice. 

“Which stack of cards don’t you like?”

“I don’t like that stack!” She scoops them up with nimble fingers.

“Okay, now which cards don’t you want?”

“I’m really not at all fond of these ones here.” They are totally in sync with the snappy back and forth. As they finish the trick, the counselor tries to get more people involved. “Anyone want to learn this magic trick? I can teach it to you! It’s really fun to show your kids.” She sounds like an infomercial in her uncharacteristic energy high. 

“Anyone want to play a board game?” someone asks. I do – I adore board games, and I’m bursting to do something. The others, however, shake their heads.

I glance around. Our debate teacher is conked out against the wall in the corner. In my memory, he has a pillow and a blanket, though looking back that doesn’t quite make sense. All the male teachers are on one side of the room, and the female staff are on the other side. Just like at staff meetings. I roll my eyes. “Seriously, are we really segregated by gender right now?” I ask aloud.

“Anyone want to play cards?” some are still insisting. 

“I do! I’ll play cards with you,” I reply excitedly. My colleague explains the rules, which my brain can’t process, but I’m feeling overly confident so I figure I’ll be able to catch on. Aces are worth one or eleven, Kings are worth ten, Jacks are worth negative four. Easy.

We start to play. She lays down an eight, and I add seven – for fifteen. She adds six with a great deal of thought to reach the sum of twenty-one. On her next turn, her face goes pale and looks almost panicked. 

“I’m having trouble adding.”

“Me too,” I assure her. “It’s the trauma,” I realize. 

“I can’t play this right now.” She scoops up all the cards urgently, in a hurry to get the game off the table and out of sight. We blink, wide-eyed, taking that in. 

We joke around. One teacher shows up with a Starbucks coffee, making a half-hearted mock-gesture to hide it behind her back. A teacher I’ve only ever known as sweet and serious makes a series of sassy remarks about our current situation, and I wonder again if that’s the adrenaline drawing her out, or maybe I just don’t know her that well. I like her sassy side.

Around 2:30, we’re told the building has been cleared and we are allowed to retrieve our items from school. 

It’s not fear we feel walking back into the building. It’s something else. I still don’t know what. Some feeling kind of like the pandemic. Like it didn’t really get you – not directly – but maybe it could have. So – do you really have the right to feel any way about it, or should you just brush it off?

After I’ve grabbed my stuff and unplugged my Day of the Dead lights, I think to myself that I could go downstairs and play piano. I really, desperately want to play. But I have to second guess if that’s appropriate, or weird, and I also have to take into account the 0.00001% chance that I’ll blow to smithereens while playing “Hey There, Delilah,” and I have two kids so that seems irresponsible. So I force myself to just walk out of the building, reassuring myself that I’ll be back here tomorrow.