Within a week, she had turned in her resignation. A few days later, she received a personal letter from the superintendent of schools, thanking her for her years of service and expressing his sympathy for what had happened to her. He assured her that he would give her a glowing recommendation wherever she chose to go and wished her well.
Now that she’d officially resigned, she was free to start looking into other options. She didn’t have time to waste in deciding what to do because when her contract ended in June, so would her paychecks.
She began by making lists of jobs other than teaching and researching the qualifications needed. The biggest drawbacks were the pay scales and benefits. The jobs either had a decent wage but no benefits, or basic benefits but lower pay. It was a rude awakening. Between the nightmares at night and the uncertainty of her future, Katie McGrath was scrambling to find a foothold again. It was beginning to look like teaching was still, for her, her best choice, but she had to find a way to get past what had happened to her.
After looking online at Teacher Certification Reciprocity, she easily found out what was required in other states to be certified to teach there, then began ruling out anything farther west than where she was right now or in the northern states.
Then she began looking at job openings in small towns in the rural South. Once she was assured of certification in the states she’d chosen, she applied in rural areas of Texas, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Arkansas, and then settled in to wait for responses, while checking new postings every day for something else that might work for her. Everything about her life was in flux, which meant all options were open until she made a new decision.
Almost every night when she went to bed, she relived the shooting. Even when a dream started off on one subject, it morphed back to the school, and she would wake up in tears or hysterics. Katie’s cheeks hollowed out from lack of sleep and weight loss, and the shadows beneath her eyes grew darker.
Emotionally, she was in prison—and she was her own jailer.
***
The first four responses from her applications came from multiple states. One from Arkansas. Two from Texas. One from Missouri. She immediately checked the pay scale to see where they fell within the parameters she needed, went online to research the towns they were in, then checked population and available rental properties before responding. Once the interview times were set up on Zoom, Katie began to feel optimistic.
The first Zoom interview was at 10:00 a.m. the next day, which happened to be on a Thursday. The open position was for a second-grade teacher in a small town not far from Hot Springs, Arkansas.
When it began, four people, counting Katie, were logged into the meeting. An elementary principal and two teachers were part of the interview committee. They’d barely made introductions to Katie before the principal, a man named Forbes, bluntly asked if she was the teacher from the school shooting in Albuquerque.
Katie was taken aback that the shooting incident, and not her qualifications, was the first subject of the interview because she had included that as part of her personal info when she applied.
“Did you not read my application?” she asked.
He frowned. “Yes, I read it, but—”
Katie was stunned. “So, you already know the answer, and yet you asked it anyway. Why?”
“I just wanted to get a feel for your emotional stability and—”
The callousness of the offhand comment made Katie’s skin crawl. She cut him off without hesitation.
“Oh, my emotional stability is right where it always was…intolerant of rudeness and insensitivity. I’m ending this interview right now because I don’t like what I’m feeling about your attitude. It makes me very uncomfortable. It no longer matters what you think of my qualifications because I withdraw my application. I have no interest in associating with your administration.”
She disconnected herself, closed the lid on her laptop, and got up. She was so angry she was shaking. She’d expected questions about the shooting, but not confrontations just to see if she would throw herself into hysterics.
She was hurt, and disappointed, and struggling not to be discouraged.
The next interview wasn’t until right after lunch. It was for a position as a first-grade teacher in an elementary school in a rural school district outside of Shawnee, Oklahoma. But after that first slap in the face, Katie was anxious. To kill some time, she traded her good clothes for shorts, a T-shirt, and running shoes, put on her Fitbit, grabbed her sunglasses, and left her apartment for a run around the neighborhood.
It felt good to be outside as she paused to stretch before taking off at a jog. Within a couple of blocks, she got lost in the impact of foot to concrete, the swish of her clothing as she ran, the sun on her face, the anonymity she felt behind the sunglasses.
But her endurance wasn’t back in full force, so she paced herself by jogging a distance and then walking, then repeating the process until she was back her apartment.
Katie was bathed in sweat, but she felt good—like she’d outrun the anger she’d left home with. She stripped, showered, and threw on a robe and went to the kitchen and dug through the fridge for the container of tuna salad she’d made last night. She got some crackers and a glass of iced tea, then turned on the TV and sat down to eat. She’d just taken a bite when she reached for the remote to up the volume on a news conference taking place.
The FBI was finally giving a statement regarding the shooting at Saguaro Elementary and the shooter himself.
Katie quickly turned up the volume and pushed her food aside to listen to Special Agent Baldwin, who was at the bank of microphones.
“…false name. He was living under the name Wilton Theiry, one of several aliases. His real name was Reuben Wyandotte Hollis, and he was born in Albuquerque in 1977. He was in and out of foster care here from the age of nine until he quit high school a month before he graduated. He had been living a transient life all over the lower half of the States and had been in San Francisco for the past five years. The people we’ve interviewed who knew him indicated his continuing anger at what he called ‘the system,’ and said he blamed it for his inability to thrive in society.
“We don’t know why he moved back to Albuquerque, or why he chose Saguaro Elementary as a target, but as far as we know, he had no personal connection to anyone there. As for what might have triggered him, it was discovered during his autopsy that he had stage-four liver cancer, so he may have chosen to end his own life this way before cancer did it for him. And like every other mass murderer, he chose people he didn’t know to destroy. Finishing up this profile has ended our investigation. Do you have any questions before we end this?” he asked.
Hands went up as he glanced across the crowd of reporters and pointed at one.
The reporter immediately spoke up.
“Agent Baldwin, unfortunately, mass shootings have become almost commonplace now, and I’ve covered my share. But I’ve always wondered, why do mass murderers choose strangers? If they’re angry with certain people, why aren’t they the targets?”