Intruder Drill
Day Ten of Thirty Days of Writing

In 2003, I was in sixth grade at Holman Middle School. The overcast clouds clung overhead like a shower cap over the city of St. Louis. Earlier in the week we had an assembly to discuss a new procedure for a drill that was going into effect — an intruder drill.
They gave us the rundown that if an event like this were to occur, the principal would make a fake announcement over the intercom and the teachers would know to run the drill. They assured us that this was just procedure, and nothing like this would probably ever happen, but if it did. We would turn off all of the lights, lock the classroom door and sit there quietly until the building was “all clear”. It sounded good in theory, but why would someone come into our middle school to hurt us?
History was my second period of that gray Missouri day. Our teacher was lecturing about something, pacing through the aisles of tables we sat at, when I saw a helicopter fly by across the street — and then another one, and another one. Northwest Plaza Mall was across the street; mostly abandoned except for a movie theater we sometimes took field trips to — and a Chic-fil-a.
Being the sixth graders that we were, we all slowly drew our attention to the windows where three black helicopters were circling like vultures around the Plaza. After repeatedly trying to regain our attention, Mrs. C closed the blinds, and a few moments later the principal’s voice came on the intercom. I can’t remember what the fake announcement was, but they may as well have announced that we were enacting the intruder drill — it was so obvious. I remember thinking, if there was someone in the building, they definitely knew we were onto them.
Our teacher froze, then walked quickly over to the door, locked it, and shut off the lights. We sat there in almost darkness, slits of light from the blinds lying over the classroom like a grid, and waited. The silence was uncomfortable, and then someone asked it, “What happens if someone gets in?” We may have locked the door, but even in sixth grade we knew that a wooden door with a glass window wouldn’t stop someone from getting in if they really wanted to, and this hadn’t been talked about at the assembly.
Mrs. C paused, and looked around at us all sitting there staring back at her, and then tried to assure us that nothing like that would happen. Maybe we would have accepted that, but there had been an assembly, and we had seen the helicopters circling the mall, and we had seen things like this happening on the news at other schools. There was more silence, and then someone pushed on, “but let’s just say they did,” and everyone joined in a chorus of “yeas” and we all stared at her again, until she gave in and decided to play it out.
“First, we would flip this table in the center of the room,” she said, nodding for the students sitting there to get up and flip the table. Then as she instructed we would flip the two on each side of the first and make a barricade around Mrs. C’s desk. As we flipped the tables and made our makeshift barricade, chatter broke out between classmates, typical of a group of ten year olds. A giggle about how we couldn’t believe we were doing this was interrupted by a harsh whisper by Mrs. C, “but it will only work if we’re absolutely silent”. I remember noticing the stress bouncing between her eyes, and we remembered that there was probably an intruder in the building. As silence settled in again, I looked around at our classroom, tables turned over sideways, backpacks and binders tossed haphazardly to the corners of the room, and twenty ten year olds, silently making a barrier around our sixth grade history teacher’s desk. Just when we had finished, all of us sitting huddled behind our safe haven, the principal’s voice rang over the loudspeaker, “All clear.”
Without instruction, we all began putting the classroom back together silently, no chatter this time, and once everything was back in order we waited — still silent — for Mrs. C to continue the lesson, but she didn’t say anything either. Finally, someone raised their hand and asked if we could come up with a better code word for the principal, and laugher crushed the silence. This continued until the bell rang, announcing the end of class five minutes later. We found out later in the day that there wasn’t actually anyone in our school, but they had locked down the building just in case the police chase across the street had come our way.
The music teacher even made a joke about this drill that he claimed replaced the nuclear bomb drills of the late 80s and 90s. He laughed telling us that hiding under a desk wouldn’t protect us if a nuclear bomb was dropped on Lambert Airport that was only a few miles away. “We’d all be dust before they had time to announce the drill,” he laughed. Chuckles bounced around the classroom, and we all looked at each other wondering why this was so funny. Maybe it was one of the jokes that were only funny to grown-ups?
In retrospect, I can appreciate the dark humor of pretending that hiding under a desk would protect you from a nuke. However, every sixth grader in that room knew that a gun could kill just as many people in the right hands. Northwest Plaza was later bulldozed to the ground and replaced by a Menards.
