I started writing this book a year before Parkland (Alyssa Alhadeff, Scott Beigel, Martin Duque, Nicholas Dworet, Aaron Feis, Jaime Guttenberg, Chris Hixon, Luke Hoyer, Cara Loughran, Gina Montalto, Joaquin Oliver, Alaina Petty, Meadow Pollack, Helena Ramsay, Alex Schachter, Carmen Schentrup, Peter Wang) and Santa Fe (Jared Conard Black, Shana Fisher, Christian Riley Garcia, Aaron Kyle McLeod, Glenda Ann Perkins, Angelique Ramirez, Sabika Sheikh, Christopher Stone, Cynthia Tisdale, Kimberly Vaughan). Eighteen years after Columbine (Cassie Bernall, Steven Curnow, Corey DePooter, Kelly Fleming, Matthew Kechter, Daniel Mauser, Daniel Rohrbough, Dave Sanders, Rachel Scott, Isaiah Shoels, John Tomlin, Lauren Townsend, Kyle Velasquez). Five years after Sandy Hook (Charlotte Bacon, Daniel Barden, Rachel D’Avino, Olivia Engel, Josephine Gay, Dawn Hochsprung, Dylan Hockley, Madeleine Hsu, Catherine Hubbard, Chase Kowalski, Nancy Lanza, Jesse Lewis, Ana Márquez-Greene, James Mattioli, Grace McDonnell, Anne Marie Murphy, Emilie Parker, Jack Pinto, Noah Pozner, Caroline Previdi, Jessica Rekos, Avielle Richman, Lauren Rousseau, Mary Sherlach, Victoria Leigh Soto, Benjamin Wheeler, Allison Wyatt). I could go on and on, take up pages upon pages, listing all the schools where mass shootings have occurred. Naming their victims. In total, as of this writing on May 9, 2019, almost 250 people have died in school shootings since Columbine. According to a recent article in the Washington Post, 228,000 students have experienced gun violence at school in some manner. School-related violence has increased by 19 percent since the twenty-first century began. Schools are now regularly equipped with metal detectors and security, and practice active shooter drills. As May McGintee says in this book, “Now they are one and the same, the frightening places and the daily places.” This is our reality.

I wrote this book for all of you who are faced with this reality, day in and out. I wrote it for the people who have lived through the shootings that are mentioned above and the many other shootings that aren’t. The leftovers. The lucky ones, who are haunted by what they’ve faced and by what they have yet to face. The human beings who are collateral damage of these shootings, who have had their lives ripped out from under them, split open, used for media fodder, and then forgotten when the world moves on.

These people have had their personal memories splashed across the front pages of newspapers and discussed on twenty-four-hour news channels, and have then been left to pick up the pieces of their lives, somehow, some way, just like May and Lucy and others in my book—left to try to find a new normal once the dust has settled, if normal is even an applicable word in this context.

The world needs to remember survivors and their families. The effects of these shootings can reverberate for years. So, to all the kids who can’t move on because your pain is still with you and always will be—I see you. You are not alone.