HOME | DD

Description
I’m the type of person that likes to be invisible every once in a while. I’m by no means a loner; I just like to know that there are people out there who don’t know me. It makes me feel like the world isn’t quite so small. I don’t like being glorified, either. When you’re glorified, people crowd around you and everyone knows who you are. The world is too small that way. I’ve always felt like I was living in a small world. That is, until I met him. I knew then that the world is vast and open. I could see it in his deep, chocolate-brown eyes. Despite the way I feel about small worlds, I may have never left my hometown, never met him, had it not been for a shooting at my high school when I was seventeen years old.

The year was 1985. U2 blared from the radio of my 70’s Vista Cruiser as I pulled up to Miller High School. The backpack I lugged up the stairs to the doors of the old brick building was weighted down with textbooks and Blondie comics. I was your typical junior with nothing particularly outstanding about me. I was a normal student living a normal day. I dissected a frog in first period Biology, bombed a test in second period English and slipped in and out of consciousness in third period Economics.

Normalcy ended at lunch, along with life as I had known it. My friends and I were chattering away about the cute football players when a boy in a trench coat burst through the swinging double doors of the cafeteria. I recognized him as a loner freshman who didn’t have many friends, but I didn’t remember his name. Maybe if one person had remembered his name, one person reached out to him, he wouldn’t have done it. He reached into his trench coat and produced a double-barrel shotgun. He aimed it at the ceiling and a deafening bang rang out when he pulled the trigger. Scattered birdshot peppered the tiles above, and everyone started screaming, ducking under tables and darting for exits. But not me. I was a motionless pillar of fear as I gawked wide-eyed and mouth open at the fourteen-year-old monster less than a car length away from me.

He broke the barrel open and the two empty shells flew out. He inserted two more, snapped the barrel closed and aimed it into the crowd. It registered in my head that he was going to kill people.

I forced myself to unfreeze. It would be years before I realized what it was, but something clicked in my head. The rest is a blur of blood and adrenalin pumping harder then should be humanly possible. I remember that I lunged at the young gunman and tackled him to the ground, with one hand on the gun barrel. The gun went off, burning my hand. The pellets found a harmless home lodged in the wall. Then everything went black

I honestly don’t remember the rest of the day. It’s strange, like the gunman had pulled me into a black hole that consumed the remaining eleven and a half hours of my day. Every once in a while I get blurred images in dreams of teachers and my parents asking me if I was all right.

The school was closed for the remainder of the week. But the next day it was all over the papers: HIGHSHOOL HERO SAVES CLASSMATES FROM GUNMAN. When I returned to school, teachers congratulated me and classmates practically built an alter to me. They said I was a hero.

They said I was a hero?

“NO!” My thoughts screamed to me inside my head. “I’m not a hero.” That’s what I told the reporters, the people who stopped me on the street, the teachers, students, parents, everyone. But Miller, Nebraska was a small town, population about 10,000. Nothing grand, exciting or pivotal ever happened there. A shooting at a high school was sort of a big deal. People used it as an opportunity to create the hero they so desperately needed. (What ever happened to Superman comics?) I will admit that I may have saved a life, maybe several lives, but I didn’t like being glorified as a hero. All I did was to do the right thing. Is the world so horrid that it’s a big deal when one person does the right thing?

I guess it must be if a fourteen-year-old boy would shoot up his high school.

When you’re glorified, people crowd around you. The world is too small that way. I don’t like when the world is too small.

But that is what my life was; a small world. Up until I graduated, I was surrounded, trapped in a Plexiglas box of glory, of being a hero; helplessly looking out onto the world I was no longer allowed to live in. I couldn’t go to the mall without hearing, “OH my gosh, there’s Linda Parker, she’s a hero.” Or something that effect. Several times I caught myself screaming, “Don’t call me HERO!”
The splitmoment I graduated, I was out of that town, out of that state. I just wanted to know that there were people out there who wouldn’t point or stair when they saw me walk by. I decided to go to a place where there were enough attention mongers and real heroes that no one would even notice me: Las Vegas, Nevada.

Yes. That’s right. Sheltered small town girl was on her way to Sin City.

I had vacationed there with my family several times, and from the moment I first set my eyes on the flashing casino marquis and elaborate hotels and restaurants, I fell in love with it all. It was not only beautiful, but it was big. I like when the world feels like I could lose myself in it.

But I didn’t get lost in Las Vegas for almost twenty years. Twenty years sense I had moved into the grungy apartment complex I still lived. Twenty years sense I had started working at the dead-end job where I was still working. I was in a box again. It’s a small world after all. So much for loosing myself in Sin City.
But one night, I did get lost.

I was walking along the strip one night trying to figure out where I had parked my car. When I finally realized where I had left it, I realized that it was on the other side of the enormous casino I was standing in front of. I didn’t feel like walking all that way. I was exhausted and my brand new high heals were tormenting my feet. So I took a short cut through an ally.
Bad idea.

“Get down on the ground, NOW!” I heard the threatening order around the corner. At first I thought someone was ordering me down, but then the man continued. “I said on the ground! Guns down!”

Something drove me, compelled me to turn the corner. It was the same unidentified force I had felt in Miller when I had taken down the gunman, became a “hero.” That was why I was in this mess. I slowly slipped out of my shoes so I would not be heard. When I quietly padded around the corner, I saw a man with his back turned to me, his gun leveled at two police officers. On the ground was a body, a dead body, dotted with bullet holes. Surrounding the area was a line of bright yellow ribbon reading: CRIME SCENE KEEP OUT. Obviously the crime scene tape had not deterred the gunman.

The cops were reluctantly complying with the gunman, removing the guns from their holster and laying them on the ground. One was a blond woman, mid to late thirties. The other was a good-looking man with a buzz cut.
The blond woman spoke defiantly to the gunman. “You won’t get away with this. What do you think…”

“Shut up!” The gunman interrupted. “Both of you, on your knees.”
Like a movie in slow motion, the man and the woman lowered to the ground. The woman knelt on two knees and the man bent on one knee like he was about to be knighted, only his hands were raised above his head, as were the woman’s.
I watched the gunman press the barrel of his pistol against the woman’s head. Her façade of fearlessness broke and terror consumed her; I could see it in her eyes. I suppose it donned on all of us that he was about to kill them.

He was going to kill people. This picture was all too familiar to me.

I knew the cops knew I was behind the gunman. I couldn’t let him kill them. I had to do something. But what could I do? I was unarmed. I knew that. The two terrified cops on there knees in front of me probably knew that. But the gunman didn’t know that. I frantically glanced around looking for anything that could pass as a weapon. I saw salvation less then a foot away: a metal pipe, maybe a foot long and about an inch in diameter. I picked it up and without a second thought (there wasn’t time) jabbed it into the gunman’s back. My hope was that it would feel like the barrel of a gun.

“Drop the gun.” I ordered in a surprisingly calm, steady voice. The male cop’s head snapped up and our eyes met. In that moment I knew what had lead me down this alley tonight, what had driven me to confront the Millar High gunman twenty years ago. It may sound cheesy, but it was fate.

The gunman didn’t obey me. “I said drop the gun!”

“Make me,” he taunted. He was calling my bluff. I rose up the lead pipe and struck him on the back of the head. The gunman collapsed unconscious in between the two cops.

The man pivoted and touched the gunman’s neck, checking his pulse to make sure I had not killed him, while the blond quickly rose and stared at me in…disbelief, it may have been.

“Did I kill him?” I asked the male cop.

“No,” he said, rising to his feet and looking at me like he was looking at his freaking guardian angel. “I think I speak for Katie also when I say we couldn’t be more thankful you were back here. That man was about to kill us.”

“Most people would have disappeared at the first sight of a gun, that or been scarred stiff,” added the blond woman whose name I now knew was Katie. “You’re a civilian and it wasn’t your responsibility to intervene, but we owe you our lives.” She looked over at her partner, who had stepped aside to use his cell phone. “Grant, are you calling Captain Herral?”

Grant nodded. Katie turned back to me. “We will need you to wait here for awhile until someone gets here to take your statement. You just witnessed a crime.”

“And you guys were the victims.” I wasn’t asking a question. Katie thought for a moment and then nodded her head.

After Grant got off the phone with Herral, the three of us waited in awkward silence for the surprisingly short amount of time it took for someone to arrive.

“So this is the hero?” A chubby, gray-haired detective in a suit that I assumed to be Herral said as he waddled up to the scene, followed closely by a two more cops. My muscles tensed when I heard the word hero. Not this all over again. I said nothing in response to the fat cop; I only forced a fake smile and a nod.

Then Herral addressed Katie and Grant, “Are you two OK?” They both nodded a yes. “These two are going to take over this crime scene and…” He stopped when the gunman started to stir awake. Herral got out his handcuffs, knelt down beside the dazed man and secured his hands behind his back. He heaved the perpetrator to his feet. “Anyway,” he continued, “let’s get you down to the station so you can fill out a formal statement.”

I followed Grant and Katie’s crime scene van to the LVPD main office, dreading what was to come, but Grant’s eyes; beautiful, deep add dark, stayed on my mind to keep company with my nervousness.

It was easier than I thought it would be. I went in, answered a few questions, signed something that I probably should have read first, let them take my fingerprints and DNA, and got out. I thought, hoped, that it was over. It wasn’t yet.

“Linda,” I heard Grant call after me when I was trying to leave. I stopped without turning around. He put his hand on my shoulder and gently turned me around to face him. “Linda, what you did back there was…”

“Listen,” I interrupted him, “I saved your and Katie’s life. I get it. I don’t like being called a hero. The Captain already took care of that. I just want to go home.”

“Linda, I wanted to ask you if you wanted to go get coffee or something.”

“I don’t need a reward.”

“It’s not a reward. It doesn’t mean I’m calling you a hero. It just means you’re a nice, pretty girl that I want to buy coffee for.”
I thought for a long moment before answering, “Only if you promise not to make a big deal about what I did tonight.”

“Deal.”

On our coffee date, we talked endlessly about absolutely noting. I did, however, end up telling him why I don’t like to be called a hero; the entire story of the Miller High shooting. And the surprising thing is, he didn’t treat me like a hero, didn’t glorify me. I liked that.

One coffee date turned into two turned into four turned into eight until I stopped counting and just enjoyed our relationship that spawned from the reversed gender version of a knight in armor ferry tail. When he kissed me for the first time, he called me his hero. And you know what? I didn’t mind. In fact I actually liked it. It was because I was dubbed a hero that I came to Las Vegas in the first place. It’s because I’m a hero that I met Grant. The world doesn’t feel small any more. I know now that it is endless and filled with laughter and tears, joy and pain and limitless possibilities. And I’m going to live in this huge world with the man I love, the only person I let call me hero.

Description
I’m the type of person that likes to be invisible every once in a while. I’m by no means a loner; I just like to know that there are people out there who don’t know me. It makes me feel like the world isn’t quite so small. I don’t like being glorified, either. When you’re glorified, people crowd around you and everyone knows who you are. The world is too small that way. I’ve always felt like I was living in a small world. That is, until I met him. I knew then that the world is vast and open. I could see it in his deep, chocolate-brown eyes. Despite the way I feel about small worlds, I may have never left my hometown, never met him, had it not been for a shooting at my high school when I was seventeen years old.

The year was 1985. U2 blared from the radio of my 70’s Vista Cruiser as I pulled up to Miller High School. The backpack I lugged up the stairs to the doors of the old brick building was weighted down with textbooks and Blondie comics. I was your typical junior with nothing particularly outstanding about me. I was a normal student living a normal day. I dissected a frog in first period Biology, bombed a test in second period English and slipped in and out of consciousness in third period Economics.

Normalcy ended at lunch, along with life as I had known it. My friends and I were chattering away about the cute football players when a boy in a trench coat burst through the swinging double doors of the cafeteria. I recognized him as a loner freshman who didn’t have many friends, but I didn’t remember his name. Maybe if one person had remembered his name, one person reached out to him, he wouldn’t have done it. He reached into his trench coat and produced a double-barrel shotgun. He aimed it at the ceiling and a deafening bang rang out when he pulled the trigger. Scattered birdshot peppered the tiles above, and everyone started screaming, ducking under tables and darting for exits. But not me. I was a motionless pillar of fear as I gawked wide-eyed and mouth open at the fourteen-year-old monster less than a car length away from me.

He broke the barrel open and the two empty shells flew out. He inserted two more, snapped the barrel closed and aimed it into the crowd. It registered in my head that he was going to kill people.

I forced myself to unfreeze. It would be years before I realized what it was, but something clicked in my head. The rest is a blur of blood and adrenalin pumping harder then should be humanly possible. I remember that I lunged at the young gunman and tackled him to the ground, with one hand on the gun barrel. The gun went off, burning my hand. The pellets found a harmless home lodged in the wall. Then everything went black

I honestly don’t remember the rest of the day. It’s strange, like the gunman had pulled me into a black hole that consumed the remaining eleven and a half hours of my day. Every once in a while I get blurred images in dreams of teachers and my parents asking me if I was all right.

The school was closed for the remainder of the week. But the next day it was all over the papers: HIGHSHOOL HERO SAVES CLASSMATES FROM GUNMAN. When I returned to school, teachers congratulated me and classmates practically built an alter to me. They said I was a hero.

They said I was a hero?

“NO!” My thoughts screamed to me inside my head. “I’m not a hero.” That’s what I told the reporters, the people who stopped me on the street, the teachers, students, parents, everyone. But Miller, Nebraska was a small town, population about 10,000. Nothing grand, exciting or pivotal ever happened there. A shooting at a high school was sort of a big deal. People used it as an opportunity to create the hero they so desperately needed. (What ever happened to Superman comics?) I will admit that I may have saved a life, maybe several lives, but I didn’t like being glorified as a hero. All I did was to do the right thing. Is the world so horrid that it’s a big deal when one person does the right thing?

I guess it must be if a fourteen-year-old boy would shoot up his high school.

When you’re glorified, people crowd around you. The world is too small that way. I don’t like when the world is too small.

But that is what my life was; a small world. Up until I graduated, I was surrounded, trapped in a Plexiglas box of glory, of being a hero; helplessly looking out onto the world I was no longer allowed to live in. I couldn’t go to the mall without hearing, “OH my gosh, there’s Linda Parker, she’s a hero.” Or something that effect. Several times I caught myself screaming, “Don’t call me HERO!”
The splitmoment I graduated, I was out of that town, out of that state. I just wanted to know that there were people out there who wouldn’t point or stair when they saw me walk by. I decided to go to a place where there were enough attention mongers and real heroes that no one would even notice me: Las Vegas, Nevada.

Yes. That’s right. Sheltered small town girl was on her way to Sin City.

I had vacationed there with my family several times, and from the moment I first set my eyes on the flashing casino marquis and elaborate hotels and restaurants, I fell in love with it all. It was not only beautiful, but it was big. I like when the world feels like I could lose myself in it.

But I didn’t get lost in Las Vegas for almost twenty years. Twenty years sense I had moved into the grungy apartment complex I still lived. Twenty years sense I had started working at the dead-end job where I was still working. I was in a box again. It’s a small world after all. So much for loosing myself in Sin City.
But one night, I did get lost.

I was walking along the strip one night trying to figure out where I had parked my car. When I finally realized where I had left it, I realized that it was on the other side of the enormous casino I was standing in front of. I didn’t feel like walking all that way. I was exhausted and my brand new high heals were tormenting my feet. So I took a short cut through an ally.
Bad idea.

“Get down on the ground, NOW!” I heard the threatening order around the corner. At first I thought someone was ordering me down, but then the man continued. “I said on the ground! Guns down!”

Something drove me, compelled me to turn the corner. It was the same unidentified force I had felt in Miller when I had taken down the gunman, became a “hero.” That was why I was in this mess. I slowly slipped out of my shoes so I would not be heard. When I quietly padded around the corner, I saw a man with his back turned to me, his gun leveled at two police officers. On the ground was a body, a dead body, dotted with bullet holes. Surrounding the area was a line of bright yellow ribbon reading: CRIME SCENE KEEP OUT. Obviously the crime scene tape had not deterred the gunman.

The cops were reluctantly complying with the gunman, removing the guns from their holster and laying them on the ground. One was a blond woman, mid to late thirties. The other was a good-looking man with a buzz cut.
The blond woman spoke defiantly to the gunman. “You won’t get away with this. What do you think…”

“Shut up!” The gunman interrupted. “Both of you, on your knees.”
Like a movie in slow motion, the man and the woman lowered to the ground. The woman knelt on two knees and the man bent on one knee like he was about to be knighted, only his hands were raised above his head, as were the woman’s.
I watched the gunman press the barrel of his pistol against the woman’s head. Her façade of fearlessness broke and terror consumed her; I could see it in her eyes. I suppose it donned on all of us that he was about to kill them.

He was going to kill people. This picture was all too familiar to me.

I knew the cops knew I was behind the gunman. I couldn’t let him kill them. I had to do something. But what could I do? I was unarmed. I knew that. The two terrified cops on there knees in front of me probably knew that. But the gunman didn’t know that. I frantically glanced around looking for anything that could pass as a weapon. I saw salvation less then a foot away: a metal pipe, maybe a foot long and about an inch in diameter. I picked it up and without a second thought (there wasn’t time) jabbed it into the gunman’s back. My hope was that it would feel like the barrel of a gun.

“Drop the gun.” I ordered in a surprisingly calm, steady voice. The male cop’s head snapped up and our eyes met. In that moment I knew what had lead me down this alley tonight, what had driven me to confront the Millar High gunman twenty years ago. It may sound cheesy, but it was fate.

The gunman didn’t obey me. “I said drop the gun!”

“Make me,” he taunted. He was calling my bluff. I rose up the lead pipe and struck him on the back of the head. The gunman collapsed unconscious in between the two cops.

The man pivoted and touched the gunman’s neck, checking his pulse to make sure I had not killed him, while the blond quickly rose and stared at me in…disbelief, it may have been.

“Did I kill him?” I asked the male cop.

“No,” he said, rising to his feet and looking at me like he was looking at his freaking guardian angel. “I think I speak for Katie also when I say we couldn’t be more thankful you were back here. That man was about to kill us.”

“Most people would have disappeared at the first sight of a gun, that or been scarred stiff,” added the blond woman whose name I now knew was Katie. “You’re a civilian and it wasn’t your responsibility to intervene, but we owe you our lives.” She looked over at her partner, who had stepped aside to use his cell phone. “Grant, are you calling Captain Herral?”

Grant nodded. Katie turned back to me. “We will need you to wait here for awhile until someone gets here to take your statement. You just witnessed a crime.”

“And you guys were the victims.” I wasn’t asking a question. Katie thought for a moment and then nodded her head.

After Grant got off the phone with Herral, the three of us waited in awkward silence for the surprisingly short amount of time it took for someone to arrive.

“So this is the hero?” A chubby, gray-haired detective in a suit that I assumed to be Herral said as he waddled up to the scene, followed closely by a two more cops. My muscles tensed when I heard the word hero. Not this all over again. I said nothing in response to the fat cop; I only forced a fake smile and a nod.

Then Herral addressed Katie and Grant, “Are you two OK?” They both nodded a yes. “These two are going to take over this crime scene and…” He stopped when the gunman started to stir awake. Herral got out his handcuffs, knelt down beside the dazed man and secured his hands behind his back. He heaved the perpetrator to his feet. “Anyway,” he continued, “let’s get you down to the station so you can fill out a formal statement.”

I followed Grant and Katie’s crime scene van to the LVPD main office, dreading what was to come, but Grant’s eyes; beautiful, deep add dark, stayed on my mind to keep company with my nervousness.

It was easier than I thought it would be. I went in, answered a few questions, signed something that I probably should have read first, let them take my fingerprints and DNA, and got out. I thought, hoped, that it was over. It wasn’t yet.

“Linda,” I heard Grant call after me when I was trying to leave. I stopped without turning around. He put his hand on my shoulder and gently turned me around to face him. “Linda, what you did back there was…”

“Listen,” I interrupted him, “I saved your and Katie’s life. I get it. I don’t like being called a hero. The Captain already took care of that. I just want to go home.”

“Linda, I wanted to ask you if you wanted to go get coffee or something.”

“I don’t need a reward.”

“It’s not a reward. It doesn’t mean I’m calling you a hero. It just means you’re a nice, pretty girl that I want to buy coffee for.”
I thought for a long moment before answering, “Only if you promise not to make a big deal about what I did tonight.”

“Deal.”

On our coffee date, we talked endlessly about absolutely noting. I did, however, end up telling him why I don’t like to be called a hero; the entire story of the Miller High shooting. And the surprising thing is, he didn’t treat me like a hero, didn’t glorify me. I liked that.

One coffee date turned into two turned into four turned into eight until I stopped counting and just enjoyed our relationship that spawned from the reversed gender version of a knight in armor ferry tail. When he kissed me for the first time, he called me his hero. And you know what? I didn’t mind. In fact I actually liked it. It was because I was dubbed a hero that I came to Las Vegas in the first place. It’s because I’m a hero that I met Grant. The world doesn’t feel small any more. I know now that it is endless and filled with laughter and tears, joy and pain and limitless possibilities. And I’m going to live in this huge world with the man I love, the only person I let call me hero.