Some Dreamers
TW: self-harm, gun violence, suicide.
Santa Clarita is a city that shouldn’t exist. It’s a suburban community supplanted onto a desert— man-made lakes and over-watered lawns disguising a landscape of yearly wildfires and chronic drought. The people are mostly middle-class families and Hollywood commuters, those who want a piece of the LA dream without the rush of city life.
Two fake rivers cut through Santa Clarita. The first used to be a real river, the Santa Clara, but after years of drought and agricultural damming is only a riverbed. It is home to little else besides litter, abandoned shopping carts, and the refuse of a heroin epidemic. The middle school near my old house is named “Arroyo Seco” which translates to “dry river.”
The other fake river is an aqueduct— a gargantuan cement valley that snakes through the town and borders my high school. In kindergarten we were made to watch a PSA on aqueduct safety, and why one should never, under any circumstances, enter the aqueduct or she will be swept away by a sudden and unpredictable surge of water. I had nightmares about drowning for months afterward— visions of my loved ones pulled into man-made rapids.
Saugus High School, where I spent four years of my educational life and countless hours rehearsing forgotten plays, is a sprawling cement fortress comprised of blindingly white buildings and tall palm trees, overlooked by a hill that holds giant pipe carrying water from far up north. It is a traditional high school in only the Californian sense; there are no hallways and there is no cafeteria-- students move from class to class by walking between buildings, they eat lunch outside and sit on planters or sidewalks, basking in the golden sun.
It is this peculiar nature of Saugus’ design which makes it so immediately recognizable on camera. Even from a bird’s-eye view the campus is unmistakable. Perhaps this is why it was used as the location for the 1990 Christian Slater film, Pump Up the Volume. It was a wholly different context in which the world would be ultimately destined to see Saugus, filmed by helicopters and surrounded by emergency vehicles, its image marred by the logos and graphics of various news stations.
Before the helicopters and the tragic B-roll of teary-eyed children, Saugus was a somewhat unremarkable high school and I was a moderately-remarkable student, transfixed with grades and clubs and rehearsals. I was sheltered, largely by my own effort; an adolescent fear of the adult world paired with undiagnosed Obsessive Compulsive Disorder left me void of any classic teenage curiosity for drugs or parties or sex.
My freshman year at Saugus is when my relationship with S began to fade. She was my closest friend in middle school, and we spent hours passing notes and crafting inside jokes. We went to a now-defunct charter middle school built inside of an old factory, and clung to each other through its prepubescent chaos. S was very different from me, and I found it exciting; she was beautiful and thin and looked like an adult by age twelve, at 5 foot 9. She always dressed in short denim shorts and thin cotton tank tops, even in the dead of winter; she claimed that she “didn’t get cold.” Though one might not notice from looking at her, she was half-Japanese. Her mother worked as a language tutor. S teased me in Japanese until I understood enough to tease her back.
One time we took a walk on the hill behind her house, making our way through chaparral and collecting burrs on our socks and shoelaces. We stopped at a small pond where tadpoles swam in wriggling clusters. S reached into her backpack and pulled out a small hot-pink-and-green Barbie-branded Polaroid camera. “I only have one picture left,” she said, “so we gotta make it good.” She held the camera in her long and bony arm, and leaned her head on my shoulder. I blinked when it flashed. It felt unfamiliar and magical to watch a photo become immediately physical. We placed the film under a rock and waited for the image to creep into existence. After a few minutes we took out the photo and marveled at our blurry selves, toothy and washed out in the harsh afternoon sun. I held onto it as we walked back to her house, accompanied her brother to karate practice, and returned home to eat rice snacks and play two-person truth or dare.
It was after adventurous days like these that S would quietly confide in me things I could only pretend to understand. We would sit on her couch and wrap ourselves in a fraying quilt, a video game idling on her tv, and she would talk about how she hid cuts on her body and the number of days she had gone without eating a meal, and once we were in eighth grade, what sex was like. I would nod and do my best to disguise my concern, offering love and comfort, suggesting she seek help though neither of us knew where to find it.
I was obsessed with S in a way that I didn’t understand at the time, my naivete keeping my queerness from even my own comprehension. I knew that I wanted to put words to how I felt about her, but I’d get stuck on small details, like the way her fingers were soft and gentle when she braided my hair, but deft and strong when she brought me into her karate class. I’ve kept a journal diligently since middle school, and during this time I often wrote about S and our moments of closeness,“Today S brought eyeliner to school, and she did my makeup with it after P.E., and then helped me wash it off before Mom came to pick me up. I felt nervous and looked kind of weird with it on but it was also nice to have her look at me so closely and want to touch my face.”
During the eighth grade Halloween festival, S pulled me into a bathroom, sobbing. She was dressed as a skeleton, wearing a cartoonishly printed ribcage-with-heart shirt and black shorts, black-and-white paint on her face. I was some sort of ghostly composer, a costume I made out of a Venetian mask with music note designs and a boy’s George Washington costume. The mask was intended as home decor and not for wear, so when I took it off and set it on the counter I could see a painful red line bisecting my face. I asked S what had happened and she explained that her period was two weeks late. I nodded, pretending to understand what that meant-- my body was as late to puberty as my mind was to learning about it, and I wouldn’t get a period for the first time till sophomore year of high school. “I might be pregnant,” I remember her saying, tears smudging her skull makeup. I remember hugging her, hiding my confusion; we were kids, a person at our age creating life seemed impossible. She told me that if she was pregnant, she would kill herself, and she would do it by taking a canoe into a river and setting it and herself on fire. I wondered where she would find a river.
She got her period two days later and seemed to forget the whole situation, and we never talked about it again.
By the time we were juniors in high school, S and I had lost contact. We drifted into different friend groups, and took different classes. She graduated a year early and disappeared-- deleted her social media without warning and changed her phone number. Every so often in the years following I’d try and find her online-- hoping to see a new Facebook account and terrified to find an obituary. Neither appeared until winter of my junior year of college, when her father died of a sudden heart attack-- the article was simple, stating his occupation, explaining how he was survived by his ex-wife, his daughter S, and her brother N. I wanted to send S my condolences, but she seemed to exist nowhere on the internet with the exception of one website listing her high school track and field times. She was pretty good at the long jump. November fourteenth, 2019 was the day the helicopter footage made the image of Saugus High School infamous. I woke up in my bed in Austin, Texas, to the news that my alma mater had joined Parkland and Columbine in the ever-growing list of schools to endure mass shootings. Five students were shot, and two were killed. The shooter, a student, died of a self-inflicted wound; it was his sixteenth birthday.
It wasn’t until the end of the day that I learned that S’s brother, N, was the shooter. I spent the day reeling, obsessively rewatching videos of my friends and teachers giving interviews on national news. I refreshed social media apps to figure out the names of the victims, and texted all my old teachers to check in and send them my support. Eventually, people posted pictures of the shooter, and Daily Mail even ran an article, Everything You Need To Know About N (Last Name). I thought about S, and wondered where she was, how soon she knew. I wondered if she still had that picture of us from so long ago. I figured probably not.
A day later, the story is buried. School shootings are hard to think about, and often go the way of missing children, forgotten by everyone but those closest to the loss. The pain lives with the families of the victims and the trauma of the survivors, the bullet damage on concrete walls and the Google News search results for Saugus High School.
If I could make myself hate the shooter with the same cut-and-dried rage that I’m able to loathe criminal strangers on the news, maybe it would be easier to let the whole thing slip away. But I can still see myself at a fourth-of-July barbecue with S and N, laughing and dripping wet as we blasted each other with super-soaker water guns.
Late fall in Santa Clarita marks the last of the Santa Ana winds, which blow with a dry fierceness that rips still-green leaves from branches. A wildfire ravaged 78,000 Southern Californian acres only weeks before the shooting at Saugus, and the wind now carries its charred reminder for miles, spreading ash like impossible snow through suburban streets. In the stillness that follows such an event, hope springs like lodgepole pines out of the blackened earth, and children make quiet vigils in memory of their fallen friends. The 10-day forecast predicts a rare and heavy rain, which will quench the dry land and paint the brown hills briefly green. If it lasts long enough, the rain will find the riverbed, and form a steady creek, momentarily reviving the Santa Clara and washing the earth anew.