The "Sandy Hook" of New Mexico That Never Happened

I went to my locker to grab my books. As I opened the heavy metal door, I heard a guttural scream rip down the hallway, like a man screaming with no lungs. It was raw and terrifying, followed by the sound of loud explosions. I froze and instinctively ducked into the lockers, praying for my life as I heard a mechanical scream echo throughout the building.

Gunshots went off every five seconds.

POP

POP

POP

POP

POP

Blood filled the halls. The sticky substance spread across the floor like a Lake Natreon river, icing its way down the hall.

A freshman, on his knees next to my locker, clasped his hands together like he was a devout believer in God (which is ironic because I do youth group with him and he proudly labels himself as an atheist) and begged for mercy.

“Please,” he begged. “Don’t do—”

“Shut up,” Noah roared back, jagged and furious.

Then…

POP

THUD

I tried not to cry as his lifeless body lay spread out. The locker door wrenched open. I was manhandled by my ponytail, his gun shaking as he pointed it at me. “Please don’t do this, Noah! Please, we’re friends.”

Noah’s eyes began to soften a little—just for a heartbeat—and I tried my best to take advantage of the moment. “Noah, just put that gun down! Put it down!”

But then the warmth evaporated from his gaze, and he shot me in the chest. As I slumped against the blood-stained locker, I grappled at my chest as a slick, maroon liquid began to pour out uncontrollably and my breathing became a wet, ragged slop. I sputtered out my last words, “How…could…” Then my eyes glazed over.

As I lay unresponsive, I heard my name being called over and over again

Joyce…

Joyce…

Joyce…

JOYCE HERNANDEZ!

I jolted awake from this visceral nightmare and saw Mr. Bubba looking at me with daggers. “Why were you sleeping in my class, Joyce?” he said, disappointed. “Do you want me to call your parents and see what they think?”

Everyone in the class said, “Oooooooooooooooooh.” I’ve hated Mr. Bubba—always have—and the fact that he humiliated me in front of everyone makes me wish he were the one to get shot.

Noah Barnes, the quiet kid I befriended, tucked his head deeper under his hoodie. A group of girls behind him began whispering about him. He turned to them and tried to tell them to stop, but they taunted him and called him a mama’s boy and a fat waste of flesh. When they were finished with him, he turned to me and said, “Sometimes, I wish something bad would happen to them.” I felt a chill trickle down my spine.

I forced a laugh I didn’t feel. “Dude, don’t say that. You’ll jinx it or something.” My voice came out thinner than I wanted.

He shrugged, fingers tightening around his sleeve. “Can’t jinx what already happened,” he said under his breath.

“What?”

“Nothing.” He hunched lower in his seat.

The bell shrieked. I flinched, phantom gunpowder stinging my nose, phantom POPs echoing down the hall. Then it was just scraping chairs and bored chatter.

“Alright, pack it up,” Mr. Bubba grumbled. “Quiz on chapter four tomorrow. Don’t fail unless you like summer school.”

As everyone filed out, I watched Noah a second longer. The girls shoved past, one hissing, “Freak,” as they went. Noah flinched but said nothing, folding into the crowd.

“Joyce. Move,” Mr. Bubba snapped.

I grabbed my notebook and stepped into the hallway.

It looked exactly like it had in my nightmare—same dented lockers, same scuffed tiles, same flickering light three doors down. My feet slowed. This was where I died.

Fingers yanking my ponytail. Skull slamming metal. The punch of the bullet.

My hand flew to my chest. No wound. No blood. Just my heart, pounding way too fast.

“Get out of the way,” someone grunted behind me.

I flattened myself against the lockers, letting the crowd push past. Their voices blurred, rising into that same inhuman scream from my dream.

I squeezed my eyes shut. When I opened them, the hallway was normal again.

I forced myself to my locker. The dial felt slick under my fingers; I couldn’t tell if it was sweat or memory.

A sharp bang cracked down the hall.

POP.

Just a locker slamming.

Half the hallway flinched.

A girl dropped her books. Two guys near the bathrooms half-crouched, then laughed it off. A teacher stuck his head out of his classroom, eyes sweeping the hall a little too fast.

“Everything okay out here?”

“Yeah, Mr. Daniels. Just a locker. Chill.”

His knuckles were white on the door frame before he finally went back inside.

The intercom crackled overhead.

“Students and staff,” Principal Hale said, voice strained, “a reminder that we’ll be holding a mandatory lockdown drill on Friday during third period. Please review your classroom safety procedures. Remember: preparation saves lives.”

The hallway dimmed, just for a heartbeat.

“Another one?” someone groaned.

“This is, like, the third this month,” a boy muttered. “What, do they think we’ll forget how to hide under a desk?”

“After what happened, can you blame them?” a girl replied.

Silence hit—thick and awkward.

“What… happened?” a freshman asked. Small, dark hair, backpack too big for him.

Youth group.

The atheist.

In my dream, he’d been praying.

The girl shifted. “You know. That thing. With the…” She gestured vaguely. “Everyone freaked out. We had those assemblies.”

“We never had an assembly about guns,” the freshman said.

“Yeah, we did,” she insisted, but her voice wavered. “I remember. Candles. People crying. The slideshow. Right?” She looked around.

A few students nodded slowly, as if the memory hurt their heads.

I remembered it too: the packed auditorium, the waxy smell, the slideshow of smiling faces with captions—In loving memory of…

But there had never been a shooting here.

Right?

My notebook slipped from my sweaty fingers and smacked the floor. As I grabbed for it, movement caught my eye.

Noah stood at his locker down the hall, a small, empty space around him like a force field. He opened the door carefully, glancing over his shoulder.

For a heartbeat, I saw another version: the door ripped open, his hand locked around a gun, his face twisted with something broken.

I blinked, and it was just Noah with a crumpled math book and a half-empty water bottle.

“Stop it,” I whispered. “It was a dream.”

Except the principal was treating drills like war. Teachers jumped at loud noises. Kids remembered memorials that didn’t exist. And Noah had just wished for something bad to happen.

Dreams don’t leave fingerprints on real life.

I slammed my locker. Hard. Heads turned.

Noah’s gaze snapped to me. For a second, recognition flashed in his eyes—like he remembered me bleeding out against the lockers.

He looked away.

I couldn’t breathe.

Before I could chicken out, I pushed through the crowd and stopped at the edge of his invisible circle.

“Noah,” I said.

He didn’t look up. “What?”

“You ever…” My tongue felt thick. “Have you ever had déjà vu?”

He froze.

Slowly, he raised his head. His eyes were darker, as if someone had turned up the contrast.

“What do you mean?” he asked, voice low.

“Like you remember something that hasn’t happened yet,” I said. “Or that everyone acts like it happened, but it didn’t.”

The hallway noise thinned, as if the world were listening.

Noah stared at me. His hands shook.

“Joyce,” he said quietly, “you should probably stop talking.”

“What?”

He shut his locker with a soft click. “People don’t like it when you say things like that out loud.”

“People like who?”

He gave a bitter half-smile and nodded at the dusty intercom speaker above us.

“Everyone. They want the story, not the questions.”

The intercom crackled.

“Students, this is Principal Hale,” the voice boomed, sharper now. “All homeroom teachers, review emergency protocols today during the first ten minutes of class. We can’t afford to be unprepared… not again.”

Not again.

The words slammed into me like another bullet.

Noah went pale. Our eyes met, and I knew we were thinking the same thing:

Again means it already happened.

He slung his bag over his shoulder. “Just… be careful, okay?” he muttered, and disappeared into the crowd.

The cafeteria hummed with that low, tired noise of clattering trays and half-hearted gossip, but it felt… wrong. Like everyone was reading from a script they’d rehearsed too many times and were suddenly sick of.

I slid my tray onto our usual table and sat down between Mariah and Ben. No one really looked up.

“Mac and cheese again,” Ben muttered, poking his food as it might bleed. “They're trying to kill us slowly or what?”

Normally, that would’ve gotten at least a pity laugh. Today, it just fell flat.

Across the room, Noah sat alone at the end of a table, hunched over his tray. It was like there was an invisible bubble around him—people walked behind his chair but always veered a little too wide, faces twisting as they’d brushed against something cold.

I tore open my milk carton with shaking fingers.

Mariah wasn’t eating. She was staring.

It took me a second to realize she was staring at me—or more specifically, at my chest. Her eyes kept dropping there, then jerking back up like she was trying not to.

“What?” I asked, forcing a smile. “Do I have mac and cheese on my shirt or something?”

She flinched as if slapped.

“N-no,” she said. Her voice sounded scraped raw. “You’re just… you’re sitting in the wrong spot.”

I blinked. “What?”

Mariah’s fingers tightened around her fork until the plastic bent. “You weren’t supposed to sit there,” she whispered.

Ben snorted. “Okay, creepy. What’s that even mean?”

She ignored him. Her eyes were still locked on me, pupils blown wide. “You were right there,” she murmured, “when it happened.”

The whole table stilled. Even the distant chatter seemed to dip, as if the room were leaning in.

“Mariah, what are you talking about?” I asked. “Nothing happened.”

Ben rolled his eyes. “Here we go again,” he muttered under his breath.

Mariah shook her head, breathing too fast. “Don’t you remember?” she asked me. “Third period. The lockdown. The sirens. You—” Her voice cracked. “You stopped breathing. I held your hand. There was blood all over—”

She stared down at her fingers, turning her palms over like she expected them to still be stained.

A memory I’d been trying to shove into a dark corner shoved back.

Her hand was squeezing mine, sticky and warm. My lungs filling with liquid. Her face blurred with tears, hovering above me as the ceiling spun.

I swallowed hard. “It was just a dream,” I said. “I had a nightmare, that’s all.”

“It wasn’t a dream,” Mariah whispered. “I felt it. I heard you gurgling. You were making this noise, like—”

“Okay, that’s enough,” Ben cut in, louder than necessary. Heads turned in our direction. He shrank a little but kept going. “Mariah, seriously, you sound insane. There was no shooting. No one died. We’d know.”

“We do know,” she shot back. Tears welled in her eyes, but there was anger there too, jagged and desperate. “We just… we’re not supposed to say it.”

A tray clattered onto the table behind us, making me jump. At the next table over, someone snapped a plastic fork in half. Three kids at their bench ducked under the table automatically before popping back up, laughing nervously, cheeks flushed.

“Wow, PTSD from cafeteria sounds,” Ben scoffed. “Drama much?”

No one laughed.

By Thursday afternoon, it stopped feeling like school and started feeling like rehearsal for a funeral that hadn’t happened yet.

In the faculty lounge, teachers pinned photos of us to a giant corkboard. I saw it when the door swung open as I walked by—rows of faces, mine among them, printed in dull color under a heading someone had written in red marker:

29 DEAD – NEVER FORGET

Underneath, in smaller letters:

12 AMERICAN, 17 HISPANIC – ROSWELL HIGH, ROSWELL, NM – 2014

Except that all twenty-nine of us were alive.

I’d just passed half of them in the hallway.

“Memorize names and faces,” Principal Hale said from inside, voice clipped. “If the worst happens during the drill, the media will ask. The parents will ask. We cannot look confused on camera again.”

Again.

I should’ve kept walking. Instead, I lingered by the door, peeking through the narrow window.

Mrs. Patel ran her finger down the neat rows of photos, lips moving silently.

“Joyce Hernandez,” she mouthed when she reached me. “Seventeen. Hispanic. Third period, English. Deceased.”

Her eyes flicked up—through the glass, down the hallway—and landed right on me.

For a heartbeat, her face went white, like she’d seen a ghost.

Then she smiled, brittle and wrong, and turned back to the board.

“Memorize them,” Hale repeated. “We owe them that much.”

“But they’re not dead,” someone whispered. “They’re in our classes.”

He didn’t answer.

Outside the lounge, the bell rang, echoing down the cracked beige halls of Roswell High, 2014. Students of every shade and accent streamed past me—laughing, complaining, planning their weekends. And not even five minutes later, they took Noah away the next morning.

No announcement. No explanation.

We all watched from the end of the hallway as two Roswell PD officers walked him out of homeroom. No cuffs, but their hands hovered close enough to his wrists that they didn’t need them. Noah’s hoodie was half-zipped, hair a mess, eyes wide and stunned.

“Is he in trouble?” a freshman whispered. “Must’ve done something,” someone else said. “They don’t arrest you for nothing.” But everyone knew he hadn’t.

By evening, Noah’s face was on every local channel. By morning, Albuquerque had it on their front pages:

ROSWELL HIGH STUDENT DETAINED IN “PREEMPTIVE” SAFETY MOVE

ADMINISTRATION UNDER FIRE FOR USING “MEMORIAL LIST” OF LIVING TEENS

They blurred our photos on TV, but I knew the grid behind the reporter’s shoulder. My own face was in there, smudged into anonymity.

Parents flooded the school phones. News vans parked across from the cracked Roswell High sign, satellite dishes pointed at the sky like accusations.

When Principal Hale finally snapped, it wasn’t during a press conference. It was in the main office. My mom had cornered him, waving a printout of the memorial board photos.

“You labeled my daughter dead,” she screamed. “She’s in your hallway right now!” Hale’s smile cracked. He started laughing instead—high, thin, wrong. “We all remember the bodies,” he said, voice shaking. “We had to be ready this time. We had to fix it.”

Someone recorded it. The clip went viral before the ambulance arrived.

They took Hale out on a stretcher, strapped him down, staring at the ceiling. He kept repeating, “Twenty-nine. Twelve American, seventeen Hispanic. Roswell, 2014. This time we get it right.”

The district statement called it an “acute psychiatric episode.” Off the record, teachers whispered he was being sent to a state mental facility in Albuquerque.

Classes went on—for now. Bells rang. Assignments were handed out. But every day, more parents pulled their kids out “temporarily.” The hallways thinned. The board stayed up. And I still had a photo on my phone from a future that refused to stay imaginary.

But the closer we got to the drill, the more it felt like we were walking down a hallway we’d already died in once before—and this time, the whole town was coming along for the repeat.

They told us in the auditorium, the same place half the town insisted they’d already held our memorial once before.

The stage lights bleached Principal-for-now Mrs. Ramirez into a pale cutout against the red curtain. The infamous board had been dragged off the wall that morning, but a faint rectangle of cleaner paint still framed where it had hung, like a missing picture at a crime scene.

“Effective at the end of this semester,” Ramirez said, voice thin over the feedback hiss, “Roswell High School will be permanently closed pending further investigation and restructuring.”

No one clapped. No one cried. It was more like a collective exhale from a body that had already been told it was dead.

A reporter’s camera light blinked from the back row. A junior whispered, “We’re gonna be in Albuquerque again.”

Ramirez kept talking—about student transfers, online classes, ‘a fresh start.’ Every word floated past like dust.

All I could see were the empty chairs.

Seats that had belonged to the other names on the list. Kids whose parents had yanked them out as soon as the headlines hit. Kids who just stopped showing up, no explanation.

When she opened the floor for questions, no one raised a hand.

On the way out, we filed past trophy cases and faded prom posters for dances that suddenly felt like they’d happened in another timeline.

Outside, workers were already unbolting the metal letters from the front sign.

R O S W E L L H I G H

One by one, they came down.

And with each letter, I felt like a piece of me died.

Huh...