I will never forget..

Obviously it's April 16th. Its been one year exactly since the Virginia Tech Massacre. In just a few minutes a year ago I first heard of it happening. I was sitting in AP Chemistry and 3 of my friends were acting funny and had their phones out (which really wasn't a rare thing--the phone thing..but usually they at least tried to hide it better...) Eventually one of them told us that her sister had called her telling her about it (both her sisters were there) and they were attempting to get in touch with the other girls family and several of our friends. We turned the TV on and amazingly enough the main TV in the library wasn't on the news stations (which means we couldn't be of course). Our teacher ran to go get them to turn it on any kind of news station...and the librarian said that she wasn't allowed. Our principal had told her she couldn't--he didn't want to send the school into a panic. He came up to our room a few minutes later to tell us we shouldn't tell people and that we couldn't watch the news. The second he left we got on the internet--the internet is amazing of course. And we watched everything they had on there. No AP Chemistry that day. He came back in later and caught us but I'm thinking he knew better than to tell us we couldn't--and then of course made the announcement right as that class was letting out. Then ALLOWED us to watch 5 minutes of the news before the last to periods. 5 minutes is really nothing. My mom called me AT school to ask about some of my friends families--which were ok. We were lucky to not know anyone that was killed. The guys roommate the semester before was the guy whos locker was beside mine for the first year or two in high school. He was on the Today Show and all this stuff. Just thinking about that is weird to me.

What you should get out of that is how pissed off I was that our principal wouldn't let us know what was going on. That is simply stupid. A major college an hour and a half down the road--where a lot of our graduates went--were suffering a major massacre and he wouldn't let us watch the stupid news. September 11th--we watched the news all day and I was in 7th grade. Sure April 16th wasn't a mass attack upon the US..but it was a mass attack in our area--with a higher percentage of people we went to school with--our friends and family..and he didn't want us to even know about it.

When this happened I had narrowed my college choices down to VT or Radford...(I applied to King because it was free and you got a Tshirt when you were accepted--I didn't decide to go there until pretty much the last minute)...This shooting made my decision for me. It wasn't as easy as you'd think though. Half of me wanted to go there--to support--to help build the community moral back up--to just be there with those people. The bigger, more human part of me was terrified.

I am mostly rambling about it all. Its still a sore spot in our lives. I had a lot of friends or even mere acquaintances there then and more now.

I'm praying for the people affected daily.

Ben is coming home today. I'm so nervous. My grandpa is being taken home today too--hes going to have hospice taking care of him.