SEATTLE (AP) - The note has hung on her bedroom wall since her friend was shot and killed at school.
Nearly four years ago, Cheyenne Coe[1] ripped it from her middle-school yearbook and pinned it there to remember.
“Best friend for life, I love you, like your my sister,” the then-preteen Zoe Raine Galasso[2] wrote, in part, all those years ago while sitting at her friend’s kitchen table.
It’s a reminder of what life used to be like with Zoe[3], her next-door neighbor. And it was a funny moment in a young friendship:
While Zoe[4] was writing, Coe[5] stubbed her toe on a wall. Like any good friend would do, Zoe[6] amended her year-end send-off: “Umm awkward . you just hurt your toe . hahaha!”
When Coe[7] graduates from Marysville-Pilchuck High School[8], she’ll think of that day. It was a time when she still thought school was safe, when she could eat lunch in a cafeteria without anxiety, when she wasn’t wary of crowds.
But the terrible memories of that Friday morning at the beginning of freshman year will be with her, too. The conversation with an acquaintance outside the lunchroom doors. The gunshots. Her peers’ screams, telling her to run.
Coe[9] is among the 289 Marysville-Pilchuck High School[10] seniors who graduated Wednesday. They are the school[11]’s final student witnesses to the Oct. 24, 2014, shooting at their school, when a freshman pulled a handgun out of his backpack and opened fire. He fatally shot Zoe[12] and three others and wounded another before turning the gun on himself. They were all freshmen.
In the space of a few seconds, Coe[13] and her classmates were initiated into that most tragic and ever-growing American institution: school-shooting survivors....
Many have found ways to cope, ways to move forward, while still living with the memories from a place they once thought safe. Each new school shooting adds to the emotional strife a survivor carries.“It’s hard to go through something like that and still want to succeed,” said Coe[14], now 18. “But we’ve all . found our ways to move forward. I think it takes a strong group of people to do that.”Coe[15] and the rest of the senior class know they can’t escape the memory of that day; a diploma doesn’t erase the trauma. But the Marysville[16]-Pilchuck Class of 2018 is preparing to leave the school[17] where it happened.-An empty chair will be placed on stage at the Marysville[18]-Pilchuck graduation, to represent the students who won’t be there to walk with their classmates.The district wanted to honor them - and make sure it gave the senior class the same graduation