Our Sunday Long Read this week is John Woodrow Cox's profile in the Washington Post of Caitlyne Gonzales, survivor of the deadly Uvalde, Texas school shooting, who at age 10 is doing more for gun safety issues in Texas than a generation of politicians.
She had clipped a white bow into her hair and slipped on a yellow shirt embellished with a butterfly, and now, an hour before meeting her fifth-grade teachers for the first time, Caitlyne Gonzales sat cross-legged on her living room couch, watching YouTube videos about other school shooting survivors.
Caitlyne, who is 10, listened to a Marjory Stoneman Douglas High graduate describe witnessing the killing of two classmates in Parkland, Fla. She already knew the names of the victims, because she’d spent weeks on her phone poring over accounts of what had happened to kids like her and her friends. She lingered on a video showing a map of Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut and skipped a story about the gunman, then tapped another segment on Parkland.
“He’s now in a wheelchair,” she said about a boy who was shot three times.
“She’s a cheerleader,” she said about a girl who had seen students dying in their own blood.
When she reached a video about the four teenagers gunned down at Oxford High in Michigan last year, she pointed at a picture of one victim smiling in a field of flowers: “She was 14. She was the youngest.”
It had been 100 days since Caitlyne hid in a classroom, listening to a stranger slaughter 19 fourth-graders and two teachers across the hallway at Robb Elementary. Caitlyne knew them all.
In the shooting’s aftermath, many of Uvalde’s children were plagued by post-traumatic stress, but, to most people, Caitlyne wasn’t one of them. By September, she had become Robb’s most public survivor, a voice for her friends who were dead and for those who were alive but too daunted to say anything. She had spoken at rallies in Uvalde and Austin and to U.S. senators in Washington. She’d demanded that the people in charge of her school district fire the police officers who failed to save her classmates. She wrote her own speeches in neat block letters and stood alone before the microphones, sometimes on her tippy-toes.
The father of a child killed at Robb tweeted a photo of Caitlyne addressing the school board along with an image of the “Fearless Girl” statue facing down the charging bull in New York.
“#TeamCaitlyne,” he added.
She was a portrait of resilience, a 4-foot-8, 75-pound embodiment of the maroon “Uvalde Strong” flags flying all over Texas. To an admiring public, she was also living evidence that the hundreds of thousands of children in the United States who have survived school shootings can recover, becoming some version of who they used to be.
But the girl Caitlyne had been before “that day,” as she’d started calling the May 24 massacre, was gone. In her place was a uniquely American amalgam, a child who didn’t know how to ride a bike without training wheels but did know about ballistic windows and bulletproof backpacks and the movement to ban assault weapons. Who spent as much time following the Instagram pages of her favorite gun safety champions as she did Bad Bunny’s TikTok account. Who was 10, but seldom acted her age, speaking in public about fear and death with the eloquence of an adult, while in private, enduring flashbacks so vivid that she needed bedtime lullabies meant for toddlers to soothe her.
Now, on the way to her new school for “Meet the Teacher” night, the apprehension Caitlyne worked hard to conceal bubbled up.
“There’s going to be so much people,” she told her mother, Gladys Gonzalez, when they neared Flores Elementary. “I’m scared.”
She used to adore school, because that was the place she made new friends, and Caitlyne liked to think she could make a friend out of anyone. Now, whether she would be able to go back at all, Gladys didn’t know.
Caitlyne couldn’t stand to be apart from her mother for more than a few minutes. The night of the shooting, she asked Gladys to lie at the foot of her bed, down by her toes. Then, as the weeks passed, she insisted that her mom sleep beside her, then facing her, then so close that Caitlyne could feel Gladys’s breath on her face.
Outside Flores, Caitlyne stepped out of the car, silent as she and her mom walked in. The school’s floor was brown, the walls a weathered beige, and the overhead lights so dim that faces at the end of the hallway were obscured in shadows. They had visited Flores a month prior, and Caitlyne had been too unnerved by the darkness to go to the restroom by herself. Twice after that, she pleaded with the school board to install better lighting, but nothing had changed.
On their way to her new classroom, they rounded a corner, and Caitlyne noticed an armed police officer. She veered to the opposite side of the hallway, glancing at him with disdain. Dozens of sheriff’s deputies, state troopers, U.S. Border Patrol officers and local police had taken 77 minutes to confront the gunman at Robb, and, like many people in Uvalde, Caitlyne deeply resented them for it.
Inside Room 302, she met her homeroom teacher, a young woman with a warm smile who called her “honey.” She escorted Caitlyne next door, where her new classmates were gathering. Caitlyne barely knew most of them, in part because dozens of Robb students had decided to take virtual classes or withdraw from the district and go elsewhere.
Caitlyne avoided eye contact with a boy who used to have a crush on her and hugged a girl she did know well, relieved to have at least one old friend in her class. The teachers handed out “About Me” forms to all their new fifth-graders, and Caitlyne filled hers out in the back. Favorite hobby: TikTok. Favorite animal: dog. Favorite food: pizza rolls. Favorite color: blue.
None of the staff mentioned the kids who weren’t there, but Caitlyne couldn’t stop thinking about their absence. Back in the car after they left, she turned to her mom.
“Can we go to the cemetery?”
The last few years have broken an entire generation of kids. They will never be who they were before, but they will rebuild themselves as something different, something stronger, something that survives an America that is dangerous and violent, where school shootings and pandemics and climate crises and political violence are normal events.
I'm a Gen Xer near the Millennial border, which just means I've been an internet cynic for the entire latter two-thirds of my life. But these kids are going to be titanium when the crucible gives them a moment to reforge.
They'll need that strength. They have to fix three generations of fuck-ups while dealing with their own issues.
Godpseed, Caitlyne.
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