I had only been in America for a few months when I learned that on February 14th, we are supposed to wear a red dress because it is Valentine’s Day, when people celebrate love. Red is universally accepted as the color of true love, romance, and also blood. My friend Anju told me to wear a red churidar, a traditional Indian dress, to school, but unlike my friends, I was too shy to wear it. In the morning, as I was sitting in the school cafeteria, my eyes went red because almost half of the students were wearing red clothes. They looked gorgeous!

Our bell rang at 8:15 a.m., and we went to class. Because of Valentine’s Day, nobody was in the mood for studying, not even the teachers, so we gladly ran outside during a fire drill. The time passed quickly, and school would be finished at 2:45. We were sitting with our anatomy teacher, who was telling us how she met her husband. At 2:30, the fire alarm rang again. Everyone got confused because there had already been a fire drill in the morning.

We ran outside again. As we were running, we heard the gun shooting. Our security guard yelled, “Run, run! It is a red chord!” We knew that “red chord” meant a shooting alert. For a moment, I got confused. I stopped and looked around, trying to understand what was happening. I saw many students dressed in red, running and crying. I saw fear on their faces. They were screaming. I looked up, and I saw three helicopters hovering above. There were two ambulances standing near the building closest to the school entrance. When I turned around, I couldn’t see any of my classmates. I was alone and scared. I did not have an American phone number at that time. I had been using WhatsApp because it does not need a United States number. The only thing it needed was a network connection. But when I ran out of the school, I lost my Wi-Fi connection, so I could not call my parents to tell them I was safe.

I didn’t know my school very well because I only had classes in two buildings—the one where the shooting happened, and the one I had just left—so I was not sure where to hide. I looked in the direction of the track field and spotted my friend Anju standing in her red churidar among other students and teachers. Weeping in my extreme fear, I ran there. Catching my breath, I asked Anju for her phone to finally call my parents. I said I was safe. My aunt and my mom asked me where I was and told me they were watching CNN news and they knew what had happened in my school. It was then I learned that 17 people were killed. Too shocked and heartbroken to say these words, I did not share this with anyone. People around me didn’t know what was happening inside my school—Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida—so they asked the police about it. A police officer said that 14 students from junior and senior classes and three teachers had died. I also heard that the shooter was a student who had been suspended from my school. We spent two and a half hours on my school’s track field.

Some of my luckier classmates went home when their parents came. However, my parents couldn’t come to pick me up because the traffic on the roads leading to the school was impossibly heavy. The police officers told me and about 50 other students to walk to a nearby Walmart. My friend’s brother was working in that store, so I asked him for the phone and called my parents again to tell them to pick me up there. In half an hour, my parents came with my aunt. My mom’s face was wet from tears as she hugged me. She kept praising God for saving me.

I came to America from India with many hopes, and I hold on to them. But I will never forget the Valentine’s Day red from dresses celebrating love and the blood of my 17 schoolmates and teachers who were gunned down. I will never forget the fear, anxiety, and grief everyone at Douglas School felt in those months. I still remember struggling with insomnia and eating disorders that followed the saddest and the scariest day of my life.

And until the firearms in this country are regulated, the fear will live in me, in everyone who was with me in the school, in our families, who desperately tried to find out if their children were alive and safe, and in anyone who hears about this and other shootings in the news—almost every day.

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Linta Mathew writes, “I am from Kerala, India. I came to the United States in 2017. My first language is Malayalam and my other languages are English and Hindi. I am a CLIP student at CUNY’s College of Staten Island. In the future, I would love to study nursing because I would like to help other people through my profession.” Linta Mathew’s teacher is Polina Belimova.