8. "I feel like I'm the only one going through this."

Hardy, Arkansas, population 712, according to the sign that welcomes you to town, is about 70 minutes northwest of Jonesboro, not far from the Missouri border. The summer after the shooting, Amber Vanoven Johnston moved up here with her family. She brings her mother, Sandy Hickey, and her four kids to meet me at a playground that is tucked between some train tracks and the Spring River, behind the town's small downtown strip.

"It's beautiful up here," Johnston says. "We've got the river and a lot of stuff to keep my mind off it." Johnston is short and thin, with pale skin, light freckles and shoulder-length brown hair, a small stud in her nose and another above her lip. We sit on a bench while her kids play, and she tells me she doesn't usually smoke in front of people as she draws the first of a string of Marlboro Blacks from a pack she splits with her mother.

She was a sixth-grader at Westside in 1998. The afternoon of the shooting, she'd gone out in the hallway to get a drink of water and saw Golden, dressed in camouflage, walk in the building. He put a finger to his lips as if to tell her to keep quiet, then pulled the fire alarm and walked back out.

In the hallway on the way out into the playground, she met up with her best friend, Natalie Brooks, who had class across the hall that period. As they walked out the door, Johnston could see bits of concrete from the sidewalk popping up. "Natalie hit the ground and blood started going everywhere, all over me and my shoes," she says. "I was just standing there. Then somebody just pushed me and said, 'Run!'"

Johnston talks in way that's appealingly unguarded. Her voice is occasionally shaky, but there's a sense that there's something steely buried a little bit deeper. At the time of the shooting, she had been so distraught that that the simple act of going back to school was terrifying. Relocating up here, according to Hickey, seemed like the best thing to do. The move helped some, but Johnston continued to struggle with nightmares, flashbacks, anxiety, and depression. Loud noises set her off, especially fire alarms. A therapist diagnosed her with post-traumatic stress disorder.

In ninth grade, after a particularly vivid, harrowing nightmare, she refused to go to school the next day. Her mother decided a serious intervention was warranted, and brought Johnston to Rivendell Behavioral Health Services, an in-patient psychiatric facility near Little Rock. Initially Johnston hated it and wanted to go home, but after a month of treatment, she didn't want to leave. "Of course, only one friend knew that I went, because I was embarrassed," she says. "It was a mental institution. But they helped me so much."

Johnston got pregnant at 16 and moved in with her future husband. Having kids brought new issues. She's got three boys and a daughter, Natalie, named after Brooks. "It took me forever to even scold my kids," she says. "Because the way I see it is, the parents of the kids that died, they could've just whupped their kid's butt for something the day before, and you know they're thinking about that. I don't want that to be on me if something like that happened to my child."

School has been a major source of anxiety. Her mother had to convince her not to home-school her kids and to let them ride the bus. "I only live four minutes from their school," Johnston says. "I've timed it. I know the quickest route. If something happens, everybody else is going to be on the highway and I'm going to get there because I know the back way."

Recently, there was a bomb threat at the school, which sent Johnston into a panic attack. "I spazzed out. I couldn't breathe." She pauses. "I get mad at myself. It's stupid. Why does my body do this?" When she's in crowds, she feels like she can't breathe. She briefly had a job at a gas station but after someone came in two or three times, she was convinced she was being stalked and quit. Now she doesn't work, which worries her mother.

"She needs to file for disability," says Hickey. "As I told her, 'You're not capable of going to work.' She can't be away from the kids. It just freaks her out. If the school calls, she's got to be able to be right there."

Her husband supports her both financially and emotionally. He's a good listener, but even Johnston admits, "He doesn't understand." Beyond that, she's got her mother, her kids, and not much else. "I don't have friends," she says. "When I do get a friend, they'll say, 'When the kids are at school, we'll go to lunch together!' But when they call, it's, 'Oh no, I'm busy.' Then I sit on my couch and watch TV. I don't know why I'm like that."

Her mother shakes her head. "I think it comes from losing a friend and what she's been through," Hickey says. "She don't get close to nobody."

Many of the people I interviewed talked about the bonds they had with their fellow survivors as the closest in their lives. Fuller, who suffers seizures brought on by her PTSD, told me that the only person she can really talk to about the shooting is Spencer, who herself has battled through two failed marriages and bouts of depression. Graham said that every time a new shooting brings the old feelings to the surface, she has a small network of fellow survivors that includes Curtner and Thetford who all check in on one another. Brandi George has remained tight with a handful of her classmates and reunites with them at the school every year on March 24.

"Being able to still be in touch with all the people that were there with me that day has helped more than anything," says George. "Because we would ask each other things like, 'What nightmares are you having?' Just to see what each other was going through and talk each other through it."

Johnston, though, has lost touch with just about everyone from Westside. There are twin sisters who used to live next door to her in Bono she still sees occasionally, but they were a grade older and never talk about the shooting with her.

"I'm in the dark up here," she says. "People around here really don't know. I didn't get to talk to any of my fellow students afterwards, so I don't know if they had problems like I did. I kind of feel like I'm the only one going through this. Everybody else is probably just fine."

Johnston hasn't been back to Westside since she left at the end of sixth grade. About eight years ago, she and her husband drove close enough to the school for Johnston to point out where Brooks was lying that day. "I didn't get out of the car," she says. "My brother, he passes the school to go to his house, but I won't. I can't. Because when I do, I see her right there, laying there, and I've seen enough.

"I don't talk about it much, but when I do, it brings you back," she continues. "I can go into a place and smell paint — that's what it smelled like when we got back to school because they had to repaint, because of the blood. Outside, you had this odor from the chemicals they used to get the blood out of the concrete. I remember them having a pressure washer and they were going over where Natalie was. You could still see her blood in the cracks. You couldn't get it all up."

Johnston tells me she stopped seeing a counselor when she was about 15. She'd been prescribed a series of psychiatric medications but didn't like their effects and felt the counseling was no longer doing her any good. So now, she says, "I deal with it myself." This was a refrain I heard pretty often — while most people received at least some mental-health treatment in the months after the shooting, not many I spoke to stuck with it.

On my last morning in Jonesboro, I meet with Jennifer Vincent and her 4-year-old daughter Kinley in a Starbucks located inside a Target store. Vincent was shot at Westside when she was 12, and the bullet tore up her colon and large intestine. She went through a long recovery that included returning to school with a colostomy bag. Certain sounds, like ambulances, still can trigger flashbacks for her now. She's studying to be a nurse — something she says was partially inspired by seeing the nurses in action that day at the school — but like Johnston, the long-term psychological issues she deals with have made holding down a job difficult, if not impossible, so far.

"I don't like crowds," she says. "I can't stand it when people are close to me. I don't like to be touched. I'm getting nervous thinking about it. I mean, I'd love to go to Walmart without breaking out in welts all over my neck, but I can't stand it." In fact, she's fidgety throughout our discussion and rarely makes eye contact. In the months after the shooting, she went to counseling, but doesn't any longer. "I'm one that can deal with my emotions."

Graham suggests that there may have been a subtle but pervasive feeling within the community that extensive mental-health treatment was a sign of weakness, or something shameful, particularly as those outside the tragedy's epicenter felt like it was time to move on.

"It's really hard for people, even today with all we know about PTSD, to acknowledge they need help," she says. "That said, the stigma in the 1990s was much greater. So now, years later, those behaviors we associate with PTSD have become ingrained in the victim's 'new normal' life."

Northeast Arkansas was also, especially at that time, a very underserved area when it came to mental health. There were very few counselors trained in how to respond to a mass shooting. But with a huge pool of potential clients — most of whom were guaranteed to be able to pay for treatment through victims' assistance and reparations programs — many under-qualified counselors provided what may have been subpar treatment to those in need. The feeling amongst these survivors that they had gotten all they were going to get from their sessions may have, in fact, been less a result of their pride or shame than it was simply an astute observation.

The one thing Johnston says stuck with her from counseling is that she needs to talk about the shooting, even if she doesn't want to. "I didn't bury it," she says. "I think about it every day. Yeah, they did ruin lives. But they didn't ruin mine, and I'm not going to let them."

She's considering going back to Westside for the anniversary in March, even though just the thought of it petrifies her. "If I did go back, I wouldn't be able to hold it in. I would break down. But I really do want to go back." For a second, it almost sounds like she's asking for permission. "I want to see."