“I had a feeling there was going to be suicide after all this,” said Corinne, a seventh-grader at Westglades Middle School, adjacent to the Douglas campus. “And now, I thought, dammit, my worst predictions are coming true. I have to learn to keep going.”

For a community that longs to figure out how to move on from one of the deadliest school shootings in the nation’s history, the two new deaths peeled open a wound that hadn’t fully healed. The suicides reaffirmed there can be no simple recovery. One year, one month and two weeks after the tragedy, the trauma still lingers.

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Parkland Mayor Christine Hunschofsky said she was warned. Families from Columbine and from Sandy Hook told her that these unexpected tragedies come with more tragedy. In the aftermath of those two shootings, communities suffered from bitter public disputes, a rash of mental illnesses and suicides.

Her city was already starting to see some things change. The most recent data, from January, showed 40 students had withdrawn from Douglas to attend private schools, already exceeding the number of students who transferred in each of the previous two years. Families were selling their homes for an average of $70,000 less than they had the previous year, according to data from the property appraiser’s office.

Hunschofsky’s community wanted to be an example of resilience — after all, a group of students had become the faces of the national movement for gun control. But people in Parkland also were wrestling with the reality that not everyone would recover at the same pace and quickly highlighted the need for another movement to facilitate healing: addressing mental health.

A number for a suicide-prevention hotline flashed on the road to Douglas High School, and a museum in nearby Coral Springs opened for art therapy sessions during spring break. A wellness center, known as Eagles’ Haven, opened a month early to offer support and counseling after the two deaths.

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Corinne’s mother, Suzanne Krok, visited Eagles’ Haven this week. Krok said she felt like she was struggling with the most fundamental of parental responsibilities: making sure her kids were okay. She requested a counselor be sent to her neighborhood to talk to parents about their next steps.

After her tutor, Meadow Pollack, was killed, Corinne had suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. Sometimes, in school, Corinne had to escape to the bathroom and listen to music from Lil Peep to calm down.

During free time, she told her friends that she felt the shooting was her fault. Her fellow seventh-graders would have to assure her that there was nothing she could have done to stop the killer.

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Her mother had tried putting her in yoga, or sports, but Corinne had not shown interest in anything until her grandfather gave her a ukulele after the death of Sydney Aiello, 19, whose mother said she struggled from survivor’s guilt.

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Corinne had been practicing “You Are My Sunshine” and “Can’t Help Falling in Love” for two days when she heard about Calvin Desir, who police said died in an “apparent suicide.” No one is sure why Calvin took his own life, but other parents told Krok that he seemed to be an amiable, well-adjusted child.

Krok looked at her child and couldn’t help but wonder if she was struggling more than she was letting on.

She made sure Corinne had the numbers for the suicide hotline and walked her through the Columbia Protocol — six questions to assess whether a person might be suicidal. She wanted to assure her that it was safe to ask for help, but Corinne had heard that message so much over the past year that her mother wondered whether she had grown numb to questions from concerned adults.

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“We all want our kids to tell us they are okay, but sometimes they will say so, and they are not okay,” Krok said. “You want to be sure they are telling you the honest answer. But then you don’t want to be hovering over them all the time. I don’t have the answers. I don’t know how to move on from this.

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“I wish I had something profound to say, some words to tell them, but I don’t.”

Krok wasn’t sure she was okay. She felt guilt about sending her two children to that campus, through the red entry gates that students were calling the “gates of hell.” Guilt, about being one of the fortunate ones, because her two kids survived. Inescapable, unavoidable guilt, because she wanted to move from her home, which was so close to the campus that she could see the schools’ flood lights from her window. Guilt, about being a single mom and massage therapist who couldn’t afford a spring break getaway like some of the wealthier families in the affluent town.

Krok could not believe how much her community had changed. She officially lived in Coral Springs but was across the street from Parkland, a small, seemingly safe, lush community so obscure that a popular bumper sticker here used to read, “Where the Hell is Parkland?”

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There is no use for a sticker like that now; so many people had heard of Parkland. Now the most popular bumper stickers served as a testament to community resilience, “#MSDStrong.” And everyone wanted to live up to the hashtag.

“I feel like I have to act strong for some people,” Corinne said. “I don’t want to put any pressure on them. We are all going through so much.”

“You know you don’t have to be strong all the time, right?” her mother said.

“I just don’t want to rock the boat,” she responded. “I used to be such a mellow girl.”

“I’m here. I’m the adult,” Krok told her. “Rock that boat as much as you need to.”

***

Around here, an entire vocabulary has been built around the shooting. “February the 14th,” the day of the shooting, is said in somber tones. “The Seventeen” became the shorthand for the people who died.

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But the city of 14 square miles and 30,000 people wanted to be known for something other than wallowing. On the first anniversary of the incident, there was more than an introspective vigil and a moment of silence. Volunteers made breakfast for first responders or donated shoes to a local charity or participated in a beach cleanup.

“There was a sadness, but there was beauty and there was a hope,” Hunschofsky said at Carmella’s, a local coffee shop. “I think a lot of people thought we were on our way to move on. But I kept on saying this is a marathon.”

The suicides were “re-traumatizing,” she said, and residents resuscitated calls for accountability. They wondered why security hasn’t been beefed up more in schools and why it took six days for New Zealand to ban military-style rifles while so little was done legislatively to honor the 17. They wondered why there weren’t more counselors in the school system and why more people weren’t made aware of the services.

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Some folks wanted to talk, and others did not at all. The very nature of banter between neighbors had a newfound heaviness, an intentionality that might have been missing from the glib question: “How are you doing?”

On the Sunday after the shooting, Stefano Peña, 22, had that question for some of his old teachers. He reached out to his Spanish teacher and simply messaged: “Are you okay?”

He had loved the teacher, Alicia Blonde. when he was attending Douglas. She was firm but forthright and challenging. Blonde, 60, told him she was thankful to hear from him. She said she could use a talk over coffee.

Peña graduated from Douglas in 2015, but the shootings were “a nightmare” for him. His brother was in the building. He couldn’t stop thinking about how unsafe a classroom might be and stopped going to class at the local community college. He recently began welding school.

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“I am just beginning to get back to normal,” Peña said. “But talking about it helps.”

“I’ve noticed what the kids have done; they’ve detached from me,” Blonde said, “and I don’t think I’m getting as close to them. It might be to protect me if something happens. It might be to protect them.”

Blonde had tried to be strong for students but still found it difficult. She said she was administering an oral exam with students when she heard about the first suicide. She got so choked up that she had to pause the exam and gather her bearings.

She later received a phone call about the second.

“Is it one of my kids?” she remembered thinking. “What if it happened because I gave a bad grade or didn’t say goodbye or didn’t ask them how they were doing? And then I got the name. And I felt terrible, because I felt so relieved he wasn’t my student.”

“It’s been really hard for everyone,” Peña said. “It’s normal. Don’t feel bad.”

Blonde had always appreciated the rhythm of school — the ritual and routine of giving a lesson, handing out homework, teaching students how to love language.

“Now I try to get back to the academics, and I think, sometimes, what’s the point?” she said. “But there is a point, because life goes on. Life has to go on because that’s the natural order of things.”

She told Peña that she felt the shooting had upended that natural order of things, and she wasn’t sure if those days could ever return. She heard about the suicide of a Sandy Hook father just this week — more than six years after he lost his daughter — and realized the ripple effects of their event were just beginning.

She couldn’t help but think: Who’s next? How many more might she lose?

“And I think about all these ripple effects, all these kids that are going to be impacted for all their lives,” she said. “I’m going to be impacted for my life. We are all vulnerable because we are all going through the same thing.”

Now Blonde was crying. Peña stood up. He wrapped his arms around his former teacher, told her it would be okay.

“This helps so much, Stefano,” she said. “It reminds me why I teach.”

“It helps to talk about things,” Peña said.

It was a community filled with people who wanted to help others if they could, even as they were still figuring out how to help themselves. They tried to check in with each other on social media and text messages and found new places to memorialize and to mourn.

Across the street from where Blonde and Peña had coffee, residents and families walked into an art installation on a grassy swale. The artist used pinewood slabs to create a shrine to the victims known as the Temple of Time.

Later that evening, a 17-year-old named Justin Allen, a junior at Coral Springs Charter School, walked into the exhibit. All the slabs of wood were covered in messages.

“Thoughts + Prayers + Action,” one read.

“Nothing will change if we don’t change,” said another.

The temple was designed to help the community deal with an outpouring of grief. In May, the artist plans to burn the building, a symbolic gesture to relieve that community of the pall cast over it.

Even as Allen tried to let his pain go, he knew it would far outlast the pending plume.

“People tell me I’ve changed, that I’m more serious now,” Allen said. “I spoke to my counselors at school. They say, ‘Get out, have fun, get a hobby,’ and I do. I play a lot of basketball. Every time I try to forget it, the memories keep coming back.”

Allen had four friends who were among the 17. He had gone once when the site opened in February to pay respects, and then again, and now again, because he still had trouble dealing with the loss.