Nichole Burcal followed her son through the familiar halls to the cafeteria.

She planned to sign him up for the fall season of cross-country four years ago at Thurston High School.

Burcal placed her hand on the cafeteria door and held it open. She made it to the entryway and froze.

"I tried to take that step,'' she said. Suddenly, her breathing quickened. She felt herself turning red, her body swelling. Tears poured down her face.

She couldn't cross the threshold into the place where she had watched Kip Kinkel cut down her classmates in what until then was one of the nation's most violent high school shootings.

She was one of the wounded in 1998. A bullet traveled through a friend's stomach and hit her in the back of her right calf.

Burcal had thought the passage of time would have eased her anxiety.

It didn't.

"I told Zach, 'I'm sorry I can't do this. I can't do this,''' she recalled.

Burcal's eldest son is set to graduate from Thurston in three weeks.

Burcal, now 37, never had second thoughts about sending her son to Thurston. Her two other sons, ages 14 and 1, likely will follow suit.

But she doesn't see herself ever going back into the cafeteria.

"I was never afraid of the school itself, and it's not the cafeteria that terrifies me,'' she said. "It's the memories that keep flooding back ... it never goes away. The sad thing is, once affected, always affected.''

***

On the morning of the shooting, Burcal was Nichole Buckholtz, a 17-year-old junior sitting in the cafeteria, across from classmate Jesse Walley. At first, she heard popping sounds and thought it was some kind of class prank for school elections.

Then she saw Kinkel with a gun. She thought it was a toy gun, maybe a BB gun. Then she realized, "Holy crap, he's shooting at us."

Thurston High School shooting 20th anniversary 53 Gallery: Thurston High School shooting 20th anniversary

She crouched down on the bench of the table and felt something hit the back of her leg. As she briefly sat up to check her leg, she saw Kinkel put a gun to her friend Mikael Nickolauson's head and fire.

She ducked back down. She saw Teresa Miltonberger, at the table to her right, bleeding from her head.

Almost as suddenly, it was over. A teacher led her and others into a classroom. Matt Burcal, her boyfriend at the time and now her husband, stayed by her side. She didn't see any blood on her clothing so she figured she was OK, though it felt as if she had a "really bad pulled muscle.''

It wasn't until that night, when she took off her jeans to take a shower, that she realized she'd been shot. A ricocheting bullet had slammed into her leg.

Her father drove her to a medical clinic, where they cleaned her wound. She knew she was lucky. Many of her friends who were at the same cafeteria table, Jennifer Alldredge, Jesse Walley, Jake Ryker, had suffered more serious injuries and remained in the hospital.

***

Less than a year later, Burcal remembers sitting in class when an announcement came over the intercom. There'd been a shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado. Twelve students and one teacher dead. Twenty-four people injured.

She had to excuse herself from class. She had flashbacks to the Thurston shooting. She spent the rest of the day in the library, where counselors met with students.

That same month, Burcal performed in a play called "Bang, Bang, You're Dead.'' It helped her cope with the trauma and proved therapeutic.

Directed by Thurston High's drama teacher and written by playwright William Mastrosimone who drew from the Thurston shooting, the work focused on a high school freshman named Josh who is visited by the five classmates he shot and killed in the school cafeteria. With help from the dead, he pieces together the events that led to the carnage.

Burcal was cast as one of the classmates. "It was a way to get people talking about the effects your actions have on other people,'' she said.

She graduated with her class and traveled with the cast to Nebraska that summer to perform the play.

By then, she and Matt Burcal learned they would become parents. The day before Kinkel was sentenced in court, Burcal gave birth to a boy, Zachary, Nov. 9, 1999.

She enrolled in Lane Community College that fall, studying criminal justice, something she was interested in before the shooting, and got her associate degree. During one of her forensic science classes, her teacher showed slides of the evidence seized after the Thurston shooting.

As police evidence slides of the cafeteria flashed by, Burcal remembers thinking, "Well I'm that 'X' right there.''

***

To this day, Burcal's husband sends her text messages to warn her when another mass shooting or violent tragedy happens, cautioning her to skip the news or Facebook.

Even if it's a plane crash, she needs to avoid the initial accounts. "I don't know if it's the panic in people's voices that may be the trigger,'' she said. "I start having flashbacks.''

She gets startled when she hears balloons pop. She doesn't do well in large crowds. If she and her family go to a fair, she must have what she calls a "plan of attack'' -- how to "get in and out.''

One day two years ago was particularly disturbing. She was on a lunch break at her job in Springfield as a resolution specialist, a troubleshooter for cruise company Royal Caribbean International, when she heard the report.

There was an update on one of Kinkel's appeals, plus a story of another school shooting.

"It was kind of like a double-header,'' she recalled. She said she felt her blood pressure rise, her breathing become unsteady. She called her dad to calm her down.

***

Living two miles from the school, there was little question that her son would go to Thurston High.

Zach, 18, said his parents had told him about the shooting when he was much younger. His mom still occasionally talks about it, but his dad, who wasn't wounded, says little, preferring to move on.

He has walked by the memorial outside the school nearly every day. Vestiges of the shooting haven't made him afraid to go to Thurston.

He "completely understood" his mother's fear of the cafeteria, he said, but "I figured they'd do something to prevent another one."

The teen has noticed the thick bulletproof windows in the cafeteria. A school resource officer is now assigned to the school, and students and staff go through periodic active shooter drills.

He played violin in the school orchestra and ran cross-country all four years. He's set to look for a job after he graduates June 9.

He doesn't tell his friends about what his parents went through. It's in the past. But the Parkland, Florida, school shooting in February shook him.

"I just don't understand why a person would have the thought of ever doing that,'' he said. "It just blows my mind. I mean why?"

***

Every anniversary of the shooting, Nichole Burcal takes out a talisman from 20 years ago and holds it in her hand for comfort.

Before the shooting, she had borrowed a cigarette lighter as a prop from classmate Mikael Nickolauson for a one-act play she was directing at Thurston.

"I told him I'd give it back to him,'' she said.

She never got the chance. Nickolauson died in the school cafeteria.

"So I hang onto it,'' Burcal said. "I told him I would.''

She keeps the silver Zippo in her jewelry box.

Every May 21, she opens the box.

"I pull out the lighter and tell Mikael that I still have it.''

-- Maxine Bernstein

mbernstein@oregonian.com

503-221-8212

@maxoregonian