My English teacher made us sign contracts for total silence in class, then gave me detention for whispering to help a kid having a panic attack while she graded papers.

I was in science class when I grabbed what I thought was my granola bar from my bag. One bite and I knew something was wrong. The taste. Peanut butter. My friend’s protein bar must have gotten mixed up with mine when we studied together.

“I need the emergency EpiPen,” I gasped, already feeling my throat tighten. “I just ate peanuts.”

The substitute teacher looked up from her desk where she was eating from her own bag of peanuts. “Don’t be dramatic. Allergies are all in your head.”

“No, you don’t understand.” My tongue was already swelling. I’d left my EpiPen at home, thinking I’d be fine since every classroom had emergency ones. “Please, the med cabinet.”

“Sit down.” She stood up and walked to the cabinet, but instead of opening it, she leaned against it. “You know what my parents did when I claimed I was allergic to cats? They locked me in a room with three of them. By morning, I was cured.”

Katie jumped up and ran toward the cabinet. “She’s not faking. She needs help now.”

The sub blocked her. “The only thing killing her is her own mind.”

Then she did something I’ll never forget. She walked to the door, turned the deadbolt, and pocketed the key. “No one leaves until she admits she’s faking it. This victim mentality is destroying your generation.”

“Call 911,” someone yelled, reaching for their phone.

“Phoes in the box, now.” The sub grabbed the collection box. “Or you’re all suspended.”

My throat felt like someone was tightening a belt around it. Six minutes. That’s all I had before the swelling became irreversible. The number my doctor made me memorize.

That’s when my ex, Daniel, decided to chime in. “She pulled the same drama last year.”

The sub smiled at him. “See? Even he knows you’re faking.” She walked back to my desk with her bag of peanuts. “My parents proved allergies are psychological when I was five.” She grabbed a handful and slowly, deliberately crushed them over my desk. “Exposure therapy. This is for your own good.”

The dust fell everywhere. Blood started dripping from my nose. My lips were swelling.

Katie screamed, “Look at her.”

The sub shoved Katie back down. “Psychosmatic reaction. She believes she’s dying, so her body mimics it.”

That’s when Tommy touched his neck. I guess he was allergic too, because his eyes started swelling shut. “I can’t see. I can’t see.”

Everyone lost it. Kids were dumping entire backpacks on the floor, throwing contents everywhere. “Does anyone have an EpiPen?”

Sarah was sobbing, using her shirt to wipe blood from my nose. “Please don’t die. Please don’t die.”

Jack ran to the door and started pulling on it. “Open this right now, please.”

The sub laughed. “Sit down or you’re expelled.”

Jack kept yanking on the door handle, the whole frame rattling. “Help, somebody.”

Other kids joined him, pounding on the door with their fists. Through the door window, Mr. Peterson from next door looked in. The sub stepped in front of the window, blocking his view, and gave a thumbs up before closing the blind. He walked away.

“This is kidnapping!” Katie screamed. “Three minutes left.”

Blood dripped from my nose onto my desk. Tommy was clawing at his throat. Lisa was in the corner, vomiting from pure panic. Two girls were huddled together crying. Some kids just sat frozen at their desks, unable to move.

The sub actually laughed. “Oscar-worthy performance, though a bit over the top with the fake blood.”

My situationship, Jack, tried to give me mouth-to-mouth while I was still conscious and choking.

My ex Daniel tackled him to the ground.

“I know her better.”

“Yeah? That’s why you called her dramatic,” Jack shot back.

“Look at this. Fighting over the attention seeker,” the sub said, eating another peanut. “This is exactly what she wanted.”

I could feel myself turning blue. Foam bubbled at the corners of my mouth.

Katie smashed the med cabinet with a chair.

The sub grabbed her wrist. “Destruction of property. That’s expulsion.”

“She’s dying!”

Mike tackled the sub from behind.

“You want to go to jail for assault? I’ll press charges on all of you.”

I got out of my chair and couldn’t even stand anymore. The fire extinguisher on the wall was my only thought. I literally had to crawl over on all fours just to get there.

“Look at her performance.” The sub cackled. “Crawling for sympathy.”

My body didn’t feel like it was mine anymore. One second, I was getting ready to throw the fire extinguisher at the door. The next, I was covering my face to stop the glass from getting in my eyes.

Crash.

The sub spun around. “Vandalism! You’re going to prison.”

I reached through, slicing my arm on the wire, fumbling for the deadbolt.

“Stop her!” the sub screamed, but Mike and Katie held her back.

I turned the lock. The door flew open. I collapsed in the hallway just as other teachers came running.

“Call 911!” someone screamed.

The sub was still yelling from inside. “They’re all faking. This is mass hysteria.”

The paramedics said I was clinically dead for three minutes. They worked on me right there in the hallway while more ambulances arrived.

Miss Blade was fired and blacklisted from every school in the area.

Fast-forward two weeks later. We were sitting in class when our teacher broke the news: after receiving his diagnosis of permanent partial blindness, Tommy had taken his own life—all thanks to Miss Blade.

That’s when I knew getting her fired wasn’t enough. We had to destroy her.

The words hung in the air while everyone sat frozen at their desks. Katie’s hand found mine under the table and squeezed so hard my knuckles cracked. Her eyes were red and puffy. But there was something else there, too. Something hard and angry.

The bell rang and kids started filing out, but we stayed in our seats until the room emptied. She leaned close and whispered that getting Mis(s) Laid fired wasn’t even close to enough. I nodded because my throat was too tight to speak.

After class, I had to go straight to my follow-up appointment at the hospital. The doctor ran a scope down my throat and took pictures of the scarring. He showed me the images on his computer screen, pointing to the damaged tissue. My airways were permanently narrowed by fifteen percent. He made me practice with my new EpiPen over and over, stabbing it into an orange until I got the motion right. Three times he watched me do it before signing my discharge papers.

Walking back through the main hallway at the school the next day, I saw Mr. Peterson coming toward me. His face went white when he recognized me. He turned and practically ran into an empty classroom. I stood there with my fists clenched so tight my nails cut into my palms. He saw me dying through that window and just walked away.

That night, my phone buzzed with a text from Katie. She was making a group chat with everyone from that classroom. Sarah joined first, then Mike, then Jack. Even Lisa, who threw up, joined. We needed to get our stories straight for what was coming.

My mom drove me to the police station the next morning. The officer taking my statement kept making me repeat the part about the locked door. He wrote down every detail about the six-minute timeline. Two hours I sat in that uncomfortable plastic chair going over it again and again. He asked if I had any proof besides witness statements.

Tommy’s funeral was three days later in the school gym. Half our science class showed up, but the other half stayed away. His mom stood at the front holding his school photo and sobbing. After everyone left, I walked up to his picture display. I touched his photo and promised him that Miss Laid would really pay for this.

By Monday, the whole school was talking, but not the way we expected. Some kids were saying it was all mass hysteria and we overreacted to nothing. At lunch, a girl from another class said Tommy was being dramatic about his blindness. I threw my tray in the trash and left before I did something stupid.

Jack found me after school by my locker, looking uncomfortable. He kept apologizing for trying to give me mouth-to-mouth when I was still conscious. He said he panicked and didn’t know what else to do. I told him it was okay, even though remembering his mouth on mine while I was choking made my skin crawl.

That night, Daniel sent me a long, rambling message on Instagram. He was sorry—but also not really sorry—claiming he was trying to keep everyone calm. He said he still knew me better than anyone and was just trying to help. I blocked him after reading his last line about how we should talk in person.

The school nurse called me down the next day to go over their new allergy action plan. She showed me the new EpiPen stations they installed in locked boxes throughout the building. Each one needed a special key to open. She gave me a laminated card with the locations marked, but I noticed the keys were only in the main office.

That afternoon, my phone buzzed with an email from the school district while I sat on my bed, still feeling weak from everything. The subject line just said: “Important update regarding recent incident.” The whole thing was maybe three sentences about how Miss Blade had been terminated from her position and banned from working in any school in the state due to an incident involving student safety protocols. They didn’t mention me dying for three minutes or Tommy going blind or anything real that happened. My mom read it over my shoulder and threw her phone across the room.

Katie showed up at my house around seven with a huge notebook and a folder full of papers and started spreading everything out on my kitchen table. She said we needed to write down every single thing we remembered about what happened and every symptom I was still having, because if we were really going to destroy Miss Blade, we needed evidence for more than just her getting fired. My hands were still shaking sometimes and I got dizzy when I stood up too fast, and Katie wrote all of that down in her neat handwriting.

The next morning, the school called and said Principal Barfield wanted to meet with me and my mom immediately about the situation. Talk about taking “no peanuts allowed” to a whole new level of wrong. This teacher turned a science class into a horror movie where the villain eats snacks while kids literally die.

We drove there and he was sitting behind his desk with his hands folded, looking all serious, and started talking about how we needed to handle this situation carefully and not make it public or cause unnecessary drama for the school.

My mom stood up so fast her chair fell backward and asked him if he thought watching her daughter die for three minutes was “unnecessary drama.” He actually had the nerve to say the school had already taken appropriate action and we should move forward.

Two days later, a detective named Darren Budro called our house and said he’d been assigned to investigate potential criminal charges, including child endangerment and false imprisonment, against Miss Laid. He came over that afternoon with a recorder and took my statement for almost two hours. When I told him about her locking the door, he stopped writing and looked up and said that changed everything legally because that made it false imprisonment on top of everything else.

That night, I was trying to do homework when suddenly I couldn’t breathe and felt like I was back on that classroom floor crawling toward the door with my throat closing up. I grabbed a notebook and started writing down every single detail I could remember about those six minutes because I needed to get it out of my head before it drove me crazy. I wrote about the taste of the peanut butter and the way the blood felt dripping from my nose and how the floor tiles felt cold under my hands when I was crawling.

Katie organized a meeting at her house with everyone from our class who wanted to help. We sat in her basement making a plan. She decided destroying Miss Blade meant three things had to happen: criminal charges that would put her in jail; civil lawsuits that would take all her money; and making sure everyone everywhere knew exactly what she did so she could never hurt another kid. Katie assigned Mike to research similar cases and Sarah to collect medical records, and everyone got a job to do.

My mom found a lawyer named Gray Bellamy who specialized in school negligence cases, and we met him in his office downtown where he had all these awards on the wall. He explained that to win, we needed to prove the school knew or should have known Miss Laid was dangerous, which meant we had to get her employment records and any complaints from other schools. He said the discovery process would let us request all her files. That’s when we’d find out if there were warning signs the school ignored.

I started seeing a therapist named EMTT Bloom twice a week because I was having panic attacks every time I smelled peanut butter or heard a door lock. He taught me breathing exercises where I counted to four while breathing in, held it for four, and breathed out for four. It actually helped a little bit. He told me what I went through was real trauma and my anger was justified—and I shouldn’t feel bad about wanting justice.

A week later, a guy named Gordon B.S. from the district’s legal department scheduled interviews with all of us kids who were in the classroom that day. He came to the school and pulled us out of class one by one. But it was obvious he was just trying to protect the school from getting sued because he kept asking leading questions about whether we might have misunderstood what Miss Blade meant or if maybe she was just trying to teach us a lesson about being prepared. He actually asked Katie if she thought Miss Blade might have been planning to open the cabinet after making her point.

And Katie told him, “Miss Blade watched her turn blue and foam at the mouth. So what point was she trying to make exactly?”

Then a local reporter named Jasper Beckwith started calling everyone, trying to get our side of the story for some investigation he was doing. Katie thought we should talk to him and get the truth out there. But Gray Bellamy told us to wait until he could find out what angle the reporter was taking, because sometimes they twist things to make victims look bad.

Two days later, I was sitting in Gray’s office downtown signing a stack of papers while he explained each one. He kept pointing to different sections about witness statements and the locked-door detail while his assistant made copies of everything. The retainer agreement was way more than my family could afford, but he said we could work out a payment plan after the case settled. My mom had to sign, too, since I was still a minor, and her hand shook when she wrote her name. Gray’s office walls were covered with newspaper clippings about cases he’d won, and I counted twelve involving schools while he talked about discovery procedures and depositions. He said having fifteen witnesses who saw everything made this stronger than most negligence cases he’d handled.

The school announced Tommy’s vigil three days later and everyone had to walk to the football field during fifth period. They set up a microphone at the fifty-yard line and kids took turns talking about what a good friend he was. When a sophomore mentioned how Tommy spent his last week scared about losing more of his sight, I had to walk away. My chest felt so tight I couldn’t breathe and I ended up throwing up behind the bleachers while everyone else stayed to light candles.

Daniel followed me and started saying he never meant to hurt me when everything happened in the classroom. I turned around and told him that calling me dramatic while I was dying was something I’d never forgive. He just stood there with his mouth open as I walked back toward the parking lot without letting him say another word.

Gray called that afternoon to say he’d filed official records requests with the district for Miss Blad(e)’s training certificates and any emails about the incident. The district had thirty days to respond, but he warned they’d probably claim some documents were missing or hadn’t been kept properly.

Gordon from the district scheduled an interview with me the next week and Gray insisted on being there as my lawyer. Gordon kept trying to make it sound like Miss Blade was just one bad teacher instead of asking about the locked cabinet or Mr. Peterson walking away. I made sure to mention both things three times while Gordon typed notes on his laptop and avoided eye contact.

Meanwhile, Jasper was interviewing students and Katie told me he’d talked to five kids separately about what happened. He showed Katie a timeline he was building that proved how many chances adults had to stop this from happening. She said he looked really upset when she described Tommy crying about going blind and how scared he’d been those last few weeks.

Detective Budro called while I was doing homework to update me on the criminal investigation. The DA was looking at charging Miss Laid with false imprisonment and reckless child endangerment based on the evidence. He said having two students with severe reactions and Tommy’s death made the case much stronger than if it was just me.

My next therapy appointment with EMTT Bloom focused on my anger and how it was eating me up inside. He helped me see that destroying Miss Laid wasn’t the real goal, but stopping her from ever hurting another kid was. It felt better thinking about it that way, even though the rage still burned in my stomach every night.

Gray tried getting the hallway security footage that would show Mr. Peterson walking away, but the school said it was under legal hold. He actually smiled when he told me this was good because now they couldn’t delete it or claim the cameras weren’t working.

The next morning, he sent official preservation letters to both the district and the substitute teacher agency by certified mail. These letters legally required them to keep all documents about Miss Blade, including training records and previous complaints from other schools. He explained that companies sometimes lose important papers right before trials, but now they’d face criminal charges if anything disappeared.

That same week, the local paper ran an op-ed that made my blood boil. The writer called our whole situation “moral panic” and said Miss Blade was just a victim of helicopter parents who coddle their kids. They wrote that allergies are overblown these days and teachers shouldn’t have to deal with every little medical complaint. The online comments turned into a war zone. Some people shared their own allergy horror stories and said Miss Blade should be in jail. Others said we were drama queens looking for attention and a payday. My mom spent hours screenshotting the worst comments for our lawyer while my dad paced around the kitchen reading them out loud. Katie’s parents had to change their phone number after someone posted it online.

The records request Gray filed finally came back with some interesting stuff. Miss Laid had two previous complaints at other schools that nobody knew about. The first one was from three years ago when she wouldn’t let a diabetic kid check his blood sugar. She told him he was being dramatic and seeking attention—just like she told me. The kid ended up passing out and hitting his head on a desk. The second complaint was from last year at a middle school where she refused to let a girl use her inhaler during an asthma attack. The girl’s parents pulled her out of school the next day and filed a complaint, but nothing ever happened.

Gray made copies of everything and added them to our growing pile of evidence.

Then things got worse when some idiot from our class posted on social media that Miss Blade was trying to kill us for insurance money. They said she had life insurance policies on all her students, which was completely made up and stupid. The post went viral before anyone could stop it, and suddenly we looked like crazy conspiracy theorists. Katie made them take it down, but the damage was already done. News outlets started calling us “the students who cried wolf” and questioning if we were making everything up. Gray had to send out a statement saying we had nothing to do with that post and it didn’t represent our actual claims.

Two days later, FedEx showed up at all our houses with thick envelopes from Miss Blade’s lawyer. The cease-and-desist letters threatened to sue us for defamation if we kept talking about what happened. They said we were ruining her reputation and causing emotional distress with our false allegations. My parents were freaking out, but Gray called an emergency meeting at his office. He explained this was just an intimidation tactic to shut us up, but we still had to be careful about what we posted online. No more social media posts about the case, no talking to reporters without him present, and definitely no wild theories about insurance money.

We decided to get organized and create a shared Google Drive for all our evidence. Mike took charge of scanning every document we had, while Sarah handled all the medical records and doctor’s notes. Katie organized the witness statements from our classmates and I worked on the timeline of exactly what happened that day. We had folders for news articles, social media screenshots, emails from supporters, and the growing stack of legal documents. Seeing it all organized like that made it feel more real and less like a nightmare we couldn’t wake up from.

School was getting harder, too, because I couldn’t control my panic attacks anymore. In chemistry class, someone opened a bag of trail mix with nuts and I completely lost it. My throat started closing up even though I didn’t eat anything, and I couldn’t breathe. The teacher had to call the nurse, who implemented my new emergency exit plan where I could leave any class without permission if I felt triggered. It was so embarrassing having everyone watch me run out of the room gasping for air. The nurse gave me a paper bag to breathe into and called my mom to pick me up early. I missed the rest of the day and had to make up a test I was supposed to take.

The next week was the school board meeting we’d been preparing for. Katie had written a three-page statement about what happened and practiced reading it over and over. But when she got up to the microphone, they told her she only had three minutes for public comment. She tried to read faster, but they cut her off mid-sentence when the timer went off. Parents in the audience started yelling that this was a cover-up and they deserved to know what happened. One mom stood up and shouted that her kid was in that classroom and had nightmares every night. Security guards started moving toward the crowd and the board president threatened to clear the room if people didn’t calm down. Three parents got escorted out, including Katie’s dad, who was filming everything on his phone. The board said they’d take our concerns under advisement, which basically meant they weren’t going to do anything. We were crushed walking out of that meeting knowing they didn’t care about what happened to us.

Then finally, we heard from the DA’s office—but it wasn’t good news. They called our parents, saying they were still waiting for final medical reports before deciding on charges. The prosecutor warned that the process could take months, and even if they charged Miss Blade, she might get a plea deal. They said cases like this were hard to prove because she could claim she didn’t know how serious allergies were. My dad slammed his phone down so hard after that call that the screen cracked. We all felt like the system was failing us and Tommy died for nothing.

But then Jasper got an interesting email that gave us new hope. Someone who worked with Miss Blade at a summer camp ten years ago reached out after seeing the news stories. This person said Miss Blade used to brag about how her parents “cured” her cat allergy by locking her in a room with cats when she was five. She would tell this story to anyone who mentioned allergies and say that’s how all allergies should be handled. The email had dates and names of other counselors who heard her say this stuff. Jasper forwarded it to Gray right away and we added it to our evidence folder. This proved her dangerous beliefs went back years and she knew exactly what she was doing to me.

Gray used all this evidence to officially file our civil lawsuit against Miss Blade and the school district. The lawsuit sought damages for medical costs, trauma, and Tommy’s death, which his parents joined as plaintiffs. The paperwork was over a hundred pages thick with every single detail of what happened spelled out in legal language. Reading through it made me realize how serious this all was and how much our lives had changed because of one substitute teacher who thought she knew better than doctors.

Two days later, Katie texted me a link that made me throw my phone across the room. Miss Blade had posted a twenty-minute video on YouTube calling herself the real victim and claiming we were all lying about what happened. She sat in her living room crying fake tears while saying she never meant to hurt anyone and that cancel culture was destroying her life. The comment section was full of people saying kids these days are too soft and that she was scapegoated for a tragic accident nobody could have prevented. I spent the next three hours throwing up while my mom held my hair back.

The district called an emergency meeting that Friday where they offered us all early settlements with non-disclosure agreements attached. The paperwork was thick and full of legal terms, but basically they wanted to pay us to shut up about the whole thing. Some parents were already signing because they needed money for medical bills and therapy costs. My mom looked at the check amount and I could see her doing math in her head about my hospital bills. Other parents were yelling that this was blood money and the district was trying to sweep everything under the rug before the real investigation started. Katie’s dad ripped up his settlement offer right there in front of everyone. The room split into two groups arguing while the district lawyers sat there taking notes.

That’s when our lawyer Gray dropped a folder on the table that shut everyone up. Training records showed Miss Blade had skipped the mandatory module on recognizing and responding to anaphylaxis three years ago. She’d submitted a form claiming she already had equivalent training from a previous job, but nobody ever checked if that was true. The district superintendent’s face went white as he read through the papers. Gray had also found emails where administrators ignored warnings about her behavior at staff meetings. One teacher had written that Miss Blade seemed to enjoy having power over students too much. Another email mentioned she’d made weird comments about allergies being made up by pharmaceutical companies. The district lawyers started whispering to each other and asked for a recess. We sat in that conference room for two hours while they panicked in another room down the hall.

Mr. Peterson showed up at my house that weekend asking to talk privately. He sat on our porch steps and couldn’t even look me in the eye while he admitted he’d seen us through the window that day. He said Miss Blad(e)’s thumbs up made him think everything was fine and he trusted her because she was a teacher. His hands were shaking as he explained how he’d been having nightmares about Tommy and couldn’t stop thinking about what would have happened if he’d just opened the door. I told him his guilt didn’t undo his choice to walk away when kids were screaming for help. He left crying, but I didn’t feel bad for him at all.

The district announced new policies the next week requiring all classroom doors to stay unlocked during instruction. They were also installing emergency EpiPens in bright red, unlocked boxes in every room. Principal Barfield held an assembly explaining the new rules while avoiding any mention of why they were suddenly necessary. It felt like such a small victory considering what it took to get there. Kids were still having panic attacks in that classroom, even though they’d replaced all the desks and repainted the walls.

Jack started coming over after school to help me prepare for giving depositions. We sat at my kitchen table while he asked me practice questions, and I tried to answer without crying or getting too angry. He was really patient when I had to take breaks to calm down. We figured out boundaries for our complicated relationship and agreed to focus on the case while dealing with personal stuff later. His presence helped more than I expected, even though things were still weird between us.

That lasted until Daniel decided to betray everyone by leaking our private group chat screenshots to some blogger defending Miss Blade online. He’d edited them to make himself look reasonable and the rest of us look like we were exaggerating for attention. The messages spread across social media with people calling us crisis actors and saying we were ruining an innocent woman’s life. Our group kicked Daniel out immediately and his reputation at the school tanked when people found out what he’d done. Kids knocked his books out of his hands in the hallway and nobody would sit with him at lunch. Even teachers looked at him with disgust when he walked into their classrooms.

During my next therapy session with EMTT, we worked through my urge to personally confront Miss Blade. I’d been having dreams about showing up at her house and making her understand what she’d done to us. EMTT helped me see that channeling everything through legal channels was safer and would actually accomplish more than any confrontation could. The temptation to do something reckless faded, but never completely went away—especially when I’d wake up gasping from nightmares.

Jasper Beckwith’s full investigation finally published as a long article with our real names after we gave permission. He’d spent months piecing together every detail, including Tommy’s declining vision in his final days and the note his parents found. Public opinion shifted dramatically when people read the timeline of Tommy losing his sight bit by bit and choosing to end things rather than live in darkness. Her video—crying about being the real victim—while Tommy’s parents joined a lawsuit? That’s some Olympic-level mental gymnastics right there. Someone give her a gold medal for missing the point completely. The article went viral with millions of shares and even celebrities posting about it. Miss Blade’s supporters mostly went quiet, except for a few conspiracy theorists who claimed the whole thing was staged.

That’s when Gray found the smoking gun we’d been looking for. Records showed Miss Blade had done something similar five years ago at a school three districts over. She’d locked students in during a tornado drill, claiming she was teaching them discipline and respect for authority. One kid had a panic attack and passed out, but the school quietly let her resign to avoid scandal. They’d passed the problem to us by giving her neutral references and never mentioning the incident. The other district’s HR person admitted in a deposition that they just wanted her gone and didn’t care where she went next.

Two days after that deposition dropped, Miss Blade’s supporters found us online. My phone started blowing up with messages calling me a liar and attention-seeker, while Katie got death threats on Instagram. Gray made us screenshot everything and told us not to respond to any of it. The messages kept coming for weeks—people saying we destroyed an innocent teacher’s life; that Tommy killed himself because he was weak, not because of what happened. I blocked over forty accounts, but new ones kept popping up.

Three weeks later, I sat in a conference room for my deposition while Miss Blade’s lawyer grilled me for four straight hours. He kept asking the same questions different ways, trying to get me to contradict myself or admit I was being dramatic. I stuck to the facts, describing exactly how I crawled across the floor, how the blood dripped from my nose, how my throat closed up. Miss Blade sat across from me the whole time, and when I described crawling on my hands and knees, her face went white and her lawyer had to call a recess.

The DA called us two months later to say they were filing criminal charges. Miss Blade got arraigned on two counts of reckless child endangerment and one count of false imprisonment. She showed up in a gray suit trying to look professional, but they still put her in handcuffs after she pleaded not guilty. The judge set bail at $50,000 and she posted it that same day. But seeing her in cuffs felt like the first real victory we’d had.

The district’s lawyers came to us with a bigger settlement offer that would cover all our medical bills plus therapy for the next five years. The number was huge, but it came with an NDA that would stop us from talking about what happened—except for policy stuff. Katie and I spent three days going back and forth with them about adding language that would let us speak at schools about allergy safety and advocate for better training. They kept saying no until we threatened to reject the whole thing and go to trial instead. The lawyers caved and added the carve-out we wanted, plus money for a foundation in Tommy’s name.

The school held a mandatory assembly the next week with a moment of silence for Tommy, but half the kids were on their phones and some were whispering about how we were being dramatic. One kid actually said out loud that Tommy was probably depressed anyway and this was just an excuse. I walked out and threw up in the bathroom while Katie stayed and recorded the whole thing on her phone.

The state board of education met the following month and voted unanimously to revoke Miss Laid’s teaching certificate permanently. They posted it in the public records database where any school that searched her name would see it forever. She couldn’t even teach at private schools or tutor kids anymore because the revocation specifically banned her from any position of authority over minors.

That’s when she filed her wrongful termination lawsuit against the district, claiming they made her a scapegoat for their own failures in training and oversight. Her filing called us manipulative children who orchestrated a performance to get attention and destroy her career. I found it online at two in the morning and read the whole thing—every page where she painted herself as the victim and us as scheming brats who planned the whole thing. EMTT found me crying on my bedroom floor at four a.m., took my laptop away, and made me promise to stop reading anything about the case online. He set up blockers on my devices and helped me find a therapist who specialized in trauma from authority figures.

We met with the lawyers one last time to sign the settlement papers with all our changes included. The money would cover everything medical plus therapy for years, and we could still speak about what happened as long as we focused on safety reforms instead of attacking the district directly. It wasn’t perfect justice, because nothing could bring Tommy back, but at least we got something real that we fought for and won.

Katie pulled out her laptop that night and started typing up a mission statement, while Sarah made a list of every school board meeting in the state. Jack designed a logo with Tommy’s initials inside a medical cross, and I started writing down everything we wanted to change about emergency protocols in schools. We filed the paperwork to make Tommy’s Law an official nonprofit the next week and set up social media accounts that got thousands of followers within days.

Our first school board meeting was three towns over, and we drove there in Sarah’s mom’s minivan with a box of flyers and our hearts pounding. I stood at that podium and told them about watching Tommy’s eyes swell shut while our teacher ate peanuts and laughed at us. Katie showed them the video someone had recorded on their phone before the teacher took them away. Sarah read statistics about how many kids die from allergic reactions in schools every year. Jack presented our proposal for mandatory unlocked medical cabinets and quarterly emergency training for all staff. The board voted yes right there in the meeting and parents were crying in the audience.

We hit twelve more districts that month and every single one passed our safety reforms. Local news picked up the story and suddenly we were getting calls from schools in other states asking how to implement Tommy’s Law. We spoke at a national education conference where I had to leave the stage twice to use my inhaler because talking about it still made my chest tight. Sarah’s mom drove us everywhere, made sandwiches for the car rides, and never complained about the gas money. Katie kept a spreadsheet of every school that adopted our protocols. By month three, we had over two hundred. Jack got us meetings with state legislators who started drafting actual laws requiring allergy training. I testified at the state capitol with my EpiPen in my pocket and my hands shaking the whole time.

Six months passed. Now I check every single food label twice before eating anything and carry three EpiPens in different pockets. My therapist says the nightmares about blue lips and foam will fade eventually, but I still wake up gasping sometimes.

Miss Laid’s trial starts next month and the prosecutor says we have a solid case for criminal negligence and false imprisonment. Tommy’s parents sent us a letter thanking us for everything we did, but his mom couldn’t stop crying at his memorial service last week. The rage isn’t drowning me anymore, but it’s still there when I see peanut butter in stores or hear teachers complaining about overprotective parents.

We couldn’t bring Tommy back, but we made sure Miss Blade will never have the power to hurt another kid again.

“Man, thanks for hanging out with me and diving into all these questions today. It’s always such a wild ride just sitting here wondering about stuff together. Can’t wait to do it again next time. If you made it to the end, drop a comment.”