Like a snowman, one of my twins suggests—looping first around the cracked basketball court and playground equipment, then the large parking lot where caregivers line up early, some in pickups, some in indistinguishable SUVs, one in a Cybertruck. Adults fall into phones as they wait to collect their middle schoolers, who are banned from carrying their own phones to class.

Our walk is crunchy with newly dropped leaves, and my boys relish the rustle, notice the variety of color, observe the world the way I’ve taught them to. The twins say they hope their brother, my eldest, remembers to bring his fleece home today. A leaf pile awaits.

So far this year, my sixth grader has lost his planner, library book, ruler, eraser, and the squishy cube he uses to ease anxiety. He’s misplaced his water bottle twice and fleece once. Like phones, backpacks are banned. Once children arrive at their lockers in the morning, they must select what they need for first period and balance it all—binder, notebook, folder, planner, pencil case, water, maybe a calculator or sketchpad—in their hands. After each class, they have only two minutes to return to their lockers and exchange the necessary supplies for the next. I get how the eraser didn’t make it.

The school has banned backpacks because backpacks can hide phones, drugs, and guns. If a child is going to wield a weapon, he’d have to do it before the homeroom bell.

Last week, a rumor spread through our parent community. An eighth grader, we heard, penned a hit list on Snapchat. The principal keeps messaging the parent body to scold us for gossiping. But we go on messaging each other, rumoring whether, in the absence of more information, there’s a kernel of truth to the hit list story. One parent in our Facebook group suggested that it might be carried out in a few weeks, on Halloween, and now I can’t decide whether my son should attend that day, dressed as Sir Gawain. He’s not allowed to carry his toy sword to school.

I know sudden loss. My father was killed when I was six. I often imagine the countless other cars on the highway that evening and speculate about the math that sent the drunk driver’s hood into a single windshield: his.

Looking at the line of waiting cars, faces aglow with blue-white phone light, I consider the same odds. Which state, which town, which school? When will it happen here? Who among us will lament, if only my daughter had a cold, if only my son had overslept, if only the kid had aimed three inches to the left.

My son walks into and out of school with a teacher, because his anxiety is profound and navigating the hallways alone overwhelms him. But I don’t know how to parse this particular anxiety for my sons. I don’t know how to explain there’s as much danger on Snapchat as there is on the sidewalk. I don’t know how to teach them to notice signs of trouble without also filling them with fear. What I do know is that after my father died, my then-single mother hand-sewed my Halloween costume and sent me with a plastic pumpkin into the dark.

The phone in my pocket buzzes. I try not to check my phone during walks with the twins, but later I’ll see the messages from the principal: your children will be safe at school; we held a lockdown drill today; intramural signups are open!

For now, we crunch along, naming the colors carrot and egg yolk and plum, until the last bell rings, until we climb into the car and wait for my eldest son’s teacher to return him to us.

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Suzanne Farrell Smith’s books include Small Off Things: Meditations from an Anxious Mind, an essay collection; The Memory Sessions, a memoir about searching for lost childhood memory; and The Writing Shop, a teaching guidebook. She won a Pushcart for her essay “If You Find a Mouse on a Glue Trap,” published in Brevity. With a BA from Trinity College, an MA from The New School, and an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, Suzanne teaches at Westport Writers’ Workshop. She lives in a creek-cut valley in Connecticut with her husband, three sons, and three cats.

Artwork by Meera Lee Patel