It was pitch black as I struggled to balance all of my overpacked bags. 

“Who the hell gets up at 3 in the morning?” I thought to myself as I threw the duffel, packed so tight I feared the zipper would break, into the trunk. I felt like I was in a dream, awake so early in the morning wearing upsettingly long shorts in cooperation with the church dress code. Myself, along with 70 other teenagers, were headed to Philadelphia on a five am train for my church's annual summer mission trip. 

1 hour into the train ride I was more bored than I have ever been, and I lived through freshman physics. No electronic devices were allowed for the entire week-long trip. I wasn’t smart enough to carry on my pillow but it’s not like I would have been able to rest anyway with the sharply intense fluorescent lights burning through my eyelids. I was truly amazed at the ability of all the people around me to fall asleep in such conditions.

By the time we finally made it into the building we were staying in and sat down to eat, the annoyances were piling up like tests the week before winter break. The restrictive dress code, the less than ideal sleeping conditions, the stomach-ache inducing food, and the lack of sleep to name a few. While it was fun to joke about the situation with my friends on the trip, I could not wait to go to sleep even if it was in the world's hottest room on the world's most unreliable air mattress.

I woke up again at an ungodly hour but this time the only thing separating me from the cold, hard, suspiciously filthy ground was the thin material of my completely deflated air mattress and somehow, the breakfast food was somehow even more repulsive than last night's dinner.

My discomfort continued as my day group packed into our van, the kind that makes you want to cross to the other sidewalk rather than walk by. I was, of course, stuck in the back row, the only row not reached by the air conditioning. The intense silence of the sweaty car ride was interrupted by my group leader, Mr. McGinnis. He had gone to grad school at Temple, as he wouldn’t let us forget, and took it upon himself to extend his expertise of the city of Philadelphia onto us at every opportunity. 

As I peeled myself off of the sticky van seat, I was hardly prepared for what I would face in the next 4 hours. The small community garden was packed full of weeds grown so tall I was sure nothing had ever been grown there in my 15 years of life. If you know me at all you know that I was not made for physical labor, and fixing this garden required an absurd amount of work. I found myself pulling weeds that had to be taller than my dad out of the ground in the suffocating heat of what would end up being the hottest day of the summer.

By the time we returned back to our building I was so exhausted that I found myself not even caring what the food looked like, but still avoided the meat. Although the day felt like it had lasted years and was filled with discomfort, I still found myself laughing. As my friends and I all sat at dinner recalling the events of the day I realized that the misfortune we encountered during the day was actually pretty funny. 

The next day went pretty similarly to the last, and by the third day we had all settled into the routine and for the most part things were going pretty smoothly. Things started to change on the ride home from church that Wednesday morning. Once again I was stuck in the back row of the hot van tuning out the arguments of Mr. McGinnis and his son, Liam, in the front seat. I was paying little attention to the road and hadn’t even thought to buckle myself in. 

All of a sudden I am being pulled forward into the small gap between the first 3 rows. Thankfully I didn't fall far at all and was not injured beyond a slight rope burn from a seatbelt in the row in front of me. I was still processing what had happened when all four doors of the bright red minivan we had just crashed into opened simultaneously. Out of the car poured at least ten people, way more than can safely fit into a standard minivan. A few of the passengers were teenagers and as they exited single file they began taking pictures and videos of our van. While his father talked with the driver of the minivan, Liam began to yell about how unfair it was that we were being blamed for an accident that his father had clearly caused. I looked out my window to see Mrs. Fairbanks, the trip coordinator, running towards us. It was like watching a slow motion scene from some cheesy low-budget movie as she turned the corner in a full sprint to the soundtrack of a whiny 18 year old screaming from the front seat. 

Once everything was settled and we returned to the group it was like we were celebrities. Everyone rushed over to us asking what happened and we even got out of our cleaning duties for the day. Eventually the day continued on as normal but we were all still fixated on the events of that morning. At the time we figured that the crash had to have been the biggest obstacle we could face throughout the week, we could not have been more wrong.

On our way to our worksite for the day Mr. Mcginnis was, once again, sharing stories of his glory days as a Philly grad student. As we got closer to our destination, he described the area we were working in as the “armpit of Pennsylvania”. I turned to my friend, Mikayla, to give her a look as if to say “what is this old guy even saying” but immediately turned away when the rest of my van started shouting.

Through my finger-print-stained window I saw one of our vans pulled over in front of an older looking light blue sedan. When I turned to look through the opposite window I saw police sirens and two men laying on the grass. We were all pretty confused at the sight but came to the conclusion that they had probably just gotten into a simple fender bender. 

“Wow, what are the odds we get into two crashes in two days?” my friend Grace said as we all, excluding the van from the accident, arrived at the garden. We began to start our work for the day as we waited for the last van to arrive, we all couldn’t wait for them to arrive so we could hear the story of what had happened. Around 10-15 minutes later the van arrived and immediately the entire environment changed. The group from the crash were mostly upperclassmen so as they met up with their friends, we waited patiently for the gossip to trickle down to us. We then began to notice that all of the adult chaperones on the trip were gathered around talking with looks ranging from shock to fear upon their faces. My confusion increased tenfold as I saw Mrs. Fairbanks crying as she left the other adults and stood in front of us. She told us that it was a hard decision but we had to leave the worksite because they thought it wasn’t safe for us to stay any longer.

“The man that hit them was on the run after killing 4 people”. An upperclassman leaned over to explain to us amidst the chaos and confusion. “He ran as soon as he hit the van, but there was an undercover cop parked across the street that caught and tazed him”. We all stopped walking and stood there, mouths open, in shock. Our group of rich, privileged Hopkinton kids had just had a run in with a serial killer.

Since our plans for the rest of the day, and our lunch, was abandoned at the worksite most groups stopped to buy their own lunches, with the exception of my group. We were once again plagued by the miserable driving skills of Mr. Mcginnis as he got lost not once, not twice, but three times all while his GPS was on. Because of all this lost time not only were we unable to get lunch, but we were the last to arrive back at our building. As we approached our friends we noticed everyone was gathered in groups talking intensely.

“What is everyone talking about?” I asked as I sat down.

“You haven’t heard? There was a driveby shooting” came the answer from next to me. I sat still, completely in awe, as I listened to my friends in the group that had gone to McDonalds for lunch share what had happened to them. As they opened the door they were pulled in by an employee and told to get on the ground. They heard gunshots and saw a car passing by with a gun out the window. They were all forced to wait there for the next 20 minutes while their chaperone was out getting gas. 

Of course we were all shaken and the shooting only added to the damper that had been set upon the group that day, but no one seemed too affected. On fact, it was almost scary how fast everyone moved on from it.

That night after dinner, the rumors began to spread like a poorly executed game of telephone. I heard from Grace who heard from Nick who heard from Alex who’s mom was a chaperone that they were sending us home early. It turns out the dramatic story we heard was not at all true and it was only one kid leaving early. We spent the rest of the week acting like nothing had happened and to this day it still feels like some big funny joke and not something I actually experienced.