Nearly a year has passed since a 14-year-old student with a gun took Twila Smith's classroom hostage. But she still feels uneasy around open doors.
On Aug. 25, 2015, Smith, a teacher at Philip Barbour High School, was preparing to teach her sixth-period world studies class when the freshman student, who had missed her first-period class, hurried into the room.
She thought he'd come to ask about missed homework. He put a gun to her head and told her she was going to die.
Smith recounted the experience at the West Virginia Center for Professional Development's Safe Schools Summit at the Charleston Marriott Town Center on Tuesday.
She noticed toward the beginning of her speech that a door at the back of the room was open.
"I thought, 'Am I going to have to get up there and speak with that door open,' because the door to my classroom was open," she said Tuesday. "It became an issue for me and the students that were in there all throughout the rest of the year."
Last August, Smith's student told her to lock her door and throw her keys across the room. It didn't occur to her to try to disarm him.
"I'm not going to tell you how old I am, but I got an AARP card, and I'm going to tell you, that is my last thought," she said.
He also ordered her to close the curtain in the window. Curtains in the school were only supposed to be closed in lockdown situations.
"This is my little advice for you today, and I appreciate you listening to advice of one of your teachers," she said. "If it looks strange, if it feels strange, if it seems strange, it is strange."
The student singled out five students for direct questioning. He told them if they didn't answer his questions correctly, they would die.
Everyone made it out of the classroom alive.
One student the boy had wanted to question was at a dentist's appointment.
"I want to tell you something," Smith said. "I'm not going to speak a lot about this, but I'm a woman of faith, and that wasn't a dentist appointment. That was a God appointment."
She thought about her 9-year-old granddaughter, who had said she wanted to be a teacher: "I thought, boy, that's not going to happen."
She knew that at 1:22 p.m., the bell would ring. She worried the students would stir, and the teenager with the gun would respond by firing.
She told him they needed to come up with a plan, and he told her the next class of students would come inside the room and be taken hostage as well.
"I didn't think I was walking out of that room, but I was not going to allow another child to walk in that room," she said.
Smith and the boy began to negotiate. He agreed to let her answer the door each time a student knocked, and tell them to go to the classroom across the hall.
When a crowd at formed at that door, teacher Jennifer Swift walked over to Smith's room and knocked on the door.
Smith and the boy answered. The boy placed a gun to Swift's head, but somehow she was able to get away and get help.
While they waited, a girl walked over to the boy and said "just give me the gun."
"This was my first inclination that they had been romantic," Smith said. "They had been in a relationship and it had broken up and I know that we don't think 14-year-old love is real love, but 14-year-olds do." (The boy's pastor has also said bullying contributed to the incident.)
Philippi police soon arrived.
"I tried again to say 'we're coming out' because I kept thinking that if there were people out there he would just go with me," Smith said, "and Chief [Jeff] Walters had to say to me, 'ma'am, could you stop talking.'
"He thought I was interfering with his negotiation. I really kind of thought he was interfering with mine. Don't tell him that."
When the boy finally agreed to let everyone file out of the room, he stood behind Smith's desk with his gun to his head.
"I'll tell you, there's a lot of things that happened that day and there are a lot of images I have in my mind from that day, and that is one that is hard to get out of my head," she said. "I was scared of the student that came in. I was terrified. I felt at time that he was going to take my life, but at that moment, at the end, I felt sorry for him."
The boy's pastor ultimately arrived and worked with police to persuade the boy to come out of the room without harming himself.
Smith described several ways educators could learn from her experience. She called for more police presence in schools. She called for more communication between educators when students who display warning signs transition between schools. She asked for administrators to look for anything out of the ordinary, like that closed curtain. She mentioned the need for school-based mental health care.
But over the past year, Smith has come to a conclusion. Preventing a school shooting isn't a task to leave up to other people, for another day.
In the months after the incident, she kept thinking, "they need to do something."
"They're not making us feel safe," she would think. "They need to do something. They need to do this. They need to do that. You know what? I had to really check myself, and I had to say 'what are we going to do? This is our school. What are we going to do about this?'"
In many ways, Smith is changed. She will never again feel comfortable when she looks at the clock, and it says 1:22 pm.
In others, she remains the same.
"Make your school the safest school in West Virginia," she told the group. "Make it West Virginia safe. And that granddaughter - she still wants to be a teacher."
She choked up as she added, "So do I."
Reach Erin Beck at erin.beck@wvgazettemail.com, Facebook.com/erinbeckwv, 304-348-5163 or follow @erinbeckwv on Twitter.