Maddy Wilford, John Wilford

SURVIVING STUDENTS

Maddy Wilford has had to piece together what happened between the moment she sat down in her fourth-period AP psychology class and the moment she woke up alone in a hospital room. “I was blacked out for most of it,” she says. She had been shot three times in the arm and torso and was still in the hospital when her classmates were in Tallahassee advocating for gun control less than a week after the shooting. “I’m not really into the gun-activist thing,” she says. “I’m more focusing on the mental side of it, because the people that shoot up schools are obviously going through something.”

Returning to Stoneman Douglas this year has been hard for Maddy, 18, and her younger brother, John, 15, who was approached by the gunman at a nearby mall after the shooting. John was unharmed, but he hasn’t spoken about that day publicly. Maddy’s grades have dropped, and she has put off applying to colleges. “If I can’t even make it through high school courses,” she says, “then I need to take some time off so I can mentally heal.” But she still plans to study medicine, and interned last summer at the hospital where she recovered: “The excitement and joy it gave me watching [the doctors] help someone — I can’t even put it into words.”