She survived a high school shooting. At Michigan State, it happened again.

“I’m sorry babe,” her dad, Matt Riddle, wrote back. “Let’s hope it is nothing.”

His daughter called a few minutes later. It wasn’t nothing.

“There’s an active shooter,” she whispered, hiding beneath her desk, the lights off and the windows covered. “I can’t believe this is happening again.”

On a winter afternoon a little more than a year ago, Emma had been 80 miles east, in the band room at Oxford High School, when someone rushed in, panicked. Something bad was happening. Then an emergency alert blared through the intercom. They had drilled on what to do next for years.

Run. Hide. Fight.

Emma, who played clarinet, waited in terror behind barricaded doors until the students decided to try escaping. A door at the back of the room led out to a field where the marching band practiced. They peeked out into the daylight, then fled.

Dozens of police cars sped by, and helicopters circled overhead. Sprinting through a neighborhood, Emma called her father.

“Dad, there’s an active shooter,” she said, weeping and out of breath. “I’m scared.”

Emma, then a senior, didn’t know that in the building behind her, in the town she’d spent all her life, a 15-year-old sophomore had opened fire, wounding 11 people. Four of them — all teenagers — died, including Justin Shilling, who was a friend.

The weeks that followed were a haze of funerals and memorials and community gatherings. It was hard to say no to anything, but all the trauma and grief exhausted her, as it did many of her classmates.

The sounds of police sirens and helicopters overwhelmed Emma, yanking her back to that frantic sprint through the neighborhood.

She refused to let any of it derail her senior year, though. Emma attended therapy sessions at school and learned to manage her flashbacks. An excellent student, she decided on Michigan State because of its history program. She liked that it was close to home, too.

As a freshman, Emma thrived. She made good grades and lots of friends. She joined a history club and a book club and a Taylor Swift club, where members discussed lyrics and favorite songs (she was torn between “Willow” and “August”).

Emma, one of about 20 Oxford survivors at the university, decided to minor in women’s studies, hoping to one day get a doctorate, maybe become a professor and teach students like her.

And then came Monday night.

“I’m so scared,” she texted her family.

“I known,” her dad replied, typing too fast to correct the typo. “I love you. He isn’t going in the dorms. They have locked the buildings.”

“Why haven’t they caught him yet,” she continued. “He’s so close dad.”

She and her roommate hid in the darkness for hours, and at 12:31 a.m., in a moment of fury and frustration, Emma composed a tweet: “14 months ago I had to evacuate from Oxford High School when a fifteen year old opened fire and killed four of my classmates and injured seven more. Tonight, I am sitting under my desk at Michigan State University, once again texting everyone ‘I love you.’ When will this end?”

Around 1:30 a.m., they learned that the school would allow students to leave campus. The gunman, who killed three students and wounded five others, had taken his own life.

Her dad sped to East Lansing, pulling up outside his daughter’s building at 2:30 a.m. Emma wrapped her arms around him, then she and her roommate got in the car.

Matt Riddle took the week off to support his daughter at home. The memories of Oxford have all rushed back, but her dad also realized that, in her mind, she felt prepared for what’s to come.

She’s been an adult for only nine months, but she is a veteran of school shootings. She won’t overextend herself this time. She’ll know when to say no. She’ll know when to talk about it and when not to.

“It’s heartbreaking,” her dad said, “that she has those tools.”

She’ll need them, especially when she goes back, he said. Many of her classes were in Berkey Hall, where the gunfire started. Emma knows she could have been there Monday night, too.

“For me, as a parent, you’re so focused on supporting and loving and just making sure that she has the means to deal with everything she has to deal with,” Riddle said. “Every now and then, you get a little mad, you get a little angry, and you’re like, ‘Why are we doing this again?’”

“Nothing,” he said, “has changed.”

Emma adores Michigan State and its sprawling campus of 50,000 students. As when she was at Oxford, she is determined not to let an act of gun violence strip her of the future she’s worked so hard to reach. But by Tuesday evening, she and her family had all begun to think about the reality of their drive back to campus on Sunday.

They will make the 80-mile trek west. They will pull up to her dorm. They will hug and force themselves to say goodbye. And they will hope that it doesn’t happen again.

Razzan Nakhlawi contributed to this report.