Photos:Cosmopolitan features 3 Chibok Girls who fled Boko Haram captivity

Mercy, Sarah, and Deborah (Grace asked not to be photographed)

Grace slept through the sounds of gunfire in the night. Exhausted from final exams at her boarding school in Nigeria, she awoke when her roommate Mary prodded her, "Get up!"

Suddenly, the girls saw a gang of men spreading across the school grounds. "They said they were soldiers. They said they were there to protect us," Grace says. "They told us all to stay together."

Terrified, the girls did as they were told. The men made their way to the pantry, grabbing all the food. Then they headed for the administrative office. On the way, they began shouting, "Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!" It means "God is great" in Arabic. They lit the office on fire

"We realized they were impostors," Grace says. "They were not there to help us." But it was too late to run. The girls were forced into trucks at gunpoint. Grace sat with Mary as their vehicle roared off into the dawn. As the school burned in their wake, lighting the sky, Grace thought, These men are going to kill us.

That was more than a year ago, in April. Terrorist group Boko Haram seized hundreds of school girls from the town of Chibok, threatening to sell them as slaves.

Global outrage followed. Social media erupted with the Bring Back Our Girls campaign. Hillary Clinton and Angelina Jolie joined the rallying cry. A few dozen of the kidnapped girls managed to escape. Yet at press time, more than 200 remained missing, despite a recent military offensive that freed hundreds of other captives.

Boko Haram has waged an increasingly bloody war in recent years, beheading, burning alive, and gunning down thousands of people in an effort to create an Islamic state and wipe out Western influence from the country's schools. At least 2,000 women and girls have been kidnapped since the start of last year, according to Amnesty International. Some were reportedly stoned to death.

Today, Grace is living a world away from all that, at a high school in Canyonville, Oregon, a town ringed by mountains and towering redwoods. She and three other Chibok girls are quietly finishing their education at the Canyonville Christian Academy, a cozy boarding school with students from more than a dozen countries. Grace wants her tale of escape to be told. But she is not too eager to do the telling.