Give a Boy a Gun (4 page)

I could have just gone and offed myself quietly, but that would have been an even bigger waste. If I go this way, taking the people who made my life miserable with me, then maybe it will send a message. Maybe something will change, and some other miserable kid like me somewhere will get treated better and maybe find a reason to live.

Each year 2.5 million new handguns are sold in this country.

I thought I knew Gary better. We sort of went together on and off for nearly two years. It's obvious now that I didn't know him. Not really. I knew he had that whole other thing with Brendan. Sometimes it almost felt like they had their own language. They each just seemed to know what the other was thinking. But now it's obvious he hid a lot. Not just from me, but from everyone except Brendan.

—Allison Findley

Until Gary came into the picture, I think I was Brendan's closest friend. I can't say I was really sorry when that changed. By then I'd gotten to know some other girls who were like me—quote, unquote “outcasts”—and we were trying to have a life in spite of all that cliquey weirdness at school. I don't know
why, but Brendan couldn't get past the weirdness. He was more fixated on it. It was almost all he would talk about. I was trying to get away from it. He just wanted to keep looking at it under a microscope.

— Emily Kirsch

Gary and I got into my mom's car one day. It was parked in the driveway, facing the garage. Gary sat behind the wheel, and I was next to him. He put his arm around my shoulder, and we just pretended we were driving somewhere. We were staring at the garage door with big flakes of white paint peeling off it, but in our minds we were going through the desert. Gary had done that once, so he was talking about cactus and sun-bleached bones and jackrabbits and hot sun.

I leaned my head on his shoulder, and I could see it all in my mind. The two of us, all alone, driving through the desert, a million miles away from everything. Just sagebrush and creosote bushes and burned reddish cliffs. A trail of dust flying up behind us.
Gary pulled me close and kissed my hair, and it was one of those really happy moments. I guess it was about as close as we ever got to blissful puppy love. Ha, ha!

Then Gary stopped. I looked up and saw that he was staring into the rearview mirror. I turned around, and Deirdre Bunson and Sam Flach and a bunch of other kids were in the street, pointing at us and laughing.

I wanted to die. Gary did too. He couldn't even turn around. He just slumped down in the seat and stared at that stupid garage door and the peeling paint. It was like they'd just stuck a knife in his heart.

Sometimes Gary and I could escape into that world where no one bothered us or laughed or made fun. But it never lasted long, and then it was like waking up from a dream and facing the cold, bald truth that it wasn't real and never would be. For the popular kids the dream was real. They lived it. They never had to be afraid of waking up.

—Allison Findley

It started to change at the beginning of ninth grade. I went away with my parents for two weeks in August, and Brendan and Gary stayed home and just hung with each other. When I got back, it was different. I can't exactly explain how, but I felt it. There was something dark in Brendan. I don't know where it came from. Whether it had always been inside him, or whether it just started to grow because of the way people treated him in school.

—Allison Findley

Gary wasn't always like that. When we were in eighth grade and some big jock would
body-slam us into a chalkboard or rip the pocket off our shirt, we'd be pissed, and we'd grumble about how we'd like to kill this guy and kick his face in. The thing was it was all sort of make-believe wishful thinking. Maybe you'd go home and play
Doom
for an hour and just blow everyone to bits. But you never
really
considered getting a gun and going after them. At least, I didn't.

—Ryan Clancy

“The . . . cliques that rule American high schools are every bit as murderous as Harris and Klebold, only their damage is done in slow motion, over a period of many years, and fails to draw the attention of parents or teachers.”

—a posting on the Internet

Gary would try to play it down, make fun of it. He'd say, “Hey, doesn't matter, I'm just a loser.” I'd tell him no, he wasn't a loser. But it was like he couldn't hear me. The rest of the school said he was a loser, and that just drowned me out.

—Allison Findley

People talk like our school is this sick, depraved place. That's so wrong. I talked to my mom and her friends about it, and they say it was just like this when they went to school. It must be like this at every other high school. Yes, kids can be really mean to one another, really cruel. But that's the way it's always been. I mean, isn't
part of growing up just learning to deal with it?

—Deirdre Bunson

Brendan and Gary got picked on. That's a fact. We all did. Little guys; fat guys; skinny, gangly, zit-riddled guys like me. Anyone who wasn't big and strong and on a team got it. You'd even see big guys on the football team push around some of the smaller players. Middletown High is big and crowded, and you've got ten dillion kids in the hall at once. Maybe if it's an all-out, knock-down-drag-out fight, some teacher will notice and try to stop it. But if it's just some big jerk shoving you into a locker, who's gonna see?

—Ryan Clancy

Julia [Reingold, one of Brendan's seventh-grade
teachers] is a close friend and has amazing radar for the kids who are going to need support but might otherwise fall through the cracks. One of the kids she mentioned was Brendan, so I made sure he was one of mine. I got him into my office one day, and he just about “yes, ma'amed” and “no, ma'amed” me to death. “Yes, ma'am, everything's fine.” “No, ma'am, I don't have a problem with anyone.” But you could see the pain and anger in his eyes. Of course, I had fifty boys and girls like that, all of them feeling more or less the same thing. And I was responsible for another 350, so what could I do?

—Beth Bender, Middletown High School counselor

“ ‘Every day being teased and picked on, pushed up against lockers—just the general feeling of fear in the school. And you either respond to a fear by having fear, or you take action and have hate.'”

—Brooks Brown, a student at Columbine High who knew both Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold,
Rolling Stone
, 6/10/99

Several news organizations pointed out that the ratio of students to counselors at Kipland Kinkel's high school was roughly 700 to 1.