Read We Need to Talk About Kevin Online
Authors: Lionel Shriver
Tags: #Fiction, #Psychological, #Teenage Boys, #Epistolary Fiction, #General, #Literary, #Massacres, #School Shootings, #High Schools, #New York (State)
We Need to Talk About Kevin (41 page)
“I never came within a mile of that cunt. And as for that fat Woodham fuck, you know his
mother
came with him on every date? No wonder he reamed her with a butcher knife.”
mother
came with him on every date? No wonder he reamed her with a butcher knife.”
“What happened? Did you finally work yourself up into cornering her against a locker during lunch? Did she slap you? Laugh in your face?”
“That the story you wanna tell yourself,” he said, scratching his exposed midriff, “I can’t stop you.”
“Tell other people, too. I was approached by a documentary filmmaker not long ago. Terribly anxious to hear ‘my side.’ Maybe I should call him back. I could explain to him how it was unrequited love all along. My son was head-over-heels for this smashing little number who wouldn’t give him the time of day. After all, how did Laura go down? Kevin may have made a hash of the rest of that crowd, but he shot her
straight through the heart
, our own cupid of Gladstone High. All those other poor wretches were just camouflage, just—what did he call it?
Collateral damage
.”
straight through the heart
, our own cupid of Gladstone High. All those other poor wretches were just camouflage, just—what did he call it?
Collateral damage
.”
Kevin leaned forward and lowered his voice confidentially. “How much did you care what girls I did and didn’t like before I whacked a couple? How much did you care about anything that went on in my head until it got out?”
I’m afraid that at that point I lost it a bit. “
You want me to feel sorry for you?
” I said in a voice that carried; the mole guard looked over. “Well, first I’ll feel sorry for Thelma Corbitt, and Mary Woolford. For the Fergusons and the Randolphs, for the Ulanovs and the Espinozas. I’ll let my heart break over a teacher who bent over backward to get inside your precious head, over a basketball player who can barely walk, and even a cafeteria worker I’ve never met, and
then
we’ll see if there’s any pity left over for you. There just might be, but it’s the scraps of my table you’re due, and for scraps you should count yourself lucky.”
You want me to feel sorry for you?
” I said in a voice that carried; the mole guard looked over. “Well, first I’ll feel sorry for Thelma Corbitt, and Mary Woolford. For the Fergusons and the Randolphs, for the Ulanovs and the Espinozas. I’ll let my heart break over a teacher who bent over backward to get inside your precious head, over a basketball player who can barely walk, and even a cafeteria worker I’ve never met, and
then
we’ll see if there’s any pity left over for you. There just might be, but it’s the scraps of my table you’re due, and for scraps you should count yourself lucky.”
“Nyeh
nyeh
nyeh nyeh
nyeh
nyeh-nyeh
nyeh
-nyeh!”
nyeh
nyeh nyeh
nyeh
nyeh-nyeh
nyeh
-nyeh!”
Then he laughed. Oh, Franklin. Whenever I let fly he seems so satisfied.
I admit, I tried to make him mad today. I was determined to make him feel small, not the deep dark impenetrable conundrum of Our Contemporary Society, but the butt of a joke,
hoisted on his own retard
. Because every time Kevin takes another bow as Evil Incarnate, he swells a little larger. Each slander slewed in his direction—
nihilistic
,
morally destitute
,
depraved, degenerate,
or
debased
—bulks his scrawny frame better than my cheese sandwiches ever did. No wonder he’s broadening out. He eats the world’s hearty denunciations for breakfast. Well, I don’t want him to feel unfathomable, a big beefed-up allegory of generational disaffection; I don’t want to allow him to cloak the sordid particulars of his tacky, crappy, gimcrack, derivative stunt with the grand mantle of Rudderless Youth Today. I want him to feel like one more miserable, all-too-understandable snippet of a plain dumb kid. I want him to feel witless and sniveling and inconsequential, and the last thing in the world I want to betray is how much of my day, every day, I spend trying to figure out what makes that boy tick.
hoisted on his own retard
. Because every time Kevin takes another bow as Evil Incarnate, he swells a little larger. Each slander slewed in his direction—
nihilistic
,
morally destitute
,
depraved, degenerate,
or
debased
—bulks his scrawny frame better than my cheese sandwiches ever did. No wonder he’s broadening out. He eats the world’s hearty denunciations for breakfast. Well, I don’t want him to feel unfathomable, a big beefed-up allegory of generational disaffection; I don’t want to allow him to cloak the sordid particulars of his tacky, crappy, gimcrack, derivative stunt with the grand mantle of Rudderless Youth Today. I want him to feel like one more miserable, all-too-understandable snippet of a plain dumb kid. I want him to feel witless and sniveling and inconsequential, and the last thing in the world I want to betray is how much of my day, every day, I spend trying to figure out what makes that boy tick.
My needling about his being stuck on Laura was merely an educated guess. Although any suggestion that his grandiose atrocity derived from a tawdry little broken heart was certain to offend, I’m not honestly sure how much Kevin’s crush on Laura Woolford had anything to do with
Thursday
. For all I know, he was trying to impress her.
Thursday
. For all I know, he was trying to impress her.
But I have made a study of those victims, whether or not he cares to examine the list himself. At first glance, it was a disparate group, so motley that their names might have been drawn from a hat: a basketball player, a studious Hispanic, a film buff, a classical guitarist, an emotive thespian, a computer hacker, a gay ballet student, a homely political activist, a vain teen beauty, a part-time cafeteria worker, and a devoted English teacher. Slice of life; an arbitrary assemblage of eleven characters scooped willy-nilly from the fifty or so whom our son didn’t happen to like.
But Kevin’s displeasure is not the only thing that his victims had in common. Okay, throw out the cafeteria worker, clearly there by mistake; Kevin has a neat mind, and he’d prefer a tidy group of ten. Otherwise, every one of them
enjoyed
something
.
Never mind whether this passion was pursued with any flash; whatever his parents claim, I gather Soweto Washington hadn’t a chance at going pro; Denny was (forgive me, Thelma) an atrocious actor, and Greer Ulanov’s petitioning New York congressmen who were going to vote with Clinton anyway was a waste of time. No one is willing to admit as much now, but Joshua Lukronsky’s obsession with movies was apparently annoying to many more students than just our son; he was forever quoting whole sequences of dialogue from Quentin Tarantino scripts and staging tiresome contests at lunch, when the rest of the table preferred to negotiate trades of roast beef sandwiches for slices of pound cake, over who could name ten Robert DeNiro films in chronological order. Be that as it may, Joshua did love movies, and even his outright irksomeness didn’t keep Kevin from coveting the infatuation itself. It didn’t seem to matter infatuation with what. Soweto Washington loved sport and at least the illusion of a future with the Knicks; Miguel Espinoza, learning (at any rate, Harvard); Jeff Reeves, Telemann; Denny Corbitt, Tennessee Williams; Mouse Ferguson, the Pentium III processor; Ziggy Randolph,
West Side Story,
not to mention other men; Laura Woolford loved herself; and Dana Rocco—the ultimate unforgivable—loved Kevin.
enjoyed
something
.
Never mind whether this passion was pursued with any flash; whatever his parents claim, I gather Soweto Washington hadn’t a chance at going pro; Denny was (forgive me, Thelma) an atrocious actor, and Greer Ulanov’s petitioning New York congressmen who were going to vote with Clinton anyway was a waste of time. No one is willing to admit as much now, but Joshua Lukronsky’s obsession with movies was apparently annoying to many more students than just our son; he was forever quoting whole sequences of dialogue from Quentin Tarantino scripts and staging tiresome contests at lunch, when the rest of the table preferred to negotiate trades of roast beef sandwiches for slices of pound cake, over who could name ten Robert DeNiro films in chronological order. Be that as it may, Joshua did love movies, and even his outright irksomeness didn’t keep Kevin from coveting the infatuation itself. It didn’t seem to matter infatuation with what. Soweto Washington loved sport and at least the illusion of a future with the Knicks; Miguel Espinoza, learning (at any rate, Harvard); Jeff Reeves, Telemann; Denny Corbitt, Tennessee Williams; Mouse Ferguson, the Pentium III processor; Ziggy Randolph,
West Side Story,
not to mention other men; Laura Woolford loved herself; and Dana Rocco—the ultimate unforgivable—loved Kevin.
I realize that Kevin doesn’t experience his aversions as envy. To Kevin, all ten of his victims were supremely ridiculous. They each got excited over trifles, and their enthusiasms were comical. But like my wallpaper of maps, impenetrable passions have never made Kevin laugh. From early childhood, they have enraged him.
Sure, most children have a taste for spoliation. Tearing things apart is easier than making them; however exacting his preparations for
Thursday
, they couldn’t have been nearly as demanding as it would have been to befriend those people instead. So annihilation is a kind of laziness. But it still provides the satisfactions of agency: I wreck, therefore I am. Besides, for most people, construction is tight, concentrated, bunchy, whereas vandalism offers release; you have to be quite an artist to give positive expression to abandon. And there’s an ownership to destruction, an intimacy; an appropriation. In this way, Kevin has clutched Denny Corbitt and Laura Woolford to his breast, inhaled their hearts and hobbies whole. Destruction may be motivated by nothing more complicated than acquisitiveness, a kind of ham-handed, misguided greed.
Thursday
, they couldn’t have been nearly as demanding as it would have been to befriend those people instead. So annihilation is a kind of laziness. But it still provides the satisfactions of agency: I wreck, therefore I am. Besides, for most people, construction is tight, concentrated, bunchy, whereas vandalism offers release; you have to be quite an artist to give positive expression to abandon. And there’s an ownership to destruction, an intimacy; an appropriation. In this way, Kevin has clutched Denny Corbitt and Laura Woolford to his breast, inhaled their hearts and hobbies whole. Destruction may be motivated by nothing more complicated than acquisitiveness, a kind of ham-handed, misguided greed.
I watched Kevin despoil other people’s pleasures for most of his life. I can’t count the number of times I picked up the word
favorite
during some hot-under-the-collar maternal diatribe—the red galoshes stuffed with snack cake in kindergarten were Jason’s
favorite
footwear. Kevin could easily have overheard that the white caftan he squirted with concord grape juice was my
favorite
floor-length dress. For that matter, each walking adolescent bull’s-eye in that gym was some teacher’s
favorite
student.
favorite
during some hot-under-the-collar maternal diatribe—the red galoshes stuffed with snack cake in kindergarten were Jason’s
favorite
footwear. Kevin could easily have overheard that the white caftan he squirted with concord grape juice was my
favorite
floor-length dress. For that matter, each walking adolescent bull’s-eye in that gym was some teacher’s
favorite
student.
He seems to especially revile enjoyments I can only call innocent. For example, he habitually beelined for anyone who was poised to snap a photograph and walked deliberately in front of the lens. I began to dread our trips to national monuments, if only on behalf of the Japanese and all their wasted film. Why, across the globe are scattered dozens of collectible snaps, blurred head shots of the notorious
KK
in profile.
KK
in profile.
Further illustrations are countless; I’ll cite only one in detail.
When Kevin had just turned fourteen, I was approached at his middle school’s PTA meeting to chaperone the eighth-grade spring dance. I remember being a little surprised that Kevin intended to go, since he boycotted most organized school activities. (In retrospect, maybe the draw was Laura Woolford, whose shimmering crotch-high frock for the occasion must have set Mary back hundreds.) This end-of-the-year bash was the highlight of the school’s social calendar, and most of his classmates would have been anticipating admission to this exclusively senior rite of passage since the sixth grade. The idea was to give these kids practice at being Real Teenagers and to let them swagger around as kings of the hill before entering the adjoining high school as hacked-on peon freshmen at the bottom of the pecking order.
Anyway, I said I’d do it, not especially looking forward to confiscating pints of Southern Comfort; I treasured the memory of my own hot, surreptitious hits from hip flasks behind the stage curtains of William Horlick High School in Racine. I was never keen on getting stuck with the role of Big Killjoy Meanie and wondered if I might not look quietly the other way so long as the kids were discreet and didn’t get sloppy drunk.
Of course I was naive, and Southern Comfort was the least of the administration’s worries. At our preparatory meeting the week before, the first thing they taught chaperones was how to recognize a crack vial. Graver still, the faculty was still anguished over a couple of national incidents at the start of the calendar year. Kids graduating from eighth grade may be
only
fourteen, but Tronneal Mangum had been
only
thirteen when that January in West Palm Beach, he shot and killed another classmate in front of his middle school because the boy owed him $40. Only three weeks later in Bethel, Alaska (it’s embarrassing, Franklin, but I remember all this stuff because when conversation flags at Claverack, Kevin often reverts to reciting his favorite bedtime stories), Evan Ramsey had got hold of his family’s .12-gauge shotgun, murdered a popular school athlete at his desk, shot up the school, and then systematically stalked and blew away his high school principal—in my day, a word whose spelling we were taught to distinguish from
principle
by the mnemonic, “The principal is your PAL.”
only
fourteen, but Tronneal Mangum had been
only
thirteen when that January in West Palm Beach, he shot and killed another classmate in front of his middle school because the boy owed him $40. Only three weeks later in Bethel, Alaska (it’s embarrassing, Franklin, but I remember all this stuff because when conversation flags at Claverack, Kevin often reverts to reciting his favorite bedtime stories), Evan Ramsey had got hold of his family’s .12-gauge shotgun, murdered a popular school athlete at his desk, shot up the school, and then systematically stalked and blew away his high school principal—in my day, a word whose spelling we were taught to distinguish from
principle
by the mnemonic, “The principal is your PAL.”
Statistically, of course, in a country with 50 million schoolkids, the killings were insignificant, and I remember going home after that meeting and complaining to you about the faculty’s overreaction. They’d moaned about the fact that there wasn’t enough left in the budget to purchase metal detectors, while training a whole cadre of chaperones on how to frisk every kid on the way in. And I indulged myself in a bit of liberal indignation (that always revulsed you).
“Of course, for ages
black
kids and
Hispanic
kids have been shooting each other in shithole junior high schools in Detroit,” I opined over a late dinner that night, “and that’s all very by-the-by. A few
white
kids,
middle-class
kids, protected, private-telephone-line, own-their-own-TV
suburban
kids go ballistic, and suddenly it’s a national emergency. Besides, Franklin, you should have seen those parents and teachers eat it up.” My stuffed chicken breast was getting cold. “You’ve never seen so much self-importance, and when I made a joke once they all turned to me with this
it’s not funny
expression, like airport security when you make a crack about a bomb. They all love the idea of being on the front line, doing something ooh-ooh dangerous instead of chaperoning a
sock hop
, for God’s sake, being in the national spotlight so they can participate in the usual politics of hysteria. I swear on some level they’re all jealous, because Moses Lake and Palm Beach and Bethel have had one, what’s wrong with Gladstone, why can’t we have one, too. Like they’re all secretly hoping that as long as Junior or Baby Jane sneaks off without a scratch wouldn’t it be keen if the eighth-grade dance turned into a melee and we could all get on TV before the whole tacky number becomes passé. . . .”
black
kids and
Hispanic
kids have been shooting each other in shithole junior high schools in Detroit,” I opined over a late dinner that night, “and that’s all very by-the-by. A few
white
kids,
middle-class
kids, protected, private-telephone-line, own-their-own-TV
suburban
kids go ballistic, and suddenly it’s a national emergency. Besides, Franklin, you should have seen those parents and teachers eat it up.” My stuffed chicken breast was getting cold. “You’ve never seen so much self-importance, and when I made a joke once they all turned to me with this
it’s not funny
expression, like airport security when you make a crack about a bomb. They all love the idea of being on the front line, doing something ooh-ooh dangerous instead of chaperoning a
sock hop
, for God’s sake, being in the national spotlight so they can participate in the usual politics of hysteria. I swear on some level they’re all jealous, because Moses Lake and Palm Beach and Bethel have had one, what’s wrong with Gladstone, why can’t we have one, too. Like they’re all secretly hoping that as long as Junior or Baby Jane sneaks off without a scratch wouldn’t it be keen if the eighth-grade dance turned into a melee and we could all get on TV before the whole tacky number becomes passé. . . .”
I’m making myself a little sick here, but I’m afraid I did spout this sort of thing, and yes, Kevin was probably listening. But I doubt there was a household in the United States that didn’t talk about those shootings one way or another. Decry the “politics of hysteria” as I might, they hit a nerve.
I’m sure that this dance has emerged in such high relief in my mind because of where it took place. After all, it’s a small memory; whether to the disappointment of those parents or not, the event passed without a hitch, and as for the one student who probably remembers the evening as a calamity, I never even knew her name.
The gym. It was in that gym.
Because the middle school and high school had been built on the same campus, they often shared facilities. Fine facilities they were, too, for it was partly this
good school
that had drawn you to buy us a house nearby. Since, to your despair, Kevin shunned school sports, we’d never attended his middle school’s basketball games, so this glorified baby-sitting job remains my sole experience of that structure from the inside. Freestanding, it was cavernous, more than two stories high, slick and expensive—I think it even converted to an ice hockey rink. (How wasteful that the Nyack School Board has, last I read, decided to tear the whole thing down; students are apparently dodging PE courses by claiming that the gym is haunted.) That night, the arena made quite a booming echo chamber for the DJ. Any sports equipment had been cleared off, and though my expectation of balloons and bunting was clearly a hangover from my own dance debut doing the twist in 1961, they had hung a mirror ball.
good school
that had drawn you to buy us a house nearby. Since, to your despair, Kevin shunned school sports, we’d never attended his middle school’s basketball games, so this glorified baby-sitting job remains my sole experience of that structure from the inside. Freestanding, it was cavernous, more than two stories high, slick and expensive—I think it even converted to an ice hockey rink. (How wasteful that the Nyack School Board has, last I read, decided to tear the whole thing down; students are apparently dodging PE courses by claiming that the gym is haunted.) That night, the arena made quite a booming echo chamber for the DJ. Any sports equipment had been cleared off, and though my expectation of balloons and bunting was clearly a hangover from my own dance debut doing the twist in 1961, they had hung a mirror ball.
I may have been a rotten mother—just shut up, it’s true—but I wasn’t so deplorable as to hang around my fourteen-year-old son at his school dance. So I positioned myself on the opposite side of the gym, enjoying a good view of his sideways slump against the cinder-block wall. I was curious; I’d rarely seen him in the context of his larger social milieu. The only student beside him was the unshakable Leonard Pugh, with his weaselly hee-hee face, and even at 100 yards exuding that greasy toadying quality, a sniggering obsequiousness that always seemed of a piece with his faint odor of day-old fish. Lenny had recently pierced his nose, and the area around the stud had got infected—one nostril was bright red and half again as large as the other; its smear of antibiotic cream caught the light. Something about that kid always put me in mind of brown smudges in underpants.
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