with me barely
noticing. Nothing
really mattered
the same way
anymore. All I cared
about was that gun.
I didn’t think about
Becky Ann, Sue,
or anybody at all.
I didn’t do the math
to learn that March 5
was only nineteen days away.
Blake grew sullen
and didn’t hang out
with me as much,
but we still shared the gun.
We still had the pact
of it between us.
Aaron still knocked Blake around.
Dad was still pissed at me.
I still sucked at math.
But with the Beretta
in my hands,
the future was unwritten
instead of just a repeat
of the same loathsome
story of my past.
Let me be honest—
that gun put me in charge
of my own autobiography.
WHAT WE DID
* * *
Becky Ann started up a Fashion Club.
Sue got a week’s suspension
for selling cigarettes at school.
Nicholas broke up with Sue (again)
but won an award for a sci-fi
story in Mrs. Hawkins’s class.
My dad worked longer hours
now that Pete was in Seattle,
trying to be the next Kurt Cobain.
Mr. Green tried to two-hand stuff
a basketball and fell so hard
on the playground concrete
that he had to be hospitalized.
A retired math professor from Tennessee
was hired as my tutor. When my
parents left the room, she snapped,
Stop screwing around and learn.
Mom started up classes
at the community college.
Painting 101, I think. And
something about ceramics.
Grandma got even worse,
fired her nurse, and told everyone
to leave her the hell alone.
Blake and I fired the gun
and talked about how much
we hated everything.
MICHAEL JORDAN
* * *
God knows why
he brought the MJ
rookie card to school,
but when Aaron
and two others stopped
Blake in the hall to push
him around and laugh—
“Buttsmacker!” and
“Psycho-geek!” they said—
no one expected him
to shred it and toss
the confetti at Aaron’s
feet before storming
past them, mumbling
under his breath as he
wrung his hands.
Just then, Nicholas emerged
from the bathroom
and saw the card’s destruction.
Dude …, he said,
shaking his head.
A card like that was worth
a few hundred bucks, surely.
I knew a little about baseball
and nearly nothing about hoops,
but even I realized that an MJ card
was sacred.
I tried to stop Blake
but he was too far gone
into whatever dark mood
had taken him. He slid
right past me and disappeared
toward the cafeteria.
For a moment, I considered
following him, but the tardy bell
rang so I just rushed into
English class instead.
After school, I tried to find Blake.
No one had seen him.
And from the hallway whispers,
that card had been the real deal.
CARD
* * *
When I found him at the Winn-Dixie
the next evening, a pile of spent shells
littering the ground, Blake told me
it was his father’s, a basketball
junkie who grew up in Chicago.
That MJ card was from an eBay auction
the week before he headed off to Iraq.
Something to look forward to seeing again,
he’d joked to Blake, giving him a fake
noogie at Jacksonville International,
where a 747 touched down, ready
to ferry Blake’s father away forever.
He had planned on giving it to me,
which floored me, even though
the only thing I had ever collected
were bottle caps, and my dad
threw all those out when I was nine.
HATE
* * *
Kids hated.
That’s what we did.
It’s what we do best.
We hate our hair,
our zits, our friends,
our parents.
We hate our hand-me-down cars,
our crappy cafeteria lunches,
our classes, our weather.
We hate, we hate,
we hate, we hate,
all no differently
than how kids
have hated
for centuries.
March 5.
It came to me
at last, thinking
so much of hate.
A little math
assured me
I was right.
It had to be
the day Blake’s
father was killed.
March 5.
I told myself that.
For me,
the gun was a hobby,
though on some level
I knew that was a lie.
For Blake,
it was something
more.
These days, he carried it
more often than not.
Even to the movies and Wal-Mart.
I hadn’t thought much
of it until now,
late February.
I began to worry
about how much hate
a kid like Blake
harbored, if the mercury
of his own thermometer
ran close to the shattering point.
I began to really worry,
thinking of the list of names
my own heart wanted
to even the score with.
I began to wonder what it really was
that mortared Blake and I together.
WHY
* * *
Everyone knows why a kid
brings a gun to school.
Columbine. Virginia Tech.
The blossom of blood
as a head explodes.
The holy vengeance
of a thousand, thousand
wrongs suddenly righted.
Red Lake, Minnesota.
Northern Illinois University.
Becky Ann laughed at me
when, in an unexpected burst
of bravado, I invited her
to the Spring Fling Dance.
When I’m dead, maybe,
she said, yukking it up
with her pals Linda and
the less-pretty Becky.
SuccessTech Academy.
Bard College at Simon’s Rock.
Kids mocked my father,
saying he hace las mesas
spic and span. He’s not
even Latino. My grandmother’s
just a dark-skinned Greek.
University of Arizona College of Nursing.
Buell Elementary.
Why didn’t people tease Romeo?
He was Mexican and had a faint
lisp. Or Aaron, whose brother
was doing sixty months for grand larceny?
Or anyone anyone anyone
> but Blake who ached like
his heart was an old salt mine
now emptied of all worth.
Dawson College.
Platte Canyon High School.
I knew what Dr. Zigler would say,
but those shrink phrases
didn’t mean anything anymore.
“Stuck at denial.” “Deferred closure.”
“Antisocial tendencies.”
Language no longer affected us.
That’s the power a gun brings.
Essex Elementary.
Notre Dame Elementary.
Eyes shut, mouth fastened tight,
I couldn’t move, couldn’t
do anything but shake.
Everyone knows why someone
brings a gun to school.
Inskip Elementary.
Bridgewater-Raritan High School.
MARCH 1
* * *
Blake read Nietzsche
regularly, even
loaned me Twilight
of the Idols, which
I couldn’t delve more
than five pages into.
Then Blake texted:
if it doesn’t kill us,
it makes us stronger
entirely ignoring
that everyone knows
old Friedrich
went nutso and died.
MARCH 2
* * *
You’ll like this,
Blake promised,
then showed me
how to jimmy open
a maintenance door
to access the roof.
Together, we stood
in the spot I’d seen him
months earlier,
tempting the ledge
with its thirty-foot drop.
He urged me to the lip,
where you could see
the points of trees below
like wide green knives.
Wow, he stood so close
that his soles were half
off into open air, defying
gravity like it couldn’t touch him.
Heights aren’t my thing,
I said. I swear to God.
He cut me a look. God?
We stoned him to death
a few hundred years ago.
Then he brought out the gun
and sat—feet dangling
into space—while he
polished the barrel with his shirt.
Why’d you bring that here?
I asked, thinking how trust
can disappear like a star,
vanish so suddenly
without a trace.
Blake said, What do you mean?
and I realized I might as well
have asked why he liked
french fries or wore Nikes.
We stayed there for a while,
so high above the rest of the world.
I couldn’t shake the feeling
that Blake was convinced
he could stroll off the rooftop
and escape unscathed.
MARCH 3
* * *
With my Warcraft account down,
I sometimes surfed chat rooms
and just wasted away the evening
while my parents watched TV
and ate Chex Mix in bed.
Without intending to, I clicked
onto a site called Teen Help
and just stayed a voyeur
for forty-five minutes,
longing for Warcraft mayhem
and player-versus-player battles,
wishing I could reenter
a world where the strong
could toss bolts of flame
and fire lightning arrows from a bow.
A world where there were rules
and limits and boundaries.
What I got instead was a mess
of crybabies one-upping each other.
Who cared about acne
or prom dresses or study hall notes?
Finally, I typed it in as fast as I dared.
What do you do when your friend
takes a gun to school?
The first answer: You tell him
he’s quite the pistol.
And I logged out, an idiot
for believing this was anyone’s
problem except my own.
MARCH 4
* * *
My heart thudding
away all day long
as I went class
to class, learning
nothing except
a growing appreciation
for the power of fear.
I watched Blake
when he wasn’t
looking at me,
trying to see if
anything, ANYTHING
seemed different.
What did I expect?
Devil horns? Maniacal
laughter? A black
cowboy hat and
bandito mask?
Mr. Oliver called on me
again, but all I could hear
was my own breath
thundering in my ears,
a countdown.
1 TRIED
* * *
He skipped lunch,
but I caught up
with Blake before
history class.
What’s going on?
I insisted.
He tried to push
past me, but I
wouldn’t let him.
I said, C’mon,
even though
the tardy bell
had rung.
He pursed his lips
and cut me a look.
It’s not up to us
anymore.
When he turned
and ambled
the opposite way
to his classroom,
I didn’t stop him.
I just stood there
and tried to figure out
who
and what
he meant
exactly.
USUALLY
* * *
Blake followed me
home from school,
then took a crosstown
bus back to his neighborhood.
Today, he met me
near the bike rack
and said he had
“something to take care of,”
the words hanging
in the air between us
like frosty December breath.
Okay, I told him,
imagining boxes of 9mm slugs
and hunting knives and rifle scopes
and blood and brain matter
and screaming and sobbing.
All we’d ever shot? Cans.
And sometimes 2-liter bottles.
And one time, a dead rat.
And the telephone poles.
Why did my mind insist on
such gruesomeness?
Okay, I told him,
trying not to let horror
erupt on my face.
When he said, Good-bye,
I felt it like he’d gut-slugged me,
as if he knew that I knew.
Which maybe was what he
really wanted, after all.
FINALLY
* * *
I hadn’t had
a friend before.
Not really.
I liked how
Blake gave me
the burned fries
at McDonald’s.
I liked the smell
of mint from
the pack of gum
he never opened.
I liked how he
showed me
how to aim
a pistol
with one eye closed—
you cock your arm
just so.
I liked that he
showed me his
secret place
atop the school�
�
The only place
I can actually think,
he said.
I liked how
we didn’t have
to talk—we just
hung out.
He trusted me
and hated phonies.
I didn’t want
him to hate me
like he hated
everyone,
everything else.
Maybe Blake let it slip
about us and the gun,
I don’t know.
But Becky Ann believed now,
and I didn’t want her
to keep asking me
what it felt like,
holding that heavy steel
so cold in my hand.
I didn’t want
anything bad
to happen to Blake—
he lost his father.
His family had money
and the insurance payout
had left them even more,
but they didn’t have
anything important.
No store-bought
Valentine’s cutout cards
or sudden popularity
was antidote enough
for either of our lives.
We were two losers
who ate too much McDonald’s,
played too many video games,
and had families we sometimes
wished we could trade for twenty bucks.
Plus we had a secret.
But it struck me—
Blake and I were not
the same. The toxic world
he lived in felt huge
and free at first,
but it came at a cost
I wasn’t willing to pay.
My voice thready,
my pulse double time,
I puffed on my inhaler
as if it’d give me strength.
I puffed again.
MARCH 5
* * *
That Tuesday morning,
instead of going to class,
I found my dad
in the boiler room, tearing
open a box of detergent.
Sweating from the sudden heat,
my entire body quivering,
I told.
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