Since we’re all just harum-scarum kids, the school bathrooms are important to us as places to congregate, places the teachers mostly leave us alone, clubhouses, repositories of bodily distress and bodily secrets, our faces presented to the mirrors as we tried to puzzle out what we looked like to everybody else.
I’ve just had my rumble with Megan and her friend, and my heart is still crashing around in my chest from it. I can’t even remember that much of the fight, so it’s not in the movie. But I know that I hate Megan. The fact of her existence devalues and negates my own. I pace back and forth, exhilarated with hating her but scared too, because the pushing and shoving and threatening is something new and I don’t know what’s going to come of it.
Now there is background noise, a popping, and someone at a great distance shouting something you can’t make out, and sounds of running and slamming. You can tell this is unusual, unexpected, by the way I stop my pacing and try to listen.
After a while I creep up to the door and wait. There aren’t any locks on these school bathroom doors so that the teachers or the cops can bust in whenever they want, and the one window, over a radiator, has a metal grate over it to keep us off the roof, and anyway, I have not yet fathomed and won’t until it’s too late that I ought to be thinking about running or hiding. If anything, I’m still afraid of Megan, and getting beat up.
So when the door opens and Megan comes in, I take a step back, ready to take a punch or throw one, and her friend Eyeliner is right behind her (I did not know her name then, but I was to learn that and much more about her), and right behind them was this boy. A boy in the girls’ bathroom! This is more remarkable than the gun he is holding, which I don’t even see or maybe don’t comprehend because I’ve never been around an actual gun before. And maybe the trespassing is what Megan has in mind when she says, in what seems like her normal, hateful voice, “You are going to be in so much trouble.”
The boy doesn’t say anything. He’s nobody I know, he’s tall and weedy and wearing an army jacket. He’s got this pale pale skin, and his hair’s combed back so his face stands out, big and white, like a sign. The gun is flopping around in his hand in a nervous way and he says, “I am the Angel of Death.”
“That’s just stupid,” Megan says, and she starts to cry. Her face gets red again. Anything pretty about her just falls away when she cries.
There’s a moment when you’re not yet able to think anything through, but you know there’s some bad, wrong, mortal danger staring you down, and if only you can accomplish this one simple task, get on the other side of the door, you’re safe. And so you take a step toward the door but the boy is in the way and your robot brain doesn’t understand, because it has already managed the task and is rejoicing in its relief and freedom, because things cannot be otherwise.
But they are otherwise. Another kind of understanding comes over you.
The Eyeliner girl is crying too now. Her eyes are all black and runny. She says, “Please just let us go. We won’t say anything, we’ll forget we ever saw you.”
The movie slows down here because the boy with the gun slows down, he is not in any kind of a hurry. His big white face looks sleepy. From a certain angle it almost looks kind, although it is not.
Megan says, “Look, you don’t have to shoot anybody. We’ll do whatever you want. Won’t we?” She looks around at me and at Eyeliner. “We wouldn’t care, I mean, we would want to.”
Poor dumb Megan, thinking it is possible to have a conversation here. Thinking that what this boy must want is the treasures of her body, a body that she only has about five minutes more to inhabit.
The boy says, “In my one hand is vengeance, in the other mercy.” He says it like he is ordering a sandwich when he’s not very hungry.
The Eyeliner girl tries to get her phone out of her purse without anybody noticing but he sees her and uses his gun hand to hit her in the mouth. We all scream then, and the scream is something black pulled out of my throat by its roots. Eyeliner girl is on the floor but he makes her get up. I keep thinking that someone will come help us, save us. Nobody does.
The boy shoves Eyeliner girl into one of the toilet stalls and Megan into another one and me into the last. I sit down on the toilet because my legs aren’t holding me up. Megan is next to me and I can hear her working the latch, locking the stall door. The boy hears it too and kicks the door so the latch breaks and Megan yelps a little. The boy goes in there with her and I think, maybe he’ll do things to her, maybe that’s all he wants.
But no, he goes right back out again, and when I look out through the place where the door doesn’t shut, the boy is at the sink, washing his hands, with the gun resting on the shelf below the mirror where we always spread out our combs and makeup.
I look down and I see Megan’s feet in their suede boots with the tassels and I nudge my own foot up against hers and she presses back and later I’m really glad I’ve done that, done something to her that wasn’t horrible.
The boy is talking to himself, at least his lips are moving. His eyes are heavy, almost closed. Then he opens them and in the mirror he sees me looking at him.
“Come out here,” he says.
It’s like I’m already dead. I can’t get my legs to work right, they’re flopping around all loose. I’m not anybody brave. I open the stall door and prop myself up against a wall and I just want to get the part that will hurt over with.
He says, “Do you have a boyfriend?”
I don’t think I’ve heard him right. He’s picked up the gun again. Maybe he said, “I’m going to shoot you now.” I don’t know anything about guns, real ones. He’s crazy and this is some intersection of crazy and real. Do I have a boyfriend? Is there a right answer or a wrong one? I’m too stupid scared to know which is which, so I just say, “No.”
He says, “Well I’m your boyfriend now.”
I’m so out of it, I’ve peed my pants, and my ears aren’t working right, there’s a scratchy, magnified echo to everything, Eyeliner girl and Megan scrabbling around in the stalls, the boy’s voice landing in my head too loud.
He says, “You aren’t like them, are you? They are unclean beasts. They were going to hurt you, but I stopped them.” He holds up the gun. “This is the sword of righteousness.”
Oh let me speak up for the wretched girls, or for myself, anything except snivel and pee myself, faint and fall. But that’s what I do. That is all I do.
The boy says, “We should kiss.”
So he shuffles over to where I’m propped up against the wall and he puts his big white sleepy face up to mine and this is meant to be a big moment, this first time I kiss a boy and there’s nothing to say about it. It’s like putting my mouth up to a blackboard.
He says, “You should go now.”
I’m so used to the idea that I will never get out of this room that I don’t understand him at first, and he gives me a little shove. He says, “When this is all over we can be together. You have my blood promise.”
I’m out in the hallway then and I’m running and it’s like running downhill even though the floor is level. I’m trying to get as far away as I can from what’s coming, the sound of the shots, but I’m not fast enough not to hear them and they echo forever.
When I have the bad, black dreams, or daylight spells of shaming fear, I tell myself one more time that nothing was my fault. That boy did not really know me or my kid’s grievances, and I didn’t summon him forth to act them out. I don’t want him thinking about me. I hope that where he is, they give him the kinds of pills that make you forget your crazy self.
But sometimes I have a different kind of dream, and in it we’re both different people, in the way that only makes sense in dreams. We are shy about being together. And we love each other as we have promised to do, hand in hand, our hearts made clean. When I wake up I’m still in love, and I go out into my day as if no other day matters.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jean Thompson is the author of five previous novels, among them The Year We Left Home, City Boy, and Wide Blue Yonder, and five story collections, including Who Do You Love, a National Book Award finalist. She lives in Urbana, Illinois.
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