We Need to Talk About Kevin

by Lionel Shriver

  " N y e h nyeh nyeh nyeh nyeh nyeh-nyeh nyeh-nyeh)."

  T h e n he laughed. O h , Franklin. W h e n e v e r I let fly he seems so satisfied.

  — 2 9 0 —

  I admit, I tried to make h i m mad today. I was determined to make h i m feel small, n o t the deep dark impenetrable c o n u n d r u m of O u r C o n t e m p o r a r y Society, but the butt of a joke, hoisted on his own retard. Because every time Kevin takes another b o w as Evil Incarnate, he swells a littie 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 w o n d e r he's broadening out. He eats the world's hearty denunciations for breakfast. Well, I don't want h i m to feel unfathomable, a big beefed-up allegory of generational disaffection; I don't want to allow h i m 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 hke one m o r e miserable, all-too-understandable snippet of a plain d u m b kid. I want him to feel widess and sniveling and inconsequential, and the last thing in the world I want to betray is h o w m u c h 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 litde broken heart was certain to offend, I ' m not honestly sure h o w m u c h Kevin s crush on Laura Woolford had anything to do with 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 m o d e y that their names might have been drawn from a hat: a basketball player, a studious Hispanic, a f d m 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 willynilly from the fifty or so w h o m our son didn't happen to like.

  But Kevin's displeasure is not the only thing that his victims had in c o m m o n . 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 t h e m enjoyed something.

  Never m i n d w h e t h e r this passion was pursued with any flash; whatever his parents claim, I gather Soweto Washington hadn't a chance at going pro; D e n n y was (forgive me,Thelma) an atrocious actor, and Greer Ulanov's petitioning N e w York congressmen w h o were going to vote with Clinton anyway was a waste of time.

  No one is willing to admit as m u c h 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 Q u e n t i n Tarantino scripts and staging tiresome contests at lunch, w h e n the rest of the table preferred to negotiate trades of roast beef sandwiches for slices of p o u n d cake, over w h o could name ten R o b e r t D e N i r o 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; D e n n y 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 R o c c o — t h e 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.

  T h e y 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

  — 2 9 2 —

  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 D e n n y 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 h a m -

  handed, misguided greed.

  I watched Kevin despoil other people's pleasures for most of his life. I can't count the n u m b e r of times I picked up the w o r d 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 w h o 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 fdm. Why, across the globe are scattered dozens of collectible snaps, blurred head shots of the notorious KK in profile.

  Further illustrations are countless; I'll cite only one in detad.

  W h e n Kevin had just turned fourteen, I was approached at his middle school's PTA meeting to chaperone the eighth-grade spring dance. I r e m e m b e r 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 M a r y back hundreds.) This end-of-the-year bash was the highlight of the school's social calendar, and most of his classmates would have b e e n anticipating admission to this

  — 2 9 3 —

  exclusively senior rite of passage since the sixth grade. T h e idea was to give these kids practice at being R e a l Teenagers and to let t h e m swagger around as kings of the hill before entering the adjoining high school as hacked-on p e o n freshmen at the b o t t o m of the pecking order.

  Anyway, I said I'd do it, n o t especially looking forward to confiscating pints of Southern Comfort; I treasured the m e m o r y of my o w n hot, surreptitious hits from hip flasks behind the stage curtains ofWilliam 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 C o m f o r t was the least of the administration's worries. At our preparatory meeting the week before, the first thing they taught chaperones was h o w 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 M a n g u m had been only thirteen w h e n that January in West Palm Beach, he shot and killed another classmate in front of his middle school because the boy owed h i m $40. O n l y three weeks later in Bethel, Alaska (it's embarrassing, Franklin, but I remember all this stuff because w h e n 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 w o r d whose spelling we were taught to distinguish from principle by the mnemonic, " T h e principal is your PAL."

  Statist
ically, of course, in a country with 50 million schoolkids, the killings were insignificant, and I remember going h o m e 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

  — 2 9 4 —

  training a whole cadre of chaperones on h o w to frisk every kid on the way in. A n d I indulged myself in a bit of liberal indignation (that always revulsed you).

  " O f 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, " a n d that's all very by-the-by.

  A few white kids, middle-class kids, protected, private-telephone-line, o w n - t h e i r - o w n - T V 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 m u c h self-importance, and w h e n I made a j o k e once they all turned to me with this it's not funny expression, like airport security w h e n you make a crack about a bomb. T h e y all love the idea of being on the front line, doing something o o h - o o h 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, w h y 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 passe..."

  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 U n i t e d 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 m i n d because of where it took place. After all, it's a small m e m o r y ; whether to the disappointment of those parents or not, the event passed without a hitch, and as for the one student w h o probably remembers the evening as a calamity, I never even k n e w her name.

  T h e gym. It was in that gym.

  — 2 9 5 —

  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 j o b remains my sole experience of that structure from the inside. Freestanding, it was cavernous, m o r e than two stories high, slick and expensive—

  I think it even converted to an ice hockey rink. ( H o w 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 b o o m i n g 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 o w n 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 t r u e — b u t 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 h i m in the context of his larger social milieu. T h e 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 recendy 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 m i n d of brown smudges in underpants.

  Kevin had recently conceived his tiny-clothes fashion, which (typically) Lenny had aped. Kevin's black jeans might have fit h i m w h e n he was eleven. T h e legs reached mid-calf, exposing dark hairs sprouting on his shins; the crotch, whose zipper would not quite close, well sponsored his equipment. Lenny's ocherous

  — 2 9 6 —

  cotton slacks would have looked nearly as hideous had they fit.

  T h e y were both wearing stretched Fruit of the L o o m white T-shirts, leaving the usual three inches of bare midriff.

  Perhaps it was my imagination, but whenever schoolmates passed by, they seemed to give those two wide berth. I might have been alarmed that our son appeared to be the object of avoidance—and I was, rather, though his classmates didn't snicker at Kevin as if he were a social reject. If anything, had the other students been laughing, they stopped. In fact, w h e n crossing in front of that pair, other students ceased to talk altogether and only resumed their chatter once well out of the duo's earshot.

  T h e girls held themselves unnaturally erect, as if holding their breath. Instead of squinting at the tiny-clothes brigade askance, even football types trained their eyes straight ahead, only darting an edgy backward glance at Kevin and his pet hamster once a safe stone's throw away. Meanwhde, as eighth-graders h u n g back from the dance floor and flowered the walls of the gym, the space on either side of our son and his sidekick remained deserted for a good ten feet. N o t one of his classmates nodded, smded, or ventured so much as an innocuous how's tricks, as if hesitant to risk—-what?

  I'd anticipated that the music would make me feel old—by groups I'd never heard of, whose p o u n d i n g appeal would elude the decrepit. But w h e n the sound system cranked up, I was startled to recognize, between selections of timeless bubblegum, some of the same "artists," as we pretentiously called t h e m then, to which you and I would have flopped about in our twenties: T h e Stones, Credence,The W h o ; Hendrix,Jophn, and T h e Band; Franklin, Pink Floyd! W i t h little to do with myself and repelled by the sweet red p u n c h (which cried out for a slug of vodka), I wondered if the fact that Kevin's peers were still nodding along with Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young, T h e Grateful Dead, and even T h e Beatles made our own era especially distinguished, or his especially destitute. W h e n "Stairway to Heaven" came on—that old warhorse!—I had to stifle a laugh.

  — 297 —

  I never expected that Kevin would dance; that would be dumb, and in some respects that boy hadn't changed since he was four. T h e rest of the group's reluctance to break in the dance floor was pro forma; we were the same way, no one wanting to be first, to draw excessive and inevitably less than kind attention to themselves. In my day, we'd all dare one another interminably, nip at D u t c h courage behind the curtains, and finally shuffle from the walls in concert once our safety-in-numbers q u o r u m had reached at least ten. So I was impressed when, the mid-court populated by no more than whirling polka dots from the mirror ball, one lone soul took the floor. She didn't assume a shadowy corner, either, but the center.

  W i t h pale, translucent skin, the girl n o t only had blond hair but blond lashes and eyebrows, whose tentative definition made her features look washed-out. There was also a weakness in her chin—small and ski-sloped—and it was mostly due to this one less than classical feature that she'd never be considered pretty (by h o w little we're u n d o n e ) . T h e other problem was her clothes.

  Most girls at the dance had played it safe with jeans, and the few dresses I'd spotted were either black leather or sleek, spangled, and smashing, like Laura Woolford's. But this fourteen-year-old—for shorthand, let's call her Alice—was wearing a dress that came almost to her knees and tied in the back with a bow. It was a tan plaid. It had puffed sleeves. She had a ribbon in her hair and patent leather on her feet. She'd clearly been clad by a m o t h e r afflicted with some woefully g
eneric notion of what a young girl wore to "a party," never mind the year.

  Even I recognized at once that Alice was uncool—a w o r d whose improbable currency f r o m o u r generation to the next testifies to the timelessness of the concept. W h a t is cool changes; that there is such a thing as cool is immutable. A n d in our heyday, anyway, the average nerd got a little credit for acting mortified and apologetic, staring at his shoes. But I ' m afraid this p o o r chinless waif didn't have e n o u g h social intelligence to rue her puffed-sleeve, tan-plaid, tie-bowed party dress. W h e n her m o t h e r brought it h o m e , she doubtless threw her arms around the w o m a n in moronic gratitude.

  It was "Stairway to Heaven" that had enticed her to strut her stuff.Yet however we may all keep a w a r m place in our hearts for that old Led Zeppelin standard, it's terribly slow and I personally remembered the tune as undanceable. N o t that this stopped Alice.

  She extended her arms and lunged in ever-widening circles with her eyes closed. She was clearly transported, oblivious to the fact that enthusiastic turns exposed her panties. As she got caught up in the thrall of bass guitar, her moves lost any semblance of rock-and-roll boogie and wobbled between unschooled ballet and Sufi dancing.

  In case I've sounded mean, I was really rather enchanted. O u r little Isadora D u n c a n understudy was so uninhibited, so exuberant!

  I may even have envied her a little.Wistfiilly I remembered jigging around our Tribeca loft to Talking Heads w h e n pregnant with Kevin, and it saddened me that I no longer did that. And though she was a good eight years older than Celia, something about this girl as she flounced and pirouetted from one end of the gym to the other reminded me of our daughter. An unlikely exhibitionist, she seemed to have taken to the floor simply because this was one of her favorite songs—that word again—and because the empty space made it easier to rush around the floor in a swoon. She probably emoted about her own living r o o m to the same song and saw no reason not to dance in exactly the same flamboyant manner merely because 200 malicious adolescents were leering on the sidelines.