We Need to Talk About Kevin

by Lionel Shriver

  It always seems interminable, but "Stairway to Heaven" was almost over; he might have held off two more minutes. But no. I felt a peculiar stab of fear as Kevin peeled languidly off the cinder block and sauntered in an unerring straight line toward Alice, tracking her like a Patriot missile homing in on a Scud. T h e n he stopped, right under the mirror ball, having correcdy calculated that Alice's next pirouette would land her left ear exacdy in line with his mouth.

  There. Contact. He leaned, just a litde, and whispered.

  — 2 9 9 —

  I w o u l d never pretend to k n o w w h a t he said.But the image has i n f o r m e d all my subsequent mental reconstructions of Thursday.

  Alice froze. H e r face infused with all the self-consciousness of w h i c h it had a m o m e n t before been so conspicuously absent.

  H e r eyes darted left and right, unable to find a single resting place that afforded respite. Suddenly all too well aware of her audience, she seemed to register the obligations of the folly she'd begun; the song wasn't quite finished, and she was compelled to keep up appearances by bobbing to a few m o r e bars. For the next forty seconds or so, she floundered back and forth in a macabre slow-motion death dance, like Faye Dunaway at the end of Bonnie and Clyde.

  T h e DJ having aptly segued to Jefferson Airplane's " W h i t e Rabbit," she clutched her tan-plaid skirt and bunched it between her legs. Hobbling toward a dark corner, Alice pressed her elbows tightly to her waist, as each hand fought for cover under the other. I sensed that, in some sickening fashion, over the course of the previous minute she had just grown up. N o w she k n e w that her dress was geeky, that her chin was weak.That her m o t h e r had betrayed her. That she was uncool; that she would never be pretty.

  A n d most of all, she had learned to never, ever take to an empty dance floor—possibly any dance floor—for the rest of her life.

  I wasn't there, on Thursday. But two years before, I was witness to its harbinger in that same gym, w h e n a lone graduate of Gladstone Middle School was assassinated.

  M A R C H 2 , 2 0 0 1

  Dear Franklin,

  My colleague Ricky approached me at the end of the workday today, and his proposal was the closest he's ever come to acknowledging the unmentionable: He invited me to attend his church. I was embarrassed, and thanked him, but said vaguely,"I don't think so"; he didn't let it go and asked why. W h a t was I supposed to say,

  "Because it's a load of crap"? I always feel a little condescending toward religious people, as they feel condescending toward me. So I said, I wish I could, that I could believe, and sometimes I try very hard to believe, but nothing about my last few years suggests that an entity with any kindness is watching over me. Ricky's comeback about mysterious ways left neither of us very impressed. Mysterious, I said. N o w you can say that again.

  I've often returned to the remark you made in Riverside Park before we became parents, "At least a kid is an answer to the Big Question." It perturbed me at the time that your life was posing this Big Question with such persistence. O u r childless period must have had its shortfalls, but I recall charging in the same conversation that maybe we were "too happy," a distinctly more agreeable excess than a surfeit of harrowing emptiness. Maybe I ' m shallow, but you were enough for me. I loved scanning for your face outside Customs after those long trips that were so m u c h harder on you than on me, and sleeping late the next m o r n i n g in a hot, pectoral cocoon. It was enough. But our twosome was not,

  — 3 0 1 —

  it seems, enough for you. While that may make you, between us, the more spiritually advanced, it hurt my feelings.

  Yet if there's no reason to hve without a child, how could there be with one? To answer one life with a successive life is simply to transfer the onus of purpose to the next generation; the displacement amounts to a cowardly and potentially infinite delay. Your children's answer, presumably, will be to procreate as well, and in doing so to distract themselves, to foist their own aimlessness onto their offspring.

  I raise this matter because I think that you did expect Kevin to answer your Big Question, and that he could sense that fantastic expectation from an early age. How? Small things. T h e aggressive heartiness in your voice, under which gasped a shy desperation. The ferocity of your embraces, which he may have found smothering. T h e resolve with which you cleared your decks every weekend to put yourself at his disposal, for I suspect that children want their parents to be busy; they don't want to have to fill your schedule with their paltry needs. Children want to be assured that there are other things to do, important things; more important, on occasion, than they are.

  I'm not commending neglect. But he was only a little boy, and he alone was supposed to answer a Big Question that had his grown father stymied. What a burden to place on the newly arrived! What's worse, children, Hke adults, vary drastically in what I can only caU their religious appetites. Ceha was more Hke me: a hug, a crayon, and a cookie, and she was sated. Though Kevin seemed to want practicaUy nothing, I now realize that he was spiritually ravenous.

  Both of us were lapsed, so it made sense to raise our kids as neither Armenian Orthodox nor Presbyterian. Although I ' m reluctant to inveigh that Youth Today just need to crack the Old Testament, it sobers me that, thanks to us, Kevin may never have seen the inside of a church. T h e fact that you and I were brought up with something to walk away from may have advantaged us, for we knew what lay behind us, and what we were not. So I

  — 3 0 2 —

  w o n d e r if Kevin, too, would have been better off had we spewed a lot of incense-waving hooey that he could have coughed back in o u r faces—those extravagant fancies about virgin births and commandments on mountaintops that really stick in a kid's throat. I ' m being impractical; I doubt we could have faked a faith for the chddren's sake, and they'd have k n o w n we were posing.

  Nevertheless, repudiation of self-evident dross like travel guides and Oldsmobile ads must be so unsatisfying.

  It was Kevin's starvation that his teachers—with the exception of D a n a R o c c o — n e v e r detected, p r e f e r r i n g to diagnose o u r little underachiever as one more fashionable victim of attention deficit disorder. T h e y were determined to find something mechanically w r o n g with him, because broken machines can be fixed. It was easier to minister to passive incapacity than to tackle the more frightening matter of fierce, crackling disinterest.

  Clearly Kevin's powers of attention were substantial—witness his painstaking preparations for Thursday or his presently impeccable c o m m a n d of the malevolents' R o l l of H o n o r , right d o w n to the population of Uyesugi's pet fish. He left assignments unfinished not because he couldn't finish them, but because he could.

  This voracity of his may go some distance toward explaining his cruelty, w h i c h among other things must be an inept attempt at taking part. Having never seen the p o i n t — o f anything—he must feel so brutally left out. T h e Spice Girls are dumb, Sony Playstations are dumb, The Titanic is dumb, mall cruising is dumb, and h o w could we disagree? Likewise, taking photos of the Cloisters is dumb, and dancing to "Stairway to Heaven" in the latter 1990s is dumb. As Kevin approached the age of sixteen, these convictions grew violent.

  He didn't want to have to answer your Big Question, Franklin.

  He wanted an answer from you.The glorified loitering that passes for a fruitful existence appeared so inane to Kevin from his very crib that his claim last Saturday that he was doing Laura Woolford

  "a favor" on Thursday may have been genuine.

  But me, I ' m superficial. Even once the shine was off travel, I

  — 3 0 3 —

  could probably have sampled those same old foreign foods and that same old foreign weather for the rest of my life, just so long as I flew into your arms at Kennedy w h e n I came home. I didn't want m u c h else. It is Kevin w h o has posed my Big Question. Before he came along, I'd been m u c h too busy attending to a flourishing business and a marvelous marriage to bother about w
hat it all amounted to.

  Only once I was stuck with a bored child in an ugly house for days on end did I ask myself what was the point.

  And since Thursday? He took away my easy answer, my cheating, slipshod shorthand for what life is for.

  We last left Kevin at the age of fourteen, and I ' m getting anxious.

  I may have dwelt so on his early years to stave off rehashing the more recent incidents that set you and me so agonizingly against one another. Doubdess we both dread wading back through events whose only redeeming feature is that they are over. But they are n o t over. N o t for me.

  D u r i n g the first semester of Kevin's ninth-grade year in 1997, there were two m o r e School Shootings: in Pearl, Mississippi, and Paducah, Kentucky, b o t h small towns I had never heard of, b o t h n o w permanently marked in the American vocabulary as synonyms for adolescent rampage. T h e fact that Luke W o o d h a m in Pearl n o t only shot ten kids, three fatally, but killed his mother—stabbing her seven times and crushing her j a w w i t h an aluminum baseball b a t — m a y have given me an extra private pause. (Indeed, I remarked w h e n the reports first started p o u r i n g in, " L o o k , all they do is go on and on about h o w he shot those kids. And then, oh, by the way, he also murdered his m o m . By the way? It's obvious that the w h o l e thing had to do with his mother."This, in due course, was an observation that w o u l d qualify in legal terms as admission against interest.) Still, I ' m n o t so pretentious as to i m p u t e to myself during that period a sense of deep personal foreboding, as if I perceived these repeated tragedies on the news as an inexorable c o u n t d o w n to o u r o w n family's misfortune. N o t at all. Like all

  — 3 0 4 —

  news, I regarded it as having n o t h i n g to do with me. Yet like it or not, I had m o r p h e d from maverick globetrotter to one m o r e white, well-off suburban mother, and I couldn't help but be u n -

  nerved by deadly flights of lunacy f r o m fledglings of my o w n kind. Gangland killings in Detroit or L.A. happened on another planet; Pearl and Paducah happened on mine.

  I did feel a concentrated dislike for those boys, w h o couldn't submit to the odd faithless girlfriend, needling classmate, or dose of working-single-parent distraction—who couldn't serve their miserable time in their miserable public schools the way the rest of us did—without carving their dime-a-dozen problems ineluctably into the lives of other families. It was the same petty vanity that drove these boys' marginally saner contemporaries to scrape their dreary little names into national monuments. A n d the self-pity! That nearsighted W o o d h a m creature apparently passed a note to one of his friends before staging a tantrum with his father's deer rifle: " T h r o u g h o u t my life I was ridiculed. Always beaten, always hated. C a n you, society, blame me for what I do?"

  A n d I thought, Yes, you little shit! In a heartbeat!

  Michael Carneal in Paducah was a similar type—overweight, teased, wallowing in his tiny suffering like trying to take a bath in a puddle. But he'd never been a discipline problem in the past; the worst he'd ever been caught at theretofore was watching the Playboy video channel. Carneal distinguished himself by opening fire on, of all things, a prayer group. He managed to kill three students and w o u n d five, but judging f r o m the cheek-turning memorial services and merciful banners in classroom w i n d o w s —one of w h i c h embraced photos not only of his victims but of Carneal himself with a heart—the born-again got theirs back by forgiving him to death.

  T h e October night that news of Pearl came in, I exploded as you and I watched the Jim Lehrer Newshour. "Jesus, some kid calls h i m a fag or pushes him in the hallway, and suddenly it's ooh, ooh, I'm gonna shoot up the school, I'm gonna crack from all this terrible pressure! Since w h e n did they make American kids so soft?"

  — 3 0 5 —

  "Yeah, you gotta ask yourself," you agreed, "whatever happened to heading out to the playground to duke it out?"

  "Might get their hands dirty." I appealed to our son as he glided through on the way to the kitchen; he'd been eavesdropping, which as a rule he preferred to participating in family conversations."Kevin, don't boys at your school ever setde their differences with an old-fashioned fistfight?"

  Kevin stopped to regard me; he always had to weigh up whether anything I asked him was worthy of reply. " C h o i c e of weapons," he said at last, "is half the fight."

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "Woodham's weak, flabby, unpopular. Fistfight's low p e r -

  centage. A doughboy's got way better odds w i t h a 30 millimeter.

  Smart call."

  " N o t that smart," I said hotly. "He's sixteen. That's the cutoff in most states for being tried as an adult. They'll throw away the key." (Indeed, Luke W o o d h a m would be given three life sentences, and 140 extra years for good measure.)

  "So?" said Kevin with a distant smile. "Guy's life is already over. Had more fun while it lasted than most of us ever will.

  G o o d for him."

  " C o o l it, Eva," you intervened as I sputtered. "Your son's pulling your leg."

  For most of his life, Kevin's troubles, too, remained on a minor scale. He was bright but hated school; he had few friends, and the one we k n e w was smarmy; there were all those ambiguous incidents, from Violetta to let-us-call-her-Alice, that set off alarm bells at a volume only I seemed able to hear.Yet character expresses itself with remarkable uniformity, be it on a batdefield or in the supermarket. To me, everything about Kevin was of a piece. Lest my theories about his existential disposition seem too highfalutin, let's reduce the unifying glue to one word: spite.

  Consequendy, w h e n two Orangetown policemen showed up at our door on that night in D e c e m b e r 1997 with Kevin and

  — 3 0 6 —

  the unsavory Leonard Pugh in tow, you were shocked, while I regarded this constabulary visit as overdue.

  " W h a t can I do for you, officers?" I overheard.

  " M r . Khadourian?"

  "Plaskett," you corrected, not for the first time. " B u t I am Kevin's father."

  Having been helping Celia with her homework, I crept up to hover behind you in the foyer, buzzing from voyeuristic excitement.

  "We had a motorist phone in a complaint, and I ' m afraid we found your son and his friend here, on that pedestrian overpass over 9W? We had to run these two down, but it seemed pretty obvious that they were the kids throwing detritus onto the roadway."

  " O n t o the cars?" you asked, "or just empty lanes?"

  "Wouldn't be m u c h sport in empty lanes," snarled the second officer.

  "It was mosdy water babies, Dad!" said Kevin behind the police. I k n o w his voice was changing, but whenever he spoke to you, Franklin, it skipped up an octave.

  "Wasn't water balloons this motorist called in about," said the second, chunkier cop, w h o sounded the m o r e worked up.

  "It was rocks. A n d we checked the highway on either side of the overpass—littered with chunks of brick."

  I nudged in urgently. "Was anyone hurt?"

  "Thankfully, there were no direct hits," said the first officer.

  " W h i c h makes these boys real, real lucky."

  "I don't k n o w about lucky," Lenny sniveled, " w h e n you get nabbed by the cops."

  "Gotta have luck to push it, kid," said the pohceman with the hotter head. " R o n , I still say we should—"

  "Look, Mr. Plastic," the first cop overrode. "We've r u n your son through the computer, and his record's clean. Far as I can tell, he comes f r o m a good family." (Good, of course, meaning rich.)

  "So we're going to let this young m a n off with a warning. B u t we take this sort of thing real serious—"

  "Hell," the second cop interrupted, "a few years back, some creep tossed a quarter in front of a w o m a n doing seventy-five?

  Shattered the windscreen and drove right into her head!"

  R o n shot his partner a glance that would get t h e m the more quickly to D u n k i n ' Donuts. " H o p e you
give this young m a n a good talking to."

  " A n d how," I said.

  "I expect he'd no idea what kind of risk he was taking," you said.

  "Yeah," said C o p N o . 2 sourly. "That's the whole attraction of throwing bricks from an overpass. It seems so harmless."

  "I appreciate your leniency, sir," Kevin recited to the primary.

  "I've sure learned my lesson, sir. It won't happen again, sir."

  Policemen must get this sir stuff a lot; they didn't look bowled over. " T h e leniency won't happen again, friend," said the second cop, "that is for damned sure."

  Kevin turned to the hothead, meeting the man's eyes with a glitter in his own; they seemed to share an understanding.Though picked up by the police for (as far as I knew) the first time in his life, he was unruffled. "And I appreciate the lift home. I've always wanted to ride in a police car— sir!'

  "Pleasure's all mine," the cop replied jauntily, as if smacking gum. " B u t my m o n e y says that's not your last spin in a black-and-white— -friend."

  After a bit more fawning gratitude from both of us, they were on their way, and as they left the porch, I heard Lenny whining,

  "We almost outran you guys you know, 'cause you guys are like, totally out of shape...!"

  You had seemed so sedate and courteous through this exchange that w h e n you wheeled from the door I was surprised to observe that your face was livid and lit with rage.You grabbed our son by the upper arm and shouted, "You could have caused a pileup, a fucking catastrophe!"

  Flushed with a morbid satisfaction, I stepped back to leave you to it. Cursing, no less! Granted, had one of those bricks indeed

  — 3 0 8 —

  smashed someone's windshield I'd readily have forgone this petty jubilation for the full-blown anguish at which I would later get so m u c h practice. But spared calamity, I was free to muse with the singsong of the playground, You're gonna get in trou-ble. Because I'd been so exasperated! T h e unending string of misadventures that trailed in Kevin's wake never seemed, as far as you were concerned, to have anything to do with him. Finally, a tatdetale besides m e — t h e police, w h o m Mr. Reagan Republican had no choice but to trust—-had caught o u r persecuted innocent red-handed, and I was going to enjoy this. Moreover, I was glad for you too to experience the bizarre helplessness of being this supposedly omnipotent parent and being completely flummoxed by h o w to impose a punishment that has the slightest deterrent effect. I wanted you to apprehend for yourself the lameness of sending a fourteen-year-old for a "time-out," the hackneyed predictability of "grounding" w h e n , besides, there was never anywhere that he wanted to go, and the horror of realizing that, if he did launch out to his archery range in defiance of your prohibition on practicing the sole activity that he seemed to enjoy, you would have to decide whether to physically tackle him to the lawn. Welcome to my life, Franklin, I thought. Have fun.