We Need to Talk About Kevin

by Lionel Shriver

  "Wouldn't be so sure," said Kevin, reaching for a handful of nacho tortilla chips with glow-in-the-dark cheese. "You weren't

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  listening—as usual—cause Celie had to have her huggy-wuggies.

  They're under fourteen. According to the law in Arkansas, Batman and R o b i n there'll be back in the Batmobile by eighteen."

  "That's outrageous!"

  "Records sealed, too. Bet everybody in Jonesboro's really lookin' forward to it."

  "But you can't seriously imagine that they took a trip to the law library beforehand and checked out the statute books."

  "Mm," Kevin hummed noncommittally."How do you know?

  Anyway, maybe it's dumb to think about the future all the time.

  Put off the present long enough and it, hke, never happens, know what I'm sayin'?"

  "They have lower sentences for juveniles for good reason,"

  you said. "Those kids had no idea what they were doing."

  "You don't think so," said Kevin caustically. (If he was offended by my ridicule of adolescent angst, our son may have been more affronted by your compassion.)

  " N o eleven-year-old has any real grasp of death," you said.

  " H e doesn't have any real concept of other people—that they feel pain, even that they exist. And his own adult future isn't real to him, either. Makes it that much easier to throw it away."

  "Maybe his future is real to him," said Kevin. "Maybe that's the problem."

  " C o m e on, Kev," you said. "All the kids in these shootings have been middle class, not guys from some urban sewer. Those boys were looking at a life with a mortgage and a car and a j o b in management, with yearly holidays to Bah or something."

  "Yeah," Kevin purred. "Like I said."

  "You know what?" I said. " W h o cares. W h o cares whether shooting people is or isn't real to them, and w h o cares about their painful bust-ups with girlfriends that don't even have tits yet.

  W h o cares. The problem is guns. Guns, Franklin. If guns weren't kicking around these people's houses like broom handles, none of these—"

  — 3 6 7 —

  " O h God, here we go again," you said.

  "You heard J i m Lehrer say that in Arkansas it isn't even illegal for minors to possess firearms?"

  " T h e y stole t h e m — "

  " T h e y were there to steal. And b o t h boys owned rifles of their own. It's absurd. No guns, and those two creeps go kick a cat, or— your idea of h o w to solve differences—go p u n c h their ex-girlfriends in the face. Bloody nose; everybody goes home.

  These shootings are so inane that I'd think you'd be grateful to find some litde turd of a lesson in them."

  "Okay, I can see restricting automatic weapons," you said, getting that preachy sound that for me was the bane of parenthood.

  "But guns are here to stay. They're a big part of this country, target shooting and hunting, not to mention self-defense—."You stopped because I had obviously stopped listening.

  " T h e answer, if there is one, is the parents," you resumed, n o w ranging the r o o m and raising your voice above the TV, from w h i c h Monica Lewinsky's big fat lovelorn face was once more ogling. "You can bet your b o t t o m dollar those boys had no one to t u r n to. No one they could really p o u r their hearts out to, w h o they could trust. W h e n you love your kids, and you're there for them, and you take them on trips, like to museums and battlefields, and make time for them, you have faith in t h e m and express an interest in what they think? That's w h e n this kind of plunging off the deep end doesn't happen. A n d if you don't believe me, ask Kevin"

  B u t for once Kevin wore his derision on his sleeve. "Yeah, Dad It makes a real big difference to me that I can tell you and M u m s e y anything, especially w h e n I ' m u n d e r all this peer pressure and j u n k ! You always ask w h a t video games I ' m playing or w h a t my homework is, and I always k n o w I can t u r n to you in times of needl"

  "Yeah, well, if you couldn't turn to us, buster," you grumbled,

  "you wouldn't think it was so damned funny."

  Ceha had just crept back to the den's archway, where she h u n g

  — 368 —

  back, fluttering a piece of paper. I had to m o t i o n her inside. She'd always seemed undefended, but this cringing, Tiny T i m meekness of hers was new, and I hoped it was only a phase. After resealing the edges of her Opticlude bandage, I pulled her into my lap to admire her picture. It was discouraging. Dr. Sahatjian's white coat was drawn so large that his head was off the page; the self-portrait of Celia herself rose only to the oculist's knee. Although her drawings were usually light, deft, and meticulous, in the place where her left eye should have been, she's crayoned a formless scribble that violated the outline of her cheek.

  Meanwhde, you were asking, "Seriously, Kev—do any of the students at your school ever seem unstable? Does anyone ever talk about guns, or play violent games or hke violent movies? Do you think something hke this could happen at your school? A n d are there at least counselors there, professionals kids can talk to if they're unhappy?"

  Broadly, you probably did want answers to these questions, but their caring-Dad intensity came across as self-serving. Kevin cased you before he replied. Kids have a well-tuned radar to detect the difference between an adult who's interested and an adult who's keen to seem interested. All those times I stooped to Kevin after kindergarten and asked h i m w h a t he did that day—even as a five-year-old he could tell that I didn't care.

  "All the kids at my school are unstable, Dad," he said. " T h e y play nothing but violent computer games and watch nothing but violent movies.You only go to a counselor to get out of class, and everything you tell her is a crock. Anything else?"

  " I ' m sorry, Franklin," I said, lifting Ceha to sit beside me, "but I don't see h o w a few more heart-to-hearts are going to put the brakes on what is clearly becoming some kind of fad. It's spreading just hke Teletubbies, only instead of having to have a rubber doll with a TV in its belly, every teenager has to shoot up his school.

  This year's must-have accessories: a Star Wars cell p h o n e and a Lion King semiautomatic. O h , and some accompanying sob story about being picked on, or ditched by a pretty face."

  — 369 —

  "Show a little empathy," you said. "These are disturbed boys.

  They need help."

  "They're also imitative boys. Think they didn't hear about Moses Lake and West Palm Beach? A b o u t Bethel, Pearl, and Paducah? Kids pick up things on TV, they listen to their parents talking. Mark my words, every well-armed temper tantrum that goes d o w n only increases the likelihood of more. This whole country's lost, everybody copies everybody else, and everybody wants to be famous. In the long term, the only hope is that these shootings get so ordinary that they're not news anymore. Ten kids get shot in some Des Moines primary school and it's reported on page six. Eventually any fad gets to be uncool, and thank G o d at some point hip thirteen-year-olds just won't want to be seen with a Mark-10 in second period. Until then, Kevin, I'd keep a sharp eye on any of your classmates w h o start feeling sorry for themselves in camouflage gear."

  As I reconstruct this tirade of mine, I can't help but observe its implicit lesson: that if School Shootings would inevitably grow hackneyed, ambitious adolescents with a taste for the headlines had best make their bids while the going was good.

  Just over a m o n t h later in Edinboro, Pennsylvania, fourteen-year-old Andrew Wurst promised one day to make his eighth-grade graduation dance "memorable," and indeed, the next day he did.

  On the patio of Nick's Place at 10 P.M., where 240 middle-schoolers were dancing to " M y Heart Will Go O n " from the film Titanic, Wurst shot a forty-eight-year-old teacher fatally in the head with his father's .25-caliber handgun. Inside, he fired several more shots, wounding two boys and grazing a female teacher.

  Fleeing out the back, he was apprehended by the owner of Nick's Place, w h o was carrying a shotgun and convinced the fugitive
to back down in the face of superior firepower. As journalists were eager to observe for a welcome note of drollery, the theme of the dance was "I've Had the T i m e of My Life."

  Each of these incidents was distinguished by whatever sorry lessons could be squeezed from it.Wurst's nickname was "Satan,"

  which resonated with the commotion over Luke Woodham in Pearl having been involved in a demonic cult. Wurst was a fan of an androgynous heavy-metal vocalist called Marilyn Manson, a man w h o jumped about on stage in poorly applied eyeliner, so this singer w h o was only trying to make an honest buck out of teenage bad taste was deplored in the media for a spell. Myself, I was sheepish about having been so derisive regarding the precautions taken at Kevins own eighth-grade dance the previous year. As for the shooter's motivation, it sounded amorphous. " H e hated his life," said a friend. " H e hated the world. He hated school.The only thing that would make him happy was when a girl he liked would talk to him"—exchanges that we're forced to conclude were infrequent.

  Maybe School Shootings were already growing passe, because the story of eighteen-year-old Jacob Davis in Fayetteville, Tennessee, in mid-May pretty much got lost in the shuffle. Davis had already won a college scholarship and had never been in trouble. A friend remarked to reporters later, " H e didn't hardly ever even talk. But I guess that's the ones that will get you—the quiet ones." Outside his high school three days before they were both to graduate, Davis approached another senior w h o was dating his ex-girlfriend and shot the boy thrice with a ,22-caliber rifle. It seems the breakup had hit him hard.

  I may have been impatient with lovesick teen melodrama, but as killers go Davis was a gentleman. He left a note behind in his car assuring his parents and his former girlfriend how much he loved them. Once the deed was done, he put down his gun, sat down next to it, and put his head in his hands. He stayed just hke that until the police arrived, at which time the papers reported that he "surrendered without incident." This time, anomalously, I was touched. I could see it: Davis knew he had done something stupid, and he had known it was stupid beforehand. For these two facts to be concurrently true would present him with the great human puzzler for the rest of his four-walled life.

  — 371 —

  Meanwhile, out in Springfield, Oregon, young Kipland Kinkel had digested the lesson that wasting a single classmate was no longer a sure route to immortality. Just three days after Jacob Davis broke his beloved parents' hearts, this scrawny, weasel-faced fifteen-year-old upped the ante. Around 8 A.M. as his classmates at Thurston High finished up their breakfast, Kinkel walked calmly into the school cafeteria bearing a .22-caliber handgun, a 9-millimeter Glock, and a .22-caliber semiautomatic rifle under a trench coat. Deploying the most efficacious weapon first, he sprayed the r o o m with rifle fire, shattering windows and sending students diving for cover. Nineteen in the cafeteria were shot but survived, while four additional students were injured in the panic to get out of the building. O n e student was killed outright, a second would die in the hospital, and a third would have died as well, had Kipland s semiautomatic not run out of ammunition.

  Pressed to a boy's temple, the rifle went click, click, click.

  As Kinkel scrambled to insert a second clip, sixteen-year-old Jake R y k e r — a m e m b e r of the school wrestling team w h o ' d been shot in the chest—lunged at the killer. Kinkel pulled a pistol from his trench coat. R y k e r grabbed the gun and w r e n c h e d it away, taking another bullet in the hand. Ryker's younger brother j u m p e d on the shooter, then helped wrestle h i m to the ground.

  As o t h e r students piled on top, Kinkel shouted, " S h o o t me, shoot me n o w ! " U n d e r the circumstances, I ' m rather surprised they didn't.

  O h , and by the way: O n c e in custody, Kinkel advised the police to check his h o m e address—a lovely two-story house in an affluent subdivision lush with tall firs and rhododendrons—where they discovered a middle-aged man and w o m a n shot dead.

  For at least a day or two there was m u c h evasion in the press about w h o these two people might be exacdy, until Kinkel's grandmother identified the bodies. I ' m a litde disconcerted as to just w h o the police imagined might be living in Kinkel's h o m e besides his parents.

  Now, as they go, this story was rich, its moral agreeably clear.

  — 372 —

  Little Kipland had brisded with "warning signs" that hadn't been taken with sufficient seriousness. In middle school, he'd been voted "Most Likely to Start World War III." He had recendy given a class presentation on how to construct a bomb. In the main, he was predisposed to vent violent inclinations through the most innocuous of schoolwork. "If the assignment was to write about what you might do in a garden," said one student,

  "Kipland would write about mowing down the gardeners."

  Though in an eerie coincidence Kip Kinkel's initials were also

  "KK," he was so universally disliked by his schoolmates that even after his performance in the cafeteria they refused to give him a nickname. Most damningly of all, the very day before the shooting he had been arrested for possession of a stolen firearm, only to be released into his parents' custody. So the word went out: Dangerous students give themselves away. They can be spotted, ergo, they can be stopped.

  Kevin's school had been acting on this assumption for most of that school year, though news of every new shooting jacked up the paranoia another notch. Gladstone High had taken on a battened-down, military atmosphere, except the McCarthyite presumption ran that the enemy was within. Teachers had been provided lists of deviant behaviors to look out for, and in school assemblies students were coached to report the most casually threatening remark to the administration, even if it "seemed like" a joke. Essays were combed for an unhealthy interest in Hitler and Nazism, which made teaching courses in twentieth-century European History rather tricky. Likewise, there was a supersensitivity to the satanic, so that a senior named R o b e r t Bellamy, w h o was known by the handle "Bobby Beelzebub,"

  was hauled before the principal to explain—and change—his sobriquet. An oppressive literalism reigned, so that when some excitable sophomore screamed, "I'm gonna kill you!" to a volleyball teammate w h o dropped the ball, she was slammed into the guidance counselor's office and expelled for the rest of the week. Yet there was no safe haven in the metaphoric, either.

  — 3 7 3 —

  W h e n a devout Baptist in Kevin's English class wrote in a poem,

  " M y heart is a bullet, and G o d is my marksman," his teacher w e n t straight to the principal, refusing to teach her class again until the boy was transferred. Even Celia's primary school grew fatally p o -

  faced: A boy in her first-grade class was kicked out for three days because he had pointed a chicken drumstick at the teacher and said, "Pow, pow, pow!"

  It was the same all over the country, if the embarrassing httle squibs in New York Times sidebars were anything to go by.

  In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a fourteen-year-old girl was strip searched— strip searched, Franklin—and suspended w h e n , in a class discussion about School Shootings, she said she could see h o w kids who'd been teased might eventually snap. In Poncha-toula, Louisiana, a twelve-year-old boy was locked up in juvenile detention for an entire two weeks because his warning to his fellow fifth-graders in the cafeteria line that he'd "get t h e m " if they didn't leave him enough potatoes was construed as a "terrorist threat." On a two-page web site, Buffythevampireslayer.com, an Indiana student posited a theory that must have crossed many a high-schooler's mind from time to time that his teachers were devil worshipers; unsatisfied with his mere suspension, his teachers filed a federal lawsuit charging b o t h the boy and his mother with defamation and infliction of emotional distress. A thirteen-year-old was suspended for two weeks because on a field trip to Albuquerque's Atomic Museum, he had piped, "Are they going to teach us h o w to build a bomb?" while another boy got the third degree from a school administrator just for carrying his chemistry textbook. Nationwide, kids were expelled for
wearing trench coats hke Kipland Kinkel, or just for wearing black. A n d my personal favorite was a nine-year-old's suspension after a class project about diversity and Asian culture, during which he wrote the fortune cookie message, "You will die an honorable death."

  Although Kevin was ordinarily tight-lipped about goings-on at his school, he went out of his way to dehver us tidbits of this escalating hysteria. T h e reportage had the intended effect: You

  — 3 7 4 —

  were more afraid for him; I was more afraid q f h i m . He enjoyed the sensation of seeming dangerous, yet clearly regarded the school's precautions as farcical. " T h e y keep this up," he remarked once, and on this point he was astute, "they just gonna give kids ideas."

  It was an evening near graduation, a falling off the edge of childhood that for seniors always has a hint of the apocalyptic, and so might have made the faculty antsy even without Kip Kinkel's help. After his usual dinner—a brutish nosh before the open refrigerator—Kevin cooled back in the den's easy chair and delivered the latest installment: T h e entire student body had just been subjected to a "lockdown" in their classrooms for four periods straight while the police searched every locker and prowled the hallways with sniffer-dogs.

  " W h a t were they looking for, drugs?" I asked.

  Kevin said lighdy, " O r poems!'

  "It's this Jonesboro-Springfield nonsense," you said. " T h e y were obviously looking for guns."

  " W h a t really slays me," said Kevin, stretching out and spewing his words like cigarette smoke, "—if you'll excuse the expression—is they sent a m e m o on the search procedure to the teachers? That loser drama teacher, Pagorski, left it on her desk, and Lenny saw it—I was impressed; didn't k n o w he could read.

  Anyway, word got around. W h o l e school k n e w this was coming.

  Kid with an AK in his locker had plenty of time to reconsider his piss-poor hiding place."

  I asked, "Kevin, didn't any of your classmates object to this?"