Lionel Shriver - We Need to Talk About Kevin

My heartfelt congratulations.

Identical notices were sent to eight other students, with the blanks filled in accordingly. Denny Corbitt was commended for acting, Jeff Reeves for classical guitar, Laura Woolford for “personal grooming,” Brian “Mouse” Ferguson for computing skills, Ziggy Randolph not only for ballet but for “encouraging tolerance of difference,” Miguel Espinoza for academic achievement and “vocabulary skills,” Soweto Washington for sports, Joshua Lukronsky for “cinematic studies” and—I fault Kevin here for not being able to control himself—“memorizing whole Quentin Tarantino scripts,” though most people are disinclined to regard flattery with suspicion. Dana Rocco was sent a somewhat different letter that requested she chair this Thursday meeting but also advising that she herself had been selected for the Most Beloved Teacher Award and likewise requesting, since all the other teachers are also beloved, that she keep her MBTA on the q.t.

If the trap was well set, it was not immune to glitches. Dana Rocco might have mentioned the meeting to Bevons, who would have protested ignorance, and the whole business might have come unraveled. Can we really call Kevin lucky ? She didn’t.

On the evening of April 7, Kevin set his alarm for half an hour earlier than usual and laid out clothing for the morning roomy enough to allow for ease of mobility, choosing that dashing white shirt with billowing fencing-style sleeves in which he might photograph well. Personally, I would have tossed through such a night in anguish, but then I personally would never have contrived this grotesque project in the first place, so I can only assume that if Kevin lost any sleep it was from excitement.

Riding the school bus the following morning he would have been encumbered—those bike locks weighed 6.2 pounds apiece—but Kevin had arranged for this independent-study archery course at the beginning of the semester, interest in the unpopular pastime being too slight for a proper class. Other students had been trained to regard his lugging archery equipment to school as ordinary. No one was sufficiently attuned to the niceties of this dorky sport to be disturbed that Kevin wasn’t lugging his standard bow or his longbow but his crossbow, which the administration later bent over backward to deny would ever have been allowed on school grounds. Though the number of arrows in his possession was considerable—he was obliged to cart them in his duffel—no one remarked on the bag; the wide berth that his classmates allowed Kevin in eighth grade had by his sophomore year only broadened.

After stashing his archery materiel, as usual, in the equipment room of the gym, he attended all of his classes. In English, he asked Dana Rocco what maleficence means, and she beamed.

His independent-study archery practice was scheduled for the last period of the day, and—his enthusiasm firmly established—PE teachers no longer checked up on him as he fired arrows into a sawdust target. Hence, Kevin had ample time to clear the gym of any apparatuses such as punching bags, horses, or heavy tumbling mats. Conveniently, the bleachers were already up, and to make sure they stayed up, he clipped small combination padlocks around the intersection of two iron supports on both banks, ensuring that they could not fold out. When he was finished there was absolutely nothing in that gym except six blue mats—the thin kind, for sit-ups—arranged in a convivial circle in the middle.

The logistics, for those impressed by such things, were impeccably worked out. The physical education building is a freestanding structure, a good three-minute walk from the main campus. There are five entrances to the central gym itself—from the boys’ and girls’ locker rooms and the equipment room, as well as from the lobby; a door on the second floor opens onto an alcove, used for the aerobic conditioning machines, that overlooks the gym. Yet not one of these entrances lies on the outside of the building. The gym is unusually high, a full two stories, and there are windows only at the top; you can’t see inside from ground level. There were no sporting events scheduled for that afternoon.

The bell rang at 3:00, and by 3:15 the distant clamor of departing students was dying down. The gym itself was deserted, though Kevin must have still padded with trepidation as he glided into the boys’ locker room and unlooped his first Kryptonite bike lock from around his shoulder. He’s a methodical person in the most ordinary of circumstances, so we can be sure that he had twist-tied the correct key to each bright yellow, plasticcoated padlock. Looping the heavy chain around each handle of the double doors, he pulled the chain taut. After hiking up the chain’s protective black nylon sheath, he hooked the sunny yellow padlock into a middle link, clicked the lock shut, twisted the round key from its socket, and slipped it in his pocket. I dare say he tested the doors, which would now only open with a crack between them before they seized. He repeated this exercise in the girls’ locker room, then at the gym entrance from the equipment room, exiting from its back door into the weights room.

I now know that these locks were state-of-the-art in bicycle security. The U-shaped portion of the tiny, sturdy padlock is only about two inches high, denying prospective thieves the leverage for a crowbar. The chain itself is forged interlinking at the factory; each link is half an inch thick. Kryptonite chains are famously resistant to heat, since professional cycle thieves have been known to use torches, and the company is sufficiently confident of its technology that if your bicycle is stolen, it guarantees a full refund for the purchase value of the bike. Unlike many competitors’ models, the guarantee is even good in New York.

Despite his avowed disinterest in your work, Franklin, Kevin was about to launch Kryptonite’s most successful advertising campaign to date.

By 3:20, giggling with self-congratulatory glee, the first BSPA winners were starting to arrive through the main entrance from the lobby, which remained unlocked.

“ Personal hygiene , my momma !” Soweto declared.

“Hey, we’re bright and shining ,” said Laura, tossing her silken brown hair. “Don’t we get any chairs?”

Mouse crossed to the equipment room to scrounge some fold-ups, but when he came back reporting the room already locked for the day Greer said, “I don’t know, it’s kind of neat this way. We can sit cross-legged, like around a campfire.”

“Puh- lease ,” said Laura, whose outfit was—scant. “Cross-legged, in this skirt? And it’s Versace, for Chrissake. I don’t want to stink it up with sit-up sweat.”

“Yo, girl,” Soweto nodded at her spindly figure, “that close as you gonna come to sit-up sweat .”

Kevin was able to listen in on his prizewinners from the alcove, an inset shelf on the upper level; so long as he remained against the back wall, he couldn’t be seen from below. The three stationary bicycles, treadmill, and rowing machine had already been dragged away from the alcove’s protective railing. Transferred from the duffel, his stash of some hundred arrows bristled from two fire buckets.

Enticed by the marvelous echo, Denny emoted a few lines from Don’t Drink the Water at the top of his lungs, while Ziggy, who made a habit of flouncing around school in a leotard and tights to show off his calves, couldn’t resist making what Kevin later called “a big queeny entrance,” dancing a series of turns in pointe position across the length of the gym and finishing with a grand jeté . But Laura, who doubtless thought it uncool to ogle fags, only had eyes for Jeff Reeves—though quiet and terminally earnest, a handsome blue-eyed boy with a long blond ponytail with whom a dozen girls were known to be smitten. One of Jeff’s salivating fans, according to an interview with a friend recorded by NBC, was Laura Woolford, which more than his mastery of the twelve-string guitar may have explained why he, too, was christened Bright and Shining.