Lionel Shriver - We Need to Talk About Kevin

“My parents would have a cow. They’d think I was denying them. Or that I was under your thumb. They’d think I was an asshole.”

“I should get varicose veins for a Plaskett ? It’s a gross name!”

You looked stung. “You never said you didn’t like my name.”

“That wide A , it’s kind of blaring and crass—”

“Crass!”

“It’s just so awfully American . It reminds me of fat nasal tourists in Nice whose kids all want ice cream. Who shout, Honey, look at that ‘Pla-a-askett’ when it’s French and the word’s really pronounced plah-skay .”

“It’s not Plah-skay , you anti-American prig! It’s Plaskett, a small but old and respectable Scottish family, and a name I’d be proud to hand on to my kids! Now I know why you didn’t take it when we got married. You hated my name!”

“I’m sorry! Obviously I love your name in a way, if only because it’s your name—”

“Tell you what,” you proposed; in this country, the injured party enjoyed a big advantage. “If it’s a boy, it’s a Plaskett. A girl, and you can have your Khatchadourian .”

I pushed the bread basket aside and jabbed your chest. “So a girl doesn’t matter to you. If you were Iranian, she’d be kept home from school. If you were Indian, she’d be sold to a stranger for a cow. If you were Chinese, she’d be starved to death and buried in the backyard—”

You raised your hands. “If it’s a girl it’s a Plaskett, then! But on one condition: None of this Gara-souvlaki stuff for a boy’s first name. Something American . Deal?”

It was a deal. And in hindsight we made the right decision. In 1996, fourteen-year-old Barry Loukaitis killed a teacher and two students while taking a whole class hostage in Moses Lake, Washington. A year later, thirteen-year-old Tronneal Mangum shot dead a boy at his middle school who owed him $40. The next month, sixteen-year-old Evan Ramsey killed a student and his principal and wounded two others in Bethel, Alaska. That fall, sixteen-year-old Luke Woodham murdered his mother and two students, wounding seven, in Pearl, Mississippi. Two months later, fourteen-year-old Michael Carneal shot dead three students and wounded five in Paducah, Kentucky. The next spring in 1998, thirteen-year-old Mitchell Johnson and eleven-year-old Andrew Golden opened fire on their high school, killing one teacher and four students, wounding ten, in Jonesboro, Arkansas. A month after that, fourteen-year-old Andrew Wurst killed a teacher and wounded three students in Edinboro, Pennsylvania. The following month in Springfield, Oregon, fifteen-year-old Kip Kinkel massacred both his parents, proceeding to kill two more students and wounding twenty-five. In 1999, and a mere ten days after a certain Thursday , eighteen-year-old Eric Harris and seventeen-year-old Dylan Klebold planted bombs in their Littleton, Colorado, high school and went on a shooting rampage that killed one teacher and twelve students, while wounding twenty-three, after which they shot themselves. So young Kevin—your choice—has turned out as American as a Smith and Wesson.

As for his surname, our son has done more to keep the name Khatchadourian alive than anyone else in my family.

Like so many of our neighbors who latched onto tragedy to stand out from the crowd—slavery, incest, a suicide—I had exaggerated the ethnic chip on my shoulder for effect. I’ve learned since that tragedy is not to be hoarded. Only the untouched, the well-fed and contented, could possibly covet suffering like a designer jacket. I’d readily donate my story to the Salvation Army so that some other frump in need of color could wear it away.

The name? I think I just wanted to make the baby mine. I couldn’t shake the sensation of having been appropriated. Even when I got the sonogram and Dr. Rhinestein drew her finger around a shifting mass on the monitor, I thought, Who is that? Though right under my skin, swimming in another world, the form seemed far away. And did a fetus have feelings? I had no way of anticipating that I would still be asking that question about Kevin when he was fifteen.

I confess that when Dr. Rhinestein pointed out the blip between the legs, my heart sank. Although according to our “deal” I was now bearing a Khatchadourian, just getting my name on the title deeds wasn’t going to annex the kid for his mother. And if I enjoyed the company of men—I liked their down-to-earth quality, I was prone to mistake aggression for honesty, and I disdained daintiness—I wasn’t at all sure about boys .

When I was eight or nine, and once more sent on some errand by my mother to fetch something grown-up and complicated, I’d been set upon by a group of boys not much older than myself. Oh, I wasn’t raped; they wrenched up my dress and pulled down my panties, threw a few dirt clods and ran away. Still, I was frightened. Older, I continued to give wide berth to eleven-year-olds in parks—pointed into bushes with their flies down, leering over their shoulders and sniggering. Even before I had one myself, I was well and truly frightened by boys. And nowadays, well, I suppose I’m frightened by just about everybody.

For all our squinting at the two sexes to blur them into duplicates, few hearts race when passing gaggles of giggling schoolgirls. But any woman who passes a clump of testosterone-drunk punks without picking up the pace, without avoiding the eye contact that might connote challenge or invitation, without sighing inwardly with relief by the following block, is a zoological fool. A boy is a dangerous animal.

Is it different for men? I never asked. Perhaps you can see through them, to their private anguish about whether it’s normal to have a curved penis, the transparent way they show off for one another (though that’s just what I’m afraid of). Certainly the news that you’d be harboring one of these holy terrors in your own home so delighted you that you had to cover your enthusiasm a bit. And the sex of our child made you feel that much more that the baby was yours, yours, yours .

Honestly, Franklin, your proprietary attitude was grating. If I ever cut it close crossing the street, you weren’t concerned for my personal safety but were outraged at my irresponsibility. These “risks” I took—and I regarded as going about my regular life—seemed in your mind to exhibit a cavalier attitude toward one of your personal belongings. Every time I walked out the door, I swear you glowered a little, as if I were bearing away one of your prized possessions without asking.

You wouldn’t even let me dance , Franklin! Really, there was one afternoon that my subtle but unrelenting anxiety had mercifully lifted. I put on our Talking Heads’ Speaking in Tongues and began buoyantly herky-jerkying around our underfurnished loft. The album was still on the first song, “Burning Down the House,” and I’d barely worked up a sweat when the elevator clanked and in you marched. When you lifted the needle preemptorily, you scratched a groove, so that forever after the song would skip and keep repeating, Baby what did you expect and never make it to Gonna burst into fla-ame without my depressing the cartridge gently with a forefinger.

“Hey!” I said. “What was that about?”

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

“For once I was having a good time. Is that illegal?”

You grabbed my upper arm. “Are you trying to have a miscarriage? Or do you just get a kick out of tempting fate?”

I wrestled free. “Last time I read, pregnancy wasn’t a prison sentence.”

“Leaping around, throwing yourself all over the furniture—”