Lionel Shriver - We Need to Talk About Kevin

“If it makes you feel better,” I added sourly, “Soweto’s basketball career is no longer a slam-dunk .”

“Yeah, well as a matter of fact that does make me feel better. Last thing the world needs is one more darkie who wants to play hoops in the NBA. Talk about stale.”

“Talk about stale! Another high school rampage?”

Kevin cleaned his nails. “I prefer to think of it as tradition .”

“The media assumed you picked on Soweto because he was black.”

“That makes sense,” Kevin snorted. “Nine kids locked in that gym. Only one of them’s of the Negro persuasion, and bingo, it’s a ‘hate crime.’”

“Oh, it was a hate crime, all right,” I said quietly.

Kevin half smiled. “Totally.”

“They said the same thing about Miguel Espinoza. That you went for him because he was Latino.”

“Superspic? I leave out communities of color , they’d say I discriminated.”

“But the real reason was he was such an academic bright spark, isn’t it? Skipped a grade. All those dizzyingly high scores on state achievement tests and the PSAT.”

“Whenever he talk to you, turn out he just trying to use ‘echelon’ in a sentence.”

“But you know what ‘echelon’ means. You know all kinds of big words. That’s why you thought it was such a hoot to write whole essays with words three letters long.”

“Fine. So it’s not like I was jealous . Which, if I’m getting the drift of this bor-ing third degree, is what you’re getting at.”

I took a moment; you know, Kevin did look bored. Documentary makers like Jack Marlin, criminologists dashing off best-sellers, the principals and teachers and reverends interviewed on the news; your parents, Thelma Corbitt, Loretta Greenleaf—all these people obsessing over why KK did it , with the notable exception of our son. It was one more subject in which Kevin was simply not interested: himself.

“The cafeteria worker,” I raised. “He doesn’t fit the pattern.” (I always feel sheepish that I can’t remember his name.) “He wasn’t on the list, was he?”

“Collateral damage,” said Kevin sleepily.

“ And ,” I said, determined to say something to get him to look alive, “I know your secret about Laura Woolford. She was pretty, wasn’t she?”

“Saved her trouble,” Kevin slurred. “First sign of a wrinkle and she’d a killed herself anyway.”

“Very, very pretty.”

“Yep. Bet that girl’s mirror was all wore out.”

“ And you were sweet on her .”

If I’d any remaining doubt, Kevin’s theatrical guffaw cleared it right up. He doesn’t often, but he rent me then, just a little. Adolescents are so obvious. “Give me credit,” he sneered, “for better taste. That Barbie doll was all accessories.”

“It embarrassed you, didn’t it?” I prodded. “The eyeliner, the Calvin Klein, the designer haircuts. The nylons and opalescent pumps. Not icy, misanthropic KK’s style.”

“She wasn’t all that hot-looking when I was finished.”

“It’s the oldest story in the book,” I goaded. “ After confiding darkly to friends that, ‘If I can’t have her, then no one else is going to… ,’ Charlie Schmoe opened fire….’ Is that what this whole sorry mess was meant to cover? Another pimply teen smitten with the unattainable prom queen goes berserk?”

“In your dreams,” said Kevin. “You wanna turn this into a Harlequin romance, that’s your midget imagination, not mine.”

“Luke Woodham was lovesick, wasn’t he? In Pearl? You know, ‘The Whiner.’”

“He only went out with Christy Menefee three times , and they’d been busted up for a year!”

“Laura rebuffed you, didn’t she?”

“I never came within a mile of that cunt. And as for that fat Woodham fuck, you know his mother came with him on every date? No wonder he reamed her with a butcher knife.”

“What happened? Did you finally work yourself up into cornering her against a locker during lunch? Did she slap you? Laugh in your face?”

“That the story you wanna tell yourself,” he said, scratching his exposed midriff, “I can’t stop you.”

“Tell other people, too. I was approached by a documentary filmmaker not long ago. Terribly anxious to hear ‘my side.’ Maybe I should call him back. I could explain to him how it was unrequited love all along. My son was head-over-heels for this smashing little number who wouldn’t give him the time of day. After all, how did Laura go down? Kevin may have made a hash of the rest of that crowd, but he shot her straight through the heart , our own cupid of Gladstone High. All those other poor wretches were just camouflage, just—what did he call it? Collateral damage .”

Kevin leaned forward and lowered his voice confidentially. “How much did you care what girls I did and didn’t like before I whacked a couple? How much did you care about anything that went on in my head until it got out?”

I’m afraid that at that point I lost it a bit. “ You want me to feel sorry for you? ” I said in a voice that carried; the mole guard looked over. “Well, first I’ll feel sorry for Thelma Corbitt, and Mary Woolford. For the Fergusons and the Randolphs, for the Ulanovs and the Espinozas. I’ll let my heart break over a teacher who bent over backward to get inside your precious head, over a basketball player who can barely walk, and even a cafeteria worker I’ve never met, and then we’ll see if there’s any pity left over for you. There just might be, but it’s the scraps of my table you’re due, and for scraps you should count yourself lucky.”

“Nyeh nyeh nyeh nyeh nyeh nyeh-nyeh nyeh -nyeh!”

Then he laughed. Oh, Franklin. Whenever I let fly he seems so satisfied.

I admit, I tried to make him mad today. I was determined to make him feel small, not the deep dark impenetrable conundrum of Our Contemporary Society, but the butt of a joke, hoisted on his own retard . Because every time Kevin takes another bow as Evil Incarnate, he swells a little 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 wonder he’s broadening out. He eats the world’s hearty denunciations for breakfast. Well, I don’t want him to feel unfathomable, a big beefed-up allegory of generational disaffection; I don’t want to allow him 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 like one more miserable, all-too-understandable snippet of a plain dumb kid. I want him to feel witless and sniveling and inconsequential, and the last thing in the world I want to betray is how much 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 little broken heart was certain to offend, I’m not honestly sure how much 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 motley that their names might have been drawn from a hat: a basketball player, a studious Hispanic, a film 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 willy-nilly from the fifty or so whom our son didn’t happen to like.