Lionel Shriver - We Need to Talk About Kevin

“Anyway,” you resumed, “they ran. Didn’t get very far, since he realized that running was crazy, and he grabbed Lenny’s jacket to put the brakes on. And here’s the thing: It seems our friend Lenny Pugh already has something on his record—the old sugar-in-the-gas-tank trick, or some such. Lenny had been told that if he was caught at anything else they’d press charges. Kev reckoned that with his own clean record, they’d probably let him off with a warning. So Kevin told the cops that he was the ringleader, and he was the only one who threw rocks. I have to say, once the whole thing was on the table, I felt kind of sheepish for laying into him like that.”

I looked up at you with dumbstruck admiration. “Did you apologize?”

“Sure.” You shrugged. “Any parent’s got to admit when he’s made a mistake.”

I groped my way to a chair at the kitchen table; I had to sit down. You poured yourself a glass of apple juice, while I declined one (what was wrong with you that you couldn’t tell I needed a stiff drink ?). You pulled up a chair yourself, leaning forward chummily as if this whole misunderstanding was going to make us an even more closely knit, supportive, rememberthat-daft-business-about-the-overpass family.

“I’ll tell you,” you said, and took a gulp of juice, “we just had this terrific conversation, all about the complexities of loyalty, you know? When to stick by your friends, where to draw the line when they’re doing something you think is out of bounds, how much you should personally sacrifice for a buddy. Because I warned him, he could have miscalculated by taking the fall. He could have been booked. I admired the gesture, but I told him, I said I wasn’t exactly sure that Lenny Pugh was worth it.”

“Boy,” I said. “No holds barred.”

Your head whipped around. “Was that sarcastic?”

Okay, if you weren’t going to attend to a medical emergency, I would pour a glass of wine myself. I resumed my seat and finished off half of it in two slugs. “That was a very detailed story. So you won’t mind my clarifying a few things.”

“Shoot.”

“Lenny,” I began. “Lenny is a worm. Lenny’s actually kind of stupid. It took me a while to figure out what the appeal is—for Kevin, I mean. Then I got it: That’s the appeal. That he’s a stupid, pliant, self-abasing worm.”

“Hold on, I don’t like him much either, but self-abasing —?”

“Did I tell you that I caught them out back, and Lenny had his pants down?”

“Eva, you should know about pubescent boys. It may make you uncomfortable, but sometimes they’re going to experiment—”

“Kevin didn’t have his pants down. Kevin was fully clothed.”

“Well, what’s that supposed to mean?”

“That Lenny isn’t his friend, Franklin! Lenny is his slave! Lenny does anything Kevin tells him to, the more degrading the better! So the prospect of that miserable, sniggering, brownnosing dirtbird having an idea to do anything—much less being the ‘ringleader’ of some nasty, dangerous prank, dragging poor virtuous Kevin unwillingly along—well, it’s perfectly preposterous!”

“Would you keep it down? And I don’t think you need another glass of wine.”

“You’re right. What I really need is a fifth of gin, but Merlot will have to do.”

“Look. He may have made a dubious call, and he and I discussed that. But taking the rap still took guts, and I’m pretty damned proud—”

“ Bricks ,” I interrupted. “They’re heavy. They’re big. Builders don’t store bricks on pedestrian overpasses. How did they get there?”

“Piece of brick. I said piece.”

“Yes,” my shoulders slumped, “I’m sure that’s what Kevin said, too.”

“He’s our son , Eva. That should mean having a little faith.”

“But the police said—” I left the thought dangling, having lost my enthusiasm for this project. I felt like a dogged attorney who knows that the sympathy of the jury is already lost but who still has to do the job.

“Most parents,” you said, “apply themselves to understanding their kids, and not to picking apart every little—”

“I am trying to understand him.” My ferocity must have carried; on the other side of the partition, Celia started to whimper. “I wish you would!”

“That’s right, go tend to Celia,” you muttered as I got up to leave. “Go dry Celia’s eyes and pat Celia’s pretty gold hair and do Celia’s homework for her, since God forbid she should learn to do one miserable assignment by herself. Our son was just picked up by the cops for something he didn’t do, and he’s pretty shaken up, but never mind, because Celia needs her milk and cookies.”

“That’s right,” I returned. “Because one of our children is spelling farm animals, while another of our children is pitching bricks at oncoming headlights. It’s about time you learned to tell the difference.”

I was really angry about that night, and I wasted most of my subsequent workday at AWAP mumbling to myself about how I could have married a complete fool . I’m sorry. And this was despicable of me, but I never told you what I stumbled across late that afternoon. Maybe I was just embarrassed, or too proud.

So beside myself with fury and frustration that I was getting nothing done, I took the CEO’s prerogative of cutting out early. When I got back and relieved Celia’s baby-sitter Robert, I heard voices down the hall. It seems that the stupid, pliant, self-abasing worm didn’t even have the good sense to make himself scarce for a few days after showing up at our door with the police, because I recognized the nasal, querulous pule emitting from Kevin’s nightmarishly tidy bedroom. Unusually, the door was ajar; but then I wasn’t expected home for another two hours. When I headed toward the bathroom I wasn’t exactly eavesdropping, but—oh, I guess I was eavesdropping. The urge to listen at that door had been upon me the night before and had lingered.

“Hey, you see that cop’s fat butt hanging out his pants?” Lenny was reminiscing. “Working man’s smile grinning ear-to-ear! I bet if that guy’d taken a dump while he was running, it would’ve cleared his belt!”

Kevin did not seem to be joining in with Lenny’s cackle. “Yeah, well,” he said. “Lucky for you I got Mr. Plastic off my back. But you should have heard the scene in here, Pugh. Straight out of Dawson’s Creek. Fucking nauseating. Thought I’d bust into tears before a commercial break from our sponsors.”

“Hey, I hear you! Like, with those cops dude, you were so smooth dude, I thought that fat fuck was going to take you to some little room and kick the shit out of you, ’cause you were driving him like, fucking insane! Sir, I really must terribly protest, sir, that it was me— ”

“It was I , you grammatical retard. And just remember, chump, you owe me one.”

“Sure, bro. I owe you big-time. You took the heat like some superhero, like—like you was Jesus!”

“I’m serious, pal. This one’s gonna cost you,” said Kevin. “’Cause your low-rent stunt could do my reputation some serious damage. I got standards. Everybody knows I got standards. I saved your ass this time, but don’t expect a sequel, like, ‘Ass-Save II.’ I don’t like associating myself with this shit. Rocks over an overpass. It’s fucking trite, man. It’s got no class at all, it’s fucking trite .”

Dear Franklin,

You’ve put it together: I felt ashamed of my false accusations, and that’s the real reason I decided to ask Kevin on that mother-son outing, just the two of us. You thought it was a weird idea, and, when you commended so heartily that Kevin and I should do that sort of thing more often, I knew you didn’t like it—especially once you added that barb about how we’d better avoid any pedestrian overpasses, “Since, you know, Kev would have an uncontrollable urge to throw whole Barcaloungers onto the road.”