Lionel Shriver - We Need to Talk About Kevin

I was jealous. “Generally when I knock at the door, it’s locked.”

“Please don’t despair. I assume that with you, just as in school, he’s inaccessible and sarcastic. As you said, he’s a teenager. But he’s also inhaling information at a ferocious rate, if only because he’s determined that nobody get the better of him.”

I glanced at my watch; I’d run overtime. “These high school massacres,” I said offhandedly, collecting my purse. “Do you worry that something like that could happen here?”

“Of course it could happen here. Among a big enough group of people, of any age, somebody’s going to have a screw loose. But honestly, my turning violent poetry into the office only makes my students mad. In fact, it should make them mad. Madder, even. So many kids take all this censorship, these locker searches—”

“Flagrantly illegal,” I noted.

“—Flagrantly illegal searches.” She nodded. “Well, so many of them take it lying down like sheep. They’re told it’s for ‘their own protection,’ and for the most part they just—buy it. When I was their age we’d have staged sit-ins and marched around with placards—.” She stopped herself again. “ I think it’s good for them to get their hostilities out on paper. It’s harmless, and a release valve. But that’s become a minority view. At least these horrible incidents are still very rare. I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.”

“And, uh—,” I stood, “the rumors about Vicki Pagorski. Think there’s anything to them?”

Ms. Rocco’s eyes clouded. “I don’t think that’s been established.”

“I mean, off the record. Is it credible. Assuming you know her.”

“Vicki is a friend of mine, so I don’t feel impartial—.” She once more put that eraser on her chin. “This has been a painful time for her.” That was all she would say.

Ms. Rocco saw me to the door. “I want you to give Kevin a message for me,” she said with a smile. “You tell him I’m onto him .”

I’d often nursed the same conviction, but I’d never have asserted it in such a cheerful tone of voice.

Anxious to avert legal action, the Nyack School Board held a closed disciplinary hearing at Gladstone High, to which only the parents of four of Vicki Pagorski’s students were invited. Trying to keep the event casual, they put the meeting in a regular classroom. Still the room sizzled with a sense of occasion, and the other three mothers had dressed up. (I realized I’d made terribly classist assumptions about Lenny Pugh’s parents, whom we’d never met, when I found myself scanning for overweight trailer-park trash in loud polyester to no avail. I later discerned that he was the banker-type in chalk-stripe, she the stunning, intelligent-looking redhead in understated gear that was clearly designer label, because it didn’t show any buttons. So we all have our crosses to bear.) The school board and that beefy principal, Donald Bevons, had assumed a set of folding chairs along one wall, and they were all scowling with rectitude, while we parents were stuck in those infantilizing school desks. Four other folding chairs were arranged on one side of the teacher’s desk at the front, where there sat two nervous-looking boys I didn’t know, along with Kevin and Lenny Pugh, who kept leaning over toward Kevin and whispering behind his hand. On the other side of the desk was seated, I could only assume, Vicki Pagorski.

So much for the powers of adolescent description. She was hardly a hag; I doubt she was even thirty. I would never have depicted her breasts as large or her keister as wide, for she had the agreeably solid figure of a woman who ate her Wheaties. Attractive? Hard to say. With that snub nose and freckles, she had a lost, girlish, innocent look that some men like. The drab dun suit was doubtless donned for the event; her friend Dana Rocco would have counseled against tight jeans and a low-cut shirt. But it’s too bad she hadn’t done anything about her hair, which was thick and kinky; it frizzed from her head in all directions and suggested a ditzy, frazzled state of mind. The glasses, too, were unfortunate: The round oversized frames gave her a pop-eyed appearance, inducing the impression of dumb shock. Hands twisting in her lap, knees locked tightly together under the straight wool skirt, she reminded me a bit of let-us-call-her-Alice at that eighth-grade dance immediately after Kevin whispered I-didn’t-want-to-know.

When the chairman of the school board, Alan Strickland, called the little group to order, the room was already unpleasantly quiet. Strickland said that they hoped to clear up these allegations one way or the other without landing this business in court. He talked about how seriously the board took this sort of thing and blathered on about teaching and trust. He emphasized that he didn’t want anything we said that evening leaving this room until the board decided what action to take, if any; the stenographer was taking notes for internal purposes only. Belying the rhetoric of informal chitchat, he explained that Miss Pagorski had declined to ask her attorney to be present. And then he asked Kevin to have a seat in the chair placed in front of the teacher’s desk and to just tell us in his own words what happened that afternoon in October in Miss Pagorski’s classroom.

Kevin, too, recognized the importance of costuming, and for once was wearing plain slacks and a button-down of the customary size. On command, he assumed the shuffling, averted-eye squirm that he’d practiced in the archway of our den. “You mean, like, that time she asked me to stay after school, right?”

“I never asked him to stay after school,” Pagorski blurted. Her voice was shaky but surprisingly forceful.

“You’ll get your chance, Miss Pagorski,” said Strickland. “For now we’re going to hear Kevin’s side of things, all right?” He clearly wanted this hearing to proceed calmly and civilly, and I thought, good luck .

“I don’t know,” said Kevin, ducking and weaving his head. “It just got kinda intimate , you know? I wasn’t gonna say anything or anything, but then my dad started asking questions and I like, told him.”

“Told him about what?” Strickland asked gently.

“You know—what I told Mr. Bevons about, too, before.” Kevin sandwiched his hands between his thighs and looked at the floor.

“Kevin, I realize this is difficult for you, but we’re going to need details. Your teacher’s career is on the line.”

Kevin looked to you. “Dad, do I have to?”

“Afraid so, Kev,” you said.

“Well, Miss Pagorski’s always been nice to me, Mr. Strickland. Real nice. Always asking did I need help choosing a scene or could she read the other part so I could memorize mine… And I’ve never thought I was all that good, but she’d say I was a great actor and she loved my ‘dramatic face’ and my ‘tight build’ and with my looks I could be in the movies. I don’t know about that. Still, I sure wouldn’t want to get her in trouble.”

“You leave that to us, Kevin, and just tell us what happened.”

“See, she’d asked me several times if I could stay after school so she could coach me on my delivery, but before I’d always said I couldn’t. Actually, I could, most days, I mean, I didn’t have anything I had to do or anything, but I just didn’t—I felt funny about it. I don’t know why, it just felt kinda weird when she’d pull me over to her desk after class and, like, pick off little pieces of lint on my shirt that I wasn’t sure were really there. Or she’d take the flap of my belt and tuck it back in the loop?”

“Since when has Kevin ever worn a belt ?” I whispered. You shushed me quiet.

“—But this one time she was real insistent, almost like I had to, like it was part of class work or something. I didn’t want to go—I told you, I don’t know why exactly, I just didn’t—but it seemed like this time I didn’t have any choice.”