David Vann - Last Day on Earth - A Portrait of the NIU School Shooter

Steve wraps his arms around her, and it’s like the rest of the world doesn’t matter anymore. Their own little island.

They graduate together in May 2006 and make plans to attend NIU for graduate school in the fall. And then the impossible happens — more impossible than being off meds for five years straight. More impossible than finding an amazing girlfriend.

Steve wins the Deans’ Award. This is the highest honor given to any undergraduate in the college.

“I only got it because of everything Jim has done and said for me,” he tells Jessica, but she can tell he’s proud. This is the highest achievement of his life, after all the struggle and hard work. It’s unbelievable, how a life can shift from one point to another, from slitting his wrists at the end of high school, graduating into Mary Hill Home, to this moment now, graduating summa cum laude, winning the Deans’ Award, moving on to grad school with Jessica.

I MEET JESSICA FOR THE FIRST TIMEon Sunday, April 20, 2008, at the Olive Garden restaurant in Champaign. I wait in the lobby for a while, listening to the music of idealized Italy. I’m wondering whether Jessica is going to show. If I were her, I wouldn’t. You can never trust someone who wants to tell a story. But then she walks in. It’s like seeing a celebrity, after watching her on CNN. Her pale, open face, an oval of confusion and guilt and loss. Impossible to know what she was like before. She’s a kind of ghost now, walking carefully, and she’s brought a friend. “This is my friend Josh,” she says. “He’s here for moral support.” It’s a new Josh, not the one Steve knew, this one smaller, dark hair, quiet, mild as milk. I wonder whether he’s the new boyfriend. I’m guessing I won’t find out.

We’re shown to a table, and I’m talking, trying to ease the tension, wondering how to put her at ease. So as we sit down, I talk about my father, about suicide bereavement, about how sorry I am she’s having to go through all this. And all of this is true. I feel tremendously sorry for anyone heading down the early part of that long road. You can’t see the end in sight. It’s terrifying. And I see similarities between Steve and my father, especially the relentless feeling they both had, deep down, that they weren’t good, that they were ultimately just pieces of shit.

“It’s been an intense couple of weeks,” I tell Jessica, “because I’ve had to reevaluate my father and look at him more generously in some ways. After twenty-eight years of suicide bereavement, you sort of feel like you’re through with it, but it’s amazing, even after years, there are new stages that come up as you learn new things. It’s made me more sympathetic to that struggle he had, seeing it in someone else.”

I offer Jessica the chance to write something herself for the Esquire article, her own voice presented directly. She could tell the story of how she first met Steve. “It’s pretty awful,” I tell her, “in the media and vigils and such, how he’s been erased, and demonized by the media, and I think there’s something valuable in trying to recover who he was and what everyone loved about him.”

At this point, I don’t yet know his story. I’m still thinking he was that sweet grad student who just inexplicably snapped, because I’ve spent two weeks with his friends and professors, all the people who loved him, all the people he hid his past from. It won’t be until the next evening that I go bowling and am offered that first contact with one of his high school girlfriends, Julie Creamer.

So I feel sorry for Jessica at this dinner, and she gets teary-eyed several times. When I first mention the victims, for instance, and when I mention his cutting his arms, though I don’t yet have any context for that. She’s especially upset when I mention that Steve’s memorial cross on campus was burned by someone. I thought she already knew this. She cries, and I feel awful for bringing it up.

But mostly, at this dinner, Jessica lies to me. She realizes I just don’t know much yet, and so she lies about everything she possibly can. I ask, for instance, whether Steve was ever with a man, because one of the grad students mentioned that Steve had confessed having several encounters in high school, but Jessica tells me that’s absolutely not true. She’s so upset she’s not eating her meal. It just sits there in front of her for a full three hours of conversation, and her friend Josh doesn’t eat, either. Jessica has ordered a peach iced tea with slices of peaches in it, and she swirls these around with the straw. I believe her about everything, have no idea she’s lying to me. I was feeling manipulative, bringing in my father and my own suicide bereavement, but Jessica is even better at this game than I am. Her tears are real, she tells a few real memories of Steve, she confirms just enough to make the lies and evasions invisible.

STEVE’S WINNING OF THE DEANS’ AWARDis a triumph after all he’s been through. His life is good now. He’s in love with Jessica, graduating and looking forward to grad school, and he also wins a two-year paid internship in public administration with the village of Buffalo Grove, about sixty miles from DeKalb. “It was my first choice and I am ecstatic!” he writes to his friend Ashley Dorsey, who has been awarded a similar internship. “All the people that I’ve talked to from Buffalo have been wonderful!” He’s just as enthusiastic about the graduate program, a master of public administration: “As Dr. Clarke said at the beginning of the fair on Friday, it’s the first day of the rest of our lives and will be a fantastic two years+!”

Something doesn’t work out at the Buffalo Grove job, though. The internship fits perfectly into Steve’s job aspirations to become a city manager, and the annual salary of $27,000 will certainly help him through grad school, but in his first week, spent shadowing all the city’s departments (fire, police, public works, etc.), his supervisor, Ghida Neukirch, writes that Steve is “extremely shy and appeared to have the deer in the headlights look.” He’s always nervous about new social environments, and he’s not fitting in. He’s drinking a lot of Red Bull. He’s upset, also, that he’s not doing more important policy work. And then, on June 2, 2006, he abruptly leaves, after less than two weeks. He quits the master in public administration program, also, and switches to a master in sociology.

These changes are abrupt, and looking back, they seem tremendously important. Public administration was something Steve was truly interested in, not just the influence of a good teacher. The fact that this road ended so quickly must have created a lot of anxiety about who he was and what he was going to do with his life.

But at the time, everything seems to work out, perhaps because sociology is easy for him. He has a good fall semester, 2006. He’s tutoring students, working as a teaching assistant in statistics. He’s good at this, and the students seek him out. One of them is Anne Marrin, who was given his internship at Buffalo Grove after he left. He’s upset to learn that she’s been assigned an important project there, something not offered to him. But otherwise everything is working out well. He’s co-authoring the paper with Jim Thomas, Margaret Leaf, and Josh Stone on self-injury in women’s prisons. Steve a cutter, but now he’s writing about this from a distance, using his past for his future career. All is being transformed. Sociology is a safe haven.

Steve hangs out with Josh Stone in Jim Thomas’s office. Josh and Jim try to get Steve to chill out. “Meet our friend Steve,” they tell new folks, and then they give some variation on that mass-murderer line. “He must be a mass murderer, he’s such a nice guy,” or “he’s too nice, he must be an axe murderer.” Steve polite to a fault, apologetic always, but he starts to relax with Jim and Josh. They introduce him to a new world. Those stories of a poker chip on a bull’s forehead, monkeys strapped to dogs. Josh’s funny stories about Disney World, his confessions about his brother’s time in juvie. Steve still doesn’t reveal much about himself, but he feels at home with Jim and Josh. They get him to have a beer, get him to hang out and take some time off. He’s happy, or as close to happy as he can be.