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

Goths. This is what Steve and his friends become in high school, except that Steve is an outcast even within this group. Just beyond the school grounds is a parking lot where they all gather and smoke. Long black trench coats, black leather boots, chains and spikes. Officer Lancaster lurking at the edges with his bionic mic, trying to catch drug deals.

It takes time, unbearable time, all of ninth grade and into tenth grade, for Steve to regain his friendships with Joe and Lee, and there’s always an edge with Adam. Steve waits for his life to change, passes the time with Pete Rachowsky, who becomes a drug dealer.

Steve and his friends form a campus club in the fall of their sophomore year, try to get a radio station. It starts with just a few short bits to go with campus announcements a couple times a day. Free Your Minds, they call the club, and it’s unsuccessful. They’re not liked, after all. Who would want to listen to them?

Steve doesn’t care much, though. Somehow, the miraculous has happened. A girl named “Missy” likes him for some reason, and suddenly he has a girlfriend. She’s cute, too, looks like Liv Tyler, wears a black choker. His parents let her stay over a couple nights a week as a “family friend.” Then, in the winter, Missy dumps him, tells everyone he has a small penis, can’t satisfy her in bed. Steve’s older sister, Susan, is no help. She laughs at him too. She’s always had an easier time. The two of them are night and day.

So Steve goes for the lowest common denominator, “Nicole,” “a girl with a self-esteem problem, a girl you wouldn’t want your parents to know about,” according to Adam. Secret sex for that entire summer after tenth grade. No one is supposed to know, except Steve’s friends. At Rich’s house, there’s a foam lounger that reclines. They call it the Flip-N-Fuck. They do it on the ottoman, too, in Rich’s living room late at night, just a moving sheet with two bodies underneath.

I COMMITTED MY CRIMES ALONEpartly because, like Steve, I was losing all my friends. Eighth grade was the time of “cut-downs,” competitive insults. After my father’s death, I was weak. Ian VanTuyl, who had been my best friend, began using everything he knew against me. At school, on the blacktop, we’d all stand around in a circle with our hands in our pockets and Ian would say that my front teeth were too big, or I smiled too much, and I would grin weakly and not know what to say. This is how you become a target in junior high. Others in the group were relieved, because this meant they were no longer targets, and they heaped it on. Every day I was made fun of, every day, all day, and so I know some of the rage Steve must have felt, and I know what it means to be an outcast in your social group.

Like Steve, I turned to secret sex. A girl with a terrible reputation, someone from a poorer part of town. At her house after school, her parents never home, we made out on her bed. I put my finger inside her and couldn’t believe how soft she was, but then she said we could have sex, and this scared me too much. I wasn’t ready. I had limits. My friends were just starting to drink, but I refused. It was something about control. My father’s suicide had come as a shock, and perhaps I couldn’t sleep and couldn’t drink and couldn’t have sex because I wasn’t willing to let something happen again that would be beyond my control.

I broke up with this girl, and then a guy named Ryan started having sex with her and telling everyone about it at school, started calling me a pussy. So now my friends had two new ways to make fun of me, about drinking and about sex. I still invited them for sleepovers, and had an agreement with my mother that we could go out toilet-papering people’s houses and such and she’d pretend not to notice. One time she forgot and came out into the hallway when she heard a sound, so then she had to shield her eyes, looking down, pretending she was really sleepy, as she talked to me and we all stood there with TP in our hands. She was a good actress.

Outside, toilet-papering a house, my friends still made fun of me, but I had an edge they didn’t. I’d stick around as they all ran away. I’d walk up into the yard and unscrew the light bulb on the front porch, walk around into the backyard, even. Compared to what I was doing at night on my own, none of this felt like anything.

In the afternoons, I was going into neighbors’ houses. I had their phone numbers, and this was right before answering machines became widespread, so I would simply call their house and let it ring the entire time I was inside. If anyone came home, they would rush for the phone and I would slip out the way I’d come in, which was always through the small sliding bathroom window. Everyone in our neighborhood left that window open. It was difficult to climb in, headfirst, balancing on the toilet and trying not to break anything, but it always worked.

I never stole anything. I think I was just alone, an outcast, with a life that felt empty, so I was looking at all the stuff of other peoples’ lives, trying to see or feel what made them. I also looked for pornography, of course, and guns.

I had fantasies during this time that cast me as the underdog, everyone against me. I would imagine myself out behind the school backstop with the.30-.30 having to defend the honor of some girl as my classmates, all boys, attacked. I held them off, shooting them one by one with the rifle. So it was a fantasy born of reading too many of my father’s westerns, Louis L’Amour and later the adults-only ones by Jake Slocum. It was the fantasy of an outcast becoming a hero, showing everyone. But there I was, imagining a school shooting.

STEVE SPENDS ALMOST NO TIME AT HOME.He lives at his friends’ houses the fall of eleventh grade. He’s better friends now with Julie Creamer, a big girl who’s on lithium for bipolar, same as Steve. His parents put him on it. It helps a bit. You’d never know Julie was on it; she’s light and fun and chatty. Her mother asks for help moving the furniture, and Steve handles it himself, tells her to relax, he’ll take care of it. Home away from home. He feels safe here.

At school, in the parking lot where all the Goths hang out, Julie gets Steve to try pot for the first time. He’s resisted before, even with Pete, but she gets him to try pot she’s bought from Pete, and he’s skipping around afterward, like a new bird. She’s laughing and trying to get him to stop. “Lancaster will bust us,” she tells him.

The other hangout is at The Tubes. A short walk to the forest preserve, hop a fence, slog though mud and wet grass past the federal nursery, rows of trees. In the next field, a dozen leftover concrete sewer pipes six feet in diameter, tall enough to stand inside. Shelter from rain and snow, the constant wind. He tries to get Julie to give him head here, but when they kiss, it’s awkward. She feels like she’s kissing her brother, and she wonders whether he’s really attracted to her. They date for two days, then decide to just be friends.

Most the time, at least half a dozen of their friends are here. They light chemicals on fire, blow shit up, shoot pellet guns, make out, smoke pot, sneak away to the porno stash in the trees. Whenever they shoot, Steve brags he has a membership with the NRA. His godfather, Richard Grafer, bought it for him.

“We know,” Adam says. “Like you haven’t told us a million times.” Adam and Steve are friends again, sort of, and they bring white spray paint one day for tagging. Steve tags a white swastika on the front of one of the pipes. “You’re doing your swastika wrong,” Adam says.

“No I’m not,” Steve says.

“Remember how you used to put ‘Hi Ho Hitler’ instead of ‘Heil Hitler’?”