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

“Shut up. I’ll show you what’s real.” And Steve gives Adam a business card from the KKK. Then he tags “blows” under “Metallica,” even though he loves Metallica.

On colder nights, they hang out in one of the bathrooms. Steve’s godfather, Grafer, works for the forest service, for Cook County, so Steve has access to the keys. The bathrooms are cinderblock stand-alone huts in the wilderness. Their own concrete chalets. They’re used, also, by gay cruisers. If you back into a parking space here, you’re asking for a visit.

Steve has been with a man before, but his friends don’t know this. Secret sex, like his summer with Nicole.

Steve hangs out a lot with Pete Rachowsky. They get arrested September 22, 1996, for trespassing on railroad tracks and the Pepsi lot, planning to go through some dumpsters. By the end of the semester, as it gets colder, Steve has become odd, even for him, and antisocial.

“Is something going on at home?” Julie asks him.

“Nothing,” he says. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Steve decides to commit suicide, plans it ahead of time, holds a sale first to get rid of all his stuff. His friend Jason gets his guitar. His friend Lee gets his video games. “He sold all his shit,” Adam says.

December 14, 1996, Steve overdoses on Tylenol and calls Missy. His parents throw him into Rush, a hospital, for a week, but something becomes unstoppable about these suicide attempts. Steve is anxious all the time, depressed, unable to sleep. He blows up on the meds, goes from skinny to obese, 300 pounds, in just a couple months. Rich can’t understand what’s happened. Steve is like a zombie, with a faraway stare, “like the personality was just sucked out of him.” Julie tries to talk with him, and most the time he’s just glassy-eyed, so out of it he won’t even look at her.

In one clear moment, he stands at the mirror with her, at her house. He has terrible acne, one of the side effects. “You don’t need makeup,” he tells her. “You look beautiful. I look like shit. Look at me. This is horrible.”

People talk about him at school that winter. He’s sitting in the cafeteria, an enormous and exposed room right off the main hall, a place where you can’t hide. He’s with Julie, and a couple of jocks come up to him. They know his sister, Susan, and they know Joe Russo’s older brother and sister. They know everything about him. “Hey, Suicide Steve, what’s up?” one of them asks. “Uh-oh, don’t say that, Crazy Mierczak might off himself,” the other says. Then the first one flips Steve’s tray onto the floor, all his food.

Steve walks out to the Goth lot and Julie follows him. “Who cares about them,” she says.

“Just back off,” he says, and he won’t say anything more the rest of the day.

The next day, though, he tells her, “I love school because I love working. But I hate school because of everyone in my classes. I hate everyone.”

“You can’t hate everyone,” she tells him. “You don’t hate me.”

“No.”

“So the others?”

“I do. Some people I wanna hurt.”

BY THE FALL OF HIS JUNIOR YEAR,when Steve first attempts suicide, his life is already destroyed. And then it gets worse, steadily, month by month.

I can understand some parts of that life, including being an outcast. I finally left all my friends the fall of tenth grade. We were all in band, like Steve and his friend Adam, and we went on a field trip down to an amusement park in Southern California. I hated Ian VanTuyl by that point, had fantasies of killing him, shooting him with one of my rifles. He deserved it, in my opinion, and I hated all my other friends about half as much for going along with him. They were brutal to me, every day, constant humiliation. So on this trip, I finally got off the bus they were on and got on the other bus. This one was for all the cheerleaders and baton twirlers, so I wasn’t exactly welcome there, either, but I knew a couple of them, and they invited me over to help me get away from my friends.

So that was it. I wandered school friendless for the next two weeks. At lunch and snack break, when everyone huddled into their groups, I felt exposed and awkward, like I had a target on me that said loser. And I felt my life sliding away, a sense of doom that I was destined to repeat what my father had done, as if his suicide had a kind of magnetic force. I didn’t imagine it happening soon. I imagined growing old enough to get married and have kids, and then watching my life fall apart as my father’s had, with infidelity and divorce, guilt and depression that would make me finally pull the trigger, fulfilling my fate. Doom is the only word that fits, and that feeling would last, waiting always in the background, for twenty years.

But after wandering friendless for those two weeks, I started hanging out with a new friend I’d met on the wrestling team, Galen Palmer, and he turned my life around for the better. He introduced me to his friends in drama, and I tried out to be in the after-school drama workshop, an unusual program run by a teacher who had studied with the Polish Laboratory Theatre. Instead of pretending to feel emotion or planning out gestures, the focus was on improvisation, on working indirectly through associations, such as making your voice sound like dry grass if the part called for sadness.

I wanted into this group badly. I wanted friends, and I wanted to belong. So at the auditions, I told the truth about my father for the first time. For three years, I had told everyone that he had died of cancer. His suicide just felt too shameful, a personal shame, something dirty. But to this group, I told the story of the day we found out, and they let me in. What it meant for the shape of my life was that instead of continuing to spiral down into a double life, things began to improve for me, and this is what never happened for Steve in high school. His life spiraled into drugs, medications, suicide attempts, sexual shame, bitter fights with his mother, threats of violence. It’s hard to know how exactly it all happened. Who handed him a KKK card? Who was the man he first had sex with, and was it consensual? How was he able to plan his own suicide in advance and even sell his things? I’ve visited all the places he went during those times, I’ve talked with his friends and spent time with them, gone to their houses, but I just don’t have the experience to really understand. I haven’t been on those medications, for instance.

Prozac is the one antidepressant approved for use in teens, and it’s famous for causing or heightening suicidal thoughts. Depakote may have been the drug that puffed Steve up and sent him to 300 pounds, though Lithium can have that effect, too. The main problem may have been that he was on cocktails, combinations of drugs, so who knows what all the effects were. Of all his symptoms over the years — psychotic episodes, hallucinations, paranoia, anxiety, violent rage, insomnia, checking behaviors, despair, etc. — which ones were his and which ones belonged to the medications? It’s partly because of the drugs that Steve goes off the chart and I can no longer connect his life to my own. Terence wrote, “Nothing human is foreign to me,” but a person on drugs becomes something different than human.

ON APRIL 8, 1997,Elk Grove High School denies a request by Steve’s parents to have a case study evaluation. They give his parents a handbook on dealing with students with disabilities. By this point, Steve’s parents see him as mentally disabled and are asking for help, but the school refuses to help. April 13, Steve overdoses on forty Ambien and slits his wrists. Hospitalized at Rush. In the fall of his senior year, November 4, 1997, he tells his mother he doesn’t want to go to school anymore. They fight, he says he’s not going, and then, at 11:00 p.m., he takes fifty Depakote, an entire bottle, and goes to sleep.