INTO IT (complete novel)
Two high school boys respond to reports of a school shooting by plotting their own while a classmate secretly plans to stop them.
INTO IT (a novel) Chapter 1: Adam
The experiment is my idea. In his garage John and I will tape a large Amazon box into a terrordome for juvenile mice.
INTO IT (a novel) Chapter 2: The Number
Our phones lit up with the news, one thousand of us moving through the halls and sitting in the classrooms of Lincoln High. We bent our heads over our screens like dowsers divining for answers. Something above thirty dead, and then the wounded. It was a fifth grader in Texas, a child shooter.
INTO IT (a novel) Chapter 3: John
Everything flowed from the Texas kid. That’s when we entered the movie. One morning, a girl in the hall stared at me. I was a sea creature beached beneath an unforgiving sun, my gel eyes sliced open to expose everything behind them had gone haywire.
INTO IT (a novel) Chapter 4: Adam
“Here’s how you walk down the hall so no one fucks with you,” I say. John and I are at the mall, looking at the video games and the books and the breasts behind the girls’ T-shirts. “No, I feel that there’s …” he says, trying to get it out. We are eating gyros at the food court. John describes people staring at him. The experience of it.
INTO IT (a novel) Chapter 5: John
Adam and I were strangers and then we weren’t. We got grouped from several grades for being troubled. That means got caught. My best guess is Adam and I met in that mobile building that was anchored in the high school parking lot, its sheet metal walls hot to the touch at the start of our special ninth grade.
INTO IT (a novel) Chapter 6: Adam
At the beginning of the year there are the looks that say, He hasn’t lost any weight, he’s actually gained, but those looks quickly dissolve into indifference. Who wants to bother with the fat boy dressed by his mother? I wouldn’t. I don’t. I’ve been a baby-fat all my life. There’s a line of baby-fat photos narrating their way down my mom’s mantlepiece, …
INTO IT (a novel) Chapter 7: John
Adam told me he had been paying attention to me. He’d heard about the Jesus incident even before our internment in the trailer. He said he was impressed. He said he would be better than anyone at saving my precious mind because he believed. So, maybe he was always there, fat.
INTO IT (a novel) Chapter 8: Adam
In Honors English we talk about the Texas shooting. Mr. Lardner lets us go on about it. We’ve killed twenty-five minutes of class time and the conversation doesn’t look like it’s going away any time soon. This is good. It keeps us from the Tolstoy I didn’t read last night. I sit in the back row, fat. Marcy Glick speaks.
INTO IT (a novel) Chapters 9-10
Chapter 9: John I can be mean, too, said a fattie liberal in a viral clip. A Red-Stater had bumped into his rolling suitcase at an airport, and, a few days later, infamous enough to be on the news, the cell phone video of their brawl led the liberal to record his own from the hospital, promising to press charges, paralyzed now from the sternum down.
INTO IT (a novel) Chapters 11-12
Chapter 11: John This girl who came out of the background while my idiot friends debated the shootings. After three days, I thought about Meredith McCandless’s stare, her limp blond hair framing her cheekbones and her beautiful, pitiful face. When her eyes hit mine, limitlessness and agelessness broke into me and something smoothed out for a second. An …
INTO IT (a novel) Chapters 13-14
Chapter 13: John Adam always said yes to the idea of doing anything sick, like dropping pennies over the interstate from Clearwater Bridge, and barely hearing the crack when they hit a car. Or, seeing who can hold a lighter to his thumb longer. Adam gave himself a third-degree burn and had to go to the ER. For three weeks, he lugged around a fist in gauz…
INTO IT (a novel) Chapters 15-16
Chapter 15: John One day I looked over my cubicle in the special-ed trailer to find the fat kid I’d felt had been looking at me. My face had itself written all over it. We’ll get through this, his face seemed to say. I stole a demagnetizer from behind a shop counter while a clerk helped someone unimaginably stupid. I put the magnetic block under my shirt,…
INTO IT (a novel) Chapters 17-18
Chapter 17: John I wanted to laser into the back of her head. One long, beautiful, anonymous trail into the back of Meredith’s head. I followed Meredith to her classes. With too many students in this space under the fire code, I didn’t worry about setting off stalker alarms, her long hair swinging blondly down her back, her books held at an angle against…
INTO IT (a novel) Chapters 19-21
Chapter 19: John The experiment was my idea. We called it the Dead Pond. Between the grade-school parking lot and the high school, a deep puddle with one dead tree reaching across it. No fish, only brown water and tadpoles dying in the tall weeds. Back in that special class, and before we were friends, I wandered during lunch off grade-school grounds and…
INTO IT (a novel) Chapters 22-25
Chapter 22: Adam I see him walking down the hall, eyes gazing up and into the middle distance. He has a distrusting expression, like someone’s about to pull a trick on him at any moment and he’s bracing himself for the fall. I’ve seen this in John before, and it’s usually like this just before he disappears, goes home, cursing the world, or ends up in th…
INTO IT (a novel) Chapters 26-28
Chapter 26: John I thought you would’ve had lots of girls over before, Meredith said. Where’s the trash? Leave it, I said. Is this a house where you just leave it? Meredith said. She wore me thin and strained my imagination. Girls didn’t lie. Girls didn’t cheat on tests. Girls weren’t duplicitous. Girls were faithful to their boyfriends. I had dug them up f…
INTO IT (a novel) Chapters 29-32
Chapter 29: Adam It’s the morning after my first football practice. My ankles are a blood-encrusted pain zone. It’s agonizing to pull up fresh socks. I’m so sore I feel like an old man trying to get out of his bed, straining against his bulk and the curdling wet spot on his sheets, my tendons tight to the point taking down the corpus.
INTO IT (a novel) Chapters 33-36
Chapter 33: John I made a Facebook profile, congrats to me. I uploaded two photos of Meredith: one where she was staring at me with that smile on her face, the other where she’d realized that I was taking photos of her, so she was blurry from ducking out of the way.
INTO IT (a novel) Chapters 37-40
Chapter 37: John I had been a fucked-up sicko, but I got better. I couldn’t think anything different, as if thinking you’re badly-off is what keeps you together and what makes you break is any feeling of security. I saw in Adam’s eyes and in his behavior suspicion of my progress, a flinching away from me. This guy whom I’d known as the fattest, most desp…
INTO IT (a novel) Chapters 41-45
Chapter 41: John John? dupliss is on CNN I’m watching he was fucked up for a little kid yeah but smart about it. checking out his maps. he could have been caught any time before this. people r not looking in the right places. r u a white hat I’m a white hat
INTO IT (a novel) Chapters 46-48
Chapter 46: Adam I step up and into John’s truck, jacked up on a high chassis. We drive east out of town to the outskirts, where the interstate passes by an unfinished cloverleaf overpass that’s far too grand for our small township. I don’t know what they were thinking when they started building it. Maybe that we were going to grow. They must have decide…
INTO IT (a novel) Chapters 49-54
Chapter 49: John We stood in the hall, staring at each other as the students walked around us, Meredith’s house filled with juniors and seniors there to paint their signs for the first football game of the new year. She’d stopped when she saw me standing with some guys I didn’t know, bullshitting about something, Slayer, whatever, and we met eyes. Nothi…
INTO IT (a novel) Chapters 55-60
Chapter 55: John I went outside and stood with the smokers. I finished two cigarettes while talking more bullshit with people I didn’t know, the jeebs hitting me with the elation over talking with Meredith about what I did to her. Getting it out there. Maybe she would write about me in another editorial. I would have to be gone by then, because everyone …
INTO IT (a novel) Chapters 61-69
Chapter 61: John We forgot to buy bullets. The gun stank of burned powder, but I put the ammunition box and the Glock back into my father’s sock drawer and slid it shut. I knew that he opened the drawer every day, so he might detect the scent of a fired pistol and I’d be caught. I hid the gun and the box of bullets behind several rolls of socks just to m…
INTO IT (a novel): Chapter 70 - The End
Adam The Wednesday after John comes back. I am no closer to Meredith than I was a few weeks ago before John left, with her not seeing me, not seeing even my morbid body, just seeing me as John’s invisible, silent friend. I am nothing in particular to Joan. I am, at best, a faint memory to Claudette. I have not heard a word from my mom about my diabetes. I…