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.
The girl’s blond hair parted in the middle. She slouched her shoulders, kept her hands crammed into her pockets. Awkwardness indicating sexual prowess. Her eyes were light blue or light green. From either kind of distance, distance measured or felt, the color name didn’t matter, blue, green.
“I had never really looked at you,” the girl told me weeks later. But she was easy to hate, to shame, and to dismiss.
Practice mindfulness. Close your eyes and listen to your breathing and suppress the fizzing feeling, the mental carbonation that is a manifestation of a need to go out and do something sick. I would breathe and I would dream about my future homelessness, crumbled into the nook of a brick building and remembering the old breathing lessons. No home, no food, no people—just breaths.
In the movie, laughing extras passed between me and the girl. I hadn’t mutated into a liquid-skulled being. That morning, no one was seeing in, not even the too-tall, staring girl.
Fat Adam said the kid in Texas was sicker because he was in the fifth grade. I’d forgotten Adam was standing by me. I did what we hated in other people. I ignored him. The universal human right not to be ignored, abrogated again. Leonard and I had been talking about another shooter, in Ohio. This one had been trending a full two days alongside the Texas kid.
Adam ordered us to voice an opinion on the question, which killer was better, the Texas kid or the Ohio church killer?
Adam said, There’s a big pile of fucking soggy teddy bears below the restraining fences outside Elmwood Elementary and it’s still raining.
For Adam, always a celebrity or politician or kid at school should be headshot, closed casket. Shootings, tidal waves, tornadoes, and earthquakes: when megatons were killed, Adam came into his own. Funny and natural and intense and confident. Something spiritual—not by Adam but of Adam—came into the air. Adam paid attention to news of the sick to get free. Nothing could have been better for him than a week of back-to-back shootings. The Texas kid looked like the push Adam needed to reach real freedom.
The staring girl turned and walked off.
I pointed in the direction she had gone.
I said, Who’s that?
I’d guessed that she was Meredith McCandless, ignored for her incessant talk about various causes, her demands for our donations, our time, our concern. I wanted to know if her stare had happened only in my head, or if it was an objective fact out there in the flaming world?
Who cares, Adam said. It’s just a girl.
McCandless wanted to check whether classes were canceled for a faculty meeting. She had a pep-club meet in the wrestling hall in five minutes. She had mistaken me for someone else. She was lost. All of this, Adam-talk. The disappointment that is life, the background music of miserable luck.
Ohio was sicker, Leonard said. He killed his people in a church.
Adam said, A kid is automatically sicker than an adult.
But the Ohio guy killed people while they were singing, Leonard protested.
Aha, a sympathetic side of Leonard. But he was an artist, so, there you go. Battle scenes done in ballpoint pens on the inside back covers of his textbooks. Given the chance, Leonard would sketch warfare non-stop.
Draw us a picture of the sickest one, I told Leonard.
Why do you want to know who that girl is, Adam said. She was just looking at your T-shirt.
I bought shirts online. I kept them under my button-ups. Sometimes, I’d leave the shirts open. So, sometimes I was sick, sometimes I was normal. But it all had to do with Adam. He stood in steadfast support of my wardrobe. He liked to watch the hive people react. Adam wore lame shirts, anything his mom bought him. He wore a uniform for a game no one was watching. And it was the case that we thought Meredith McCandless knew nothing about us.