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.
“But couldn’t someone have seen the warning signs?”
“What warning signs?” Amber Sprague says, an angry edge in her voice.
I’m guessing Amber’s been watching as much, if not more, TV news than the rest of us. She has commented on everyone’s opinions. She might even think the conversation is being graded.
“He was just like any other fifth grader,” she says.
“There must have been something,” Marcy says. “You can’t just be a murderer like that without a sign someone could see, like his teachers.”
Marcy looks at Mr. Lardner for help on this, expecting him to jump in and confirm that yes, teachers do possess this ability to pick out murderers. But if he tries it, he’s fucked, because they can’t, and what makes him so special? He was a sub until this year. He opens his mouth to speak when Amber cuts in.
“There’s no way to tell.”
Mr. Lardner looks relieved and strengthened.
He says, “Most people think these go on a case-by-case basis. You can’t say what sets one person off rather than another. It’s a tragedy, but there’s something to be learned from the situation.”
He goes on, words dry and dusty and filled with easy thoughts. It must come with the job of working your way up to becoming a permanent teacher. You don’t want to stand out in any particular way. And the student evaluations are always coming up. Mr. Lardner wears slacks, plaid shirts and coaches girls soccer and tennis. Video games, bad parenting, easy access to guns.
Bill Stoakley breaks his silent-jock persona and says, “You can tell who they are because of when they take out their guns, yeah? All’s anyone has to do is pull the trigger. Bro, there’s plenty of time to get a shot off and take him down.”
Bill means get a shot off at the shooter. He means a second shooter would have to be in the room, a white hat shooter. But there’s no law allowing concealed firearms in Illinois. I’ve checked. So who’s going to play the good guy?
Bill sits two rows away, and Amber sits to my right. Meredith sits directly in front of me, and I stare at her hair most of the hour. There are thirty-one students in this class and one is absent today. There are two exits. One leads to the hallways with the lockers, the other leads to a patio we never use. Every day I count the number of people in my classes and think about where they are in relation to the nearest exits. I don’t know why I started doing this. I’m not particularly concerned about the school burning down with me inside, however amazingly sick that would be.