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 gauze. Blood seeped to the surface and reddened the fine fabric lines of the bandage. He loved how sick it made him look.
A day after he told me Meredith wanted to stop me from being a threat, obese Adam Davis told me that Coach Grady had run up to him in the parking lot and begged him to join Varsity football. The team needed him. He walked taller, with his head up. He looked around the halls for the other football players, trying to make eye contact, but was ignored. They would know in two days, Adam must have been thinking. They would know he was one of them.
Let me be a winner for a change.
I told him he was the Texas kid and shoved him to knock him out of his pretenses, but I think he took it as a compliment. Sweat rings had formed under his arms. Something was going wrong with him. Maybe it was the same thing that was going wrong with me, maybe that.
Chapter 14: Adam
There’s a level below which I will not go, which is why I don’t have the jeebs. I leave school feeling strong. My mom is in her bedroom, where she keeps her computer, doing whatever with it when I get home. I call something out to her, then go upstairs to work on my essay.
When I reach the top of the stairs, I’m panting.
I see myself in the football pads. You’re huge under the lights. I dream of hitting through the line, punching a hole for the running back. I dream of recovering fumbles and taking them—look at him, despite his size—down the sidelines for a touchdown. Meredith watches the other team crumble. I’m a bloody wreck after the game, limping and barely able to direct myself to the correct side of the field, so wasted by the violence that I’ve been in, a warrior. Meredith is scared by how I look, my bruised arms, my sweaty face, my hair all in disarray, some of the blood on me not my own.
At my desk, my heart hammers fast with the fantasy of the all-destructive game and my march toward the locker rooms, Meredith’s eyes following me. She recognizes me and wonders where I got the courage. This is going to be my year. My veins feel open, and my mind is clear.
I write the essay for Honors English.
When violence happens in places of calm and safety, everyone in the community freaks. There’s a reaction to violence that makes people act in different ways. Some are afraid and want to lock down the movie theater, the school, the church, the mall, and whatnot. Some want to blame the kids’ parents. Some people claim that outside forces caused the tragedy, like music, video games, guns, or drugs.
These reactions are natural, but none of them gets at the heart of it, which is alienation and courage. It takes someone alienated from the community to plan the act, and courage to follow through. If you want to figure out who’s capable of these acts, look for people who have the qualities of alienation and courage.
I know it’s starting out crap, but I believe in the essay. At times, I have the ability to believe in myself. But I worry about the essay following the inverted triangle shape. And, it isn’t long enough for the assignment, but it still covers all the bases. These are the things that make a violent person, and there isn’t much more to say. Courage.
I’m on the field, a destructor. Meredith will have to see me. She will see my rage out there, where I’m stronger than the mice panicking within the smallest of all possible spaces. Now the Drano has a fizzing quality. It’s like tonic water smoothly poured into a tall glass of ice.