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.
Goodbye, Meredith.
I uploaded the shot of my face with my closed eyes as my profile photo and captioned it, Still Smoking. I sent Adam some metal to keep him annoyed and unaware that anything serious had happened.
The pills started doing their job, but this time they made me nervous that Meredith would tell someone about us. A headache came on. I wanted to think it was coming from my furious concentration on what I’d just done. I wanted to be in control of myself.
I sent a message to Adam: Will you be my stupid fucking computer friend?
Adam didn’t have a real Facebook profile, just his name, Adam Davis, and Illinois, and Lincoln High School, no idiot’s photograph. If you don’t have a photo, they give you a ghost. That was Adam: never there, just an outline. I was sure he was happy Facebook didn’t sketch him as fat. He had one friend, his mom, with a picture of her at Dwayne’s, where she worked. She looked grim and tired. Everything made sense, but only after you put it online.
Meredith McCandless: words I only typed in a search box. I didn’t press Enter. I grew tired of looking around and wondering whether Adam would be my computer friend. I uploaded a scan of my map because no one could see my eyes, and I wrote in the caption, Mental Health Day. I closed my laptop and went to bed.
In my dream, Adam and I sat together in an empty movie theater. The lights were down, but no movie played. There was only the soundtrack of a gunfight, with some screaming, glass shattering, explosions, but no action music. Then the noises stopped, and I looked at Adam. He was holding his belly. Dark blood oozed between his fingers.
Apply some pressure, I told him.
He gripped the bloody spot with both hands and looked at me. He was crying.
Goodbye, Adam, I said. Then I woke up.
Chapter 34: Adam
Football practice, and I’m suited up again. It’s hotter today. My socks bulge over the tape I’ve wrapped around my ankles to protect them from my inability to run straight. Today, I’m going to run with them. On the second day of practice, I’m not going to slow to a walk.
I see Navneen doing hamstring stretches and I send him a hello gesture that has a bit of a point-and-grin move mixed in, like, I have a gun, gotcha. He waves back, returns to his stretches. I am certain that he thinks little of me, despite what he said in the hall earlier today. I begin to stretch my legs, modeling my technique on what Navneen’s doing, because I do not know what I’m doing. I’m bending at the waist, at my waist that is bulging and impossible to get around, trying to keep my legs straight as I reach for the ground in this, the most basic of things. The heat inside my helmet has already become oppressive and sweat has slicked up my pad’s straps and harnesses beneath my jersey. We rotate through increasingly difficult stretches that I can only shadow. But for the first time, I’m thankful for being huge. I hit harder.
Grady calls for laps, and we’re off, shuffling, complainingly slow at first but then moving more quickly, the receivers and other littler guys taking the lead of the pack and setting a trotting pace that I’m able to keep up with only because I’m all-out sprinting. With nearly every stride my cleats bang painlessly into my ankles. The tape wraps do their job.
In her essay Meredith wrote,
Incidents of violence can occur in school anytime, anywhere. It doesn’t matter what kind of high school you find yourself in, or what types of students attend that school. Someone there may be unstable. The difficulty comes in determining who is unstable, and why.
Recently someone assaulted a sophomore in the boys’ bathroom. This boy was punched without warning in the face and fell to the floor. Bullying happens all the time at a myriad of schools around the country. Learning the motive behind the bullying is important, but even more important is knowing whether these attacks are a preface to something worse, and to show compassion to the boy who felt compelled to attack and to help him to a more stable way of being.
Lunch period. John and I sat with Meredith’s essay at the Dead Pond. I read the pages to John, who sat with a faraway look in his eyes and said nothing. He snorted when I said, a more stable way of being. But he seemed at peace with the change that might be coming over us. The expression on his face indicated something like amazement or a growing understanding of the fact it would be good if Meredith published this in the school newspaper, before. We could leave a copy behind with the maps, the scraps of motive that illuminate nothing in the end.
Running the football field, I’m having a hard time keeping up with the slowest of the stragglers, the other linebackers. My fat seems to move independently of me, bouncing on my frame, my legs, my arms, rebounding. The great victory dream is gone.
What are the warning signs? Who’s going to crack? I don’t claim to know. Maybe those who on the outside seem the most stressed, showing signs of strange speech, irritability, cruelty, will be the least likely to become violent, while those who keep everything bottled up inside are the most likely. Or it could be the other way around. Only the people close to them can know, and there’s the problem, because so often there aren’t enough people close to them to find out.
By the pond, I said to John, “She can’t figure out which one of us to be afraid of.”
“She doesn’t know anything about you,” John said.
He wouldn’t have told her anything about me. According to John, all they did when Meredith came over was paint posters and talk about the shootings. I pictured John going to his laptop to look up the facts. Most interesting to John, the pro-shooting sites published hand Kelley’s drawings. Kelley Allen DuPliss’s internet presence filtered its way out of his tiny fifth-grade obscurity. His journals appeared online, scans of maps he’d made of the school showed up on one of the main sites and were immediately mirrored on secondary sites around the world. John described for me DuPliss’s sketches. His superheroes, the women with penises running with shotguns, the men with breasts wielding machetes. I think DuPliss’s banality touched John somehow, made him feel less alone in the world. Hundreds of thousands of us.
“Why wouldn’t you at least tell her who I am?” I asked him.
“She knows who you are, asshole,” he said.
But I know that not to be true. I know that she knows John and she does not know me.
Grady calls for more laps. Heat hammers the nape of my neck. Blood seeps through my ankle tape, and again I think of the visit Meredith made to John yesterday. If she suspected him of attacking Tyler, then she was putting herself in the line of fire, because how would she know he wouldn’t go off on her, too? She could see John’s anime T-shirts about rape, but that’s Japanese and she’s Illinoisan…
I run off the track. I’m jogging on the grass outside the track. I can’t see anyone in front of me anymore, and so I think I must have finished the race—but what race? And so I slow and then I stop. My blood catches up with my inertia, slams into my heart and I black out into the great victory dream. I wield my helmet with a berserker’s mania, bashing and swiping aside every opposing player on game night. I go on like this for quite a while before a whistle blows, I use my helmet as a cudgel against the other kids’ heads, knock them to the ground and dent their skulls. I am pulled to the side by two referees and an outraged parent, and I feel robbed of my only opportunity to make a play for the team.
I wake up lying in the grass. Coach Grady is pressing a smelling salt tablet into my fat upper lip. It sparks wheels of pain in my nose and throat, but my mind—no idea they did that. When Grady pulls the capsule from under my nose, I grab his hand and bring the little packet back to my nose, and I breathe.
Chapter 35: John
By the Dead Pond we read Meredith’s essay. It was October and starting to get chilly. I wore my WWIII t-shirt. Meredith had my Han Solo beheading t-shirt because I gave it to her. I had her red dress, not because she wanted me to have it but because she’d lost it after willingly taking it off in my bedroom. I stuffed it into a garbage bag and tossed the bag into my closet where my mother never looked, and kept the secret.
Adam was reading and we weren’t laughing, because the essay wasn’t funny, and because it was like we’d made it somewhere finally, and, if she was going to publish it in the Lincoln school newspaper, possibly getting into print.
Adam hadn’t friended me yet, but I didn’t care, someone would find the map, maybe some lonely idiot at Facebook who had been tasked to check for those kinds of things after the Texas kid. No one was talking about DuPliss anymore, or even the older guy who shot up the church in Ohio. He probably wasn’t in Ohio anymore anyway. He was crossing state lines, unlike me. I’d wait down at the cloverleaf, sort of blend in with the homeless there, just disappear. AFK, away from keyboard.
Chapter 36: Adam
The hospital. I’m probably misunderstanding, but I think I must have six stitches on my forehead, just above my right eye. I don’t understand how a patch of grass could cut me through my helmet. Maybe it was the helmet itself that cut me.
My mom meets me at the emergency room wearing one of John’s t-shirts that he’d left at my house, which has flames shaped like naked women on it. I am under a topical anesthetic that makes my forehead tingle, and an IV drip of something that makes the pain in my forehead and ankles go so far away I feel in shape and ready to go back out to the field and finish practice, and I don’t wonder what she’s doing in John’s shirt because I know it was just at hand.
“You’re dehydrated,” she says. She puts her hand on my shoulder and squeezes.
I shrug my shoulder away from her touch. I do not need her. I am a destructor. The dream has not dissolved.
“Would you rather I not come at all?” she says. “I could have stayed home and finished the laundry, but I had to come out to see my little guy who doesn’t know how to drink enough fluids.”
My mom is good at barely suppressed rage, but in the next moment she can coo to me so sweetly that I don’t know who the real mom is, or whether any of this could possibly be my own fault. I seem to have been drawn to these types from an early age, mom when I was born, and John, ten years later.
The key to the violent student’s life becomes friendships. Where there exist no real friendships, there can be no peace in the mind. Scientists have isolated some signs of future violence: the violent child will have fewer friends than the average student and those friends won’t be genuine. His parents will be distracted or uncaring. He’ll have no one to look out for him.
When I woke up on the grassy edge of the jogging track, Grady was bending over me and waving smelling salts.
“Let’s see what kind of shape we can get you into during the next two weeks,” Grady says. “The weather should be a little cooler then, so you won’t be passing out every time I turn around.”
He says this even though I have fainted only one time, but right in front of him, Adam Davis orbiting on his heels and plummeting to the ground in the presence of everyone on the team, just a few seconds ago. Navneen was right: I will not roll over him today.
Then come the paramedics, in their shiny windbreakers and with their plastic boxes and bottles they throw around my body. They connect tubes, pop things out of plastic bags and snap them together—and then a silver needle comes toward me.
“This is to help your heart,” one of them says.
Time is of the essence in matters like this. There’s not a day to be wasted in reaching out to the other students at this school. No one knows how long it takes someone to go from lonely to wanting to be permanently alone, and to possibly take others with them. It’s an interesting fact that there are almost no female shooters. This may have something to do with the inability for a man to express his loneliness in any other way.
By the Dead Pond John snorted at Meredith’s half-understanding of our situation. At least that’s how I interpreted the sound he made. He could have been thinking of something entirely different. He’s been so far gone into his jeebs, it’s hard for me to guess his thoughts.
We tore grass from the ground in tufts and let the breeze take the blades away.
“She’s right about there being barely any female shooters,” I said. “They’re just really not into murder as much.”
“Mothers are the most magnificent fucking killers of all time,” John said. “They get you before you have the chance to breathe.”
I know that John thinks abortion is murder, but then I think that it doesn’t matter, that he’s trying to take my mind off the subject. We are finished with the essay.
“You’re the one who hit Max,” John says, “So it’s about you.”
“She doesn’t know that,” I say. “I’m not the one she’s trying to help by coming over during my absences from school, which are transparent.”
“To you.”
“What’s happening with them?” I say. I really want to know, to be able to gauge whether John is headed toward a hospital again.
“What?”
“The jeebs, that shit you were telling me about in the mall. Do you still think people are watching you?”
“They also talk about me.”
“Just kidding,” I say.
“It’s little tidbits of conversations they’re always having, I can’t tell who they are, but I know they’re girls because they talk so fast. I can hear my name mixed in with what they’re saying, Oh, John Teller, John Teller. It’s fucking annoying. They’re definitely talking about me.”
“What are they saying?”
“Sometimes I can understand them. It’s about how I smell.”
“You smell like cigs most of the time.”
“That’s not what they’re talking about.”
John turns to stare at the pond.
“They’re not talking about anything in particular,” I say.
“It’s too hard to get this across,” John says.
I make a mistake. I say, “Have you talked to Mr. Langhorne?”
“Yes,” John says, surprising me by not getting angry.
I was ready for a pummeling over the impertinence of thinking that he’d go to our moronic school therapist. This could've easily led to another hospitalization. Langhorne knows all about John’s history, it having been passed down from when he was too young to hide and too innocent to lie his way through sessions.
At one point, before all this, back before the mice, John had told me that Mr. Langhorne informed him that he had a disorder. Straight-up. It was, here you go, you’re crazy. State law crazy. Homeless crazy. He'd suggested a psychiatrist, but John had told him that his regular doctor, the pediatrician, was giving him medication already.
This I knew to be the wrong idea, but John wouldn't listen to me. He'd barely gotten this far in the description of his meeting with Langhorne before going dark. It would have been impossible to suggest to John that he see a shrink in Chicago, in a real psychiatrist’s office with a waiting room with magazines on the tables, smiling crazy people on the covers, a place where people get better.