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
I found my dads pistol
where
in his fucking sock drawer
what kind
i don’t know, a revolver?
What time r u going to the party
its real
why r u in your dads sock drawer
doesnt matter guns silver and short like a cop show gun come take a look
Chapter 42: Adam
This Saturday morning, my mom upstairs sleeping off her insomnia from the night before and the worry I caused her with the trip to the hospital, I try to work myself into the mood of the thing again. It seems so ordinary while I am sitting at home, and so charged with meaning while I’m sitting at school. I can’t make out the reasons for this, other than to assume that it’s because I’m hating being at school and DuPliss is influencing my thought patterns. Was DuPliss like John? That’s the question of the hour. Is John capable of doing something like that—and by that I mean, would other people think so? Because that’s all you need to be sick. Meredith thinks John could be into it. But that’s because I’m helping John. Without me, he’d never have drawn the map, and without me hitting Tyler Max in the boy’s bathroom, he never would look like a time bomb.
But speaking plainly to myself, keeping calm, I can see that’s not entirely true. John caught her attention before I hit Tyler, and she doesn’t know anything about the map, so I don’t know what I’m talking about. It just seems there must be some connection between myself and the attention that John’s been getting from the girl. He hasn’t gotten any attention since Marcy and the incident at the dead pond, as far as I can tell. And now he is. And there has to be something of me in this.
I close the maps page and bring up DuPliss’s LiveJournal excerpts, in which he says that nearly everyone in his school should die. He lists the good guys, the white hats. The black hats should all die, and he would one day die trying to get rid of them, so the white hats could live in peace. They’re getting younger, someone on CNN says, and I start to think the TV is reading my mind. That’s a John thought, not a thought I should be having, so I turn down the volume and check to see if John’s online.
dupliss is on CNN
Im watching
he was fucked up for a little kid
yeah but smart about it
I don’t know what John means by smart about it, but I continue without asking, not wanting to sound dumb about DuPliss. I’d rather sound stupid about anything else to John.
checking out his maps. he could have been caught anytime before this. people r not looking in the right places.
There is a thirty-second pause, then,
r u a white hat
I’m a white hat
i found a pistol
where
in my dads sock drawer
what kind
i don’t know
I put the laptop onto the coffee table and sit back on the couch to think for a moment. I don’t know what John’s trying to tell me. I don’t know if he’s being 100 percent truthful, but I don’t want any more of this text to be recorded in a server farm somewhere.
What time r u going to the party
its real
why r u in your dads sock drawer
doesnt matter guns silver and short like an old cop show gun come take a look
It’s not working, trying to keep myself and John off the subject, so I say okay and drag my fat ass up off the couch to go wake my mom and ask her for a ride to John’s.
Chapter 43: John
If you’re reading this, I’m already gone. That’s how I began the book. I would self-publish it online and time its release for the day I would go. It would only take a couple more nights to finish. If I didn’t log in to my computer for two days, the book would be emailed to everyone at Lincoln High. In a few days, after Meredith had broken and run to the police, and they came for me with Tasers drawn, or in six months, when the school year'll be over and the world may as well come to an end. There will be no one there who isn’t afraid of me, Adam being practically gone and me turning seventeen, the year I knew I’d get whacked somehow, anyway. I could die in several ways, by accident, by murder, by disease, at my own hands. Those are the ways you could die, I had figured out, but then I realized I’d missed one, murder by cop, getting someone else to kill you. So I thought if I had missed such an obvious one, I had probably missed others. More ways to die were to be found, to be invented, and there wasn’t a particular one on my list I wanted to choose over the others.
Spontaneous combustion. If that were invented, that’d be the one I’d check-mark. But if that was one of the options, maybe you’re still just as dead as a fucking mangled corpse in a five-car pileup, even if you go poof. Maybe you go to the same place, a kind of no-place, where the accidents go. God doesn’t know what to do, with you suddenly on His plate. Maybe it’s the worst way to end it, I thought, so that was why I chose it.
Chapter 44: Adam
It’s sitting in the drawer among John’s father’s navy and black balled-up socks. Revolver in the sock drawer. The phrase sounds good. Revolver in the sock drawer. The phrase soothes. I’m sure I’ve heard it from somewhere before, maybe in a movie. But either his father’s or John’s an idiot, or both, because it was a Glock with a 9-round clip, not a revolver. I think the gun should not stay there in that sock drawer.
“We need to take it out and test it,” I say.
He’s in no position to say no to this because this is a gun and we’re sixteen and it’s important we check this situation out. It’s silver, tiny and toy like.
“Where are we going with it?” I say.
The houses around John’s, though expensive and huge, are built so close together you couldn’t just go out to the backyard and squeeze off a few rounds without alerting five families in each direction. It sounded like firecrackers, they’d tell the police as we were handcuffed. Sounded like.
“We can drive out of town somewhere,” John says.
“Where’s this supposed to be?” I say.
“The cloverleaf,” John tells me.
I immediately know he’s sick again. The cloverleaf, out in the country. Once a place of drinking beer and whiskey and eating shrooms and fucking, it had been taken over by homeless freaks living in a tent town, who, if they saw you shooting, would probably haul out their own firearms.
John reaches further back in the sock drawer and pulls out a red box filled with little slugs lined up like candy, jiggling in their slots as the drawer comes to a rest. There must be a hundred bullets in the box.
“Won’t your dad notice the missing ones?” I say.
“We’re shopping at Walmart on the way back.”
All right, so we’re going shooting. This will be the end of the period of my life when I’ve not shot a gun. I’m furiously reflecting on last and first things, fast approaching change, whether getting laid for the first time or shooting a snub-nosed silver pistol at a bunch of garbage resting under the cloverleaf just a little way out of town make me any different.
“We’ll go out there before the sign-painting party,” John says.
I flash on the party and how much I don’t want to go, and at the same time how desperately I do want to go. I don’t know how someone can keep both those thoughts in his head at the same time, but I can. The wanting to go, that’s what sends me back to the present with John, my fat, my unwillingness to go anywhere I’m not forced to go.
Chapter 45: John
Adam, over for a hang again, so soon after Meredith’s visit I was beginning to think that time was speeding up. People did not come over often, not even Adam, and only then to use the stuff my family could afford and his couldn’t. It was like being deathly ill and getting visits from people saying good-bye. I wondered what each of them wanted from me. Meredith seemed like she wanted her own version of the truth about me, that I was a shooter waiting to snap, and she wanted change me. What she had to get out of that for herself, I had little idea. Something about stopping the end of the world, most likely; some kind of fear of dying. Adam just wanted the gun.
Where is it, Adam said. He was more sure of his actions now he was nearing a weapon. I could see the peace settle into him. His shoulders went down, he tucked in his chest and gut and could, at a brief glance, be taken for a strong fat-man, his bulk hiding powerful muscles. The kind of fatsos who jog, who box, who grapple with people and world affairs.
At the chest of drawers I said, It’s kind of small.
Concealment, Adam said.
To match your johnson, I said. You tuck it in here.
I took the gun out of the drawer and slid it between my jeans and my stomach and arranged my shirt over it.
Can’t tell, Adam said. Load it, and let’s go.
The pistol was cold against my skin, but in a moment it warmed to my skin and I couldn’t tell I was carrying it. I brought out the box of shells and handed it to Adam. He looked engrossed in the moment. Mindful. I was jealous that something so simple could keep him calm, make him forget himself. I wanted to bring him out of it because seeing Adam take a gun so seriously was beginning to annoy me. I reminded him of the thing I knew frightened him.
We’ll do some shooting before we go to the party, I said.
His gaze moved from my belly and the hidden gun to my eyes. He’d hoped I’d forgotten. I wanted to see if Meredith had forgotten about that afternoon. Showing up at her house seemed like the sickest possible thing to do.
After Adam told me to hate her, I felt lighter, and although I didn’t hate her yet, I was getting close. She’d been a red-flag nut, like Adam was a gun nut, danger-seeking and impulsive to have come over to my house, kiss me, take off her dress. I would walk up to her front door and ring her bell, and she would let us in, no choice with Joan and the rest of the class painting in the living room behind her. How would she explain not letting in the person she announced she would help?
Had she known I was coming, would she have canceled the party and sent out a mass email, claiming the flu? Probably not. This must have been her grandest gesture toward the social in her life, inviting people who didn’t care about her to her house. Adam had told me that we’d just end up standing around, doing nothing; that I’d then sneak away from the party to fool around with Meredith. Maybe I still would. I’d seen crazier things happen in everything.
I would unleash Adam on the gun, watch him fall into himself by finally firing a gun after all those trips to the mall and the Dwayne’s to browse the hunting department. I would go further, again, drink Meredith’s pretty party fruit punch, maybe spike it, and see how she was living with our experience. After all, I’d spent the last ten years fighting the jeebs, so why not give in to them.