INTO IT (a novel) Chapters 61-69
One final post next week...
Chapter 61: John
We forgot to buy bullets. The gun stank of burned powder, but I put the ammunition box and the Glock back into my father’s sock drawer and slid it shut. I knew that he opened the drawer every day, so he might detect the scent of a fired pistol and I’d be caught. I hid the gun and the box of bullets behind several rolls of socks just to make sure he’d be less likely to find them, also wanting not to be caught and be free to engineer my own way out.
That I copied Adam, this then would be the largest proof that he was a self-deluder: the pathetic accusation that I was just following him. Still, I let him hold the pistol on the way back from the party, until I pulled up to his shitty home, no porch light, the house like the neighborhood’s missing tooth.
I grabbed the gun. “Heave ho.”
Adam popped open his door and left without a word.
Home, I would start the book in what I thought was the sickest way to begin, saying good-bye. Then, reading it would go in reverse. Everyone would know what happened to me first and learn where I came from after. A quick life: two chapters and I’d get it done in time if I worked hard. The first thing that popped up when I tried to start writing was an IM from Adam, which made perfect sense.
what would it take to get your dads gun for a little while?
He would be there every moment my brain began to turn and would try to steer it. And he wanted one of my expensive toys again.
I opened porn in five separate browser windows and placed them around the outside of the book, hit play one by one, turned down the sound of each until they blended into one moaning soundtrack. I didn’t pay attention to what was going on in the porn videos but having them arrayed around my computer screen made me feel like I did on the first days after I painted my walls black: Protected and private and solitary, open to discoveries about myself, and about plans. I opened two more random pornos and moved them around the screen until the window of my book was walled in by bouncing flesh-colored forms.
We would meet up in the senior’s lounge, a big airy room sealed off from the rest of the school by soundproof glass wall and always filled with compulsive liars. And now I could see, like Meredith, girls who could be saying one thing and meaning another.
Or we’d start walking from the elementary school parking lot, where our fifth grade special-ed trailer had been moored, guns hidden in our black hoodies and parkas. It would be raining hard in the daydream and the morning sun through the storm is soft and blue. We'd go by the dead pond and see a couple of sophomores smoking behind the reeds and we shoot. We'd head for our lockers, where we'd have stored our extra ammunition, no one inside having heard the shots. I'd pull out my map and put an X mark over the dead pond.
Or it would be me alone walking down the hall, scattering them before I even began. Waving the gun around like I did at the cloverleaf, I'd fire into the ceiling, and everyone would fall into animal crouches. Whoever comes at me first will get it. I'd be a black hat waiting for a white hat to help me disappear.
Chapter 62: Adam
The gun web site only takes credit cards. I have my mom’s, and I hardly care what she’ll think about the OzarkGuns.com charge popping up on her bill. I just want it. My mom told me that when you want something, you should wait a day for every ten dollars the thing costs to think about whether you should make the purchase. But I decide that’s too long, that I don’t know what kind of person I’m going to be by that time, and I’m the kind of person who wants the .357 today, not nine hundred divided by ten, whatever amount of time that is. I’m not a math person. I’m a mapmaking person.
I have her credit card in my wallet for emergencies and this seems like a goddamned emergency. So, it becomes nothing to type in its numbers. I don’t know whether I want the gun to shoot myself or something else; I only know I want the thing. It just gleams in the photo, snubbed and lethal and toy like all at once. A message appears on the screen, something about having to go through a local gun dealer, having to be eighteen, having to have a background check, all the obstacles I thought the Internet had erased. Easy access to guns, video games, and violent music.
But I can get John’s father’s gun; his father is never home. I open an IM window with John.
what would it take to get your dads gun for a little while
for what
target practice at the cloverleaf
probably not now I just put it back
revolver in the sock drawer.
what
a joke
whatever you can come borrow it if you want I dont care
I went online and found Claudette on Facebook, some photos of her with her arms around girls and guys at parties, red plastic cups, a shot of her painting at Meredith’s, me by her side, sort of blocked by her body, but there, rotund, disgusting, and utterly shocking. This is what got me going into it again, the crying and the carrying on. Late Sunday evening, the most vulnerable time of the week, that sundown of the most dreadful of the week’s strings of sun-downs—and who notices sundowns, anyway? Sunrises, though, my mom has seen plenty of them. I don’t want to think about what they must be like for her.
Monday morning, I get ready for school. I inspect the weave on my chinos, which barely fit. Someone made these. Someone with white hair and a receding chin and large glasses. I used up a part of her lifespan as she made this cloth.
I want so badly to feel sick again that I’m looking forward to seeing John at school, and it’s ridiculous. He’s going to be gone soon, the jeebs are washing over him and they’re going to get him put away again. This time he’s nearly eighteen, so perhaps they’ll put him in an adult facility, where he’s likely to stay longer.
I don’t know how to help John, and neither does Meredith, although Claudette might have figured it out. Maybe she could have fixed me, even though I don’t have the jeebs.
So, when Coach Grady comes up to me between second and third period, I’m thinking about clothing factory workers, Claudette, and my essay. Not the soothing football dreams, which have disappeared over the past two days.
“Do you have a little time for me?” Grady says.
We go into an empty classroom, desks in empty rows, about twenty. One exit. Door opens inward. Grady leans on the teacher’s desk and I stand by the door, holding my backpack by my side.
“I’m sorry about this, kiddo, but it’s just not going to work out with you and football practice.”
“Oh,” I say. But I don’t understand. I’m not only in football practice. I’m on the football team.
“Your fainting spell and your blood pressure and your diabetes, all these things we got back from the hospital are not really all that good, kiddo.”
“But that’s why I’m in practice. To get better and to lose some weight. You said.”
“I said something about shedding some weight, but that was taking into account that you were healthy. We can’t have a diabetic student on the football team, fainting on the practice field during runs. You need to regroup, kiddo, and take stock of the situation.”
“What diabetes?”
“What?”
I don’t say anything.
“Haven’t you talked about this with anyone?”
“With who.”
“Your mother. Mr. Ferguson. Anyone?”
“No,” I say.
I don’t want to tell him that no one has mentioned diabetes to me. I feel slow, as though my brain has been drugged to lower its pace. I can’t feel anything anymore. I’ve heard of diabetes probably a thousand times on CNN but haven’t retained anything beyond the prospect of blindness and amputations.
He stands up from the edge of the desk. My impression is that he’s pretending to be in a hurry.
“You need to ask your mother about this. For now, we’re going to have to keep you off the team until you can get healthy.”
He motions for me to turn around and walk out the door with him.
“We’d better get out of this room before someone needs it,” he says.
Chapter 63: John
I had to get my pills refilled, so I was at the Walmart when the anorexic woman came in. She looked like she could have been between twenty and fifty. She was wearing a sleeveless top and a black miniskirt, and her bones were wrapped in skin, all there to see, muscle and sinew moving her body toward the prescription refills line. I was waiting for my little bottle to be filled, so I gestured for her to go ahead of me. I didn’t look in her eyes.
Everyone is a copycat killer when you take the widest view. Each is inspired by someone who laid it out for him to see that it’s time. The smaller, less interesting shootings that happened after the day in Texas came and went quickly, but every one of them made national news. There was a momentum. One or two killed here and there, in home and work settings. A guy in California killed his family on a camping trip but couldn’t escape the park rangers when his car got stuck in the mud. A reality-show star shot her husband in their bathroom. A small rampage at a grocery store in Georgia. A tinny soundtrack on a loop.
The woman stood on one leg, stork-like, one hand on her hip as she waited, elbow out and bent, a gaping space between her torso and arm, the one shoulder blade stretching her skin. There was almost nothing of her. Maybe a former dancer or Pilates instructor struck down by the disease and wasting away, just here to pick up vitamin pills or whatever she needed to stay alive.
Meredith’s ribs as she brought her dress up over her head, over her skinny breasts. It goes from there. I had moved toward her and ran my fingers over her ribs. I'd heard and had felt her exhale, inside, my head against her chest, on my knees with my arms up to hold her sides, a low-range hushing of wind in her lungs, and outside, her voice in her breath.
Adam said sooner or later we’d all know someone who had been shot. It was like the movie playing in my head about the end of things, Meredith probably provoking something in me from the start with her stare. Maps were being made all over, shooter plans drawn up, and guns were flying, as they said, off the shelves.
“Erin,” said the pharmacist. The thin woman came forward to take three white paper bags. First-name basis, it couldn’t be good. I didn’t care that she’d been called ahead of me despite coming in after I did, because I could follow her. It hit me like a new idea, undiscovered, but I knew I already understood I could follow her. So, on the spot, Jeeb feelings telling me something that sounded exciting and fresh, when it was the old sick I’d decided was sad at the dead pond.
I’m on my knees, reaching up to hold Meredith’s breasts. She’s taking in breaths quickly, sometimes in a gasping way, and I do not know what to do. I want to stay there shirtless in my jeans, my knees on the carpet, my head against her stomach, my bottom lip grazing the soft fuzz of hair above her jeans. She bends down slightly, like a bow, and her breasts come into my hands. She takes in another large breath and holds it, doesn’t exhale, and doesn’t exhale and a pulse of fear runs through my spine. I’m not doing the right things and she’s waiting for me to do something before she takes another breath. Her long hair is falling around my face as I grab the top hem of her jeans and try to pull them down lower, to see her hair there. She takes my hands in hers. I pop the button and start pulling, but her jeans are too tight and won’t come down. She’s saying something.
“Wait a minute,” I say.
“Stop.”
“Wait.”
She shouts it. “Stop pulling. Stop.”
“Wait a minute.” I know I’ll get it right.
The movie is about the coming war where the people with guns chase the people without guns down the middle of the street.
I told Meredith I wasn’t going to do it, even though she thought I had it in me. That part wasn’t broken. She’d succeeded in keeping me calm up to this point, but now that we’d said good-bye to each other in her bathroom, I wasn’t a good investment. She’d rinse herself of me if she hadn’t already. It was hard to read girls, now that I knew Meredith could turn on me, so when she said she wanted me to send her my book, I didn’t believe her. Or I believed she wanted to read it to make fun of it. I could do either.
I followed the wasted woman out to the parking lot. I would go farther than they were expecting. She came to a badly banged up Maxima, stopped to dig her keys from her tiny black purse hanging off her bony shoulder from golden links. I kept some distance between us, not wanting to be noticed yet. She beeped the car open, opened the dented-in driver’s side door and got in. A glimpse of tendon running from her thigh to her underwear before she slammed the door. She started the car, and I was standing across the lane between the parking spaces. I took a step forward and waved to her as she began to pull out of her spot.
Chapter 64: Adam
I’m either invaded by a virus that has killed my ability to respond to insulin, or I’ve become so fat and inactive that I’ve developed diabetes type 2. Or both at the same time. I could have types 1 and 2, making me diabetes type 3. That would be possible, with my luck. A medical anomaly, a freak, and on CNN they’d ask me how I’m feeling and what I worry about most when I think about the future. I would tell them that I’m not worried about the future. When John’s gone nuts with his meds and has the jeebs, when I’ve just been kicked off the football team, when I’ve missed any chance with the girl who is back in Houston living her life, and when I’ve caught a disease, I’m worried about the now. That’s what I would tell CNN after I DuPlisse’d the school.
This is the first time I’ve really been into it. It has become part of a serious train of thought rather than some daydream, the everyday daydream of one hundred thousand kids who wish they had the courage to shoot up their schools and, for some of them, the guts to shoot themselves.
It feels sick and good to admit something that I’ve kept secret from myself for a while. DuPliss has been on my mind and it’s not because I’m interested in the case. The case is boring, the kid’s dead and didn’t leave anything interesting behind other than his early attempts at mapmaking and those journal entries about white hats killing black hats. DuPliss is interesting because I want to do what he did.
I’m at home in front of my computer while my mom’s downstairs smoking at the TV. My former football coach knows more than my mom. Revolver in the sock drawer. I didn’t see the point of questioning her about the diabetes on my way in.
My mom probably thinks I should go on not knowing about it, not knowing being the key to happiness. She’s in her deep vagueness for the same reason. Not knowing about Claudette would have made me happier. I don’t care how it’s always better to have and lost than not to have had at all. I had, and I never had. It’s not better to know what could have happened, it’s better to be able to forget it, to be mentally challenged like John and to live only in the present with your jeebs and your fan club of girls you don’t appreciate, even if they are trying make you feel wanted.
I open a chat window with John.
DuPliss didn’t have a Meredith
There’s no response for more than twenty minutes, so I give up on him. I don’t know if he’s staring at his screen and ignoring my message, or if he’s off down some rabbit hole of jeebs.
I want to tell him about football, to let him know that I’m not going to be a jock after all, so he’ll drop his grudge. At the same time, I think he enjoyed the tension, wanted to see me either fail at football or some other calamity to happen to confirm his dogma about organized sports: that the players are zombies, that I’d lose myself in the brainwashing. John fiercely holds onto whatever you’d call his own independence, slammed around as it is by the jeebs taking him up and down.
I stick with calling it the jeebs because that’s what they’ve been since the fifth grade, when I came up with the word. Nothing serious, funny sounding, even though I always worried about him going back to the hospital. He emerged from one hospital to become my only friend, and he could go back into one and then I’d be by myself again. But he might reemerge wearing an even brighter white, a blinding light wrapped around him, glowing freakishly like an angel, manically tapping his pencils and spinning in his chair and drawing me with machine guns firing at my head.
I don’t know whom I’d target. It doesn’t seem to matter. The faces of the other students smash into each other and whirl around, a wildly spinning flesh-colored kaleidoscope. Everyone matters but no one matters. I realize I don’t have a target as I stare at the juvenile diabetes page, the animated advertisements for low-rate mortgages looping for the fiftieth time. But not having a target shouldn’t matter. I ping John again.
what r u doing
There’s nothing for a few minutes. His status says AFK, which is like AK-47, which is like ATF, which is what the Waco cult had their standoff against, and the Columbine kids partly honored, on Hitler’s birthday. I know John hasn’t touched the keyboard in at least ten hours. I’m talking to myself.
I want to run the borrowing of the gun by him again, to nail down a commitment, something that says yes, he’ll let me borrow his dad’s gun and the box of bullets. It shouldn’t take more than a couple of shots to scatter them like the mice in the box to the corners of the building I’ve carefully mapped out. I begin to see that I’ve been into it for quite a while, going back not just to last year, when I punched a kid at the mall. He’d provoked the thing, calling me Fatty to one of his friends, and I was feeling so strong that day I threw out my fist and made contact with his throat and knocked him to the ground. He started something like crying and heaving and huffing and puffing and gagging like he was trying to hold the crying inside.
I remember a punch I threw in fourth grade, the quality of that hit compared with the recent two. I jumped the boy and hit him on the back of his ear. I walked away unharmed and began to build a small record. Hence the cubicles.
Harbored violent impulses, they’ll say. Daily, I get the desire to reach out and hit someone. I thought everyone felt like this, like I used to think everyone felt winded when they got to the top of a flight of stairs, until I told John both thoughts and he laughed at me. You idiot. You are fat, for one thing and you’re sick, for another.
Harbored impulses. My violent thoughts now strung out like pearls on a necklace, connected by someone else’s dream—DuPliss’s—and I’m searching for some way to be more into it than he was, on a personal level. Football is over forever. I shall have a new hobby, diabetes, and privacy intrusions by coaches who shouldn’t be given information about my health. I will have to lose weight, go on pills, go see the doctor all the time, and think about all of this while everyone else is free to think whatever they want to think.
I type a line of question marks to get John to chat, but he’s gone for good tonight, so I go to the gun site again. I look at the silver ones first, then the matte black guns. The black pistols don’t do anything for me. The silver I can see myself holding in the hallway, reflected in the trophy glass area, fat but finally here, escaping myself and my body, my ghost now controlling everything.
Chapter 65: John
I stepped in her way. She stopped the car abruptly. It rocked forward on its shocks, then fell back, and I could see, through the grimy glare on the windshield, her head on her pencil-thin neck jerk back into the headrest. I came around to her side. Her shocked, brown eyes followed me, and she lowered the window.
“I’m so sorry.”
The voice was clear, soft, and girl-like. I wanted to say something normal. I wanted to be able to choose from several options of what to say but had only one.
I said, “You shall not believe that anyone cares about you.”
“What?”
“That’s my motto.”
“Do I know you?” she said. I didn’t feel this had to become a confrontational moment. She seemed open to the possibility that she knew me.
“You don’t know me,” I said.
“Why are you talking to me when I don’t know you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Don’t freak out or anything.”
“Why would I freak out? What are you going to do? It’s the middle of the morning, this place is packed.”
“I’m not going to do anything to you,” I said.
“'You shouldn’t…”
“Shall not.”
“You shall not think…”
“Believe.”
“You shall not believe anyone cares about you.”
“Right.”
“That’s your motto?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, then you should take a more positive approach and it’ll be easier for you to get what you want.”
“I want to stop someone from shooting up my high school.”
“Okay, that’s it,” she said.
She reached back for the seat belt, but she already had it on.
“His name is Adam Davis, and we go to Lincoln. I swear, he’s going to kill someone.”
“Oh, my god,” she said.
I didn’t know how to take that, was she floored by the premise, or horrified by me. Her window started to go up.
“You should tell someone at my school.”
I started laughing. It felt like such a release saying the words, this unbinding that I’d felt while Meredith was feeding me barbecue in my kitchen, and before that, when she’d stared at me in the hall. I got excited because this anorexic woman had stopped for me. She’d conversed with me. She’d given me advice. But there was something tragic on board. Her eyes, her eyeballs, couldn’t get skinny along with the rest of her.
“That’s funny,” I said. “Just kidding.”
“Fuck you,” she said as the window closed.
The car jerked away and sped up down the lane. I was still laughing when another car came up behind me and blew its horn. I stepped out of its way, waved the woman by.
Go ahead, I’m not getting in anyone’s way, for now.
Chapter 66: Adam
Tuesday, one week later.
I have a printed-out note folded over three times with the original of my map, and I want to slip them in someone’s locker, anyone’s other than John’s. John’s been gone. He’s not in school and he’s not at home and of course he can’t keep track of his cell phone. His parents are screening all their calls.
Something bad is happening here today. I want to warn someone with the note and the map, but I don’t know who I want to warn, and I don’t want to end up warning everyone by putting them into a loudmouth’s locker. Meredith should be spared. But I want her there on the day to see what happens, to actually see me. I don’t want her to run home, afraid, dialing everyone in the school and begging them to go home too. Maybe, I think, Meredith’s friend Joan, the one who used to accompany Meredith on her walks up to John’s locker to get him to join a club. She seems like she wouldn’t care enough tell everyone about it. I don’t trust her to alert me to looming mayhem, for example, so I think she’s perfect. But I don’t leave the note.
Wednesday.
I’m getting my teeth cleaned after school and I still can’t find John, who has my gun. I think about the gun as being mine. I think his father doesn’t deserve it. He never uses it; he’s only thinking he’ll shoot a rapist breaking into his house. I can put it to use. I don’t have the jeebs, but I can’t help but feel them when John’s not around. A dizziness, a lack of focus, except when I’m at home looking at OzarkGuns.com. That’s not completely honest. I can concentrate when I’m counting the number of kids in the senior lounge, or the number standing around the trophy cases, grenade, or when I count how many people can get through the doors to the outside within twenty seconds, the time it takes to reload. I want this to be my tribute to DuPliss, disrespected in the media, his courage never talked about. I’m going to leave his maps as my laptop’s wallpaper, leave it for them to see when they go through my computer, looking for clues.
Thursday’s pep rally.
There’s a thumping bass going through me. It’s a rally for Friday’s game, the first one I was going to play in. I’m standing by the bleachers without John, almost under the bleachers because sheeple are crowded up against me, clapping and stomping their feet to the booming drums pounding out a routine for the cheerleaders’ dance. I haven’t seen John in two weeks now, have had lunch outside by myself by the dead pond or in the study hall. Today, I skipped. I couldn’t sit by myself again. I’m having trouble concentrating on anything other than the beat of the two big bass drummers, and to their rhythm I have the great victory dream again. I’m standing over the quarterback from the other school, and I dream about him not getting up, just lying there. I dream of the other coach trotting out into the field, holding his baseball cap as he runs, then kneeling at the motionless body and trying to get the chinstrap loose so the kid can breathe.
Friday.
I’m putting the note and the map in Joan’s locker when I remember what day it is, and that because the note says something’s going to happen at the school today—this would make the day a Saturday, or Monday, when Joan would find the note, too far off—and I have to stop myself and I actually catch myself shaking my head at my fucking stupidity. Everyone in the halls can see me stopping by a locker not my own, pulling papers back out of the slits of the vent.
It seems we may have switched positions, John and I, from when we were playing with the mice. I’m the unsure one now, and John, when I last saw him, was confident. I’m unsure about my role in my immediate future because this thing’s somewhat large. A revolver in the sock drawer, which I don’t seem to be able to get access to. Maybe if I told his mother that I needed to get something from John’s room while he’s away at the hospital, I could sneak into his father’s room and nab the gun. That only happens in the movies: Just enough time while the mother turns her head, the father not noticing it’s gone until it’s too late. I don’t know how long it’ll be before it’s too late.
The days pass without end because John’s not around. With John gone, Meredith’s not around, though I see her in the hall, and she occasionally gives me a disapproving look, like I’ve been a bad influence and somehow behind John’s disappearance. After a couple of these looks, these sidelong, passing-me-by looks, I stop and I say, loud enough for her to hear me as she’s walking by in the crowded hall, “What?”
“What?” she says.
“You want to say something to me.” I’m shaking a little now, and the Drano, a thin rivulet of it, starts trickling down the inside of my left arm.
Meredith says, “We’ve been worried about how you’re holding up.” I see she’s not staring at me with disgust, but in some other way I can’t make sense of. She’s with Joan, who I hadn’t noticed. Joan’s been invisible the entire time John’s been gone. I see her and I feel guilty because I myself am not noticed, except when Claudette noticed me, and I’m thinking about the universal human right not to be ignored. I’m not being noticed. I seem to be watched, and there is a difference.
“What?” I say. I don’t want her to know I understood what she said, because I do not want to accept that she is talking to me alone, pity-fuck fat.
“You don’t have John to hang out with. How are you surviving?”
“Like we’re all surviving,” I say.
I want to say that hanging out with John wasn’t real, that he’s so different day to day that hanging with him has only one theme—sickness—but that’s the one quality she, Meredith, wants to deliver us from and I don’t want to disappoint her.
“It’s been fine,” I say.
I want to add that eating alone sucks. I want to say that the more time John spends away, the more I feel I’m becoming like him: paranoid, thin-skinned, searching out people who are looking at me. I try to project all these thoughts straight from my forehead, through Meredith’s eyeholes, and into her brain. DuPliss didn’t have a Meredith.
Chapter 67: John
The pharmacy, the waiting line, something about a woman, a very thin woman I thought was funny, a minivan horn beeping behind me. I don’t remember what I was feeling. Maybe I was thinking about getting my prescription filled. She almost hits me, and I say something like, that’s funny. She takes off. I don’t remember what was funny, can’t remember anything around the headache.
I'd spent most of the days downstairs, on the TV-room couch, movies just on because I couldn’t follow them, my head hurting too much. But cutting through it had been a calming coming from somewhere—and I'd gotten to take codeine.
Another text came in. The chime pinpricked a spot in the middle of my head. Adam again.
where
I was not in my room because the walls looked nauseating, and I’d decided that I didn’t want to be in the same room as Meredith’s dress stuffed in a garbage bag, anyway. My mother’s beige-on-beige decorating adventure was all around me, but nothing looked familiar. I wouldn't tell her that. She was supposed to monitor my memory—was I remembering anything else? —because she’d ultimately made the call to the hospital. I wanted to downplay the memory thing to get her off my back about it. She was always asking me what I knew.
I remember thinking that ECT would be like an extra dose, that it would push me up and not down onto this couch with a bag of ice on my forehead. But that’s something I only guessed and didn’t know. I can’t remember the last day I was at school, although I could technically look at Adam’s messages to figure it out. And I can’t remember being at the hospital. I went to bed dreaming of the parking lot and I woke up with the headache.
When she asked me about my life, I felt a nothingness between fifth grade to this summer, pushing the mower, the start of the year, and then the shootings. I told my mother I could remember everything and said yes to everything she remembered for me.
I didn’t text Adam back. I would be at school tomorrow, Monday, still with no girls’ voices chattering and my body collected, my thoughts of Meredith smoothed over. All the jeebs zapped, so much calmer now.
Chapter 68: Adam
Wednesday is the best. Hump day when everyone’s defenses are down. There are more students per classroom on Wednesdays, with people taking Monday or Friday off, being sick on Tuesday, or being at chorus recitals on Thursdays.
John’s been gone so long I’ve begun to think of him as gone for good, and all that that would entail. I see the summer and then the year ahead as I used to see things before fifth grade, as something I would go through alone, thinking that I would be alone for the rest of my life. There’s a kind of freedom in that courage.
I knew I could do anything if I could contemplate being alone. I could discover who I was out there in the void. But it turned out that I didn’t discover that alone. It was when John showed me the dead thing in the half-frozen pond between the elementary and high schools that I came to know myself as sick. So maybe I would have figured that out on my own, maybe I could have done that without waiting too long, the lost time most people take to know themselves.
John’s been at my brain ever since, like I’m at his, surgically close, right after the mice thing, grabbing my collar and shoving me and calling me the Texas kid and knowing he was right. No one else has known me, not Meredith with her circle of concern and not Joan with her invisibility even when she’s right in front of us, quiet and pointless in the larger story, like I vow never to be. I’m not going to be like Joan, standing on the side watching Meredith and John, or like John, watching the world walk by.
I stand at the top of the stairs that lead down to the senior lounge and the rest of the common areas. At least one hundred kids are down there, crossing in their haphazard patterns, flowing around each other, girls breaking into little laughing trots, a shove from one guy to another: extras in a high school movie unspooling over a period of years. Decades, if you count the kids who came before us and will come after, if they don’t shut down the school after I’m done.
“Why doesn’t he just look after his own head?” Joan had whispered to Meredith, just after John had left. “Why does he need us?”
I had eavesdropped on them, listening to them talk about John’s absences from school. It was well-known because John started here in fourth grade, which is a long time to carry a secret, too long to sustain it. It was the secret that John had spent time in a mental hospital. No one had known what to do with a fourth grader who had asked Mrs. Blackerbee what Jesus was like, because he had been thinking he was Jesus but hadn't known how to go about being Jesus, having not known all that much about him.
Joan had said, “Why doesn’t he just look after his own head?” And I had misunderstood her, hadn't taken the full comment in, had denied it, whatever. Or I just hadn't appreciated that thought at the time, the idea that maybe she wasn’t as enthralled with John as I’d assumed all girls must have been.
And I’d never considered the idea that John could take care of his own head. He’d always needed me. Who else was going to tell him that things were worth doing? Would pull his sprits out of the trash can, or the sky, and try to bring him back down to the level of mere mortals?
The following Monday.
I am still trying to decide when to leave my note when John comes in through the east double doors, blinding blue-white light pouring in from the parking lot where a freak October snowstorm rages. John Teller returned to us all wearing white clothing and gracefully walking to his locker, not quite believing this was happening to him. He is coming back to school again. He must be wondering how many more times he would come back to school, how many more times he would have to return to it before he simply had no place to go after getting out of the hospital.
We do not stop what we are doing. The halls continue with their bustle and shuffle, the gossip machines whir, the ostracizing of the weak continues, the petty thievery continues, the grunted bartering, the fist bumps, and the furtive kissing—all that I am separate from.
John walks into this like a ghost. He slides from the doors to his locker. I am standing by mine, a dozen lockers over, watching him. I am not letting him see me just yet. I want to watch him before I want to talk to him. To see what they’ve done to him, how they have left him.
He spins his combination lock, pulls it down, and opens his locker by rote. A white oxford shirt, off-white chinos, white Nikes. All better now.
Meredith materializes by his side. John turns to her and begins to speak. I watch from my locker, angry with myself for not being there first. Maybe I won’t be friends with John now that he is well. Will he need me? I want to know. I know I don’t need him to help me stay sick. I have the note; I have the excellent essay; I have the gun Web site bookmarked. But I don’t have the gun itself. For that, I need him, so I walk over to the two of them, nervous now.
“So, what did they do to you?” I ask him.
He turns to me, smiles, says nothing, as though he’s waiting for something else from me. I decide he’s waiting for empathy, and I try for it.
“We missed you,” I say, fat as ever, misplaced in that hallway, morbid.
“That’s what I was just saying,” says Meredith. “You’ve left him with nothing to do.”
Her hand to her limp hair, teasing it. She’s back in form. Her project has returned.
“Where’s Joan?” I say.
Meredith takes a cursory look around the halls. “Somewhere, I guess,” she says, as though they’re not friends anymore and Joan’s whereabouts are of no importance to her.
“Missed you guys so much,” John says.
His voice is sharp, quick, brighter than I’ve heard in a long while, even taking into account his mania during the shooting at the cloverleaf.
His eyes are sparkling and a little wild, like I remember them being in fifth grade. Like he was going to drag us back out to the dead pond and have us pray to a half-buried thing, or something sicker.
“Did you do your homework in the hospital?” Meredith says.
John laughs. “Yeah,” he says. “I did my homework in the hospital.”
“Well, I don’t know,” Meredith says.
“How’s football?” John says to me.
I hear icy sarcasm. I hear bitterness, and I also hear some pride at the same time. It’s confusing and I don’t know what attitude to take when I respond. So, I just choose flat.
“I quit.”
The halls quiet and clear out as classes begin and it’s a movie moment when this happens. I can feel it overhanging us like we are part of some fateful passage of time where things happen just the way they will through some type of movie magic. The Ohio and Texas shootings came so close to each other as to overlap in the newscasts and throw this school into a panic, with the three of us succumbing to the sweep of it all and assuming our roles in this story a little too eagerly, as though we wanted to get something out of it.
“You quitter,” John says. He punches my arm.
Chapter 69: John
In my dream, I step to the side. But I’m stepping into the path of something that will make me miss everyone. I have to say something to them.
I wear white because I want to be clean. Adam, you deserve the universal human right not to be ignored. Mom and Dad, lawn cutting season’s over. Good-bye, Meredith. It was my fault.