INTO IT (a novel): Chapter 70 - The End

The Wednesday after John comes back.

I am no closer to Meredith than I was a few weeks ago before John left, with her not seeing me, not seeing even my morbid body, just seeing me as John’s invisible, silent friend. I am nothing in particular to Joan. I am, at best, a faint memory to Claudette. I have not heard a word from my mom about my diabetes. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing.

We go through our days, John paying little attention to me. He just keeps staring through the halls—the walls, for that matter—in those whites he always wears, looking like a mental patient, like he’s settled into a form of insanity.

I text him from home after school.

where is the gun

I assume my dads drawer

revolver in the sock drawer

yea

Can u check?

its there I’m sure of it

can I borrow

for what to shoot up the school?

yea

in that case no

little joke. come on

Then nothing from him for a few minutes. I start again.

r u still crazy?

I dont know

didnt they tell you?

no their idiots

they didnt say your free to go or did u escape?

i left on my own you can do that

I suddenly wanted John to like me again, to be sick alongside him.

i want that gun to shoot up the school yea

srsly

yea

come over

And with that, it is like the movie again. I think how much we might look like a movie about those guys from Columbine, meeting up to go over their plans and to shoot their guns. There is going to be an even sicker shooter movie in the future, where one of the guys is fat.

I have a feeling that speaks in immediate changes. On impulse, but maybe because John is finally back, I drop the note in Joan’s locker at the end of school, after she has gone home. So, tomorrow’s the day. Joan should find it around 7:30 a.m.

It’s been two months since we messed around with the mice in the box. Two months have passed by us since we’ve been sick together. I stop my bike in front of his house. I’m being emotional now that I know I’m into it. I want to remember every moment, and remembering this hard leads to some emotional thing that I’ve never felt before. I walk up to John’s front door and press the doorbell. As I wait, I recognize the emotion as triumphant and fired up, jubilant. An insane young man in white lets me in to borrow his father’s gun.

“Where is it, again?” I say, even though I know the exact way to the revolver in the sock drawer.

“Shall we play a game?” John says, in a computer voice. It’s from something, a movie or a video game.

“Shall we play a game?” I say. “I’m here for the gun.”

John laughs. “You’re fucked,” he says.

“No, I’m not.”

“You’ve been drinking vodka so I wouldn’t smell it on you.”

“You can smell vodka on a person.”

“Then what are you on? A ton of Adderall?”

“Just please let me in and show me where the gun is at, so I can shoot our school to shit, please?”

The place smells like Lemon Pledge and a lavender candle burning in another room. Not like my house of cigarette smoke and burned bacon. John leads me back to his bedroom and once I am inside, he closes the door behind us and sits on his bed.

“My dad’s home,” he whispers.

“For how long?”

“I don’t know, could be all night.”

“Is he in the bedroom now?”

“No, he’s in the backyard working on the deck,” John says, but looks worried about what he’s just said.

“Then we can get it,” I say. “Come on. What a pussy.”

I open his door and look around the corner. The hall to his parents’ bedroom is long and dark. I walk toward the end of the hall and feel a shadow pass over me, thinking movie, movie as I open the bedroom door, walk to the bureau, open the sock drawer, and take out the Glock.

Of course, it is heavier than I expect it to be. I grab the box of shells from the drawer, little slugs rattling in their little cups, golden brass in red plastic.

“I say, let’s go shoot off a few rounds in the backyard.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” John says. “We’re going back to the cloverleaf.”

“To kill some drifters?”

“We have to get you up to speed, so yes, we’ll drop some drifters along the way.”

“How are you feeling?” I say.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just kidding.”

---

John

In my dream, I step to the side and into the line that connects me with my future. There’s no one around, which feels strange, because I had expected a crowd. John finally finds his calling. Adam is present, naturally. I’m frozen on the couch in the beige room, unable to move, and I know I’m dreaming. I’m reading my book, the two chapters titled The End, The Beginning. I can’t remember writing them, but they seem close to my vision of myself, so I just let it go. The book stopped short of listing any plans. Maybe there never were any plans.

You can’t remember, I say to Meredith. She’s tightening a tie around my neck, straightening my shoulders. We’re older, and I’m nervous. I’m not homeless, but I have been, and I crept out of it to find Meredith again. The dream turns teary. I have to say goodbye to her tonight as we get dressed. I won’t be able to find her in the ballroom once the party begins.

Adam is standing at the gun counter in Dwayne’s.

“My stomach hurts like a fucker,” he says.

He’s applying pressure, but blood pours out.

I’m pushing the lawnmower around my yard. Differing shades of green, pressed into the grass under the mower’s track, form a pattern that boxes me into the smallest space.

---

Adam

No one’s at the cloverleaf. Not the homeless, not the skate kids, not the men who flash their headlights from their parked Cadillacs, then flash their dicks. John and I hop out of his jacked-up truck, and I take the pistol out from under my arm, where I’d been hiding it under all my fat all along.

“Check to see if it’s loaded,” John tells me.

The latch is hard to press. I wonder how it will be tomorrow when I’m in school and I become nervous. What will I do if the gun jams, if I need to reload quickly with my sweaty palms? What if I can’t decide who to shoot?

This is what the end will be. I will have my gun in my hand, and I will brandish it. I will brandish, and they will scatter like the mice in the box for exits that will not accommodate the crowd. Some will drop to the floor, cowering, and I will be there, fat, brandishing.

I aim at the door of an old washing machine and pull the trigger. A firecracker pop, not much of a kickback at all. Dust puffs off the door where I wanted the bullet to go. I turn to the left and blow apart a beer bottle lying on the ground twenty feet away. The shattering and the ricochet of the bullet off overpass concrete sounds like a woman whooping.

“Jihad,” I say. I wail like a Middle Eastern woman.

“Hey, shit,” John says. “You’re a natural.”

I turn to a cardboard box, its white address label bleaching out in the sun, and I put a bullet in its center. I’m standing around fifteen-twenty feet from this stuff, nothing like the short distances I’ll see in school tomorrow.

I turn to John to tell him yes, I’m a natural, when the gun bucks. John falls to the concrete by his truck.

John’s body jerks to the right, on repeat. His feet leave the ground and he goes down. I’m standing point-blank from him. I’m standing over him. There’s a rose of red liquid blooming through the white sweater over his heart. Red flows from a smoking hole.

John spins on one foot and then both feet come off the ground and then he falls on his back.

I am a nose smelling the burned gunpowder. I am an eye watching the red rose stream to the ground and pool by his side. The Drano begins in my heart, bursting pinpricks around the edges of a bolus that makes its way down my left arm, the arm without the gun—but the gun’s not in my right hand, either. I see it under the truck. I remember now. I threw it away when John fell.

I bend to feel John’s neck. There’s no pulse, but I don’t how to find a pulse. I move my fingers across his neck, pushing hard for something. I stand up, dizzy. The red pool is larger.

It’s getting dark. They’ll expect us home soon, sitting in our spots. Me in front of the TV with my laptop, or upstairs at my computer there, IM’ing John in his black room listening to a little death metal. But he’s dead, I thought a moment after I’d thought it, like dejá vu, like the memory before the thought.

I’m sitting in the driver’s seat of John’s truck with the door open so I can smoke a cigarette as I watch John lie on the dirty concrete of the cloverleaf in his white clothes, part of his shirt red, but darker red now because the sun is going down and because the blood has started to dry.

There are at least eighty more shells in the red plastic box and five more bullets in the gun lying under the truck. I think that now one is for me.

It’s dark. The cloverleaf is cold. My mother texts me.

Where are you?

Johns house

I search the back of the cab for something to put on, one of John’s jackets or something, but find only a dog’s blanket. I wrap up in it and shiver for a couple more hours, staring at the shadow of John lying there, on his back, facing the night sky. The warm weather has come to a complete end. A halo of stars seems to run across the sky, the Milky Way out there, silent. I am all out of thoughts. It was by accident, on accident. I cannot tell anyone that I accidentally shot John at the cloverleaf. No one will believe that, at this place of desperate intentions.

What were you two doing out there?

It’s too cold in the cab, so I close the door. Goodbye, John. I stare at the dashboard, until I think to start the engine. John left the keys in the ignition. I say a silent thank you, John, as I start the truck. The noise is full-throated and loud in the night, then settles into a low idle. I crank up the heat until the cab warms up, and I become sleepy.

Shooting John would hasten what I already know will be the end, like that future opening up below my feet the last time the maladjusted fuckups were at the cloverleaf: prison somewhere.

By accident, I have to remind myself. I might have to remind myself this for a long time, so I think about Joan’s locker, the note, and about Joan finding the note in a few hours, the note saying that there will be a surprise at school today, and about finishing it. 

I check my watch. Five hours to go. I open the driver's side door. Hello, John. He’s glowing under the streetlight, lying on his back as through he’s been staring at the Milky Way. I get down on my hands and knees and feel in the darkness under the truck, feel the gritty concrete under my fingertips until they bump the gun and I latch onto it and sit in the warm cab. With a little poking around, I pop out the clip and find a few bullets. It’s like the movies again because I already know how to load this gun. Like in the movies, you just slide those fat golden bullets one after another until they go click and then you click the clip back into the body of the gun.

I lie across the seats with the blanket wrapped around my bulk and try to find a comfortable spot.

is this real?

It’s a text from John.

u wacked me

I write back,

Don’t worry going to do the whole place now

I see the chat on the screen of my laptop and see John typing at his desk in his room, alive. I wake up, the IM dream vivid, in the cab of his truck. I open the door. Hello, John. Cold, fresh air streams inside. The sun has turned the cloverleaf and John beneath it a pre-dawn, shadowless pale yellow.

I walk over to John. I stand off to the side of a dark pool. It looks like all of his blood has run out of the hole in his back. I want to say something profound, like he was a fucker, that he never meant anything for a significant period because he was always going away, becoming someone else. What did he know about losing, or never really having Claudette? But at the dead pond, a place not so unlike the cloverleaf, when John told me that something was going to be sick, the key that had fit and had turned the lock inside me, showing me what I wanted to grow up to be. John showed me who I am.

I walk to the truck but stop short. I stand motionless, thinking that the sun’s nearly up and I should decide what to do. I remember an old saying but it evaporates. Another thought, so vague I’d call it mindless, drifts. I’m in search of old advice, something from my mother, my father, from TV, about what to do in this situation. I’m trying to think clearly, but all the time I’m thinking, movie, movie, and that I should do what they’d do in the movie. In the movie, after I get the gun from under the truck, and the sun comes up, I make my way to the school.

I get into the cab and reverse out of the cloverleaf underpass. I cut sharp left to the head of the dirt road to the city, the movie projecting against the back of my skull.

7:01 am

I get off the dirt road and merge onto Race Street, the main artery that leads to the town center. Lincoln High School sits at the corner of Race and 23rd street.

7:06 am

I’m close enough to the school to see it down Race Street when I stop at 7-11 to buy two energy drinks and a beef jerky.

7:35 am

I park in the high school spaces. It is the high tide before classes. I see a lot of people rushing to class. I spot out of the passenger's side window Amber Sprague walking past me, past John’s truck, toward the school. I focus on her, think about her like a hunter would, alert to every variation in her movements, time slowing down just for me. I slept a little less than an hour and the night has merged with the day, tinting it with a feeling that nothing’s happening for real. The world has a gritty, grainy texture, like the concrete around John’s gun when I found it under his truck.

Amber disappears into the school doors with another cluster of sheeple. I reach for the gun under the blanket on the passenger seat. I pull the blanket aside. The gun shines in the grey overcast morning, rain possibly coming on, not like a toy now. It smells of burning metal. The bullets look and feel heavier as I open the red box to finish loading the gun to its maximum capacity of nine shots. I am a natural.

Tyler Max trudges by with his head down, still ashamed of the bathroom two months ago. It stays with you. I decide I’m feeling too sorry for Tyler to shoot him this morning.

7:58 am

I’m done loading the pistol and I’ve stashed the rest of the bullets in every pocket I have: shirt pockets, jean pockets. I’m going to rattle when I walk, like some cowboy with his spurs. I don’t yet move.

8:01 am

I watch pretty Geraldine Waters walk quickly across the parking lot. I’m thinking target or non-target. This goes for every student I see walking up to the school. Target or non-target. Bill McKibbin, target. He laughs behind my back. And I think about John at this moment, about John also thinking about Bill and hating him. I think that that’s more like something John would imagine, the idea that McKibbin would be thinking about him at all. This incredible facility John had for paranoia. I catch myself using the past tense for John.

The Adams girl everyone called Skee getting out of her BMW, target. Navneen and Leonard walk together to the school building, talking. I can’t hear them. Non-targets.

I jam the gun in the front pocket of my slacks. I can hear John calling me a pussy but actually meaning, you shouldn’t do this.

They will think that’s why I was into it. I accidentally shot my friend dead where homeless people piss, then I snapped.

I stretch my arm out against the sky and make the shape of a gun with my hand, my index finger forming the barrel, my middle finger the trigger and my thumb the hammer and point my hand at Alan Goldman and fire. The bullet shatters the passenger side window and slams into Goldman’s left leg, just above his knee. Goldman collapses to the asphalt.

8:02 am

I step out of the truck and move toward the school. Dave Winner has just gotten out of his black Jetta when my slug bounces off the edge of his car door, enters his arm at the shoulder, breaks his humerus and finally flattens against his clavicle. He disappears behind his car door as I continue.

I move toward the double doors that make up the south entrance to the school. There’s a crowd of fifteen to nineteen. I fire four shots in a raking pattern, hitting Megan McConnell in her right shoulder blade, Hanna Tanis in the lower spine, and George Robechek in the back of his right upper arm. Megan turns, sees my hand held out, with my fingers and palm making the gun, and she sneers and turns around. I empty the remainder of the ammo, four shots, in the back of her tits.

I am inside the school on the day it is happening, but nothing’s different. There’s no added security. This means that Joan didn’t turn in the note. Or she hasn’t come to school yet.

You may have seen someone like this before. The kid looks at you like this, like he’s zoned out, but he definitely notices you, he’s homing in on you. You can feel his eyes going directly into you, and mentally, he’s pumping bullet after bullet into you. He’s completely into it, just floating through the halls like a sleep-deprived ghost, spraying shots from his pistol. That’s me. I’m that person looking at you this way. You do notice me now, walking down the hall to my locker, hand held up in the shape of a gun. I reload and I hit Kelly Gibbs in the neck, but she keeps walking, so I hit her again and again as we walk past each other. In the moment we pass, her eyes widen, and she puts her hand to her mouth.

I raise my hand and fire down a hall to my right, miss Greg Kelp by a breath, then hit him in the chest. The bullet nicks his heart, which stops beating immediately. He’s dead by the time his face hits the floor.

It’s been three minutes of heady fun.

8:05 am

Joan leans against her locker, a piece of paper in her hand, arms folded across her chest. I don’t shoot.

“What is John doing writing a note like this?” she says.

“How do you know it’s him?” I say. I’m stunned I can speak and sound normal.

“What’s wrong with you?”

“What?”

“You’re sweating,” she says, “and you’re pointing at me.”

“Diabetes,” I say. I lower the gun.

“What’s this a map of?” Joan asks, holding the paper up to my face, a little too close. It’s my map.

“Is this of the school?” Joan says.

“How should I know?”

She takes the map away. “You’re his friend.”

“It looks like he drew it,” I say. Still helping John appear to be sick. I’ve always been the one helping him. It’s a great map. He’s lying under the cloverleaf looking up at the sky. Why not have him write the note, too?

“He wrote the note,” I say. “Did you report it to Keen?”

“Not yet,” she says, suddenly distracted by Ryan Williams walking down the hall. I think he’s maybe someone she’s into, by the way she looks at him. I raise my hand and put two shots into Ryan’s left kidney as he walks toward Music. He stumbles two steps then falls. Joan turns back in time to see me.

“What’s up with that pointing?” she says, annoyed. I wonder whether other girls get exasperated as quickly as Joan and Meredith and think how I could have found out through Claudette. Enough. There’s a real gun in my pocket. I’m standing in the hallway, an armed ghost.

“Did you tell Meredith yet?” I say.

“No,” she says. “I don’t want to upset her more than she already is about John coming back to school acting like he’s not into her anymore.”

“Was he ever into her?”

“There’s something on your neck,” she says. She walks past me on her way toward Ryan.

I go to the bathroom, the same one where I went ballistic when Meredith said she was going to start helping John, or people like John, I can’t remember which, the same place I whaled on Tyler Max. I look in the mirror. My neck is flecked with red, like someone hit me with a water pistol filled with red and it had dried there. Of course. John’s blood. I rush to a stall and rip down a long stretch of toilet paper and take it to the sink. I wet the toilet paper and scrub my neck. Little round, rolled-up pieces of the toilet paper turn pink, rub free, stick to my neck, fall with more rubbing. It’s easy to get it all off, and in a moment I look normal again. I flush the bloody toilet paper.

8:15 am

There are thirty-two students in English class today. I’m sitting in the back of the room, Meredith sits in front of me as always, with me staring at the back of her head and the long straight hair she keeps playing with. Mr. Lardner walks between our desks, handing back our papers. I watch her hand go through her hair and watch her shake her head. Her hair shimmered back into place. I decide that I will think about Meredith in the old way, before Claudette.

Mr. Lardner slaps my essay on my desk. I go through the pages, seeing red marks all over them, looking for the last page where he always puts the grade. It says SEE ME AFTER CLASS. I am a poor student, but I did not shoot John Teller.

As Lardner turns to head back up the aisle of desks, I make the pistol hand and fire. Four bullets pass through his back and out his chest, his legs buckle, and he goes down like a sack of rocks. But my heart isn’t into it anymore and I don’t feel the charge. I lower the pistol and it turns back into my hand.

Fat in the back of the class, I’m doing something incomprehensible, nearly as incomprehensible as existing so maladjusted. This is what they’re thinking, Amber Sprague and Marcy Glick, the ones who turned to catch me pointing at Mr. Lardner’s back. The Glock in my pocket looks like a gun is in my pocket. I move the folds of my shirt over my lap.

I stare at the back of Meredith’s head. My upper lip sweats and my face burns.    Somehow, no one looks at me again. They listen to Mr. Lardner.

Meredith’s head is bent. Her hair parted at the back of her neck. I want to run the back of my hand down the slope of it.

I cover my pocket with my essay pages and slide the gun out of my pocket. I bring the papers and the gun hidden under them onto my desk and lay the gun on the desk without a sound.

Meredith turns around to face me. The Drano starts up in my left armpit and travels down my arm to the elbow. I take some kind of breath, but there’s very little air in it.

She squints at my face. She looks me up and down. Her stare softens to fairness, saintliness. It’s calm and quiet. I believe she puts my face with a person and with a human. I look back into her grey eyes. Something lifts. An unworking happens inside me. A weight dissolves under her stare. This is what John felt in the hall and in his bedroom. Meredith’s recognition. It’s love, a concern out of a true, pure belief that as long as she can help it, no one should be very unhappy.

John comes to me, laughing.

“But you’re the Texas kid,” he says.

I don’t know what I’d do outside of this school. It’s everything I know. John is spared. He never has to go anywhere. He’ll float around the cloverleaf with the degenerates, just like he predicted.

I stand up, curling my essay pages around the gun. It is eyes on me. There are thirty-one people and one ghost in this classroom, and I am the ghost. I am a column. I am a mass of meat.

“Adam?” Mr. Lardner asks. “Are you sick?”

“Yes,” I say.

---

The End