Kevin would never have been quite so happy to see the consummately irritating Joshua Lukronsky. As the circle enlarged to make a place for Josh, Kevin crept out of the alcove and slipped downstairs with another Kryptonite. Although he was as quiet as he could be, the chain did rattle a little, and he may have been grateful for the banging of the cafeteria worker’s basketball at that. Back up in the alcove, he slipped his last padlock and chain around the inside bars of the alcove’s double doors.
Voilà
. Fish in a barrel.
Was he having second thoughts, or simply enjoying himself? Their meeting had proceeded another five minutes by the time Kevin advanced stealthily toward the rail with his loaded crossbow. Though he drew into sight from below, the group was too engrossed in planning their own accolades to look up.
“I could give a speech,” Greer proposed. “Like on how the office of special prosecutor should be abolished? Because I think Kenneth Starr is evil incarnate!”
“What about something a little less divisive?” Rocco proposed. “You don’t want to alienate Republicans—”
“Wanna
bet
?”
A soft, rushing sound. Just as there is a tiny pause between lightning and thunderclap, there was a single, dense instant of silence between the arrow’s
shsh-thunk
through Laura Woolford’s Versace blouse and the point at which the other students began to scream.
“Oh, my God!”
“Where’d it come from!”
“She’s bleeding all OVER!”
Shsh-thunk.
Not yet struggled to his feet, Miguel took one in the gut.
Shsh-thunk
. Jeff was nailed between the shoulder blades as he bent over Laura Woolford. I can only conclude that for those many hours Kevin spent in our backyard, the little black bull’s-eye in the middle of all those concentric circles was in his mind’s eye a perfect circle of Versace viscose. Struck perfectly through the heart, she was dead.
“He’s up there!” Denny pointed.
“Kids, get out! Run!”
Rocco ordered, though she needn’t have; the uninjured remainder had already stampeded toward the main exit, where they were giving new meaning to the term
panic bars
. Yet given the position of the alcove, there wasn’t one square foot in that gym that couldn’t be penetrated from over its railing, as they were all soon to discover.
“Oh, shit, I should have known!” screamed Joshua with an upward glance, rattling the equipment room door that Mouse had already tried. “It’s
Khatchadourian
!”
Shsh-thunk
. As he pounded on the main doors calling for help while the arrow stuck in his back quivered, a shaft sank into the nape of Jeff Reeves’s neck. As Mouse streaked to the boys’ locker room exit and the doors gave just a little and held fast, he took an arrow in the ass; it wouldn’t kill him, but as he hobbled to the one last exit on the girls’ side, he was surely beginning to realize that there was plenty of time for one that did.
Dana Rocco got to the girls’ exit at about the same time, weighed down by Laura’s body in her arms—a fruitless but valiant effort that would feature prominently in the memorial service. Mouse met Rocco’s eyes and shook his head. As his shrieking classmates began to circle from door to door in a churning motion like dough in a mixing bowl, Mouse shouted over the uproar, “The doors are locked! All the doors are locked! Take cover!”
Behind
what
?
The cafeteria worker—less attuned to the School Shooting format than the students, who had been through whole preparatory assemblies and
got into character
right away—had been easing along the walls as if feeling for one of those secret passageways in murder mysteries, moving slowly, attracting minimum attention. The cinder block unavailing, he now crouched into a fetal ball, holding the basketball between the archer and his head. Kevin was doubtless annoyed at having allowed any obstacle to remain in the gym however small, and the ineffectual protection just drew fire.
Shsh-phoot
. The ball was skewered.
“Kevin!” cried his English teacher, triangulating Mouse behind her body into the corner farthest from the alcove. “Please stop! Please, please stop!”
“
Maleficence
,” Kevin hissed distinctly from overhead; Joshua said later that it was weird how you could hear this relatively quiet word above the din. For the duration, it was all that Kevin said. Thereafter, Kevin fixed his staunchest ally on the Gladstone faculty steadily in his sight and put an arrow straight between her eyes.
As she fell, Mouse was exposed in the corner, and though he began to crouch in the shelter of her body, he took another shaft that pierced a lung. That would teach him to share the secrets of computer viruses with mere cyber-dilettantes who were really much more interested in archery.
But Mouse, in Joshua’s view, had the right idea; so far, Lukronsky’s scrabbling up all the thin blue sit-up mats and trying to fashion some kind of shield wasn’t working nearly as well as it would have in the movies, and already two arrows had whizzed within inches of his head. Scooting over to Mouse’s corner while Kevin was occupied with reaming Soweto Washington’s powerful thighs, Joshua built himself an impromptu lean-to in the corner constructed of the blue foam rubber, Dana Rocco, Laura Woolford, and the groaning, half-conscious body of Mouse Ferguson. It was from this stuffy tent that he observed the denouement, peering from under Laura’s armpit as Mouse’s breath bubbled. It was hot, suffused with the rank fumes of fearful sweat and another, more disturbing smell that was nauseously cloying.
Giving up on safe haven, Greer Ulanov had marched right up to the wall that dropped from the alcove’s railing, standing twenty feet immediately below their malevolent Cupid. She had finally found a bête noir more odious than Kenneth Starr.
“I hate you, you stupid creep!” she screeched. “I hope you fry! I hope they shoot you full of poison and I get to watch you die!” It was a rapid conversion. Only the month before, she’d written an impassioned essay denouncing capital punishment.
Leaning over the railing, Kevin shot straight down, striking Greer through the foot. The arrow went through to the wooden floor, and pinned her where she stood. As she blanched and struggled to pull the arrow from the floor, he pinned her second foot as well. He could afford the fun; he must still have had fifty, sixty arrows in reserve.
By this time, the other injured had all crawled to the far wall, where they flopped like voodoo dolls stuck with pins. Most bunched on the floor, trying to present the smallest targets possible. But Ziggy Randolph, yet unscathed, now strode to the very middle of the gym, where he presented himself with chest blown out, heels together, toes pronated. Dark and finefeatured, he was a striking boy with a commanding presence, though tritely effeminate in manner; I have never been sure if homosexuals’ limp-wristed gestures are innate, or studied.
“Khatchadourian!” Ziggy’s voice resonated over the sound of sobbing. “Listen to me! You don’t have to do this! Just put the bow on the floor, and let’s talk. A lot of these guys’ll be all right, if we just get some medics right away!”
It’s worth inserting a reminder here that after Michael Carneal shot up that prayer group in Paducah, Kentucky, in 1997, a devout Heath High School senior, a preacher’s son with the novelistic name Ben Strong was feted from coast to coast for having advanced soothingly on the shooter, urging the boy to put down his weapon and putting himself in mortal danger in the process. In response, according to legend, Carneal dropped the pistol and collapsed. Due to nationwide hunger for heroes in events that were otherwise becoming irredeemable international embarrassments, the story was widely known. Strong was featured in
Time
magazine and interviewed on
Larry King Live.
Ziggy’s own familiarity with this parable may have bolstered his courage to confront their assailant, and the unprecedented admiration that had met Ziggy’s “coming out” to an assembly earlier that semester would have further enhanced his faith in his persuasive powers of oratory.
“I know you must be really upset about something, okay?” Ziggy continued; most of Kevin’s victims were not yet dead, and someone was already feeling sorry for him. “I’m sure you’re hurting inside! But this is no way out—”
Unfortunately for Ziggy, the apocryphal nature of Ben Strong’s stern, mesmerizing
Michael? Put down the gun!
would not come out until the spring of 2000, when a suit filed by the victims’ parents against more than fifty other parties—including parents, teachers, school officials, other teenagers, neighbors, the makers of “Doom” and “Quake” video games, and the film producers of
The Basketball Diaries
—came to trial in circuit court. Under oath, Strong confessed that an initially sloppy rendition of events to his principal had been further embellished by the media and taken on a life of its own. Trapped in a lie, he’d been miserable ever since. Apparently by the time our hero approached, Michael Carneal had already stopped shooting and had collapsed, his surrender unrelated to any eloquent, death-defying appeal. “He just got done,” Strong testified, “and he dropped it.”
Shsh-thunk.
Ziggy staggered backward.
I hope I haven’t related this chronology in so dispassionate a fashion that I seem callous. It’s just that the facts remain bigger, bolder, and more glistening than any one small grief. I’m simply reiterating a sequence of events strung together by
Newsweek.
In parroting its copy, however, I do not pretend any remarkable insight into Kevin’s state of mind, the one foreign country into which I have been most reluctant to set foot. Descriptions from Joshua and Soweto of our son’s expression from overhead depart from the reportage of similar events. Those Columbine children, for example, were manic, eyes glazed, grinning crazily. Kevin, by contrast, was described as “concentrated” and “deadpan.” But then, he always looked that way on the archery range, if only on the archery range, come to think of it—as if he became the arrow, and thus discovered in this embodiment the sense of purpose that his phlegmatic daily persona so extravagantly lacked.
Yet I have reflected on the fact that for most of us, there is a hard, impassable barrier between the most imaginatively detailed depravity and its real-life execution. It’s the same solid steel wall that inserts itself between a knife and my wrist even when I’m at my most disconsolate. So how was Kevin able to raise that crossbow, point it at Laura’s breastbone, and then really, actually, in time and space, squeeze the release? I can only assume that he discovered what I never wish to. That there is no barrier. That like my trips abroad or this ludicrous scheme of bike locks and invitations on school stationery, the very squeezing of that release can be broken down into a series of simple constituent parts. It may be no more miraculous to pull the trigger of a bow or a gun than it is to reach for a glass of water. I fear that crossing into the “unthinkable” turns out to be no more athletic than stepping across the threshold of an ordinary room; and that, if you will, is the trick. The secret. As ever, the secret is that there is no secret. He must almost have wanted to giggle, though that is not his style; those Columbine kids
did
giggle. And once you have found out that there is nothing to stop you—that the barrier, so seemingly uncrossable, is
all in your head
—it must be possible to step back and forth across that threshold again and again, shot after shot, as if an unintimidating pipsqueak has drawn a line across the carpet that you must not pass and you launch tauntingly over it, back and over it, in a mocking little dance.
That said, it is the last bit that harrows me most. I have no metaphors to help us.
If it seems extraordinary that no one responded to the cries for help, the gym is isolated, and the stragglers at the school who later admitted to hearing screams and shouts understandably assumed that an exciting or fractious sporting event was underway. There was no telltale crack of gunfire. And the most obvious explanation for this absence of alarm is that, while it may take a while to tell, the melee couldn’t have lasted more than ten minutes. But if Kevin had entered into some sort of altered mental state, it was far more sustained than ten minutes.
Soweto passed out, which probably saved him. As Joshua remained motionless, his fleshy fortress shook from a systematic rain of arrows, some combination of which would finish Mouse Ferguson. Shouts for help or wails of pain further down the wall were silenced with additional shots. He took his time, Franklin—emptying both buckets, until that line of limp casualties bristled like a family of porcupines. But more appalling than this cheap archery practice—his victims could no longer be regarded as moving targets—was its cessation. It’s surprisingly difficult to kill people with a crossbow. Kevin knew that. And so he waited. When at last at 5:40 a security guard jingled by to lock up, was dismayed by the Kryptonite, and peeked through the crack of the door to see red, Kevin waited. When the police arrived with those massive but useless cutters (which the chain merely dented) and at length were driven to secure an electric metal saw that shrieked and spit sparks—all of which took time—Kevin put his feet up on the alcove rail and waited. Indeed, the protracted interlude between his last arrow and the SWAT team’s final burst through the lobby door at 6:55 was one of those untenanted periods for which I’d advised him at age six that he’d be grateful for a book.