We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [134]
I realize that Kevin doesn’t experience his aversions as envy. To Kevin, all ten of his victims were supremely ridiculous. They each got excited over trifles, and their enthusiasms were comical. But like my wallpaper of maps, impenetrable passions have never made Kevin laugh. From early childhood, they have enraged him.
Sure, most children have a taste for spoliation. Tearing things apart is easier than making them; however exacting his preparations for Thursday, they couldn’t have been nearly as demanding as it would have been to befriend those people instead. So annihilation is a kind of laziness. But it still provides the satisfactions of agency: I wreck, therefore I am. Besides, for most people, construction is tight, concentrated, bunchy, whereas vandalism offers release; you have to be quite an artist to give positive expression to abandon. And there’s an ownership to destruction, an intimacy; an appropriation. In this way, Kevin has clutched Denny Corbitt and Laura Woolford to his breast, inhaled their hearts and hobbies whole. Destruction may be motivated by nothing more complicated than acquisitiveness, a kind of ham-handed, misguided greed.
I watched Kevin despoil other people’s pleasures for most of his life. I can’t count the number of times I picked up the word favorite during some hot-under-the-collar maternal diatribe—the red galoshes stuffed with snack cake in kindergarten were Jason’s favorite footwear. Kevin could easily have overheard that the white caftan he squirted with concord grape juice was my favorite floor-length dress. For that matter, each walking adolescent bull’s-eye in that gym was some teacher’s favorite student.
He seems to especially revile enjoyments I can only call innocent. For example, he habitually beelined for anyone who was poised to snap a photograph and walked deliberately in front of the lens. I began to dread our trips to national monuments, if only on behalf of the Japanese and all their wasted film. Why, across the globe are scattered dozens of collectible snaps, blurred head shots of the notorious KK in profile.
Further illustrations are countless; I’ll cite only one in detail.
When Kevin had just turned fourteen, I was approached at his middle school’s PTA meeting to chaperone the eighth-grade spring dance. I remember being a little surprised that Kevin intended to go, since he boycotted most organized school activities. (In retrospect, maybe the draw was Laura Woolford, whose shimmering crotch-high frock for the occasion must have set Mary back hundreds.) This end-of-the-year bash was the highlight of the school’s social calendar, and most of his classmates would have been anticipating admission to this exclusively senior rite of passage since the sixth grade. The idea was to give these kids practice at being Real Teenagers and to let them swagger around as kings of the hill before entering the adjoining high school as hacked-on peon freshmen at the bottom of the pecking order.
Anyway, I said I’d do it, not especially looking forward to confiscating pints of Southern Comfort; I treasured the memory of my own hot, surreptitious hits from hip flasks behind the stage curtains of William Horlick High School in Racine. I was never keen on getting stuck with the role of Big Killjoy Meanie and wondered if I might not look quietly the other way so long as the kids were discreet and didn’t get sloppy drunk.
Of course I was naive, and Southern Comfort was the least of the administration’s worries. At our preparatory meeting the week before, the first thing they taught chaperones was how to recognize a crack vial. Graver still, the faculty was still anguished over a couple of national incidents at the start of the calendar year. Kids graduating from eighth grade may be only fourteen, but Tronneal Mangum had been only thirteen when that January in West Palm Beach, he shot and killed another classmate in front of his middle school because the boy owed him $40. Only three weeks later in Bethel, Alaska (it