We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [135]
Statistically, of course, in a country with 50 million schoolkids, the killings were insignificant, and I remember going home after that meeting and complaining to you about the faculty’s overreaction. They’d moaned about the fact that there wasn’t enough left in the budget to purchase metal detectors, while training a whole cadre of chaperones on how to frisk every kid on the way in. And I indulged myself in a bit of liberal indignation (that always revulsed you).
“Of course, for ages black kids and Hispanic kids have been shooting each other in shithole junior high schools in Detroit,” I opined over a late dinner that night, “and that’s all very by-the-by. A few white kids, middle-class kids, protected, private-telephone-line, own-their-own-TV suburban kids go ballistic, and suddenly it’s a national emergency. Besides, Franklin, you should have seen those parents and teachers eat it up.” My stuffed chicken breast was getting cold. “You’ve never seen so much self-importance, and when I made a joke once they all turned to me with this it’s not funny expression, like airport security when you make a crack about a bomb. They all love the idea of being on the front line, doing something ooh-ooh dangerous instead of chaperoning a sock hop, for God’s sake, being in the national spotlight so they can participate in the usual politics of hysteria. I swear on some level they’re all jealous, because Moses Lake and Palm Beach and Bethel have had one, what’s wrong with Gladstone, why can’t we have one, too. Like they’re all secretly hoping that as long as Junior or Baby Jane sneaks off without a scratch wouldn’t it be keen if the eighth-grade dance turned into a melee and we could all get on TV before the whole tacky number becomes passé. . . .”
I’m making myself a little sick here, but I’m afraid I did spout this sort of thing, and yes, Kevin was probably listening. But I doubt there was a household in the United States that didn’t talk about those shootings one way or another. Decry the “politics of hysteria” as I might, they hit a nerve.
I’m sure that this dance has emerged in such high relief in my mind because of where it took place. After all, it’s a small memory; whether to the disappointment of those parents or not, the event passed without a hitch, and as for the one student who probably remembers the evening as a calamity, I never even knew her name.
The gym. It was in that gym.
Because the middle school and high school had been built on the same campus, they often shared facilities. Fine facilities they were, too, for it was partly this good school that had drawn you to buy us a house nearby. Since, to your despair, Kevin shunned school sports, we’d never attended his middle school’s basketball games, so this glorified baby-sitting job remains my sole experience of that structure from the inside. Freestanding, it was cavernous, more than two stories high, slick and expensive—I think it even converted to an ice hockey rink. (How wasteful that the Nyack School Board has, last I read, decided to tear the whole thing down; students are apparently dodging PE courses by claiming that the gym is haunted.) That night, the arena made quite a booming echo chamber for the DJ. Any sports equipment had been cleared off, and though my expectation of balloons and bunting was clearly a hangover from my own dance debut doing the twist in 1961, they had hung a mirror ball.
I may have been a rotten mother—just shut up, it’s true—but I wasn’t so deplorable as to hang around my fourteen-year-old son at his school dance. So I positioned myself on the opposite