We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [136]
Kevin had recently conceived his tiny-clothes fashion, which (typically) Lenny had aped. Kevin’s black jeans might have fit him when he was eleven. The legs reached mid-calf, exposing dark hairs sprouting on his shins; the crotch, whose zipper would not quite close, well sponsored his equipment. Lenny’s ocherous cotton slacks would have looked nearly as hideous had they fit. They were both wearing stretched Fruit of the Loom white T-shirts, leaving the usual three inches of bare midriff.
Perhaps it was my imagination, but whenever schoolmates passed by, they seemed to give those two wide berth. I might have been alarmed that our son appeared to be the object of avoidance—and I was, rather, though his classmates didn’t snicker at Kevin as if he were a social reject. If anything, had the other students been laughing, they stopped. In fact, when crossing in front of that pair, other students ceased to talk altogether and only resumed their chatter once well out of the duo’s earshot. The girls held themselves unnaturally erect, as if holding their breath. Instead of squinting at the tiny-clothes brigade askance, even football types trained their eyes straight ahead, only darting an edgy backward glance at Kevin and his pet hamster once a safe stone’s throw away. Meanwhile, as eighthgraders hung back from the dance floor and flowered the walls of the gym, the space on either side of our son and his sidekick remained deserted for a good ten feet. Not one of his classmates nodded, smiled, or ventured so much as an innocuous how’s tricks, as if hesitant to risk—what?
I’d anticipated that the music would make me feel old—by groups I’d never heard of, whose pounding appeal would elude the decrepit. But when the sound system cranked up, I was startled to recognize, between selections of timeless bubblegum, some of the same “artists,” as we pretentiously called them then, to which you and I would have flopped about in our twenties: The Stones, Credence, The Who; Hendrix, Joplin, and The Band; Franklin, Pink Floyd! With little to do with myself and repelled by the sweet red punch (which cried out for a slug of vodka), I wondered if the fact that Kevin’s peers were still nodding along with Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young, The Grateful Dead, and even The Beatles made our own era especially distinguished, or his especially destitute. When “Stairway to Heaven” came on—that old warhorse!—I had to stifle a laugh.
I never expected that Kevin would dance; that would be dumb, and in some respects that boy hadn’t changed since he was four. The rest of the group’s reluctance to break in the dance floor was pro forma; we were the same way, no one wanting to be first, to draw excessive and inevitably less than kind attention to themselves. In my day, we’d all dare one another interminably, nip at Dutch courage behind the curtains, and finally shuffle from the walls in concert once our safety-in-numbers quorum had reached at least ten. So I was impressed when, the midcourt populated by no more than whirling polka dots from the mirror ball, one lone soul took the floor. She didn’t assume a shadowy corner, either, but the center.
With pale, translucent skin, the girl not only had blond hair but blond lashes and eyebrows, whose tentative definition made her features look washed-out. There was also a weakness in her chin—small and skisloped—and it was mostly due to this