We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [139]
It was Kevin’s starvation that his teachers—with the exception of Dana Rocco—never detected, preferring to diagnose our little underachiever as one more fashionable victim of attention deficit disorder. They were determined to find something mechanically wrong with him, because broken machines can be fixed. It was easier to minister to passive incapacity than to tackle the more frightening matter of fierce, crackling disinterest. Clearly Kevin’s powers of attention were substantial—witness his painstaking preparations for Thursday or his presently impeccable command of the malevolents’ Roll of Honor, right down to the population of Uyesugi’s pet fish. He left assignments unfinished not because he couldn’t finish them, but because he could.
This voracity of his may go some distance toward explaining his cruelty, which among other things must be an inept attempt at taking part. Having never seen the point—of anything—he must feel so brutally left out. The Spice Girls are dumb, Sony Playstations are dumb, The Titanic is dumb, mall cruising is dumb, and how could we disagree? Likewise, taking photos of the Cloisters is dumb, and dancing to “Stairway to Heaven” in the latter 1990s is dumb. As Kevin approached the age of sixteen, these convictions grew violent.
He didn’t want to have to answer your Big Question, Franklin. He wanted an answer from you. The glorified loitering that passes for a fruitful existence appeared so inane to Kevin from his very crib that his claim last Saturday that he was doing Laura Woolford “a favor” on Thursday may have been genuine.
But me, I’m superficial. Even once the shine was off travel, I could probably have sampled those same old foreign foods and that same old foreign weather for the rest of my life, just so long as I flew into your arms at Kennedy when I came home. I didn’t want much else. It is Kevin who has posed my Big Question. Before he came along, I’d been much too busy attending to a flourishing business and a marvelous marriage to bother about what it all amounted to. Only once I was stuck with a bored child in an ugly house for days on end did I ask myself what was the point.
And since Thursday? He took away my easy answer, my cheating, slipshod shorthand for what life is for.
We last left Kevin at the age of fourteen, and I’m getting anxious. I may have dwelt so on his early years to stave off rehashing the more recent incidents that set you and me so agonizingly against one another. Doubtless we both dread wading back through events whose only redeeming feature is that they are over. But they are not over. Not for me.
During the first semester of Kevin’s ninth-grade year in 1997, there were two more School Shootings: in Pearl, Mississippi, and Paducah, Kentucky, both small towns I had never heard of, both now permanently marked in the American vocabulary as synonyms for adolescent rampage. The fact that Luke Woodham in Pearl not only shot ten kids, three fatally, but killed his mother—stabbing her seven times and crushing her jaw with an aluminum baseball bat—may have given me an extra private pause. (Indeed, I remarked when the reports first started pouring in, “Look, all they do is go on and on about how he shot those kids. And then, oh, by the way, he also murdered his mom. By the way? It’s obvious that the whole thing had