We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [140]
I did feel a concentrated dislike for those boys, who couldn’t submit to the odd faithless girlfriend, needling classmate, or dose of working-singleparent distraction—who couldn’t serve their miserable time in their miserable public schools the way the rest of us did—without carving their dime-a-dozen problems ineluctably into the lives of other families. It was the same petty vanity that drove these boys’ marginally saner contemporaries to scrape their dreary little names into national monuments. And the self-pity! That nearsighted Woodham creature apparently passed a note to one of his friends before staging a tantrum with his father’s deer rifle: “Throughout my life I was ridiculed. Always beaten, always hated. Can you, society, blame me for what I do?” And I thought, Yes, you little shit! In a heartbeat!
Michael Carneal in Paducah was a similar type—overweight, teased, wallowing in his tiny suffering like trying to take a bath in a puddle. But he’d never been a discipline problem in the past; the worst he’d ever been caught at theretofore was watching the Playboy video channel. Carneal distinguished himself by opening fire on, of all things, a prayer group. He managed to kill three students and wound five, but judging from the cheek-turning memorial services and merciful banners in classroom windows—one of which embraced photos not only of his victims but of Carneal himself with a heart—the born-again got theirs back by forgiving him to death.
The October night that news of Pearl came in, I exploded as you and I watched the Jim Lehrer Newshour. “Jesus, some kid calls him a fag or pushes him in the hallway, and suddenly it’s ooh, ooh, I’m gonna shoot up the school, I’m gonna crack from all this terrible pressure! Since when did they make American kids so soft?”
“Yeah, you gotta ask yourself,” you agreed, “whatever happened to heading out to the playground to duke it out?”
“Might get their hands dirty.” I appealed to our son as he glided through on the way to the kitchen; he’d been eavesdropping, which as a rule he preferred to participating in family conversations. “Kevin, don’t boys at your school ever settle their differences with an old-fashioned fistfight?”
Kevin stopped to regard me; he always had to weigh up whether anything I asked him was worthy of reply. “Choice of weapons,” he said at last, “is half the fight.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Woodham’s weak, flabby, unpopular. Fistfight’s low percentage. A doughboy’s got way better odds with a 30 millimeter. Smart call.”
“Not that smart,” I said hotly. “He’s sixteen. That’s the cutoff in most states for being tried as an adult. They’ll throw away the key.” (Indeed, Luke Woodham would be given three life sentences, and 140 extra years for good measure.)
“So?” said Kevin with a distant smile. “Guy’s life is already over. Had more fun while it lasted than most of us ever will. Good for him.”
“Cool it, Eva,” you intervened as I sputtered. “Your son’s pulling your leg.”
For most of his life, Kevin’s troubles, too, remained on a minor scale. He was bright but hated school; he had few friends, and the one we knew was smarmy; there were all those ambiguous incidents, from Violetta to let-uscall-her-Alice, that set off alarm bells at a volume only I seemed able to hear. Yet character expresses itself with remarkable uniformity, be it