We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [171]
As Kinkel scrambled to insert a second clip, sixteen-year-old Jake Ryker—a member of the school wrestling team who’d been shot in the chest—lunged at the killer. Kinkel pulled a pistol from his trench coat. Ryker grabbed the gun and wrenched it away, taking another bullet in the hand. Ryker’s younger brother jumped on the shooter, then helped wrestle him to the ground. As other students piled on top, Kinkel shouted, “Shoot me, shoot me now!” Under the circumstances, I’m rather surprised they didn’t.
Oh, and by the way: Once in custody, Kinkel advised the police to check his home address—a lovely two-story house in an affluent subdivision lush with tall firs and rhododendrons—where they discovered a middle-aged man and woman shot dead. For at least a day or two there was much evasion in the press about who these two people might be exactly, until Kinkel’s grandmother identified the bodies. I’m a little disconcerted as to just who the police imagined might be living in Kinkel’s home besides his parents.
Now, as they go, this story was rich, its moral agreeably clear. Little Kipland had bristled with “warning signs” that hadn’t been taken with sufficient seriousness. In middle school, he’d been voted “Most Likely to Start World War III.” He had recently given a class presentation on how to construct a bomb. In the main, he was predisposed to vent violent inclinations through the most innocuous of schoolwork. “If the assignment was to write about what you might do in a garden,” said one student, “Kipland would write about mowing down the gardeners.” Though in an eerie coincidence Kip Kinkel’s initials were also “KK,” he was so universally disliked by his schoolmates that even after his performance in the cafeteria they refused to give him a nickname. Most damningly of all, the very day before the shooting he had been arrested for possession of a stolen firearm, only to be released into his parents’ custody. So the word went out: Dangerous students give themselves away. They can be spotted, ergo, they can be stopped.
Kevin’s school had been acting on this assumption for most of that school year, though news of every new shooting jacked up the paranoia another notch. Gladstone High had taken on a battened-down, military atmosphere, except the McCarthyite presumption ran that the enemy was within. Teachers had been provided lists of deviant behaviors to look out for, and in school assemblies students were coached to report the most casually threatening remark to the administration, even if it “seemed like” a joke. Essays were combed for an unhealthy interest in Hitler and Nazism, which made teaching courses in twentieth-century European History rather tricky. Likewise, there was a supersensitivity to the satanic, so that a senior named Robert Bellamy, who was known by the handle “Bobby Beelzebub,” was hauled before the principal to explain—and change—his sobriquet. An oppressive literalism reigned, so that when some excitable sophomore screamed, “I’m gonna kill you!” to a volleyball teammate who dropped the ball, she was slammed into the guidance counselor’s office and expelled for the rest of the week. Yet there was no safe haven in the metaphoric, either. When a devout Baptist in Kevin’s English class wrote in a poem, “My heart is a bullet, and God is my marksman,” his teacher went straight to the principal, refusing to teach her class again until the boy was transferred. Even Celia’s primary school grew fatally po-faced: A boy in her first-grade class was kicked out for three days because he had pointed a chicken drumstick at the teacher and said, “Pow, pow, pow!”
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