We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [173]
“What kind of list?”
“A hit list. Not ‘My Favorite Songs,’ but the other kind. You know, with THEY ALL DESERVE TO DIE scrawled at the top, big as life.”
“Jesus!” You sat up. “These days, that’s not funny.”
“Noooo, they didn’t think it was funny.”
“I hope they’re planning to give this kid a good talking-to,” you said.
“Oooh, I think they’ll do better than a talking-to.”
“Well, who was it?” I asked. “Where did they find it?”
“In his locker. Funniest thing, too. Last guy you’d expect. Superspic.”
“Kev,” you said sharply. “I’ve warned you about that kind of language.”
“’Scuse me. I mean Señor Espinoza. Guess he’s just bustin’ with ethnic hostility and pent-up resentment on behalf of the Latino people.”
“Hold on,” I said. “Didn’t he win some big academic prize last year?”
“Can’t say as I recall,” said Kevin blithely. “But that three-week suspension is going to nasty up his record something terrible. Ain’t that a shame? Geez, and you think you know people.”
“If everyone knew this search was coming,” I said, “why wouldn’t this Espinoza boy clear such an incriminating list from his locker beforehand?”
“Dunno,” said Kevin. “Guess he’s an amateur.”
I drummed my fingers on the coffee table. “These lockers. The kind I grew up with had slits in the top. Aeration vents. Do yours?”
“Sure,” he said, heading from the room. “So the French fries keep better.”
They suspended the valedictorian-in-waiting; they made Greer Ulanov pee her pants. They punished the poets, the hotheaded sportsmen, the morbidly dressed. Anyone with a jazzy nickname, an extravagant imagination, or the less than lavish social portfolio that might mark a student as an “outcast” became suspect. As far as I could tell, it was War on Weirdos.
But I identified with weirdos. In my own adolescence, I had strong, stormy Armenian features and so wasn’t considered pretty. I had a funny name. My brother was a quiet, dour nobody who’d scored me no social points as a predecessor. I had a shut-in mother who would never drive me anywhere or attend school functions, if her insistence on continuing to manufacture excuses was rather sweet; and I was a dreamer who fantasized endlessly about escape, not only from Racine but the entire United States. Dreamers don’t watch their backs. Were I a student at Gladstone High in 1998, I’d surely have written some shocking fantasy in sophomore English about putting my forlorn family out of its misery by blowing the sarcophagus of 112 Enderby Avenue to kingdom come, or in a civics project on “diversity” the gruesome detail in which I recounted the Armenian genocide would betray an unhealthy fascination with violence. Alternatively, I’d express an inadvisable sympathy with poor Jacob Davis sitting beside his gun with his head in his hands, or I’d tactlessly decry a Latin test as murderous—one way or another, I’d be out on my ear.
Kevin, though. Kevin wasn’t weird. Not so’s you notice. He did brandish the tiny-clothes thing, but he didn’t wear all black, and he didn’t skulk in a trench coat; “tiny clothes” were not on the official photocopied list of “warning signs.” His grades were straight Bs, and no one seemed to find this astonishing but me. I thought, this is a bright kid, grade inflation is rife, you’d think he’d make an A by accident. But no, Kevin applied his intelligence to keeping his head below the parapet. I think he overdid it, too. That is, his essays were so boring, so lifeless, and so monotonous as to border on deranged. You’d think someone would have noticed that those choppy, stultifying sentences (“Paul Revere rode a horse. He said that the British were coming. He said, ‘The British are coming. The British are coming.’”) were sticking two fingers up his teacher’s butt. But it was only when he wrote a paper contrived to repeatedly use the words snigger, niggardly , and Nigeria for his Black History teacher that he pushed his luck.
Socially, Kevin camouflaged himself with just enough “friends