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By Root 646 0

the very impulse that got me pregnant with the boy in the first place. And though he may have enjoyed sticking his mother, who fancied herself so “special,” with the insult of cliché—like it or not, little Ms. International Traveler would become one more assembly-line mother of a tacky American type, and he knew how much it pained me that my sassy VW Luna was now every fifth car in the Northeast—he still liked the idea of setting himself apart. Since after Columbine he grumbled in Claverack that “any idiot can fire a shotgun,” he must have recognized that being “the crossbow kid” would mark his little prank in the popular imagination. Indeed, by the spring of 1999 the field was crowded, and the once indelibly impressed names of Luke Woodham and Michael Carneal were already beginning to fade.

Moreover, he was certainly showing off. Maybe Jeff Reeves played a mean guitar riff, Soweto Washington could swish his free-throws, and Laura Woolford could get the whole football team to ogle her slim behind as it twitched down the hall, but Kevin Khatchadourian could put an arrow through an apple—or an ear—from fifty meters.

Nevertheless, I’m convinced that his leading motivation was ideological. Not that “I got plot” nonsense he fobbed off on Jack Marlin. Rather, I have in mind the “purity” he admired in the computer virus. Having registered the social compulsion to derive some broad, trenchant lesson from every asinine murder spree, he must have painstakingly parsed the prospective fallout from his own.

His father, at least, was forever dragging him off to some cluttered Native American museum or dreary Revolutionary War battlefield, so that anyone who tried to portray him as the neglected victim of the self-centered two-career marriage would have an uphill battle, and whatever he may have intuited, we were not divorced: no copy there. He wasn’t a member of a satanic cult; most of his friends didn’t go to church either, so godlessness was unlikely to emerge as a cautionary theme. He wasn’t picked on—he had his unsavory friends, and his contemporaries went out of their way to leave him be—so the poor-persecuted-misfit, we-must-do-something-to-stopbullying-in-schools number wouldn’t go very far. Unlike the mental incontinents he held in such contempt, who passed malignant notes in class and made extravagant promises to confidants, he’d kept his mouth shut; he hadn’t posted a homicidal web site or written essays about blowing up the school, and the most creative social commentator would be hard-pressed to deploy a satire about sports utility vehicles as one of those unmissable “warning signs” that are now meant to drive vigilant parents and teachers to call confidential hotlines. But best of all, if he accomplished his stunt entirely with a mere crossbow, his mother and all her mush-headed liberal friends wouldn’t be able to parade him before Congress as one more poster boy for gun control. In short, his choice of weapon was meant to ensure to the best of his ability that Thursday would mean absolutely nothing.

When I got up at the usual 6:30 A.M. on April 8, 1999, I wasn’t yet impelled to put that day of the week in italics. I picked out a blouse I rarely wore; you bent to me as I buttoned it in the mirror and said that I might not like to admit it, but I looked good in pink, and you kissed my temple. In those days your smallest kindness was writ large, and I blushed with pleasure. Once again I hoped you might be having second thoughts about separation, although I was reluctant to ask you outright and so risk spoiling the illusion. I made coffee, then roused Celia, helping her to clean and replace her prosthesis. She was still having trouble with discharge, and wiping the yellow crust off the glass and out of her eyelashes and tear duct could take a good ten minutes. Though it is amazing what you get used to, I still felt relieved once the glass eye was in, her watery blue gaze restored.

Aside from the fact that Kevin got up without having to be rousted three times, it began as a normal morning. As ever, I marveled at your