We Need to Talk About Kevin

MARCH 11, 2001

Dear Franklin,

It looks as if that Andy Williams thing sparked off a rash of copycat crimes. But then, they’re all copycat crimes, don’t you agree?

There were four more School Shootings that spring of 1998. I remember clearly when news came in of the first one, because that was the same day Dr. Sahatjian did the drawings for Celia’s prosthesis and then took a mold of her socket. Celia was entranced when he painstakingly painted the iris of her good eye by hand; I was surprised that it wasn’t scanned by computer, but still limned with fine brushes in watercolors. Iris-painting is apparently quite an art, since every eye is as unique as a fingerprint, and even the whites of our eyes have a distinctive color, their fine red veins a personal skein. It was certainly the only element of this agonizing process that could have passed for charming.

As for the mold making, we’d been assured that it wouldn’t be painful, though she might experience “discomfort,” a term beloved of the medical profession that seems to be a synonym for agony that isn’t yours. Though the stuffing of her socket with white putty was indisputably unpleasant, she merely mewled a little; she never really cried. Celia’s bravery was peculiarly disproportionate. She was a stoic little trooper when she lost an eye. She still screamed bloody murder if she spotted mildew on the shower curtain.

As his assistant restored the conformer and applied a fresh eye patch, I asked Krikor Sahatjian idly what drew him to this niche occupation. He volunteered that at age twelve, when taking a shortcut through a neighbor’s yard, he had climbed over a spiked fence; he slipped, and the tip of an arrow-shaped iron rod…. Leaving the rest mercifully to my imagination, he said, “I was so fascinated by the process of making my own prosthesis that I decided I’d found my calling.” Incredulous, I looked again at his soulful brown eyes, reminiscent of Omar Sharif’s. “You’re surprised,” he said amiably. “I hadn’t noticed,” I admitted. “You’ll find that’s common,” he said. “Once the prosthesis is in, many people will never know that Celia is monocular. And there are ways of covering it up—moving your head instead of your eyes to look at someone. I’ll teach her, when she’s ready.” I was grateful. For the first time her enucleation didn’t seem like the end of the world, and I even wondered if the distinction the disability conferred, and the strength it could summon, might help Celia grow into herself.

When Celia and I returned from the Upper East Side, you’d gotten home before us and were settled in the den with Kevin in front of one of those Nick at Night back-to-back binges of Happy Days. I commented in the doorway, “Ah, the 1950s that never were. I keep waiting for somebody to tell Ron Howard about Sputnik, McCarthyism, and the arms race.” I added ruefully, “Though I see you two are bonding.”

In those days, I always lavished a laden irony on trendy American buzz phrases, as if picking them up with rubber gloves. In kind, I had explained to Kevin’s English teacher that the misuse of the word literally was “one of my issues” with an exaggerated wink-and-nod that must only have perplexed the woman. I’d always thought of American culture as a spectator sport, on which I could pass judgment from the elevated bleachers of my internationalism. But these days I join in aping beer advertisements when my workmates at Travel R Us cry in unison, Whass uuuuup?, I use impact as a transitive verb, and I omit prissy quotation marks. Real culture you don’t observe but embody. I live here. As I would soon discover in spades, there is no opt-out clause.

Our son, however, could read all the above and more into my disdainful pronunciation of bonding. “Is there anything, or anybody,” he asked, looking me in the eye, “you don’t feel superior to?”

“I’ve been candid with you about my problems with this country,” I said stiffly, leaving little doubt that this candor was the source of regret, and making perhaps my sole allusion since to our disastrous dinner at Hudson House. “But I don’t know what gives you the idea that I feel ‘superior.’”

“Ever notice you never talk about Americans as ‘we’?” he said. “It’s always ‘they.’ Like you’d talk about the Chinese or something.”

“I’ve spent a large amount of my adulthood out of the country, and I probably—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Kevin broke eye contact and stared back at the screen. “I just want to know what makes you think you’re so special.”

“Eva, grab a seat and join the fun!” you said. “This is the one where Richie’s forced to blind-date the boss’s daughter, so he gets Potsie—”

“Meaning you’ve seen it twenty times,” I chided affectionately, thankful for your rescue. “How many Happy Days has it been in a row now, three or four?”

“This is the first one! Five more to go!”

“Before I forget, Franklin—I got Dr. Sahatjian to agree to glass.” Petting Celia’s fine blond hair as she hung on my leg, I refrained from citing glass-what. It had fallen to me earlier that afternoon to disabuse our daughter of the expectation that her new eye would be able to see.

“E-va,” you sang, not in the mood for a fight. “Polymer is state of the a-art.”

“So is this German Cryolite.”

“Fewer infec-tions, less chance of brea-kage—”

“Polymer’s just a fancy name for plastic. I hate plastic.” I closed the argument, “Materials are everything.”

“Look at that,” you pointed out to Kevin. “Richie sleazes out of the date, and it turns out she’s a hottie.”

I didn’t want to poop your party, but the mission from which I’d just returned was pretty grim, and I couldn’t immediately start munching your visual junk food. “Franklin, it’s almost seven. Can we please watch the news?”

“Bor-ing,” you cried.

“Not lately it isn’t.” Monica-gate was still breaking in prurient slow motion. “Lately it’s X-rated. Kevin?” I turned politely to our son. “Would you mind very much if, after this episode is over, we switched to the news?”

Kevin was slumped in the easy chair, eyes at half-mast. “Whatever.”

You sang along with the signature tune, Monday, Tuesday, happy days… ! as I knelt to pick white putty from Celia’s hairline. At the hour, I switched to Jim Lehrer. It was the lead story. For once our president would have to keep his fly zipped to make way for two unpleasant little boys in his home state, the older of whom was all of thirteen, the younger only eleven.

I groaned, flopping onto the leather couch. “Not another one.”

Outside Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Arkansas, Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden had lain in wait, huddled in the bushes in camouflage outfits after setting off the school’s fire alarm. As students and teachers exited the building, the two opened fire with a Ruger .44-caliber rifle and a 30.06 hunting rifle, killing four girls and one teacher, and injuring eleven other students. Himself wounded, if only by romantic disappointment, the older boy had apparently warned a friend the day before with cinematic swashbuckling, “I got some killin’ to do,” while little Andrew Golden had sworn to a confidant that he was planning to shoot “all the girls who’d ever broken up with him.” A single boy was injured; the other fifteen victims were female.

“Fucking idiots,” I growled.

“Yo, Eva!” you abjured. “Watch the mouth.”

“More drowning in self-pity!” I said. “Oh, no, my girlfriend doesn’t love me any more, I’m gonna go kill five people!”

“What about all that Armenian shit?” asked Kevin, cutting his eyes toward me flintily. “Oh, no, like, a million years ago the Turks were big meanies and now nobody cares! That’s not self-pity?”

“I’d hardly put genocide on a par with being jilted,” I snapped.

“Nyeh nyeh-nyeh nyeh NYEH-nyeh-nyeh nyeh-nyeh nyeh nyeh nyeh-nyeh NYEE-nyeeh!” Kevin mocked under his breath. “Jesus, give it a rest.”

“—And what’s this about wanting to kill all the girls who’d ever broken up with him?” I jeered.

“Could you shut up?” said Kevin.

“Kevin!” you scolded.

“Well, I’m trying to follow this, and she said she wanted to watch the news.” Kevin often spoke of his mother as I spoke of Americans. We both preferred the third person.

“But the brat’s eleven years old!” I hated people who talked over the news, too, but I couldn’t contain myself. “How many girlfriends can that be?”

“On average?” said our resident expert. “About twenty.”

“Why,” I said, “how many have you had?”

“Ze-ro.” Kevin was now so slumped as to be nearly supine, and his voice had a gravelly creakiness that he would soon employ all the time. “Hump ’em and dump ’em.”

“Whoa, Casanova!” you said. “This is what we get for telling a kid the facts of life at seven.”

“Mommy, who are Humpum and Dumpum? Are they like Tweedledum and Tweedledee?”

“Celia, sweetheart,” I said to our six-year-old, whose sexual education did not seem so urgent. “Wouldn’t you like to go play in the playroom? We’re watching the news, and it’s not much fun for you.”

“Twenty-seven bullets, sixteen hits,” Kevin calculated appreciatively. “Moving targets, too. You know, for little kids that’s a decent percentage.”

“No, I want to stay with you!” said Celia. “You’re my friennnd!”

“But I want a picture, Celia. You haven’t drawn me a picture all day!”

“Oh-kay.” She lingered, fisting her skirt.

“Here, first give me a hug, then.” I drew her to me, and she threw her arms about me. I wouldn’t have thought a six-year-old could squeeze so hard, and it was painful to have to pry her fingers from my clothing when she wouldn’t let go. Once she had shuffled out of the room, after pausing in the archway and waving with a cupped hand, I caught you rolling your eyes at Kevin.

In the meantime, a reporter on screen was interviewing Andrew Golden’s grandfather, from whom some of the kids’ stockpile of weapons had been stolen, including three high-powered rifles, four pistols, and a trove of ammunition. “It’s a terrible tragedy,” he said unsteadily. “We’ve lost. They’ve lost. Everybody’s lives are ruined.”

“You can say that again,” I said. “I mean, what was ever going to happen but they’d be nabbed and nailed and put away for eternity? What were they thinking?”

“They weren’t thinking,” you said.

“You kidding?” said Kevin. “This stuff takes planning. ’Course they were thinking. Probably never thought harder in their whole crummy lives.” From their first occurrence, Kevin owned these incidents, and whenever the subject arose he assumed an air of authority that got on my nerves.

“They weren’t thinking about what comes next,” I said. “They may have thought out their stupid attack, but not the next five minutes—much less the next fifty years.”

“Wouldn’t be so sure,” said Kevin, reaching for a handful of nacho tortilla chips with glow-in-the-dark cheese. “You weren’t listening—as usual—cause Celie had to have her huggy-wuggies. They’re under fourteen. According to the law in Arkansas, Batman and Robin there’ll be back in the Batmobile by eighteen.”

“That’s outrageous!”

“Records sealed, too. Bet everybody in Jonesboro’s really lookin’ forward to it.”

“But you can’t seriously imagine that they took a trip to the law library beforehand and checked out the statute books.”

“Mm,” Kevin hummed noncommittally. “How do you know? Anyway, maybe it’s dumb to think about the future all the time. Put off the present long enough and it, like, never happens, know what I’m sayin’?”

“They have lower sentences for juveniles for good reason,” you said. “Those kids had no idea what they were doing.”

“You don’t think so,” said Kevin caustically. (If he was offended by my ridicule of adolescent angst, our son may have been more affronted by your compassion.)

“No eleven-year-old has any real grasp of death,” you said. “He doesn’t have any real concept of other people—that they feel pain, even that they exist. And his own adult future isn’t real to him, either. Makes it that much easier to throw it away.”

“Maybe his future is real to him,” said Kevin. “Maybe that’s the problem.”

“Come on, Kev,” you said. “All the kids in these shootings have been middle class, not guys from some urban sewer. Those boys were looking at a life with a mortgage and a car and a job in management, with yearly holidays to Bali or something.”

“Yeah,” Kevin purred. “Like I said.”

“You know what?” I said. “Who cares. Who cares whether shooting people is or isn’t real to them, and who cares about their painful bust-ups with girlfriends that don’t even have tits yet. Who cares. The problem is guns. Guns, Franklin. If guns weren’t kicking around these people’s houses like broom handles, none of these—”

“Oh God, here we go again,” you said.

“You heard Jim Lehrer say that in Arkansas it isn’t even illegal for minors to possess firearms?”

“They stole them—”

“They were there to steal. And both boys owned rifles of their own. It’s absurd. No guns, and those two creeps go kick a cat, or—your idea of how to solve differences—go punch their ex-girlfriends in the face. Bloody nose; everybody goes home. These shootings are so inane that I’d think you’d be grateful to find some little turd of a lesson in them.”

“Okay, I can see restricting automatic weapons,” you said, getting that preachy sound that for me was the bane of parenthood. “But guns are here to stay. They’re a big part of this country, target shooting and hunting, not to mention self-defense—.” You stopped because I had obviously stopped listening.

“The answer, if there is one, is the parents,” you resumed, now ranging the room and raising your voice above the TV, from which Monica Lewinsky’s big fat lovelorn face was once more ogling. “You can bet your bottom dollar those boys had no one to turn to. No one they could really pour their hearts out to, who they could trust. When you love your kids, and you’re there for them, and you take them on trips, like to museums and battlefields, and make time for them, you have faith in them and express an interest in what they think? That’s when this kind of plunging off the deep end doesn’t happen. And if you don’t believe me, ask Kevin.”

But for once Kevin wore his derision on his sleeve. “Yeah, Dad! It makes a real big difference to me that I can tell you and Mumsey anything, especially when I’m under all this peer pressure and junk! You always ask what video games I’m playing or what my homework is, and I always know I can turn to you in times of need!”

“Yeah, well, if you couldn’t turn to us, buster,” you grumbled, “you wouldn’t think it was so damned funny.”

Celia had just crept back to the den’s archway, where she hung back, fluttering a piece of paper. I had to motion her inside. She’d always seemed undefended, but this cringing, Tiny Tim meekness of hers was new, and I hoped it was only a phase. After resealing the edges of her Opticlude bandage, I pulled her into my lap to admire her picture. It was discouraging. Dr. Sahatjian’s white coat was drawn so large that his head was off the page; the self-portrait of Celia herself rose only to the oculist’s knee. Although her drawings were usually light, deft, and meticulous, in the place where her left eye should have been, she’s crayoned a formless scribble that violated the outline of her cheek.

Meanwhile, you were asking, “Seriously, Kev—do any of the students at your school ever seem unstable? Does anyone ever talk about guns, or play violent games or like violent movies? Do you think something like this could happen at your school? And are there at least counselors there, professionals kids can talk to if they’re unhappy?”

Broadly, you probably did want answers to these questions, but their caring-Dad intensity came across as self-serving. Kevin cased you before he replied. Kids have a well-tuned radar to detect the difference between an adult who’s interested and an adult who’s keen to seem interested. All those times I stooped to Kevin after kindergarten and asked him what he did that day—even as a five-year-old he could tell that I didn’t care.

“All the kids at my school are unstable, Dad,” he said. “They play nothing but violent computer games and watch nothing but violent movies. You only go to a counselor to get out of class, and everything you tell her is a crock. Anything else?”

“I’m sorry, Franklin,” I said, lifting Celia to sit beside me, “but I don’t see how a few more heart-to-hearts are going to put the brakes on what is clearly becoming some kind of fad. It’s spreading just like Teletubbies, only instead of having to have a rubber doll with a TV in its belly, every teenager has to shoot up his school. This year’s must-have accessories: a Star Wars cell phone and a Lion King semiautomatic. Oh, and some accompanying sob story about being picked on, or ditched by a pretty face.”

“Show a little empathy,” you said. “These are disturbed boys. They need help.”

“They’re also imitative boys. Think they didn’t hear about Moses Lake and West Palm Beach? About Bethel, Pearl, and Paducah? Kids pick up things on TV, they listen to their parents talking. Mark my words, every well-armed temper tantrum that goes down only increases the likelihood of more. This whole country’s lost, everybody copies everybody else, and everybody wants to be famous. In the long term, the only hope is that these shootings get so ordinary that they’re not news anymore. Ten kids get shot in some Des Moines primary school and it’s reported on page six. Eventually any fad gets to be uncool, and thank God at some point hip thirteen-year-olds just won’t want to be seen with a Mark-10 in second period. Until then, Kevin, I’d keep a sharp eye on any of your classmates who start feeling sorry for themselves in camouflage gear.”

As I reconstruct this tirade of mine, I can’t help but observe its implicit lesson: that if School Shootings would inevitably grow hackneyed, ambitious adolescents with a taste for the headlines had best make their bids while the going was good.

Just over a month later in Edinboro, Pennsylvania, fourteen-year-old Andrew Wurst promised one day to make his eighth-grade graduation dance “memorable,” and indeed, the next day he did. On the patio of Nick’s Place at 10 P.M., where 240 middle-schoolers were dancing to “My Heart Will Go On” from the film Titanic, Wurst shot a forty-eight-year-old teacher fatally in the head with his father’s .25-caliber handgun. Inside, he fired several more shots, wounding two boys and grazing a female teacher. Fleeing out the back, he was apprehended by the owner of Nick’s Place, who was carrying a shotgun and convinced the fugitive to back down in the face of superior firepower. As journalists were eager to observe for a welcome note of drollery, the theme of the dance was “I’ve Had the Time of My Life.”

Each of these incidents was distinguished by whatever sorry lessons could be squeezed from it. Wurst’s nickname was “Satan,” which resonated with the commotion over Luke Woodham in Pearl having been involved in a demonic cult. Wurst was a fan of an androgynous heavy-metal vocalist called Marilyn Manson, a man who jumped about on stage in poorly applied eyeliner, so this singer who was only trying to make an honest buck out of teenage bad taste was deplored in the media for a spell. Myself, I was sheepish about having been so derisive regarding the precautions taken at Kevin’s own eighth-grade dance the previous year. As for the shooter’s motivation, it sounded amorphous. “He hated his life,” said a friend. “He hated the world. He hated school. The only thing that would make him happy was when a girl he liked would talk to him”—exchanges that we’re forced to conclude were infrequent.

Maybe School Shootings were already growing passé, because the story of eighteen-year-old Jacob Davis in Fayetteville, Tennessee, in mid-May pretty much got lost in the shuffle. Davis had already won a college scholarship and had never been in trouble. A friend remarked to reporters later, “He didn’t hardly ever even talk. But I guess that’s the ones that will get you—the quiet ones.” Outside his high school three days before they were both to graduate, Davis approached another senior who was dating his ex-girlfriend and shot the boy thrice with a .22-caliber rifle. It seems the breakup had hit him hard.

I may have been impatient with lovesick teen melodrama, but as killers go Davis was a gentleman. He left a note behind in his car assuring his parents and his former girlfriend how much he loved them. Once the deed was done, he put down his gun, sat down next to it, and put his head in his hands. He stayed just like that until the police arrived, at which time the papers reported that he “surrendered without incident.” This time, anomalously, I was touched. I could see it: Davis knew he had done something stupid, and he had known it was stupid beforehand. For these two facts to be concurrently true would present him with the great human puzzler for the rest of his four-walled life.

Meanwhile, out in Springfield, Oregon, young Kipland Kinkel had digested the lesson that wasting a single classmate was no longer a sure route to immortality. Just three days after Jacob Davis broke his beloved parents’ hearts, this scrawny, weasel-faced fifteen-year-old upped the ante. Around 8 A.M. as his classmates at Thurston High finished up their breakfast, Kinkel walked calmly into the school cafeteria bearing a .22-caliber handgun, a 9-millimeter Glock, and a .22-caliber semiautomatic rifle under a trench coat. Deploying the most efficacious weapon first, he sprayed the room with rifle fire, shattering windows and sending students diving for cover. Nineteen in the cafeteria were shot but survived, while four additional students were injured in the panic to get out of the building. One student was killed outright, a second would die in the hospital, and a third would have died as well, had Kipland’s semiautomatic not run out of ammunition. Pressed to a boy’s temple, the rifle went click, click, click.

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!”

It was the same all over the country, if the embarrassing little squibs in New York Times sidebars were anything to go by. In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a fourteen-year-old girl was strip searched—strip searched, Franklin—and suspended when, in a class discussion about School Shootings, she said she could see how kids who’d been teased might eventually snap. In Ponchatoula, Louisiana, a twelve-year-old boy was locked up in juvenile detention for an entire two weeks because his warning to his fellow fifth-graders in the cafeteria line that he’d “get them” if they didn’t leave him enough potatoes was construed as a “terrorist threat.” On a two-page web site, Buffythevampireslayer. com, an Indiana student posited a theory that must have crossed many a high-schooler’s mind from time to time that his teachers were devil worshipers; unsatisfied with his mere suspension, his teachers filed a federal lawsuit charging both the boy and his mother with defamation and infliction of emotional distress. A thirteen-year-old was suspended for two weeks because on a field trip to Albuquerque’s Atomic Museum, he had piped, “Are they going to teach us how to build a bomb?” while another boy got the third degree from a school administrator just for carrying his chemistry textbook. Nationwide, kids were expelled for wearing trench coats like Kipland Kinkel, or just for wearing black. And my personal favorite was a nineyear-old’s suspension after a class project about diversity and Asian culture, during which he wrote the fortune cookie message, “You will die an honorable death.”

Although Kevin was ordinarily tight-lipped about goings-on at his school, he went out of his way to deliver us tidbits of this escalating hysteria. The reportage had the intended effect: You were more afraid for him; I was more afraid of him. He enjoyed the sensation of seeming dangerous, yet clearly regarded the school’s precautions as farcical. “They keep this up,” he remarked once, and on this point he was astute, “they just gonna give kids ideas.”

It was an evening near graduation, a falling off the edge of childhood that for seniors always has a hint of the apocalyptic, and so might have made the faculty antsy even without Kip Kinkel’s help. After his usual dinner—a brutish nosh before the open refrigerator—Kevin cooled back in the den’s easy chair and delivered the latest installment: The entire student body had just been subjected to a “lockdown” in their classrooms for four periods straight while the police searched every locker and prowled the hallways with sniffer-dogs.

“What were they looking for, drugs?” I asked.

Kevin said lightly, “Or poems.”

“It’s this Jonesboro-Springfield nonsense,” you said. “They were obviously looking for guns.”

“What really slays me,” said Kevin, stretching out and spewing his words like cigarette smoke, “—if you’ll excuse the expression—is they sent a memo on the search procedure to the teachers? That loser drama teacher, Pagorski, left it on her desk, and Lenny saw it—I was impressed; didn’t know he could read. Anyway, word got around. Whole school knew this was coming. Kid with an AK in his locker had plenty of time to reconsider his piss-poor hiding place.”

I asked, “Kevin, didn’t any of your classmates object to this?”

“Few of the girls did, after a while,” he said airily. “Nobody could take a leak, see. Fact,” Kevin achieved a wheezy little laugh, “that donkeyface Ulanov wet herself.”

“Did anything make the administration especially alarmed? Or was it just, oh it’s Wednesday, why don’t we play with sniffer-dogs?”

“Probably an anonymous tip. They run a telephone hotline now, so you can rat out your friends. For a quarter, I could get out of Environmental Science any day of the week.”

“An anonymous tip from whom?” I asked.

“Hello-o. If I told you who it was, then it wouldn’t be anonymous, would it?”

“Well after all that bother, did they even find anything?”

“Sure they did,” Kevin purled. “Shitload of overdue library books. Some old French fries that were starting to stink. One really juicy, evil poem had them going for while, till it turned out to be Big Black lyrics: This is Jordan, we do what we like…—Oh, and one more thing. A list.”

“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” so as not to appear, alarmingly, a loner. They were all mediocrities—exceptional mediocrities, if there is such a thing—or outright cretins like Lenny Pugh. They all pursued this minimalist approach to education, and they didn’t get into trouble. They may well have led a whole secret life behind this gray scrim of bovine obedience, but the one thing that didn’t raise a red flag at his high school was being suspiciously drab. The mask was perfect.

Did Kevin take drugs? I’ve never been sure. You agonized enough about how to approach the subject, whether to pursue the rectitudinous course and denounce all pharmaceuticals as the sure route to insanity and the gutter or to play the reformed hell-raiser and vaunt a long list of substances that you once devoured like candy until you learned the hard way that they could rot your teeth. (The truth—that we hadn’t cleaned out the medicine cabinet, but we’d both tried a variety of recreational drugs, and not only in the sixties but up to a year before he was born; that better living through chemistry had driven neither of us to an asylum or even to an emergency room; and that these gleeful carnival rides on the mental midway were far more the source of nostalgia than remorse—was unacceptable .) Each path had pitfalls. The former doomed you as a fuddy-duddy who’d no notion what he was talking about; the latter reeked of hypocrisy. I recall you finally charted some middle way and admitted to smoking dope, told him for the sake of consistency that it was okay if he wanted to “try it,” but to not get caught, and to please, please not tell anyone that you’d been anything but condemnatory about narcotics of any kind. Me, I bit my lip. Privately I believed that downing a few capsules of ecstasy could be the best thing that ever happened to that boy.

As for sex, the accuracy of that “hump ’em and dump ’em” boast is up for grabs. If I’ve claimed, of us two, to “know” Kevin the better, that is only to say that I know him for being opaque. I know that I don’t know him. It’s possible he’s still a virgin; I’m only sure of one thing. That is, if he has had sex, it’s been grim—short, pumping; shirt on. (For that matter, he could have been sodomizing Lenny Pugh. It’s uncannily easy to picture.) Hence Kevin may even have heeded your stern caution that if he ever felt ready for sex he should always use a condom, if only because a slimy rubber sheath bulging with milky come would have made his vacuous encounters that much more delectably sordid. I reason that nothing about a blindness to beauty necessitates a blindness to ugliness, for which Kevin long ago developed a taste. Presumably there are as many fine shades of the gross as the gorgeous, so that a mind full of blight wouldn’t preclude a certain refinement.

There was one more matter at the end of Kevin’s ninth-grade school year that I never bothered you about, but I’ll mention it in passing for the sake of being thorough.

I’m sure you would remember that in early June, AWAP’s computers were contaminated with a computer virus. Our technical staff traced it to an e-mail titled, cleverly, “WARNING: Deadly new virus in circulation.” No one seemed to trouble with hard-copy dumps or those chintzy little floppies anymore, so that since the virus also infected our backup drive, the results were disastrous. With file after file, access was denied, it didn’t exist, or it came up on screen all squares, squiggles, and tildes. Four different editions were put back for at least six months, encouraging scores of our most devoted bookstores, including the chains, to put in bountiful orders for The Rough Guide and The Lonely Planet when Wing and a Prayer couldn’t satisfy the brisk summer market with up-to-date listings. (We didn’t make any friends, either, when the virus sent itself to every e-mail address on our marketing list.) We never fully recouped the trade we lost that season, so the fact that I was forced to sell the company in 2000 for less than half its valuation two years earlier traces in some measure to this contagion. For me, it substantially contributed to 1998’s zeitgeist of siege.

I did not tell you about its source out of shame. I should never have been snooping, you’d say. I should have minded every parenting manual’s edict to respect the inviolability of a child’s bedroom. If I suffered dire consequences, I had made my own bed. It’s the oldest switcheroo in the book, and a favorite of the faithless the world over: When folks discover something incriminating by poking around where they’re not supposed to, you immediately flip the issue to the snooping itself, to distract from what they found.

I’m not sure what led me to go in there. I’d stayed home from AWAP to take Celia in for another oculist appointment, to check on her adaptation to the prosthesis. There was little enough in Kevin’s room to attract curiosity, though it may have been this very quality—its mysterious blankness—that I found so magnetic. When I creaked open the door I felt powerfully that I wasn’t meant to be there. Kevin was in school, you were scouting, Celia was poring over homework that should have taken her ten minutes and would therefore take her a good two hours, so the chances of my being discovered were slim. Still, my heart raced and my breath was bated. This is silly, I told myself. I’m in my own house, and if improbably interrupted I can claim to be checking for dirty dishes.

Fat chance, in that room. It was immaculate; you teased Kevin about being a “granny,” he was such a neatnik. The bed was made with bootcamp precision. We’d offered him a bedspread of racing cars or Dungeons and Dragons; he’d been quite firm on preferring plain beige. The walls were unadorned; no posters of Oasis or the Spice Girls, no leering Marilyn Manson. The shelves lay largely bare: a few textbooks, a single copy of Robin Hood; the many books we gave him for Christmas and birthdays simply disappeared. He had his own TV and stereo system, but about the only “music” I’d heard him play was some kind of Philip Glass-like CD that sequenced computer-generated phrases according to a set mathematical equation; it had no form, no peaks or valleys, and approximated the white noise that he would also tune in on the television when he was not watching the Weather Channel. Again, the CDs we’d given him when trying to sort out what he “liked” were nowhere in evidence. Though you could get delightful screen savers of leaping dolphins or zooming spaceships, the one on his Gateway merely pointillated random dots.

Was this what it looked like inside his head? Or was the room, too, a kind of screen saver? Just add a seascape above the bed, and it looked like an unoccupied unit at a Quality Inn. Not a photograph at his bedside, nor keepsake on his bureau—the surfaces were slick and absent. How much I’d have preferred to walk into a hellhole jangling with heavy-metal, lurid with Playboy centerfolds, fetid from muddy sweats, and crusty with year-old tuna sandwiches. That was the kind of no-go teen lair that I understood, where I might discover safe, accessible secrets like a worn Durex packet under the socks or a baggie of cannabis stuffed in the toe of a smelly sneaker. By contrast, the secrets of this room were all about what I would not find, like some trace of my son. Looking around, I thought uneasily, He could be anyone.

But as for its conceit that there was nothing to hide, I wasn’t buying. So when I spotted a stack of floppies on the shelf above the computer, I shuttled through them. Inscribed with characterless perfect printing, their titles were obscure: “Nostradamus,” “I Love You,” “D4-X.” Feeling wicked, I picked one of them out, put the rest back the way I found them, and slipped out the door.

In my study, I inserted the floppy in my computer. I didn’t recognize the suffixes on the A drive, but they weren’t regular word-processing files, which disappointed me. In hoping to find a private journal or diary, I may have been less eager to discover the precise content of his inmost thoughts than to confirm that at least he had inmost thoughts. Not about to give up easily, I went into the Explorer program and loaded one of the files; perplexingly, Microsoft Outlook Express came up on screen, at which point Celia called from the dining table that she needed help. I was gone for about fifteen minutes.

When I returned, the computer was blank. It had shut itself off, which it had never done without being told. Disconcerted, I turned it on again but got nothing but error messages, even when I took the disk from the drive.

You’re way ahead of me. I carted the thing into work the next day so that my technical people might sort it out, only to discover the entire office milling about. It wasn’t exactly pandemonium, more like the atmosphere of a party that had run out of drink. Editors were chatting aimlessly in one another’s cubicles. No one was working. They couldn’t. There wasn’t a terminal functioning. Later I was almost relieved when George informed me that my PC’s hard drive was so corrupted that I might as well buy a new one. Perhaps with the infectious object destroyed, no one would ever know that the virus had been forwarded by AWAP’s own executive director.

Furious at Kevin for keeping the modern equivalent of a pet scorpion, I held onto the disk as evidence for several days rather than discreetly sliding it back on his shelf. But once I simmered down, I had to admit that Kevin hadn’t personally wiped out my company’s files, and the debacle was my fault. So one evening I knocked on his door, was granted admission, and closed it behind me. He was sitting at the desk. The screen saver was blipping in its desultory fashion, dot here, dot there.

“I wanted to ask you,” I said, tapping his floppy. “What’s this?”

“A virus,” he said brightly. “You didn’t load it in, did you?”

“Of course not,” I said hastily, discovering that lying to a child feels much the same as lying to a parent; my cheeks prickled as they had when I assured my mother after losing my cherry at seventeen that I’d spent the night with a girlfriend she’d never heard of. Mother knew better; Kevin did, too. “I mean,” I revised mournfully, “only once.”

“Only takes once.”

We both knew that it would have been ridiculous for me to have sneaked into his room and stolen a disk, with which I subsequently ruined my computer and paralyzed my office, only to come storming in to accuse him of industrial sabotage. So the interchange proceeded with an evenness.

“Why do you have it?” I asked respectfully.

“I keep a collection.”

“Isn’t that a peculiar thing to collect?”

“I don’t like stamps.”

Just then I had a presentiment of what he might have said had you burst in determined to find out why the heck he had a stack of computer viruses above his desk: Well, after we watched Silence of the Lambs, I decided I wanted to be an FBI agent! And you know how they have this whole task-force that, like, tracks down hackers who spread those terrible computer viruses? So I’m studying them and everything, ’cause I’ve read it’s a really big problem for the new economy and globalization and even for our country’s defense… ! That Kevin skipped such a performance—he collected computer viruses, end of story, so what?—left me feeling strangely flattered.

So I asked bashfully. “How many do you have?”

“Twenty-three.”

“Are they—difficult to find?”

He looked at me gamely, with that old sense of indecision, but on some whim he decided to experiment with talking to his mother. “They’re hard to capture alive,” he said. “They get away, and they bite. You have to know how to handle them. You know—like a doctor. Who studies diseases in a lab but doesn’t want to get sick himself.”

“You mean, you have to keep them from infecting your own machine.”

“Yeah. Mouse Ferguson’s been teaching me the ropes.”

“Since you collect them. Maybe you can explain to me—why do people make them? I don’t get it. They don’t achieve anything. What’s the appeal?”

“I don’t get,” he said, “what you don’t get.”

“I understand hacking into AT&T to get free phone calls or stealing encrypted credit card numbers to run up a bill at The Gap. But this sort of computer crime—nobody benefits. What’s the point?”

“That is the point.”

“I’m still lost,” I said.

“Viruses—they’re kind of elegant, you know? Almost—pure. Kind of like—charity work, you know? It’s selfless.”

“But it’s not that different from creating AIDS.”

“Maybe somebody did,” he said affably. “’Cause otherwise? You type on your computer and go home and the refrigerator comes on and another computer spits out your paycheck and you sleep and you enter more shit on your computer… Might as well be dead.”

“So it’s this—. Almost to, what, know you’re alive. To show other people they don’t control you. To prove you can do something, even if it could get you arrested.”

“Yeah, pretty much,” he said appreciatively. In his eyes, I had exceeded myself.

“Ah,” I said, and handed him his disk back. “Well, thanks for explaining.”

As I turned to go, he said, “You’re computer’s fucked, isn’t it.”

“Yes, it’s fucked,” I said ruefully. “I guess I deserved it.”

“You know, if there’s anybody you don’t like?” he offered. “And you got their e-mail address? Just lemme know.”

I laughed. “Okay, I’ll be sure to do that. Though, some days? The people I don’t like come to quite a list.”

“Better warn them you got friends in low places,” he said.

So this is bonding! I marveled, and closed the door.