Author's note: Worry not, humor fans, I'll still be writing funny stuff, too! But for this one I decided to try my hand at something serious. (No one farts in this one, I swear!) If anyone likes this, I may write a follow-up about the actual day of the shooting and the direct aftermath from Tate's perspective.
I have been making note of them for months now, compiling a list of them in my head-the quarterback and cheerleader who told their asshole friends to lay off me, the black-clad girl who asked if I was okay with a sympathetic smile in the library once, the stoner guy who offered me a cigarette and a pat on the shoulder on the trails behind school one morning when I must have looked particularly ill. They don't deserve to be here. That's why, one week from today, I will free them. I'll take them away. I don't want to have to do it, but I will.
I stand in the nurse's office bathroom, my hands on the sink, staring in the mirror. It's the first time in weeks that I've really looked. I'm pale, more than usual, my eyes red around the rims and faintly purple underneath. The skin is slightly red, raw, just beneath my nostrils, and my lips are so chapped that it hurts to smile-rough, bitten, almost bloody. I've had on the same black and white striped shirt and huge, gross old coat-a flannel with quilting inside-for three days now. My hair is greasy.
Someone knocks on the door and I know I have to hurry it up. I'm just standing and staring anyway, and I already brushed my teeth and put deodorant on, the few concessions to humanity I bother to keep these days so that I don't just reek.
"Just a second!" I say, splashing some water on my face and drying it quickly with a paper towel. As if it will do any good. I can't look human.
The school nurse looks at me skeptically when I come out. "Should I call your family, Tate?" She asks. "You really don't look well. Big bags under your eyes, and you just slept for a good two hours."
Did I? Shit. I hadn't realized that. I look at the small cot where my backpack lies, still wrinkled and indented by my frame. I missed two class periods.
"No," I say, "I should really go to class. I-I just have this kind of cold right now, but I took some stuff for it, so I should feel better soon." I consider trying to fake a cough, just to look more convincing, before realizing that I just can't bring myself to bother. I don't care if she doesn't believe me.
She clucks her tongue. "You should be drinking water, eating fruit. You're sick so often lately. Maybe a better coat?" She eyes the threadbare thing hanging off of me, the ancient plaid.
"Yeah," I say, no energy left to fake physical sickness or real emotion, "maybe." Such bullshit. All these people, saying what they think they have to out of obligation, like a little kid in a play. They don't care. They say their lines and then they're obsolved, obsolved of any guilt over what happens to me. They don't really want to know if I'm okay.
Am I okay? I wonder for a second as I walk to class, just as the bell rings signaling the end of fourth period. But I can't even think about that. Of course I'm okay. If I needed help, someone would have helped me by now. Of course there's Nora, but what can she do aside from hold me-her cold hands in my hair, the eerie stillness of her chest when I cry into it-and what kind of a person am I anyway, my only friend a ghost? The only person who has ever been willing to comfort me has been dead for sixty-eight years. I don't remember my mom ever holding me.
I shake my head, not wanting to dwell on that, and I focus instead on the noble war. A week from today I'm going to do it. I know I should be honored, but in truth it really sucks to have to be the one to do it. I didn't choose this. It puts a hard, aching rock in the pit of my stomach and makes me unable to eat. The drugs have been helping, but I didn't do that today. I'm saving them now.
I get to Mr. Vandiver's history class and take my seat near the back. I don't take my coat off-my coat, this old thing my dad used to wear to do yard work, when he was here. He's been gone eleven years now. Sometimes I could swear I catch a glimpse of him in the hallway late at night, but I know it's just my mind playing tricks on me.
The room buzzes with conversation and energy, the bell signaling fifth period's start still a few minutes from ringing. I ignore it, but then Jenni, a girl from special-ed. who they've been mainstreaming into a few classes, approaches me. I smile. My sister, Addie, great love of my life, has Downs Syndrome, and I'd do anything ever to protect her. Not that she'd need it. She's tougher than I'll ever be and we both know it. I need her.
I notice, then, a group of kids a few feet behind her, giggling and egging her on. My stomach knots. Jenni twists her hands uncomfortably. "Tate," she recites robotically, "will you go on a date with me?"
The kids crack up, and I want to punch them for putting her up to this. They just want to humiliate me, I know, but they didn't think twice about using her as a jokey pawn. I hate them. She's not a joke. My Addie is not a joke.
I maintain my smile with all the effort I can muster. "Oh Jenni," I say, "we both know I'm not good enough for you."
"Yeah," she says with a small giggle before returning to her seat, seemingly unscathed. I shoot the group of assholes a death glare but turn away quickly when I feel my lower lip start to quiver. I bite down on it as hard as I can. Goddammit, I think, hold it together, Langdon. It's just a few more hours. Do whatever it takes to hold it together-smoke cigarettes, bite your lip until it bleeds, cut your arms up in the bathroom between classes. Anything to keep the ocean behind your eyes back. As soon as you get home you can lay down and sob into Nora's skirt for an hour before falling asleep.
The bell rings, and that tool Vandiver rushes in to begin class. He's young, a student and a football player here at Westfield just ten years ago, but he's already fat and balding, looking older than his years. His desperation to still be part of the boys club is downright pitiful. He lets the jocks get away with murder, harassing people and making gross sexual jokes.
He starts talking. I drift off, my mind wandering to various things and people. To Nora-will I get to be with her for always now? I've already planned a quick route back home after the shooting, to assure that I die there and not at school. It's corny, but I want to ask her to be my mom forever, once I go. I know she wasn't really old enough in death to have had a seventeen-year-old, and I know that I'm not really what she wanted-a baby, to replace the one she lost-but if she'd just say yes, I think that I could be okay for eternity.
To Addie-will she be able to see me once I'm gone? I know she sees Nora, and she claims to see others, too, ones who I can't see. I hope she can see me. I hope she's not scared. That would be the worst thing, I think. I'd rather be invisible to her than scare her.
Or maybe it won't even work that way. Maybe the house won't take me, and I'll just go straight to hell. I'm not afraid anymore, of that.
I'm broken out of my thoughts suddenly when I hear Mr. Vandiver bring up the new gun-free school act being proposed this year. "Yes, Tate?" he calls on me, when I raise my hand.
"I think it's a good idea," I say, "but some of the paranoia everyone in the schools has these days is a little much, don't you think?"
"Yeah, cause people are getting their heads blown off," cuts in Courtney, a girl in the front row, sneering at me.
Not in the halls of suburban high schools, I think. Not yet, anyway.
"I'm not saying it's not a bad thing-" I start, but Mike, a guy in a basketball uniform, cuts me off.
"-Tate, have you ever had a gun held to your head?" he asks self-righteously.
"No, have you?"
"Guys, let's stay on topic," Vandiver tries to interject, but no one listens to him.
"I just thought he might know a thing or two about it, was all!" Says Mike innocently. And then, an awful smirk. "I know his mom knows her way around one. But that's just the good old Southern way, right Tate?" He fakes a drawl, trying to imitate my mother's deep Virginian. "Liquor, cancer sticks, and firearms, just like the good book says..."
Hot tears fill my eyes unexpectedly. I squeeze them shut, quick and desperate, hoping no one notices. This is LA, where even the jocks' moms cook organic greens and attend yoga workshops in a show of faux-granola enlightenment. My own mother, with her immaculate, outdated beehive hair and penchant for chain-smoking and Bible talk, has always attracted her share of side-eye here. Not to mention that she was investigated as a suspect in the disappearance of my father and our maid when I was little. She was cleared, but everyone still knows about it, and a lot of people still believe she killed them.
Vandiver snickers, the peice of shit. "It's okay, dude," Mike's buddy chimes in, "we're not all psychopaths..."
I put my head down on my desk. The tears come in a thick wave, so fast that I can't control it; it just comes swelling up from my chest and crashing down behind my eyes, making my face redden, my breath quicken, my nose sting. There isn't anything I can do besides put my head down, hiding my face with the sleeves of my too-big jacket, trying desperately to preserve some shred of pride. I'm failing, though.
The entire room falls dead silent. I know they're looking at me, even though all I can see now is the worn, gross old flannel of my sleeves and the darkened fake wood of my desk, so close to my face now. I don't know how I'll ever lift my face up. I'd have to wait until everyone was gone, because already my tears have formed big, shiny puddles on the non-porous laminate, and it's awkward, so so awkward, how they just sit there all jiggly and perfectly round. Even my sleeves would cause them to streak and smear and leave wet trails; I would need paper towels to mop them up. And my nose is dripping, too, because I'm crying and my face is angled straight down, forming similar puddles of snot to go with the tears. I want to sniffle it back, but I know it would be loud and conspicuous, so I can't. I just have to let it run.
I hold my breath. If I can just manage not to make a sound, I think desperately. I hold my breath because I don't trust it, because I'm scared that if I breath at all I'll lose it completely. It backfires. The quickened breath beating inside of me responds badly to being held, and instead breaks through with a vengeance, gasping and jagged. I hear the sob echo through the silent room before I even recognize it as having come from my own body.
More silence. Another one, longer but quieter, tears out of me, making my torso convulse, followed by a third, and a few of the sniffles I knew would happen if I dared take a breath through my nose. In an instant everyone is talking again, seemingly all at once, with Mr. Vandiver suddenly remembering that he's a teacher and launching quickly into a lecture about how the gun culture of the 1960's might have played a role in the assassination of JFK.
I breath as quietly and as deeply as I can, trying to compose myself. But it doesn't matter anymore, I realize. Nothing does. In a week I'll be gone, and about twenty people's last memory of me before I became a mass murderer will be of me crying in history class. I wonder if they will remember this, after that. Will they feel sad for me, I wonder with the littlest twinge in my chest, the littlest stupid hope, if they remember?
And then I feel it: a hand, awkward and tentative, on one of my still-shaking shoulders. It's Amir Stanley, the guy who sits behind me. He always seemed like nice kid, quiet and studious and a little nerdy. Really quiet, actually. I rarely hear him speak.
But now I hear his voice, quiet and earnest, whisper behind me: "Hey, it's okay..."
It's in this moment that I know. I know he'll be the last addition to my list. I know that next week I will show up here with a loaded gun inside my jacket and I will find him, and I will do my best to comfort him like he's trying to comfort me. It hurts, because I know that he won't see it that way, but I'll know. Just like I know right now. I will hold the gun up to his head and I will say a silent prayer, a thank you for his good heart, before I pull the trigger, taking him away from here to somewhere clean and kind.