Stop! If you haven't yet, go and read "The Westfielder, Version One" first. (It's rated M, so you might have to change your filters to see it.) Explanation will be there. Please comment!
There are sixteen crosses, wooden and tall, in the field behind Westfield High School. His stands at the end of the line, adorned sporadically with packs of cigarettes and Nirvana cassette tapes, making him identical in death to those he massacred-vulnerable, and furthermore, gone. The first time I visited, someone had dropped a gray inhaler. I don't know if he had asthma. I don't know if he wheezed.
People, friends and family, write letters to the victims. Someone stuck a note on his that quoted Jesus, read "Father, Forgive them, for they know not what they do." I leave him Tonka trucks, mittens for his cold hands, drawings of those birds he likes, and travel packs of Kleenex because he cries easily. I smile when I think of him undoing the sticky, the plasticky package and taking one, teen psychopath extraordinaire, the clean white crumpling soggy in his hand, to dry those drippy eyes of his.
I smoke, sitting cross-legged for Kurt Cobain and Jesus, and I cry.
Tate. He smells like track dirt and teenage boy sweat. My hands are in his hair and the pale waves are rank with it, clumpy. I watched him, prone on the weight bench, pushing the bar with those things on it up. His chest, beneath the ancient PE shirt, was rawboned and delicate, his pretty features straining.
I don't hold him. He might be disappointed by what's under the too-long sleeves, the woolen tights and heavy, awkward parka. It's just me under there; my jutting ribs and my flat, meager chest and gawky, apple-bitten thighs, my skinny feet and funny toes. There is nothing exciting under there, nothing fancy.
We hold hands in the nurse's office, side by side on papery cots. I'm bleeding and emotional, the cramps running down my tailbone and the backs of my thighs, swollen and vulnerable like vaguely hot salt water in my ankles. He coughs and sniffles and tells me how he always felt autistic, how he couldn't even cross the cafeteria without feeling self-conscious. I push his sweaty bangs back and touch his soft, hot face, his Tylenol forehead and the pressurized bridge of his nose. Beneath all that his upper lip is shiny, pink, rubbed raw from his cold. The sight of it makes me choke up, saying I love you Tate Langdon, and I kiss it, kiss it, kiss it.
It's early. He wears his track shorts and a black trench coat with pockets full of teary, snotty Kleenex. He is yelling, and I can't make his voice out, so I don't know what he means.
He has dried blood on the sleeves of his sweater and his eyes are pleading. I look around and see that the bedroom isn't mine yet, that it is painted boy colors, with a case full of VHS tapes and a boombox in place of an IPod.
I just came from the shower and I'm dressed in white pajama pants with multi-colored hearts on them and a stretchy pink tank top with a big red one on it, no bra. I'm like a little girl now, my hair up in a big wet knot, and my naked face is puffy and moon-like because I was crying in there. I tiptoe down the hallway and stand in the doorway. My face crumples when I see him on the bed. He looks back at me like a trapped deer and his face does the same. He whimpers. I go to him.
I take his long hands and I kiss his bitten fingertips, all ten one by one. I pull the dried blood of the generation X out of his hair and his throat makes a sound like the feedback on a grunge record. I hold his salty face in my hands and tell him that he's wonderful, and that I forgive him, and that I love him.
He cradles me like a dead family pet and I hold his scull like a newborn's against my flat chest. He is screaming and I am soft and good-smelling like a mother, but red lines adorn my arms, the scent of copper, and I died when I took those pills, so I also smell a little bit like vomit.
My Violet, he whispers, all tears dripping off of his nose and involuntary saliva.
I pull the collar of his shirt down until I see the bullet holes, and on my lips they are chaste and metallic; they are hot. I'm moved again by this, the rawest part of my sad, beautiful blonde boy, and I kiss them, kiss them, kiss them.