“I quit.”
Mitchell said, “What do we have here – a Hitler-in-the-bunker scenario?”
“Call it what you will.” Jeremy dropped his weapons.
Mitchell said, “Execution time.”
Being married was wild. It was worth all the delays and pleas and postponement of pleasure, and you know, this isn’t some guidance-class hygiene film speaking to you – it’s me. I was me. We were us. It was all real, and wild, and it is my most cherished memory of having been alive – a night of abandon on the sixteenth floor of Caesars Palace.
I doubt we said even three words to each other all night; Jason’s dewy antler-soft skin made words feel stupid. By six in the morning we were in a cab headed back to the airport. On the flight north, we didn’t speak much, either. And I felt married. I loved the sensation, and it’s why I remained silent – trying to pinpoint the exact nature of this new buzz: sex, certainly, but more than that, too.
Of course, the Out to Lunch Bunch and all of the Alive! crew could tell right away that something was up. We simply didn’t care as much for the group as before, and it showed. The corny little lunchtime confessions over french fries were so dull as to be unlistenable; Pastor Fields’s team sports metaphors and chastity pleas seemed equally juvenile to Jason. We knew what we had, and we knew what we wanted, and we knew that we wanted more. Then there was the issue of how we were going to go about telling our families. Jason imagined a formal dinner at a good restaurant during which to break the news – between the main course and the dessert – but I said I didn’t want our marriage to be treated like a chorus girl jumping out of a cake. I’m not clear if Jason’s desire for a formal dinner was his concept of maturity, or if he wanted to shock a crowd like an evil criminal mastermind. He did have his exhibitionist streak: I mean, in Las Vegas he’d refused to close the curtains and he was always trying to sneak me into the change room at the Bootlegger jeans store. No go.
So yes, we’d had a fight on the phone about this matter the night before my pregnancy test. Jason was angry with me for dragging my heels about announcing the marriage, and I was angry with him for wanting to be a – I don’t know – a show-off.
And that’s as far as I got in my life, my baby as well. I don’t think I’ve concealed anything here, and there’s not much left to explain. God owns everything. I was not replaceable, but nor was I indispensable. It was my time.
Dear God,
I am so full of hate that I’m scaring myself. Is there a word to describe wanting to kill people who are already dead? Because that’s what’s in my heart. I remember last year being in the backyard with my father. We lifted up this sheet of plywood that had been lying on the grass all winter. Underneath were thousands of worms, millipedes, beetles and a snake, all either eating or being eaten, and that is my heart, and the hate and the insects grow and grow blacker by the hour. I want to kill the killers, and I just can’t believe that this would be a sin.
Lord,
My son described the blood and water pooling on the cafeteria floor, coating it like Varathane. He told me about the track marks left in blood by running shoes, by bare feet and by bodies either dragging themselves or being dragged away by friends. There’s something else he’s not telling me – a father knows that – but what could be more horrible than – Oh God, this is not a prayer.
I can’t help but wonder if the other girls thought I used God as an excuse to hook up with Jason, or that I confused one with the other. Maybe I wasn’t truly in love with Jason; maybe it was just an infatuation, or maybe it was only some sort of animal need like any teenager feels.
Listen to me, practical Cheryl, covering my bases, even after death. But I know that when I was alive I did face these questions: I loved Jason, but what I felt for God was different altogether. I kept them separate.
As Mitchell was aiming at me, there were sirens outside, helicopters, alarm bells throughout the school and water splashing down from the shattered pipe. As well, Duncan was egging Mitchell on to kill Jeremy, too, and my hopes had flip-flopped – now I thought I might survive. Then Jeremy said, “Go ahead, Mitchell, shoot me – like I care.”
Mitchell seemed to be short-circuiting. He hadn’t anticipated this scenario. He turned a bit to his left, looked down at me and the Bunch, then took his rifle and shot me on my left side. He really wasn’t a good shot, because he was five paces away, and I should have been dead instantly. And quite honestly, it didn’t hurt, the shooting, and I didn’t die immediately, either. Lauren, bless her, lunged away from me, leaving me there on the floor on top of my binder, which the water had sloshed off the tabletop. At my new angle, I could see much better what was transpiring. Mitchell said, “Well, Jeremy, you stud, that’s one less girl for you to impress,” and Jeremy said, “Dear God, I repent for my sins. Forgive me for all I have done.”
In unison, Mitchell and Duncan shrieked, “What?” and turned to Jeremy, blasted him enough to kill him a dozen times over. Then I heard Jason’s voice from the cafeteria doors – something along the lines of “Put those guns down now.”
Mitchell said, “You have got to be kidding.”
“I’m not kidding.”
Mitchell shot at Jason and missed, and then I saw something that looked like a lump of gray art-class clay fly through the air and crack Mitchell on the side of his head, so fiercely that I could see his skull implode.
At this point, the boys in the camera club lifted up their table and used it as a shield as they charged against the sole surviving gunman, Duncan Boyle. It was covered with paper bags and some cookies that had been glued in place by blood. They charged into Duncan, pressing him against a blank spot of cinder-block wall. I saw the rifle fall to the ground, and then I saw the boys from the camera club laying the table flat on the ground on top of Duncan and begin jumping up and down on it like a grape press. They were making hooting noises, and people from the other tables came and joined in and the table became a killing game as all of these children, boys and girls, who fifteen minutes earlier had been peacefully eating peanut butter sandwiches and oranges, became savages, killing without pause. Duncan’s blood dribbled out from under the table.
Lauren called out, and Jason came over and lifted the table off me like a hurricane lifting off a roof. I know he said something to me, but my hearing was gone. He tried holding me up, but my neck was limp, and all I could see was across the room, children crushing other children. And that was that.
To acknowledge God is to fully accept the sorrow of the human condition. And I believe I accepted God, and I fully accepted this sorrow, even though until the events in the cafeteria, there hadn’t been too much of it in my life. I may have looked like just another stupid teenage girl, but it was all in there – God, and sorrow and its acceptance.
And now I’m neither dead nor alive, neither awake nor asleep, and soon I’m headed off to the Next Place, but my Jason will continue amid the living.
Oh, Jason. In his heart, he knows I’ll at least be trying to watch him from beyond, whatever beyond may be. And in his heart, I think, he’s now learned what I came to believe, which is, as I’ve said all along, that the sun may burn brightly, and the faces of children may be plump and achingly sweet, but in the air we breathe, in the water we drink and in the food we share, there will always be darkness in this world.
You won’t see me in any of the photographs after the massacre – you know the ones I mean: the wire service shots of the funerals, students felt-penning teenage poetry on Cheryl’s casket; teenage prayer groups in sweats and scrunchies huddled on the school’s slippery gym floor; 6:30 A.M.