socialists. Don’t tell me she’s one of those kids who refuses to carry a gun. Meets passed the gun laws, mandatory church on Sunday for all citizens, killed abortion, and got us to stand up to the Mexicans….He’s definitely gonna be the next president. “
“She’s probably the best shot in the class,” I said, realizing I’d already said too much.
My father was suspicious, and he stirred in his easy chair, leaning forward.
“I met her,” said my mother. “She’s a nice girl.”
I gave things a few seconds to settle down and then announced I was going to take the dog for a walk. As I passed my mother, unnoticed by my dad, she grabbed my hand and gave it a quick squeeze.
Back at school in January, there was a lot to do. I went to the senior class meetings, but didn’t say anything. They decided for our Act of Humanity (required of every senior class), we would have a blood drive. For the senior trip, we decided to keep it cheap, as pretty much everyone’s parents were broke. A day trip to Bash Lake. “Sounds stale,” said Bryce, “but if we bring enough alcohol and weed, it’ll be okay.” Mrs. Cloder, our faculty adviser, aimed at him, said, “Arrivederci, baby,” and gave him two Saturday detentions. The event that overshadowed all the others, though, was the upcoming prom. My mother helped me make my dress. She was awesome on the sewing machine. It was turquoise satin, short-sleeved, mid-length. I told my parents I had no date, but was just going solo. Constance and I had made plans. We knew from all the weeks of mandatory Sunday mass—the pastor actually spitting, he was so worked up over what he called “unnatural love”—that we couldn’t go as a couple. She cared more than I did. I just tried to forget about it.
When the good weather of spring hit, people got giddy and tense. There were accidents. In homeroom one bright morning, Darcy dropped her bag on her desk, and the Derringer inside went off and took out Ralph Babb’s right eye. He lived, but when he came back to school, his head was kind of caved in and he had a bad fake eye that looked like a kid drew it. It only stared straight ahead. Another was when Mr. Hallibet got angry because everybody’d gotten into the habit of challenging his current events lectures after seeing Constance in action. He yelled for us all to shut up and accidentally squeezed off a round. Luckily for us, the gun was pointed at the ceiling. Mr. Gosh, though, who was sitting in the room a floor above, directly over Hallibet, had to have buckshot taken out of his ass. When he returned to school from a week off, he sweated more than ever.
Mixed in with the usual spring fever, there was all kinds of drama over who was going to the prom with who. Fistfights, girl fights, plenty of drawn guns but not for comedy. I noticed that the King of Vermont was getting wackier the more people refused to notice him. When I left my sixth-period class to use the bathroom, I saw him out on the soccer field from the upstairs hallway window. He turned the stun gun on himself and shot the two darts with wires into his own chest. It knocked him down fast, and he was twitching on the ground. I went and took a piss. When I passed the window again, he was gone. He’d started bringing alcohol to school; and at lunch, where again we were back by the woods hanging out, he’d drink a Red Bull and a half pint of vodka.
Right around that time, I met Constance at the town library one night. I had nothing to do, but she had to write a paper. When I arrived, she’d put the paper away and was reading. I asked her what the book was. She told me, “Plato.”
“Good story?” I asked.
She explained it wasn’t a novel, but a book about ideas. “You see,” she said, “there’s a cave and this guy gets chained up inside so that he can’t turn around or move, but can only stare at the back wall. There’s a fire in the cave behind him and it casts his shadow on the wall he faces. That play of light and shadow is the sum total of his reality.”
I nodded and listened as long as I could. Constance was so wrapped up in explaining, she looked beautiful, but I didn’t want to listen anymore. I checked over my shoulder to see if anyone was around. When I saw we were alone, I quickly leaned forward and kissed her on the lips. She smiled and said, “Let’s get out of here.”
On a warm day in mid May, we had the blood drive. I got there early and gave blood. The nurses, who were really nice, told me to sit for a while and they gave me orange juice and cookies. I thought about becoming a nurse for maybe like five whole minutes. Other kids showed up and gave blood, and I stuck around to help sign them up. Cody came and watched but wouldn’t give. “Fuck the dying,” I heard him say. “Nobody gets my blood but me.” After that, a few other boys decided not to give either. Whatever. Then at lunch, the King of Vermont was drinking his Red Bull and vodka, and I think because he’d given blood, he was really blasted. He went around threatening to stun people in their private parts.
After lunch, in Mrs. Cloder’s class, where we sat at long tables in a rectangle that formed in front of her desk, Wisner took the seat straight across from her. I was two seats down from him, toward the windows. Class started, and the first thing Mrs. Cloder said before she even got out of her seat, was to the King. “Get that foolish jar off the table.” We all looked over. Wisner stared, the mist swirled inside the glass. He pushed his seat back and stood up, cradling the jar in one arm and drawing his stun gun. “Sit down, Scotty,” she said, and leveled her short barrel at him. I could see her finger tightening on the trigger. A few seconds passed, and then one by one, all the kids drew their weapons, but nobody was sure whether to aim at Mrs. Cloder or the King, so about half did one and half the other. I never even opened my lunch box, afraid to make a sudden move.
“Put down your gun and back slowly away from the table,” said Mrs. Cloder.
“When you meet the Devil, give him my regards,” said Wisner, but as he pulled the trigger, Mrs. Cloder fired. The breaching slug blew a hole in the King of Vermont’s chest, slamming him against the back wall in a cloud of blood. The jar shattered, and glass flew. McKenzie, who was sitting next to Wisner, screamed as the shards dug into her face. I don’t know if she shot or if the gun just went off, but her bullet hit Mrs. Cloder in the shoulder and spun her out of her chair onto the ground. She groaned and rolled back and forth. Meanwhile, Wisner’s stun gun darts had gone wild, struck Chucky Durr in the forehead, one over each eye, and in his electrified shaking, his gun went off and put a round right into Melanie Storte’s Adam’s apple. Blood poured out as she dropped her own gun and brought her hands to her gurgling neck. Melanie was Cody St. John’s “current ho,” as he called her, and he didn’t think twice but fanned the hammer of his pistol, putting three shots into Chucky, who fell over on the floor like a bag of potatoes. Chucky’s cousin, Meleeba, shot Cody in the side of the head, and he went down screaming as smoke poured from the hole above his left ear. One of Cody’s crew shot Meleeba, and then I couldn’t keep track anymore. Bullets whizzed by my head, blood was spurting everywhere. Kids were falling like pins at the bowling alley. Mrs. Cloder clawed her way back into her seat, lifted the gun, and aimed it. Whoever was left fired on her and then she fired, another shotgun blast, like an explosion. When the ringing in my ears went away, the room was perfectly quiet but for the drip of blood and the ticking of the wall clock. Smoke hung in the air, and I thought of the King of Vermont’s escaped souls. During the entire thing, I’d not moved a single finger.
The cops were there before I could get myself out of the chair. They wrapped a blanket around me and led me down to the principal’s office. I was in a daze for a while but could feel them moving around me and could hear them talking. Then my mother was there, and the cop was handing me a cup of orange juice. They asked if they could talk to me, and my mother left it up to me. I told them everything, exactly how it went down. I started with the blood drive. They tested me for gunpowder to see if there was any on my hands. I told them my gun was back in the classroom in my lunch box, under the table, and it hadn’t been fired since the summer, the last time I went to the range with my dad.
It was all over the news. I was all over the news. A full one-third of Bascombe High’s senior class was killed in the shoot-out. The only one in Mrs. Cloder’s class besides me to survive was McKenzie, and the flying glass made her No-face Batkin.
Senator Meets showed up at the school three days later and got his picture taken handing me an award. I never really knew what it was for. Constance whispered, “They give you a fucking award if you live through it,” and laughed. In Meets’s speech to the assembled community, he blamed the blood drive for the incident. He proclaimed Mrs. Cloder a hero, and ended by reminding everyone, “If these kids were working, they’d have no time for this.”
The class trip was called off, out of respect for the dead. Two weeks later, I went to the prom. It was to be held in the gymnasium. My dad drove me. When we pulled into the parking lot, it was empty.
“You must be early,” he said, and handed me the corsage I’d asked him to get—a white orchid.
“Thanks,” I said, and gave him a kiss on the cheek. As I opened the door to get out, he put his hand on my elbow. I turned, and he was holding the gun.
“You’ll need this,” he said.
