their lives are – so short that their dreams can only possibly be a full mirroring of their waking lives. So I guess for a squirrel, being awake and being asleep are the same thing. Maybe when you die young it’s like that, too. A baby’s dream would only be the same as being awake – teenagers, too, to some extent. As I’ve said, I’m grasping here for some solace.
Lord,
I know I don’t have a fish sticker, or whatever it is I’m supposed to have on my car bumper, like all those stuck-up kids who think they’re holier than Thou, but I also don’t think they have some sort of express lane to speak to You, so I imagine You’re hearing this okay. I guess my question to You is whether or not You get to torture those evil bastards who did the killings, or if it’s purely the devil’s job and You subcontract it out. Is there any way I can help torture them from down here on earth? Just give me a sign and I’m in.
What I now find odd is how Jason and I both assumed our marriage had to be a secret. It wasn’t from shame, and it wasn’t from fear, because eighteen is eighteen (well, almost) and the law’s the law, so in the eyes of the taxman and the Lord, we could go at it like rabbits all day as long as we paid our taxes and made a few babies along the way. Sometimes life, when laid out plainly like this, can seem so simple.
What appealed to me was that this marriage was something the two of us could have entirely to ourselves, like being the only two guests in a luxury hotel. I knew that if we got engaged and waited until after high school to marry, our marriage would become something else – ours, yes, but not quite ours, either. There would be presents and sex lectures and unwanted intrusions. Who needs all that? And in any event, I had no pictures in my head of life after high school. My girlfriends all wanted to go to Hawaii or California and drive sports cars and, if I correctly read between the lines on the yearbook questionnaires they submitted, have serial monogamous relations with Youth Alive! guys that didn’t necessarily end in marriage. The best I could see for myself was a house, a kid or two, some chicken noodle soup at three in the afternoon while standing at the kitchen sink watching clouds unfurl coastward from Vancouver Island.
I was sure that whatever Jason did for a living would amply fulfill us both – an unpopular sentiment among girls my age. Jason once halfheartedly inquired as to my career ambitions, and when he was certain I had none, he was relieved. His family – churchier than Thou – looked down on girls who worked. If I was ever going to get a job, it would only be to annoy them, his parents – his dad, mostly. He was a mean, dried-out fart who defied charity, and who used religion as a foil to justify his undesirable character traits. His cheapness became thrift; his lack of curiosity about the world and his contempt for new ideas were called being traditional.
Jason’s mother was, well, there’s no way around it, a bit drunk the few times I met her. I don’t think she liked the way her life had played out. Who am I to judge? How the two of them procreated a sweetie-pie like Jason remains one of God’s true mysteries.
If nothing else, relating the step-by-step course of events in the cafeteria allows me to comprehend how distanced from the world I’m feeling now – how quickly the world is pulling away. And for this reason I’ll continue.
After the first dozen shots, the fire alarm went off. Mitchell Van Waters walked to the main cafeteria doors, said, “Goddammit,” and fired into the hall, blasting out the bell ringing there. Jeremy Kyriakis took out the cafeteria’s fire bell in three shots, after which a hail of drywall particles pinged and rattled throughout the otherwise silent room. Beneath the tables we could still hear fire bells ringing from deep within the school’s bowels, bells that would ring past sunset since the RCMP would hold off disabling the central OFF switch for fear of tripping homemade bombs placed throughout the school – bombs made of benzene and powdered swimming-pool cleaner. Wait – how did I know that combo? Oh yes, Mitchell Van Waters’s contribution to the science fair: “Getting the Most Bang for Your Buck.” It was in last year’s yearbook.
Back to the cafeteria.
Back to me and three hundred other students under the tables, either dead or playing dead, scrunching themselves into tiny balls. Back to six work boots clomping on the polished putty-colored linoleum, and the sounds of ambulances and RCMP cruisers whooping schoolward, a little too little, a little too late.
I began doing a numbers game in my head. Three hundred people divided among three gunmen makes a hundred victims per gunman. If they were going to kill us all, it would take a bit of time, so I figured my chances of making it were better than I’d first supposed. But geographically we were in a bad spot: the center of the room, the visual and architectural core of the place, as well as the nexus of any high school’s social ambition and peer envy. Were people envious of Alivers!? We were basically invisible in the school. A few students might have thought we were small-minded and clique-ish, and to be honest, Youth Alive! members were. But I wasn’t. In general, as I walked about the school I affected a calm, composed smile. I did this not because I wanted to be everyone’s friend – or to avoid making enemies – but simply because it was easier and I didn’t need to interact. A bland smile is like a green light at an intersection – it feels good when you get one, but you forget it the moment you’re past it.
Dear Lord,
If You organized a massacre just to make people have doubts, then maybe You ought to consider other ways of doing things. A high school massacre? Kids with pimento loaf sandwiches and cans of Orange Crush? I don’t think You would orchestrate something like this. A massacre in a high school cafeteria can only indicate Your absence – that for some reason, in some manner, You chose to absent Yourself from the room. Forsake it, actually.
Cheryl – the pretty girl who was the last one to be shot. She wrote that in her binder, didn’t she? “God is nowhere.” Maybe she was right.
Dear God,
I’m out of prayers, so that just leaves talking. It’s hard for me to believe other people are feeling as intensely as I do, and as bad as I do. But then, if we’re all as messed up as I am, that scares me into thinking that the world’s all going to go to pieces, and what sort of world would that be? A zoo.
I keep to myself mostly. I can’t sleep or eat. TV stinks. School’s closed for a while yet. I smoked pot and it wasn’t a good idea. I walk around in a daze and it’s like the opposite of drugs, because drugs are supposed to make you feel good, but this only makes me feel bad.
I was walking down at the mall, and suddenly I started hitting myself in the head because I thought I could bash away the feelings. And the thing is, everybody in the mall looked as if they knew what I was doing, and no one flipped out.
Anyway, this is where I stand now. I’m not sure this was a prayer. I don’t know what it was.
I’ve not been too specific about my life and my particulars, but by now you must have gleaned a few things about who I was – Cheryl Anway. The papers are blanketing the world with my most recent yearbook photo, and if you’ve seen it then you’ll know I was a cliché girl next door: darkish blond hair cut in a way that’ll probably look stupid to future students, with a thin face and, on the day the photos were taken, no pimples – how often did that ever happen? In the photo I look old for seventeen. I’m smiling the smile I used when passing people in the halls without having to speak to them.
The description accompanying my photo is along the lines of “Cheryl was a good student, friendly and popular” – and that’s about it. What a waste of seventeen years. Or is that just my selfish heart applying standards of the world to a soul that’s eternal? It is. But by seventeen, nobody ever accomplishes anything, do they? Joan of Arc? Anne Frank? And maybe some musicians and actresses. I’d really like to ask God why it is that we don’t accomplish anything until we’re at least twenty. Why the wait? I think we should be born ten years old, and then after a year turn twenty – just get it over with, like dogs do. We ought to be born running.
Chris and I had a dog, a spaniel named Sterling. We adored Sterling, but Sterling adored