I Swear I'll Make It Up to You (6 page)

We stayed awake the entire night. My mom arrived in the morning to bring me home to New Hampshire. The campus had been locked down, so my mother had to park beyond the front gate, then check in with police before she was allowed to come and get me. As we were walking off campus to her minivan, a cluster of reporters was waiting just beyond the gates. It was 1992, a long time before Columbine or Virginia Tech or Newtown; the media arrived in droves.

“You don't have to say anything if you don't want to,” my mom said. “And we don't need to be polite. We can just walk right through them.”

The minute we stepped off campus, we were surrounded. My mom tried to pull me through, but I stopped her. We had to make some good come of this.

I told the reporters that everything Wayne had done, right up until he pulled the trigger, was perfectly legal, and that that was wrong. A kid shouldn't be able to buy an assault weapon, a weapon designed to kill the most human beings in the smallest amount of time possible. Hit with a barrage of questions, I let it slip that I had known it was Wayne the instant I had heard the
shots, then climbed into the back of my mom's Ford Aerostar for the long drive home.

I couldn't talk. I couldn't cry. But as we drove further and further from Simon's Rock, my body began to realize that I was safe. My heart slowed. The shooting was no longer
happening
; it was something that had happened. I tried to sleep. But as the terror of the night before began to dissipate and I began to process what had taken place, horror rose up in its place. My mind raced.

I had known Wayne was violent. I had known he was looking for a gun. I had even seen him early the night of the shooting. I could have stopped him. I should have stopped him. Why hadn't I stopped him? I had nearly died. Had I nearly died? I should have died.

Earlier that semester, we had joked about what we wanted our last words to be. Something juvenile and frustrating, like “The money is buried under . . .” then trailing off. What about just the cryptic and classic “knock knock”? What got the biggest laugh was when someone suggested that the perfect sign-off would be “I'm dying.” As Galen bled out in the library atrium, those had been his final words.

One day at lunch, we had gotten into a conversation about Charles Whitman, the disaffected college student who had climbed the bell tower at his university, killing sixteen people and wounding thirty-two others before he was killed. Whitman had been a punk, we decided. The way to maximize the body count would be to wait till everyone was gathered in one place—the dining hall at lunch, say—then seal off the exits and kill them all. (Seven years later, this would be the exact approach Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold took at Columbine.)

Even if I put all that on the irreverent friends I'd made at Simon's Rock, I'd fantasized about violence on my own. Tashina is First Nation, descended from the Cree Tribe on the Big River Reserve in Saskatchewan. The mascot at our high school, Sanborn Regional High, was the Indian. Our school was too poor to field a
football team, but the windbreakers of our soccer and field hockey teams were emblazoned with the grim face of a cartoon Indian in a stereotypical Lakota Sioux eagle-feather warbonnet.

Even at thirteen, I had understood that Indian Festival, our fall spirit rally of war whooping and face painting and toy tomahawks, was disrespectful white trash bullshit. By my sophomore year, I had alienated enough classmates that Indian Festival became the backdrop for a colorful fantasy.

I conjured a scenario in which I had been put in charge of our class's float for the parade. The final day of Indian Festival, the float was revealed to hold only a small teepee, out of which emerged Tashina, in the traditional war dress of her people. She muttered an ancient incantation, a song to “free the blood” that slowly and painfully burst the veins of all the kids in my high school. I, of course, would be spared, and I had envisioned the two of us gleefully bathing in the blood of our dying classmates.

It's not just that I could or should have stopped Wayne or should have died. I had basically willed the shooting to happen. My mother had wept over me when she picked me up. Galen's parents must have gone insane with grief. How could I have been so stupid, so selfish, so horrible? I was as guilty of Galen's and Nacunan's murders as Wayne Lo. I wanted to tell my mom, to confess my sins, to get that sickening knowledge out of my heart, but I couldn't yet speak. It was okay—we had time. Tomorrow I would be able to talk. I would tell her, and she would listen.

Each winter, my mother wrote a Christmas letter to her sixteen brothers and sisters and all her faraway friends, updating them on the events of the year and wishing them happy holidays. That night, still not having slept, I noticed my mother's annual family Christmas letter printed out on the pine dining room table my father had built. I picked it up and, walking into the living room, began to read it.

My father had been working out in Vancouver since the spring. It had been our understanding that we would be joining him there.
In the letter, my mother revealed that she and my father were getting a divorce.

I could not breathe. I fell to the floor. Now the tears came, so hard and so fast that I felt like I was drowning.

The next night, I pulled on my hat and coat and stepped out into the winter night. I exhaled a big, steamy breath and watched it swirl in the moonlight for a second before it disappeared. I felt the best I had since the shooting, the best I'd felt in a long time. I didn't yet feel relief, as such, but anticipation of relief, like I'd finally got an appointment to have the dentist pull a rotten tooth that had been causing me pain for years. I started walking.

I hiked the couple of miles out to the stone bridge that arched over the railway tracks on the way to the rope swing, the highest point within walking distance. I climbed up on the low retaining wall. It wasn't that far to the train tracks below. I'd have to go down head first in order to actually die and not just fuck myself up.

It was curiously cosmic when you thought about it. It took twenty-four hours for the world to spin on its axis, and it had taken twenty-four hours for my world to turn on its head. I waited for the sound of a car approaching, which would be my cue to jump. Just one quick, brave swan dive to end my life. I closed my eyes. In my mind, I could see Chuong, flying off the end of the rope swing, floating through the air, and then disappearing forever.

No car came. I waited. Still, no car.

I looked down into the darkness and saw nothing.

My father was a coward, abandoning us the minute he saw his chance. To give up now, to tap out, to submit, would be to admit that I was a coward like him.

That was no way to live and a worse way to die. Things were terrible now, this was true. This was the absolute worst. Things could never again be as hard or as painful as they were on this desolate night. But if I could get through this . . .

Galen hadn't wanted to die. He had wanted very much to live. He had fought to hang on to his life, fought to the very end. He had been seventeen, a whole life of late-night smoking and pontificating and gently mocking idiots like me ahead of him. Gifted as he had been at math and physics, Galen had wanted to be a poet. If he were here, standing on this ledge with me, he would roll his eyes, ask me what kind of asshole I was, then turn around and go home.

Carefully, I got back down off the low rock wall at the edge of the bridge. Then I turned around and started walking. You had to always keep trying, keep fighting; you had to never ever, ever,
ever
give up. I pulled my hat on tighter and hunched my jacket up around my ears. It was cold out, and I had a long way to go to get back home.

Despite Wayne Lo's killing spree, despite the impending divorce, against all reason, my parents elected to proceed with our planned family Christmas vacation at a WASP-y little ski resort in Pagosa Springs, Colorado. The tickets were bought and paid for, and we didn't waste anything in our family.

I understood from the movies that if you punched a guy with a roll of quarters in your hand, you would break his jaw. Days before the flight to Denver, I got my mother to drive me downtown, and I dutifully got a roll of quarters out of the bank while she waited in the Aerostar minivan. “For the video games,” I told her. I intended to knock my father out.

I once asked my mother why my father, who had tried unsuccessfully to prevent us from getting each of our four dogs, didn't like them. She looked puzzled for a second, then explained that it wasn't because he didn't like dogs. When Dad had been a boy, maybe eight or nine, he'd had a dog he loved dearly, a cocker spaniel named Mickey. One day, another dog attacked and killed Mickey. The man who owned the other dog came over to Dad's house with his dog to apologize to Dad's father. Dad ran into the
house, got a rifle, pointed it out the window, and shot and killed the other man's dog.

The story had blown my mind. Gleaning a moral from it had been impossible. My entire life, my parents had told us that if someone hit you, you weren't supposed to hit back; you were supposed to tell a teacher so the person wouldn't do it again. Didn't my father's actions run completely counter to this? But in the days after I got the news of my father's betrayal, I finally figured it out: If someone hurt you, you took it. But if that person hurt someone you loved, you summoned up all the destructive power in your reach, and you took bloody revenge.

When Tashina spied my dad and Tatyana waiting glumly for us at baggage claim in Denver, I wrapped the fingers of my right hand tightly around the roll of quarters. Dad looked grievously tired and beaten down. When he reached out to hug me, I stepped back and clenched my fist. In that instant, he looked so wounded that I froze.

I couldn't bring myself to punch him. I loved him. It made me hate myself. I wasn't man enough to swing on the coward who had been my hero. So I was a coward too.

Incredibly, my parents slept in the same room. My mother was constantly on the verge of tears, as clingy as my father was distant. I retreated into my music, listened to Dinosaur Jr. and Fugazi and Bob Dylan obsessively, fruitlessly searching obtuse rock lyrics for some explanation.

I called my father out at dinner one night, accusing him of competing with me for everything my entire life, telling him the contest he had wanted so badly was over, that he was an old man and that I had won. I could outrun him, outswim him, and if he wanted to step outside, he would find out that I could outfight him. Tatyana yelled at me to shut up. She was his favorite, she always had been, but backing him up on this? I hated her for it, as I hated the old man for not responding, for just standing there with his arms folded, like I had when I was getting taunted in grade school.

Tashina, who'd now had three parents completely flake out on her, fled the dinner table. When things settled down, Tatyana and I found her sitting on the bed in the girls' shared room. Tashina asked us if we ever thought about just walking out to the middle of a snowy field and lying down there and never moving again. In a rare moment of accord, Tatyana and I both instantly swore that we would never abandon Tashina, that she would always have us.

At my mother's insistence, we devoted one evening to watching
The Prince of Tides
. Sitting there in the darkness, the movie flickering before us, the silence only broken by my mother's sniffling, I didn't want to cry or scream or howl but merely to flick a switch, like turning off the TV: the world would fade, then dwindle down to a tiny white dot, then finally disappear.

No one in my family said a word to me about the shooting.