We Need to Talk About Kevin

by Lionel Shriver

in a country that so famously has “no sense of history,” as Europeans claim,

It's true though

I suppose that’s a common conceit, that you’ve already been so damaged that damage itself, in its totality, makes you safe.

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Nine, right, seven kids, two adults.

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We’re raising him to know what’s right. Maybe it seems unfair, but you really gotta wonder about the parents.

Wasn’t Mom pretty? Wasn’t Mom brave? Gosh, she went to all those scary countries all by herself! These flashes of my children’s late-night meditations on their mother were gauzy with the very adoration so signally absent from my savage dissection of my own mother.

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“You don’t love me in the same way. It has nothing to do with degree.

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I can’t recall a single trip abroad that, up against it, I have truly wanted to take, that I haven’t in some way dreaded and wanted desperately to get out of.

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You make me feel bad; feeling bad makes me mad; ergo, you make me mad.

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Indeed, just about any stranger could have turned up nine months later. We might as well have left the door unlocked.

A boy is a dangerous animal.

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Maybe by playing ‘Psycho Killer’ we’re feeding him Bad Thoughts.

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In the very instant of his birth, I associated Kevin with my own limitations—with not only suffering, but defeat.

“I believe you’re being straight up about your perception of how hard it is.

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Gravely, my shut-in mother offered to fly to me.

contrast

In a country that doesn’t discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable.

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“I needed to see something you’d done to me, to reach out and touch it. To prove that your malice wasn’t all in my head.” “Yeah,” he said, tickling the scar on his arm again. “Know what you mean.”

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as a military ally, a trusting young girl is worse than nothing, an open left flank.

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More than once you accused me of coddling her,

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“To be really famous in this country, you’ve got to kill somebody.”

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or tired, he was a completely different person. And that’s how I achieved an appreciation for how much energy and commitment it must have taken him the rest of the time to generate this other boy

you ever consider how disappointed he must have been when you accepted the decoy as the real thing?

It’s fucking trite, man. It’s got no class at all, it’s fucking trite.”

he failed to support the now fashionable revenge-of-the-nerds interpretation of these incidents, which were now meant to teach us not stricter gun control but concern for the agonies of the underage outcast.

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Once she had shuffled out of the room, after pausing in the archway and waving with a cupped hand, I caught you rolling your eyes at Kevin.

Hate him

Ten kids get shot in some Des Moines primary school and it’s reported on page six. Eventually any fad gets to be uncool, and thank God at some point hip thirteen-year-olds just won’t want to be seen with a Mark-10 in second period.

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skipped class a couple of times after that, but then I came back and tried to act as if nothing happened since I didn’t want to wreck my grade-point average.” “How?” I murmured under my breath. “By getting another B?” You shot me a glare.

At the time, of course, we had no way of knowing that you would keep Celia, too.

“Why would I not know the context?” He took a single swallow from his glass. “I am the context.”

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“She’s been all over the world, know that? You can hardly name a country where she hasn’t got the T-shirt. Started her own company. Go into any bookstore around here, you’ll see her series. You know, Smelly Foreign Dumps on a Wing and a Prayer? I used to cruise into Barnes and Noble in the mall just to look at all those books. Pretty cool.”

I was touched by that photograph over his bed, and no little chagrined that he hadn’t destroyed it after all (I guess I’ve always assumed the worst).

Screw it, I’ll do it tomorrow. And tomorrow and tomorrow.

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I did think Kevin screamed in his crib out of free-floating rage, and not because he needed feeding. I fiercely believed that when he poked fun at our waitress’s

Passge

“Oh, don’t thank me, thank Kevin,” said John easily. “I’d never heard of the psychosis thing, either. That whole approach was his idea.”

“When you’re putting on a show, you don’t shoot the audience,” he said smoothly, rolling something in his right hand.

“attachment disorder” that his counselors were always retailing at Claverack.