3:00 a.m.
I dreamed about my brother again. Not about IT, but about the Other Thing. I could hear Jesse screaming. I tried to run toward him, but it was like I was running through pea soup. Then I heard the sound of duct tape being pulled off a roll.
Dad woke me up. He said I was yelling in my sleep.
4:00 a.m.
Now Dad and I are both in the living room, watching TV. I’m in my pj’s and Dad’s wearing the robe Mom made him a zillion Christmases ago. It’s made of navy blue velour, with a patch on the chest that says World’s Greatest Dad.
It’s a strange TV landscape at 4:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning. Among the infomercials, we’ve found an old black-and-white movie called Bringing up Baby. The baby is a tiger. Seriously. It stars some famous dead actors. Their lines are fast and funny, but I still feel a bit anxious that one of them might get mauled to death by the tiger at any moment. It doesn’t seem like that kind of movie, but sometimes you can be in for a rude surprise.
6:00 a.m.
Phew. Nobody was mauled. I liked that movie.
Wouldn’t it be amazing if you could write the movie script for your own life? I guess it would have lots of boring bits. But at least you could write yourself a happy ending.
Later
After Dad and I got up for real at around eleven, we went shopping for supplies for our earthquake kit. We already have a lot of items, like sleeping bags and flashlights and a good first-aid kit, because of all the camping we’ve done. But today we were after food. We drove to an outdoor store called the Three Vets and stocked up on Meals-Ready-to-Eat (MRE’s as they’re called in the military). You can just cut open the bag and squeeze the food right into your mouth if you want. Dad and I tried a bag of corned beef hash when we got home, and it wasn’t half-bad.
“We’ll keep the kit in the hall closet,” Dad said as he put the MRE’s into a huge plastic bin along with our other supplies. “They say you should keep it near the front door so you can grab it on your way out.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that if we do have an earthquake, we’ll have bigger things to worry about than trying to grab our kit, like the third and fourth floors collapsing on top of us.
Dad has been obsessed with building this kit from the moment we moved here. Don’t get me wrong: We should have an earthquake kit, living in BC. But we never had a kit in Port Salish. My parents never got around to it.
I don’t need a degree in psychology to know what Cecil would say: Your father couldn’t stop the first disaster, so now he’s trying to plan ahead for the next disaster so the outcome won’t be as devastating.
See, Dad thinks the first disaster was his fault.
It was his gun.
Dad owned an old hunting rifle that had belonged to my grandpa Kaspar Larsen, who died before I was born. (That is what the K stands for in my name, but I don’t advertise it.) Once a year, during deer season, Dad would go hunting with a few of his buddies. He must have shot a few deer because I remember eating venison once in a while.
He was very careful with the gun. It was locked away in a special cabinet. He followed all the safety instructions. But Jesse must’ve figured out where he kept the key. And on June 1st, Jesse got the key and opened the cabinet and took out the rifle before the rest of us woke up. He also knew where Dad kept the bullets. He loaded the rifle – we found out later he’d visited a website to learn how – and placed it in his gym bag. He left while we were still sleeping. We found a note on the kitchen table: Gone to school early. I’m sorry. Love you. Jesse.
The sorry part was weird. The love you part was even weirder.
When he got to school, he carried the gym bag with him to his first class. How do I know this? I know because I can read, and the papers interviewed anyone and everyone who’d seen my brother that day. They all said he acted the same as always, which meant he didn’t talk to anyone. He kept to himself.
Except he carried the gym bag with him, and he didn’t even have gym that day.
Just before second period, Jesse saw Scott Marlin at his locker. He put the bag on the floor and took out the rifle.
“Hey, Scott,” he said.
If Scott had known what was coming, he might have chosen his words more carefully for once in his life. But he didn’t. “Did I say you could speak to me, Ballsack?”
While all of this was unfolding at the high school, I was right down the block at the elementary school. We’d just finished gym, where we were square-dancing with the girls. I had “do-si-doed” with Jodie. The bell rang for lunch, and we were all about to head outside when the principal’s voice came on the speaker system. She told us we were forbidden to leave the school; we were in lockdown.
We were sent back to our classrooms. At first, it was kind of fun; we were all trying to guess what might be happening outside. Jason thought it was a drug bust nearby. Emily thought it might be a terrorist attack. Then Anna checked her phone.
You weren’t allowed to use any electronic devices during lockdown, but Anna did anyway. Suddenly she said, “There’s been a shooting at the high school.” That was all the information she had, found on a local news website. Our teacher yelled at her, then took away her phone.
And it wasn’t kind of fun anymore. A lot of us had brothers and sisters at the high school. We had no idea what was going on, or how bad it was. Jodie started to cry. I held her hand.
I know what she was thinking, because I was thinking it, too: What if my brother is hurt? I never – not once – imagined that my brother was the shooter.
About an hour later, our principal came to the classroom door; some police officers stood behind her. “Jodie Marlin and Henry Larsen, can you come with me, please?” Her voice was shaking.
Jodie started to cry again. I was numb. When we got outside, one officer directed Jodie to her car; another officer directed me to his. “Can we go together?” I asked. The cop shook his head.
When we got to the station, I was brought into a room where my parents sat. I didn’t need to be a genius to know something awful had happened; but it still didn’t occur to me that my brother was behind it. When they told me, I didn’t believe it. Then I was whisked out of the room so the police could give Mom and Dad the grisly details.
My parents tried to shield me from the worst of it. But all you have to do is a Google search and a whole pile of articles pop up. I couldn’t stop myself. Whenever they were out of the house, which was a lot in those first couple of weeks, I read everything I could find. That’s how I found out that after Jesse shot Scott in the chest, Scott’s friends tried their best to stop the bleeding. It’s also how I found out that my brother’s body was discovered under the stairwell a minute later. He’d shot himself in the head.
I learned other things I hadn’t known before, like that Scott had wanted to join the Canadian Armed Forces after high school. Many articles said he was devoted to his two younger sisters, but I already knew that because one of his sisters was my best friend, Jodie.
I just had a chest pain. Can you have a heart attack when you’re thirteen?
Anyway. I respected the local reporter because he also dug up a lot of stuff about the constant bullying my brother had put up with, including some incidents my parents and I had never heard about: The “Jesse Larsen’s a Faggot” fan page on Facebook that quickly got shut down, but not before Jesse saw it – and the fifty-two “fans” it had acquired in less than a week; the “accidental” tripping in the hallway that sent him to the hospital for stitches (we knew about the stitches, of course, but not that Scott had sent him head-first into the water fountain); the dog poop Jesse found in his locker one day. That reporter looked at the story from all sides. But a lot of other articles I read were peppered with lies. Some so-called “experts,” people who didn’t even know us, suggested that my parents must have been abusive, or absent, or stupid.
These people were wrong. From the beginning of high school, my parents worried about Jesse all the time. They talked to the guidance counselor and to our family doctor a million times. Mom even took Jesse to a therapist once, but Jesse didn’t like her and refused to go back. Mom had him on a waiting list for another one, but then IT happened, and the appointment was no longer necessary.
The lies that hurt the most were the ones that were told by people we knew. One of our neighbors, an old lady named Alice Clayburn, told a reporter that she’d seen us performing witchcraft in our backyard. I wracked my brain over that one. All I could come up with was that once, about three years ago, I’d found a wounded kingfisher with Jodie, and we’d carried it back to my house in an old towel. Jesse and I kept it in the yard and tried to feed it, but it died the next day. So we buried it in the yard while Jesse pretended to be a minister, saying stuff like, “We commit his body to the ground,” which he’d heard on a TV show.
Witchcraft, my butt. And to think that Jesse had mowed that old bag’s lawn two summers in a row. For free!!
Gord Saunders, one of Jesse’s classmates, told a national newspaper that when Jesse was ten, he used to torture cats for fun.
LIE!!!! And the paper printed it!!!! I wanted to find Gord and the reporter after that and give them both the Testicular Claw.
It was like Jesse was one person when he was alive and another after he died. When he was alive, Jesse was the babyface. Scott was the heel. But the day Jesse took Dad’s rifle to school, they switched roles. Scott became the babyface, and Jesse became the heel.
Oh, man. I suddenly get why Cecil seemed so pleased in our last session. I’d been talking about wrestling; he’d been talking about my brother.
One big glaring difference, Cecil.
On “Saturday Night Smash-Up,” everyone comes out of it alive.