Nevermind by Matt Liebowitz

I’ve been thinking a lot about Kurt Cobain. Not so much how he ended it, that lonely moment above the garage, surrounded by impenetrably dense, green, tall trees, surrounded by nobody. Not that, as I sit in the stall nearest the far window, the toilet closed, my knees bent so my Target sneakers don’t show beneath the door.

More what I’m thinking about are his stomach pains, chronic like the doctors say mine are, undiagnosed officially, and constantly changing. I’m thinking about that, and how something can just kind of eat at you, play whatever games it wants with your insides until you’re torn up and ragged, nothing left. And how maybe you’d almost even welcome it, not death exactly, but just something else. I’m wearing a “Nevermind” tee shirt, too, which I’m sure is part of it, the one with the naked baby and the dollar bill, though I’ve put a piece of masking tape over the penis to avoid trouble.

I click my new mechanical pencil and write down in my composition notebook a few more ways I feel tragic, then flush and wash and even though the room is empty I stash the notebook in my locker and go back to Spanish, where we review infinitive verbs for a bit.

I sit close to the front, near enough to Senora Marquez that she can see my notes, so whatever I daydream in class has to stay in my head until the bell rings.

Sometimes, I think, after she calls on me and I know she won’t for a while, it’s good to let the worries and hopes and all of it mix together, let the Spanish and English mix together for a while, the gut pains and tingly fingers and the crush on Diego, my parents trying to gossip with me at dinner, my sister’s shoes I stole and feel bad about, let it all boil. And then when I write it down finally it’s got that mix in it, it’s all sort of combined and makes a little more sense, or at least the focus isn’t so narrow. Who wants to read only about pain?

In the hallway after class this kid Leonard who has a locker three up from mine is looking at me. His muscles are showing beneath his white short-sleeve polo. His parents and older brother pick strawberries like 40 minutes inland and he works there on the weekends and some days even leaves after lunch. His hair is parted on the other side and slicked back.

“Did you hear about Michaela’s brother?”

“No,” I say, grabbing my notebook and math binder, putting my laptop in my backpack because Mr. Sisson gives detentions if he even sees a computer. Leonard just stands there with a stupid half grin. “What, did he finally get out of jail?”

He shuffles quickly back to his locker to get a book. “He wasn’t even in jail,” he says quietly, “it was a misdemeanor, a kind of misunderstanding with the mechanic.”

“Okay.”

“Yeah, he got probation, but that was like months ago, why are we even talking about this?”

“Yeah I know,” I say.

“No, I – I mean, he got arrested last night late. Or early this morning.”

“Huh?”

“Yeah,” Leonard says, “I guess like the FBI or whoever had been watching him for weeks – months, maybe – and figured out he had this whole plan to shoot up the school.”

“Shit,” I say, as the first bell rings. “Jesus, so what happened?” We both start walking down the hall even though I know Leonard has environmental bio with Diego now, downstairs and the opposite way.

“Yeah, he apparently had a list and everything.” Leonard stops suddenly. Kids have to pick a side of him to go around. “We were on it, Steph. You and me, both of us.”

“Where’d you hear this?” I ask, and he’s got no answer.

The other bell rings and a sharp pain pulses out from my stomach, shoots out like a bullet, like so many bullets, really is the right way of saying it, lodging itself beside my belly button and I want to throw up, like Kurt Cobain was doing all those weeks and months and years before.

*

The news goes fast and in all directions, so by lunch it’s in snippets of conversation everyone overhears; and it’s in the pizza and it’s in the sauce; it’s dripping from brown paper bags; it’s in the foil wrapped sandwiches; the condensation wetting Coke cans; the orange seeds spit out on the floor; it’s right there in the weak moustaches of the junior boys, each tight sharp sprout loaded with information and fear; it’s crackling from the frizz and pomp of my friend Shannon’s hair; it’s in the elastic headband that keeps it all under control.

I can feel eyes on me, but those same eyes are looking at other tables, other boys, other girls. Diego gets up to refill his water bottle and I devise a quick plan to be somewhere else when he gets back and then to observe if he notices I’ve moved. I’d hide behind something, but there’s nothing to hide behind and the plan is screwed. I split a cookie in half and then end up eating both sides.

“So this list,” Shannon says.

“Jesus,” I say, because what else is there?

“I’ve never even met Braden’s brother. Heard he was home schooled or something?”

“Wasn’t it Michaela’s brother? That’s what Leonard told me, that it was Michaela’s older brother, what’s his name.”

“Huh?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Tyler? Taylor? Trevor, something like that?”

On the PA system comes Principal Sandersson’s voice, surprisingly clear. There will be an assembly at 2:30 in the gym. Sit on the bleachers by grade. 

Math goes by. Complex shapes, pi m squared, conical surface area. How much can this cylinder hold? On to English and Hamlet signing off the letter to Ophelia “Whilst this machine is to him.” I’m not looking for a nice string and narrative to tie everything together – I don’t want to do this for real despite what my creative writing teacher says — but my notebook, as I put stars around the quote, is proof, if you’re open to it, that life and love and death are everywhere, in everything, connected in innumerable ways, fitting into shapes unforeseen, bending and reflecting in splinters and shards of glass from a bedside mirror. Outside, a harsh early September heat wave simmers puddles of oil in the parking lot.

A special bell rings for the assembly. As we’re filing in, Shannon leans in and says, “I heard like 700 people were on the list. That’s crazy, right? That many?”

I start to laugh, first tentative and then it erupts from somewhere deeper as we’re pushed along with our classmates, many of whom we’ve gone to school with since we were just able to talk and walk. “Shannon, there are only 80 kids in our grade, and what, like 70 juniors? The whole school has, what, 350 kids?” I’m smiling. She looks confused, terrified. The neon exit sign flickers as we sit. The basketball hoops are raised on hydraulics, tucked neatly out of sight. “Nobody makes a list with 700 people on it. Nobody even knows 700 people. Do you?”

Shannon looks at her fingers. Her nails are painted blue but they’re chipping.

“I couldn’t make a list of 100 people if I had half the day,” I say, “and that’s including family.”

*

Principal Sandersson talks for a few minutes but honestly, I don’t listen too close. There’s a sense of comfort and peace surging through me, and it’s a new feeling and I want to embrace it, to live in it. Reports of an arrest are accurate, but there is no list, there never was a list. Rumors only, Sandersson assures the crowd. I see the same look of relief on my English teacher, his hands in his pockets as he takes repeated deep breaths. It was weapons related, we find out, but that’s all Principal Sandersson says he’s legally allowed to tell us.

“No list, no school shooting, none of that,” he says again before the final bell rings and we leave for whatever it is we all do after school: shoot hoops, braid hair, ride horses, pick strawberries with our parents, convince ourselves there’s no shooter, no threat, there never was one, no boy with a list, that it will happen somewhere, I mean, obviously, but that somewhere won’t be here, and your stomach problems are all you’ve got to worry about.

Matt Liebowitz

Image: Empty school corridor with shiny lino tiled floor and a row of yellow lockers from pixabay.com

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