I started teaching again in January, and the feeling didn’t go away. Entering the classroom each morning, after walking from my unreliable Omega through a dim, freezing dawn, I was consumed with a kind of existential terror at the day ahead. Once the day began, it was okay. There were even moments of joy. John Cheever’s “The Swimmer” turned out to be a hit, although the majority of the students were enraged by the ending of the story, by the way it slipped into the surreal. They were literalists, these affluent high school seniors, and they had one foot out of their high school towns and into prestigious colleges, then grad school, then good entry-level jobs in Boston or New York or Washington, DC. They comprehended suburban ennui, but they didn’t want to feel it.
I wish I remembered more about James Pursall but mostly what I recall was a quiet loner who sat at the back of the room. He handed in his assignments, and he would comment during class discussions, but only if I called on him. He had very white skin, dusted with acne, and very black hair that always looked unwashed. The classroom was cold, and I remember he never took off his jacket, a bulky winter parka that was either navy or black. I do remember that before the shooting, I had dubbed him “boy most likely to go on a killing spree” in my mind, picturing compact Russian machine guns suddenly emerging from his puffy winter coat. But I never thought it would really happen.
I do, however, remember Joan Grieve. She sat in the first row, made sure to comment at least once a class, and came to me after tests and essays to see if she could get me to raise her A minus to an A, or her B plus to an A minus. I knew she was a gymnast because the gymnastics team was good that year, and people were talking about them. She wore tights to class a lot, and hooded sweatshirts, and there was always a large water bottle on her desk. What I really remember about her was that she was a watcher, one of the students who kept her eyes firmly on me when I was lecturing or trying to lead a class discussion. She wasn’t the only student who kept their eyes at the front of the class, but it was still rare, most of my students staring into space or directly at their scarred and doodled-on desktops. She watched me when she wasn’t taking notes, and instead of making me feel as though I was making some kind of difference . . . If you reach just one kid . . . it made me feel exposed.
There was one odd incident with Joan, right before the Easter break. I had handed back a pop quiz so, unsurprisingly, Joan came up to me after the class had ended. I was sitting at my desk chair and she was standing, but even so, her head was only a little higher than mine as she argued that the quiz wasn’t entirely fair because I hadn’t been clear that they were supposed to read all the Anne Sexton poems I’d assigned them.
As she was talking, there was one other student still gathering her things in the classroom. Madison Brown was also a gymnast, plus a close friend of Joan’s, and I assumed she was taking her time in order to wait for Joan to plead her case. But once Madison’s giant backpack was zippered up, she slung it over her shoulder and headed for the door. Just before she exited, she turned and said, “Better look out, Mr. K, Joan told me she has the hots for you.”
I rolled my eyes dismissively, hoping to alleviate the embarrassment of the moment, but when I looked at Joan her face had gone red. I thought at first it was embarrassment, but her eyes were on the door that had just swung shut, and I remember thinking it was closer to rage that I was seeing. Still, I got up to prop open the door, hearing Maureen Block’s voice in my head—Never be alone with a student behind a closed door—and when I came back, Joan’s face had returned to a more normal color.
“You don’t need to worry, Mr. Kimball,” she said. “Madison is just being a bitch, pardon my French.”
“I thought you two were close.”
“Who? Madison and me? I mean, she’s on the team, too, but we’re not exactly close. And what she said about me . . . I mean you’re good-looking for a teacher, but you’re not my type.”
I laughed. “Don’t worry about it,” I said, wanting this particular strain of conversation to end. “And just because this has turned awkward, I’ll cut you a deal. Write a few sentences tonight about the meaning behind ‘The Room of My Life’ and I’ll up your grade on the pop quiz.”
“Thank you, thank you.” She bounced a little on her sneakers and left the room.
Two weeks later Madison Brown bled out on the floor of that same classroom while James Pursall stood over her with a gun in his hand. I stood staring at the tableau, about three feet away, and my bones had turned to rubber, and then James lifted the gun, angling it toward his own chest, toward that bulky winter parka, and pulled the trigger.
I think the entire incident—from the moment James pulled the gun from the depths of that coat to the moment he lay next to Madison on the floor—took all of two minutes, maybe even less, but time in those two minutes moved at its own sickening pace. It was hours from the moment the gun emerged to the moment when the entire class, including me, became aware of it. I’d been talking about their upcoming public speaking assignment, where they each had to give a mock valedictorian speech for graduation. I’d been telling them that they should be creative, that I was not interested in hearing the exact same speech twenty-four times. And then James had yelled, “On the ground, everyone,” and no one moved. I thought it was some kind of joke, maybe he was demonstrating a very untraditional valedictorian speech, but then he was standing on his desk chair, the gun in his hand, and half the students dropped down below their desks, and a girl named Missy Robertson—I remember it because she’s a local weatherperson now—began to loudly sob.
“Everyone,” he said, louder this time, and the rest of the students got down on the floor.
I was leaning up against the front of my desk, my usual position when I was teaching, and I remember my hands were out in front of me, and I said something like, “James, let’s talk.”
It made him look at me from across the room, his eyes wide beneath the shock of greasy, inky hair. I opened my mouth to speak again but didn’t. I wanted to live and somehow I knew if I made another attempt to defuse the situation he was going to shoot me. That decision, to not speak, to keep quiet like the students on the floor, altered my body chemistry. I can’t think of a better way to describe it. My bones hollowed out, my organs liquefied. My chest was empty, as though I’d pulled my heart out of it and handed it across to James Pursall. I was frozen in place.
He came down off his desk, and walked between the cowering students, swiveling his gun, and saying, “Eenie, meenie, miney, moe,” in a shaky, unreal voice, and even at the time, from back within the dusty cave where I was cowering, I remember thinking his heart wasn’t in it, that he’d decided in advance to try to terrorize the other students, but that he just wanted to get the whole thing over with.
At the front of the room, when he was only a few feet from me, he turned around and took a few small steps, so that he was standing above Madison Brown, curled into a ball around the bulk of her backpack. He aimed the gun at her, then braced his trembling right hand with his left, and I knew he was about to shoot. I pictured myself springing from the desk I was still leaning against, grabbing him around the chest so his arms would point upward, shaking that gun loose, dropping him to the hard linoleum floor.