The Journal Entries
For some inexplicable reason there seems to be some ambiguity about the identity of the writer of the handwritten journal entries tin the novel. The author of these entries is not directly identified, true enough, but they clearly present the portrait of a self-involved, contemplative self-hating outsider slowly building to a release of energetically suppressed emotions. And, besides, what would be the point of including journal entries by any other character and then keeping the identity secret? To suggest that any student with a grudge can become a school shooter? If that were true, America just might have enough dead kids on their hands to finally make even Republican politicians care more about human life than misinterpretations about the right to own guns:
“When you don’t fit in, you become superhuman. You can feel everyone else’s eyes on you, stuck like Velcro. You can hear a whisper about you from a mile away. You can disappear, even when it looks like you’re still standing right there. You can scream, and nobody hears a sound. You become the mutant who fell into the vat of acid, the Joker who can’t remove his mask, the bionic man who’s missing all his limbs and none of his heart. You are the thing that used to be normal, but that was so long ago, you can’t even remember what it was like.”
Opening Narration
With the short exception of one of those journal entries, the narrative proper begins with imagery. It is imagery that seeks to put into perspective what can happen in the span of nineteen minutes:
“In nineteen minutes, you can mow the front lawn, color your hair, watch a third of a hockey game. In nineteen minutes, you can bake scones or get a tooth filled by a dentist; you can fold laundry for a family of five…In nineteen minutes, you can order a pizza and get it delivered. You can read a story to a child or have your oil changed. You can walk a mile. You can sew a hem…In nineteen minutes, you can get revenge.”
Love and Friendship
Believe it or don’t, but at the heart of this story of a school shooting there lies a genuine love story. Not a creepy stalker and his victim story, but the short history of a guy who wants more than a friendship and the girl who doesn’t. It does tend to lend the shooter some sympathy and maybe even empathy and that is certainly an issue deserving of discussion, but ultimately it is unsettling all the same:
“She leaned toward him slowly, until her face was too close to be in focus. Her hair fell over Peter’s shoulder like a curtain and her eyes closed. She smelled like autumn—like apple cider and slanting sun and the snap of the coming cold. He felt his heart scrambling, caught inside the confines of his own body.”
Chaos Theory
The word chaotic gets thrown around a lot. It has been used to describe the reaction of a defense in response to an offense taking advantage of the rule changes in the last two minutes of each half of a football game. It has been used to describe the entire term of office of the forty-fifth President of the United States. In both those cases and many more, the word is appropriate more often than not, but there is a huge difference between something being merely chaotic and something genuinely being an example of chaos. One of the few events to which the appropriate use of the word chaos should be limited is absolutely what happens during any school shooting:
“Chaos was a constellation of students, running out of the school and trampling the injured. A boy holding a handmade sign in an upstairs window that read HELP US . Two girls hugging each other and sobbing. Chaos was blood melting pink on the snow; it was the drip of parents that turned into a stream and then a raging river, screaming out the names of their missing children. Chaos was a TV camera in your face, not enough ambulances, not enough officers, and no plan for how to react when the world as you knew it went to pieces.”
