You Won't Hear About This On The News

This is fucked up. This is so fucked up.
I’m writing this in my dorm room. It’s way after lights-out, but I know damned well no one’s going to bother to check, not tonight… not while the walls of our room strobe with blue light from the police cars in the parking lot and the building hums with tense anxiety.
My roommate's downstairs, talking to the cops. His name was at the top of the list, and they had questions for him. My name’s on the list, too, but not nearly as high; I guess they’ll get around to me.
I’ve got to figure out what I’m going to tell them.
I sure as hell can’t tell them what I’m about to tell you guys.
I go to an all-boys private school in the southeast. It's about evenly split between day students (who live in town) and boarders (out-of-town students who live in dorms).
I'm a boarder... and this year, I’m in Stewart Hall, the oldest residence on campus. It’s a real dump. They stick Juniors (eleventh graders) in there... I guess they figure that by then, you're too invested to bail.
To add to my bad luck, I got Kevin for a prefect.
Our prefects aren't like in Harry Potter: they're just seniors who volunteer to live in non-senior dorms. There's one per floor, and they're in charge of writing you up for rule violations, checking that you're home by curfew, that kind of stuff.
Kevin’s one of those dudes who doesn't sneeze without considering how it would look on his application to Harvard. He applied early-decision in October, and ever since, he’s been an even bigger walking panic attack waiting to find out if he was accepted.
Maybe the stress was what did it.
He’s been a real pain in the ass, honestly. Dude looked like he’d chased five Adderall with a gallon of Red Bull and was handing out demerits by the bucketload.
He was paranoid as hell, too. We're allowed to go down to the vending machines after curfew, but Kevin would grill us anyway, convinced we were sneaking out even when we were holding the freaking Coke we'd gone down for. A guy down the hall had some leftovers go bad in his room, so he'd sprayed a bunch of air freshener... which convinced Kevin that the guy was smoking pot. Kevin kept trying to "bust" him, even though I'm pretty sure Kevin wouldn't know pot if it tapdanced naked on his dresser.
Point being, when Kevin started spouting all this shit about how someone was bringing a guy into the dorm at night, everyone thought it was just more of his paranoid crap.
I heard about it more than most of the others; my roommate Josh is the only openly gay dude on our floor, so he was Kevin's first suspect. I’m pretty sure that’s what that list the cops found really is… just Kevin’s theories about who might be sneaking that kid in.
Under the circumstances, though, I can’t blame the cops for thinking something else.
Anyway, yeah… for some reason, one random day, Kevin just quit talking about the guy to anyone. We all thought he'd realized he was wrong and didn't want to admit it... especially when he started being way less of a tightass about rules than usual. We figured that was his backhanded way of apologizing for accusing everyone.
You could come in half an hour after curfew and he'd barely even look at you, just waving you down the hallway. Kevin really looked like shit, too... like he hadn't slept in weeks. I actually started to feel sorry for him, wondering what kind of type-A parents he must have to be so wrecked over getting into one particular college.
Then, last week, I was heading down to the vending machines at about midnight. I passed Kevin's room... and heard him crying.
I mean... guys cry sometimes. A grandparent dies, they get dumped... the rest of us have a pretty rock-solid "pretend it's not happening, never mention it" policy. I'm sure it's somewhere in The Bro Code.
Something about this was different, though... and I found myself drifting toward Kevin's door.
He was talking on the phone... pausing like he was waiting for someone else to speak, sobbing softly.
As I got closer, I realized Kevin was… begging.
He kept asking the person on the phone to leave him alone, that he didn’t want to do whatever they were asking him to do. He was babbling, almost hysterical… I could hear him doing that snort-sniffle you get when your nose is running everywhere.
I backed away, feeling like an eavesdropping jackass… and convinced that my theory about his overbearing parents was correct.
When I got back to my room, I told Josh a sanitized version of the story. I left out the part about Kevin crying and begging, but mentioned the asshole parent phone call. I knew Josh would make sure the whole floor heard it, and I suspected it’d make the other guys feel a little more sympathetic towards Kevin for a while.
The dude could use a break. He’d sounded like he was on the verge of snapping.
And today, he did.
There’s an all-girls school across the river that we exchange some classes with and team up with for crap like choirs and plays… and just after dinner, about twenty-five of them showed up for Christmas choir rehearsal. They were walking right past Stewart Hall from the parking lot when the first shots rang out.
I had practice tonight, so I missed the worst of it… but Josh was here, and he described it.
The blasts of sound overhead… girls screaming, scattering across the courtyard. Prefects pounding through the hallways, bellowing to stay in the rooms as they rushed to the stairwell. The broken lock on the hatch to the roof, the pale terror of the guys who’d decided to try and stop him.
Josh was one of the first to realize that the girls didn’t know campus well enough to realize that Stewart Hall wasn’t another locked academic building; he’d thrown our window open and yelled for the girls to take cover within. With his body half-out the window and gesturing frantically, he’d realized in horror that he was just a few feet beneath Kevin.
Kevin had been tackled from behind by the first-floor prefect, a varsity wrestler who’d pinned him down while another gingerly retrieved the gun.
And this part may be bullshit, but I’ve heard it from several of the guys who claim they heard it straight from that wrestler.
They said Kevin started cackling, like this crazy, loony laugh, at the kid who’d ended up with the gun.
“It’s okay,” he laughed. “Tricked him. It’s okay, I won, I won…”
Practice was canceled as soon as word spread through campus, and I got back to the dorm just as they were putting Kevin in the ambulance. He wasn’t laughing then… he was hissing and spitting, his eyes all bulged out, muttering this crazy-homeless-dude patter of just four words: “bitches, sluts, whores, skanks” over and over and over.
I overheard one of the cops tell the other to check if Kevin had been rejected by a girl lately. I slipped by and headed up the stairs.
I had to stop writing there for a while. Josh came back and sent me down for my turn with the cops.
It was pretty much exactly what I expected, except for one thing: they asked me if Kevin had been friends with Mitchell Barnes. It took me a minute to even remember why that name was kinda familiar; he was two grades ahead of me, and he’d left school the year before. I didn’t know if he’d been friends with Kevin or not.
Josh was asleep when I got back, but I asked him this morning if the cops had asked him about Mitchell too.
He said they had, and added some details I hadn't known. Mitchell hadn't left, he’d gotten expelled… and committed suicide afterwards.
"I don't really see him and Kevin being buddies," Josh said. "They probably just found some of Mitchell's crap in Kevin's room. Mitchell was the prefect on this floor last year... maybe he left some stuff behind."
"How come I never heard about this?"
"One, you live under a cozy rock with Master Chief. And two... Barnes Hall, Barnes Field? Not to mention Barnes Investments, the Barnes Foundation..."
Right. Maybe it was because I wasn't local, or maybe I did live under a rock, but I'd always been two steps behind recognizing which kids came from Big Deal Families with Big Deal Last Names. Mitchell's family had sunk tons of money into both the town and our school in particular.
"How'd a kid like that get kicked out in the first place? What'd he have to do, stab the headmaster?"
Josh set his book aside, voice dropping to a conspiratorial tone. "Remember last year, when they made us watch all those videos about respecting women, and they suddenly decided it was okay for girls to park in the visitor lot?"
I did remember. There'd been a lot of bitching about how unfair it was… unlike the normal parking areas on the other side of campus, the visitor lot was super-close to class. This year, the girls were back to parking with the rest of us.
My face went pale. "Jesus... rape?"
"I heard that his suicide note was nothing but a bunch of crazy raving about how much he hated women… calling them names and shit.”
Bitches. Sluts. Whores. Skanks.
Class was canceled today, but of course, we boarders had to stay. Exams were supposed to start tomorrow, but we’ve been told they’re postponed. Everyone’s pretty sure they’re actually canceled and we’re going to be sent home early, but the faculty knows if they tell us that, there’ll be chaos.
They’ve been running movies for us in the common lounge… unsurprisingly, nothing violent… and the dorm head ordered us a shitload of pizza. Rumors have been running wild, and I’ve heard a whole bunch of crap that I don’t know whether or not to believe.
Like that Kevin’s fat acceptance envelope from Harvard arrived three days ago.
Like that Kevin didn’t own a cellphone, and his parents were super-chill.
Like that the reason none of the girls were hurt was because Kevin had loaded the gun with blanks.
And I keep thinking of how Kevin laughed.
How he said he’d tricked someone.
How he said he’d won.