Shotgunshell

By Dan Clark

Fucking jocks. Morrow, the former captain of our school’s football team, tragically died in a car accident last May. No, what was tragic was that John Cronke’s older brother was the sober one in the collision. I bet the impact and the three hours of bleeding-till-dead would’ve been a bit less painful if he was as toasted as Morrow.

Punching out all of his own garage windows was really therapeutic for John, I think. Since then, at least, he hasn’t really shown any outward signs of aggression…

" Mother darling, everything’s getting so dark in here."

I did some pretty stupid shit sometimes. Rick’s dad had this hat that said Cadence on it, and I would put it on and pull it over my eyes. Then I’d act like a dumbass, just to keep from getting over bored.

"Mother darling, give me your hand. Why won’t you give me your hand?" I’d start groping around in front of me, like a blind guy, but without getting up or anything. I kept saying, "Mother darling, why won’t you give me your hand?"

Rick’s parents were never home; so Jack, Rick, Dylan, and I could always count on the Harris’ for an afternoon hangout. We messed with computer shit, or had Dylan bring over his video equipment and film movies. This one video we made for our business class was sweet. ‘Movie of owning your own business’ was the project, and ‘Hit Men’ was the name of our business. It had John and I dressed up like fucking jocks, and Rick and Dylan in these huge trench coats. Then Rick had all these guns (real ones, don’t ask me how he got them) and they pretended to shoot us. We put in a crapload of special effects like close-ups of guns firing, oozing gunshot wounds, and shit like that. Classic B-movie material, I’m telling you. When it was done, ASB wanted to play it for the gayass morning bulletin, so we let them (all but the gun scenes, they’re not allowed to show that)…

"This? Oh, this is nothing. I fell off my bike…"

…after the rock hit me in the back. Fucking jocks. I swear, they must be bastard sadists or something. Otherwise how can any of this make sense?

"This? Oh, this is nothing. I fell in P.E…"

…after I got slammed into that metal locker. Why do they do this? Any of this. Just because they all think alike, they expect everyone to think like they do. Conformity is their god. And it’s not like unconformity is mine either, don’t get me wrong. I just try my hardest to be unlike the fucking jock lemmings. Bastards going to their damn parties with their quasi-Christian, token girlfriends to booze up and knock up. Bastards moving in droves like cattle through the halls everywhere they go. Bastard fucking jocks.

"This? Oh, this is nothing. I spilled my lunch…"

…and a couple other lunches seemed to land on me in the cafeteria as well. Damn jocks…

I drove Rick home from school once. It was a Friday, I think, after last semester’s finals. I pulled into his driveway and he started to get out, but his psycho AlAnon mother came screaming out the front door at him. Rick just turned to get back in the car and said, "Let’s go." We drove out to this community park and smoked clove cigarettes for about two hours. "No, I really think this is my faggot father’s fault." Another drag off the clove. "Fucker, dragging her around all those bases her whole life." A hard drag on the cigarette. "Fucker, yelling his throat raw how I must be in the Air Force and how she’s not going to ruin this dream he has for me." The embers left soot where he mashed them into the bricks in the wall we were sitting on. Another clove—match flame dying down into another persistent ember. "…says it’s good I get tossed around at school…says it’ll toughen me up." A stiff drag. Rick stood up. "It’s okay if I spent the night at your house tonight?"

Then Rick began to scare me. Most racist people do, but this was different. I know we have reasons to hate the jocks, but Rick started hating everyone. He got in a fistfight last semester with Phil for calling him a niggerface. He got a referral for grabbing Cynthia’s ass. He cussed out the Prayer Club last month too, during their meeting. Not only the jocks were his target anymore. He met some fucked up people through the Internet, and they were filthing his brain. Nazi and White Pride chat rooms and stuff: he got this book on how to make bombs and better explosives, and homemade timing devices. Cool stuff to pleasure read mostly, but Rick started testing out this shit. He started writing cool stuff too, and that is one of the reasons I didn’t really mind the racism so much. Like he had to write a story from the point of view of an object like a house or a baseball mitt or a streetlight. Rick chose a shotgun shell. He got into this strange-cool poetry too:

Dylan got weird towards the end, too. But not so noticeable. Mostly he just wrote stuff on the web page that pissed him off. Like jocks and charity solicitations and mispronounced words. The web page was his release, like people would one day pay attention to what he had to say…

Then on Tuesday, they both were dead. And a bunch more: about half of those were jocks. Rick and Dylan in the trench coats from our movie. Guns out their asses, and Rick’s bomb shit from that one book (he hooked propane tank bombs to the goddam school sprinkler timer). I overheard some crying girls in the aftermath: "…came in and shouted, ‘All jocks stand up. We’re going to kill every one of you.’…" I bet that was Dylan.

The jocks took it the hardest, I think (after the ignorant media-fed masses out there who don’t know any better than to accept everything they hear). Wait, no. I think the parents took it the hardest.

Me? I don’t know. The Fucking Bureaucratic Investigators were hounding John and I for weeks until they finally believed us: that we had nothing to do with the Columbine Littleton Murder Suicide Tragedy. I think it is sad. That no one heard Rick or Dylan until this happened. That not one teacher or counselor ever took us seriously or cared to think of what the freaks had to say.

That Nazi hate shit that is on the internet? I wonder why. Why is that allowed? There is no "why did those boys do it?" ( I know why, perfectly), only "why has society come to this?"

I don’t know. Maybe it was meant to be. Maybe in murderous death, Rick and Dylan showed the media-fed masses a glimpse of motive. Or maybe all was in vain. Maybe the media-lemmings will, like the fucking jocks, go on blaming the scapegoats and not looking any further to find the causes of society’s problems.

All I know is that John and I are getting the shit side of the stick from the fucking jocks a lot more than before.