sweet symphony. Phillip reckons turnabout is fair play and marches across the office, shooting them where they cower. One at a time, they stop screaming. Their pleas are each replaced by a single gunshot.
He steps into the hallway. Classmates, teachers . . . they run wild, this way and that. More screaming. Tears stream down their cheeks. In the dream, Phillip is suddenly equipped with a Mossberg 500, a pump action shotgun he found on the Internet and fantasized endlessly about. Mike Tallow, the varsity lineman, rushed the quarterback thirteen times for nine sacks in the big game against Danville that season, and he reckons Phillip no greater a foe. The Mossberg vaporizes his chassis, and he is neutralized.
Teachers are turned to Swiss. The shrieks from the cheerleading squad are silenced in a barrage of bullets. Phillip cannot miss. Every time he pulls the weapon, he hits his target. He murders en masse . The school hallways are awash with blood.
The dream varied. Sometimes, the entire student body is brought to him by African slaves. Their hard bodies gussied up by war paint and each of them with a different opinion on how his classmates should spend the afterlife. In other versions, he confronts each wing of the school as if it were a different level of a video game, culminating in a final showdown with a villain, him with no princess to save. Other times, he searches each and every hallway and finds no one, the school having been dismissed for a holiday he knew nothing about.
But mostly, in his sleep, he slaughtered his classmates, one by one.
Should he ever forget what he felt leading up to that day, he needed only consult his journals. Notebook after notebook of hand-written entries: shitty poetry, half-crazed rants, and ever-growing hit lists. Him sometimes scribbling in the margins for lack of room or discipline. Doodles of blood spatter and explosions. A collection of composition notebooks that he’d left spread across his bed that day so that there would be no mystery, no question why he did what he did.
In his dreams, he is a god. He is in complete control. In his dreams, everyone who had ever pushed him around or gave him a hard time or laughed at him and made fun of his clothes, each of them atoned in bloodshed, and he absolved them of their guilt. But every morning he woke up, the day that wasn’t supposed to happen long behind him, he cursed himself for his lack of resolve and fortitude.
For on that day, he was a junior. It was April. Spring. Skirts and short shorts and all this energy with nowhere to put it. Phillip had long resigned such was his fate. He’d settled on it well before then, perhaps sometime over the holidays. He arrived to school with the gym bag, intentionally twenty minutes late so as to catch everyone in their classrooms unaware.
He took note of the sky: wispy clouds, gentle warm breeze. He inhaled a deep breath, sweet with flower blossoms, young love and other springtime shit. The lawn was freshly manicured, and soon it would be overrun with reporters and cameramen, parents and survivors, all of them tear-streaked and looking to the heavens, asking “Why? Why?” With a smile, he opened the door to the school.
First, Holly Jordan. The halls were empty as he made the length of the school and came to the door of Mrs. Churchill’s Calculus class. He closed his eyes and visualized it one last time, then put his hand to the doorknob.
Down the hallway, a ruckus. Phillip turned his head to see Calvin Cantrell, another student of equal social standing. Mike Tallow and Stammy Peanucker, two varsity players, had knocked his textbooks from his hand and then, for good measure, kicked them the length of the hallway. This sent them into hysterics and Calvin minded not, simply went about collecting his schoolbooks. Phillip watched, hand still on the doorknob to the calculus classroom, and considered the tableau before him: Two redneck athletes, two smaller students, one of them on the
He steps into the hallway. Classmates, teachers . . . they run wild, this way and that. More screaming. Tears stream down their cheeks. In the dream, Phillip is suddenly equipped with a Mossberg 500, a pump action shotgun he found on the Internet and fantasized endlessly about. Mike Tallow, the varsity lineman, rushed the quarterback thirteen times for nine sacks in the big game against Danville that season, and he reckons Phillip no greater a foe. The Mossberg vaporizes his chassis, and he is neutralized.
Teachers are turned to Swiss. The shrieks from the cheerleading squad are silenced in a barrage of bullets. Phillip cannot miss. Every time he pulls the weapon, he hits his target. He murders en masse . The school hallways are awash with blood.
The dream varied. Sometimes, the entire student body is brought to him by African slaves. Their hard bodies gussied up by war paint and each of them with a different opinion on how his classmates should spend the afterlife. In other versions, he confronts each wing of the school as if it were a different level of a video game, culminating in a final showdown with a villain, him with no princess to save. Other times, he searches each and every hallway and finds no one, the school having been dismissed for a holiday he knew nothing about.
But mostly, in his sleep, he slaughtered his classmates, one by one.
Should he ever forget what he felt leading up to that day, he needed only consult his journals. Notebook after notebook of hand-written entries: shitty poetry, half-crazed rants, and ever-growing hit lists. Him sometimes scribbling in the margins for lack of room or discipline. Doodles of blood spatter and explosions. A collection of composition notebooks that he’d left spread across his bed that day so that there would be no mystery, no question why he did what he did.
In his dreams, he is a god. He is in complete control. In his dreams, everyone who had ever pushed him around or gave him a hard time or laughed at him and made fun of his clothes, each of them atoned in bloodshed, and he absolved them of their guilt. But every morning he woke up, the day that wasn’t supposed to happen long behind him, he cursed himself for his lack of resolve and fortitude.
For on that day, he was a junior. It was April. Spring. Skirts and short shorts and all this energy with nowhere to put it. Phillip had long resigned such was his fate. He’d settled on it well before then, perhaps sometime over the holidays. He arrived to school with the gym bag, intentionally twenty minutes late so as to catch everyone in their classrooms unaware.
He took note of the sky: wispy clouds, gentle warm breeze. He inhaled a deep breath, sweet with flower blossoms, young love and other springtime shit. The lawn was freshly manicured, and soon it would be overrun with reporters and cameramen, parents and survivors, all of them tear-streaked and looking to the heavens, asking “Why? Why?” With a smile, he opened the door to the school.
First, Holly Jordan. The halls were empty as he made the length of the school and came to the door of Mrs. Churchill’s Calculus class. He closed his eyes and visualized it one last time, then put his hand to the doorknob.
Down the hallway, a ruckus. Phillip turned his head to see Calvin Cantrell, another student of equal social standing. Mike Tallow and Stammy Peanucker, two varsity players, had knocked his textbooks from his hand and then, for good measure, kicked them the length of the hallway. This sent them into hysterics and Calvin minded not, simply went about collecting his schoolbooks. Phillip watched, hand still on the doorknob to the calculus classroom, and considered the tableau before him: Two redneck athletes, two smaller students, one of them on the
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