Forgive me, Leonard Peacock

I open my birthday present in the woods behind Asher Beal’s house—feel the familiar cold heaviness of the P-38 in my hand—and then wait for my target[52] to come home.

I’ve been doing reconnaissance for a few weeks now, so I know that on Thursdays my target arrives home around 5:43 from wrestling practice, and then usually goes into his first-floor bedroom for an hour before dinner.

The target usually surfs the Internet while waiting for feeding time, at which point the target will relocate to the kitchen.

The glow of the laptop screen lights up the target’s face and makes him look like an alien or a demon or a fish in a lit tank, and watching the target’s dead expression illuminated by the screen has also made it easier to visualize killing him—the weird lighting really dehumanizes the target.

I’ve practiced shooting my target from the tree line, using my hand as a gun.

But today I’m going to creep up to the window, shoot the target through the pane at point-blank range, stick my arm through the jagged glass teeth and pop the target six more times—mixing head shots with chest shots—to ensure the target has been eliminated, and then I’ll escape into the woods, where I will off my second target with the last bullet in the magazine before the local cops and maybe even the FBI arrive.

That’s my plan.

All I have to do is wait for my target to flick on his bedroom light, which will be the first falling domino to set the chain of events in motion.

TWENTY-FIVE

It’s cold and dark in the woods and I wonder if this is what it’s going to feel like when I’m finally dead— like a stupid unfeeling unthinking unnoticed tree. I’m hoping to feel nothing. Übernothing. I’m hoping that I merely cease to exist. What dreams may come? Hamlet and Lauren would ask.[53] None, I’m betting. None. Hellfire is not in the plans. Heaven is not in the plans. Cold and dark are not in the plans. Übernothing. That’s what I want. Nothing.[54]

TWENTY-SIX

I’ve been watching the target’s mom framed in the kitchen’s bay window, the soft overhead light making it look like she’s in a film and the bay window is like a drive-in movie screen.

I decide to call the movie Mrs. Beal Makes Her Perverted Son His Last Meal.

It’s a boring picture in the literal sense, but it conjures up a lot of emotions inside me for personal reasons.

I remember Mrs. Beal being really stupid[55] but sweet on the surface when we were kids.

She would always order us a pizza whenever I was over at their house, regardless of whether we were hungry or not. There was always pizza. Pizza was ubiquitous. It’s like that was an official rule in their house—when guests under fourteen visit, there shall be pizza, pronto.

She was also always singing songs from the musical Cats. So much that I can quote the lyrics of many of the songs, even though I have never seen the show, nor have I ever listened to a recording of the musical.[56]

“Memory” was her favorite.

Although she also liked “Mr. Mistoffelees,” who was apparently clever.

It’s funny how I’m remembering all of this right now when I’m trying to use military euphemisms, and it makes me sad, because Mrs. Beal has no idea what a Charles Darwin-type favor I’ll be doing by killing her son, mostly because she has no idea who her son is—what he has done and of what he’s capable.

Not in a million years would she believe what her son made me endure.

She wouldn’t believe it because if she did, I don’t think she’d be able to sing songs from silly musicals while doing housework, and that’s her favorite thing to do in the world, or at least it was when I used to hang out with Asher back in middle school.[57]

I try not to think about her hearing the gunshots, her running into Asher’s room, her screaming, her maybe even cradling Asher’s blood-soaked head in her arms, trying to put his brains back into his skull,[58] and her endless weeping for a fictional boy who didn’t ever exist—the son she never had—because she believes her Asher is an absolute angel.

She never saw him change, or if she did, she chose not to believe it, which makes her just as guilty, just as culpable.

I mean, don’t get me wrong; I could never shoot Mrs. Beal in the face, because she’s always singing songs from Cats and never wronged me personally.

But when you really think about it, she’s to blame just as much as Linda is—and my dad too, regardless of whether or not he’s still alive in Venezuela.

These people we call Mom and Dad, they bring us into the world and then they don’t follow through with what we need, or provide any answers at all really—it’s a fend-for-yourself free-for-all in the end, and I’m just not cut out for that sort of living.

Thinking about all of this gets me feeling so low, and I’m shivering now.

“Come on, Target Asher. Ollie Ollie in come free. Come home so I can finish this once and for all,” I whisper as I watch gray-haired Mrs. Beal pull a small chicken from the oven.

The huge window frames her perfectly as she slices the meat and moves her mouth.

She’s singing again.[59]

TWENTY-SEVEN

There’s part of me—deep down inside—that feels the need to make a confession here, especially before I go through with my plan and therefore will not be able to make any sort of statement ever again.

A few months after we went to the Green Day concert, Asher spent the weekend with his uncle Dan fishing somewhere in rural Pennsylvania—I think it might have been the Poconos. He loved his uncle Dan, who was tall and confident and funny and drove a cool truck and was always taking Asher places—like to the movies and car races and even hunting. Uncle Dan seemed like the kind of uncle every kid dreams of having. I remember liking him immediately when we first met. He really seemed like a great guy, which makes it all the worse.[60]

But when Asher came back from this particular fishing trip—something wasn’t right.

We had this project for school we were working on—about ancient civilizations—and we had picked the Incas. We were putting the finishing touches on a miniature Machu Picchu at his house the Sunday night after he returned from fishing with Uncle Dan. I remember Asher wouldn’t look me in the eye and kept saying “Nothing!” way too loud every time I asked if anything was wrong. Finally he said, “If you ask me what’s wrong one more time, I’m going to beat the shit out of you.” He stared at me—like he wanted to kill me and was capable of doing it too.

I didn’t say anything as we finished creating our Machu Picchu. We had built the skeleton out of LEGOs, had used real sod for the grass, and had been making little cube-shaped papier-mâché buildings for weeks. In my memory, the project looks magnificent—like I’d never made something so beautiful before or since. And Asher had been really proud of it just the week before—excited even. But just as I put the final bit of paint on the last structure, Asher started to smash the project with his fists.

“What are you doing?” I yelled, because we had spent weeks on it.

He just kept punching and smashing, sending down fists from above like some cruel boy-god.

It was so fucking awful to watch—not just because he was ruining all of our hard work, but because I could clearly see he was coming undone.

52

I read on the Internet that the US military employs euphemism to make it easier to kill people. Military men and women shoot “targets,” not people, and blow up “targets,” not buildings full of women and children. So I employ that little bit of wisdom here. I will shoot a “target” and not a former friend/current classmate. You might think using euphemism is dumb, but you’d be surprised how much it helps to calm the nerves and ease the conscience. It really works.

53

For completely different reasons.

54

“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player. That struts and frets his hour upon the stage. And then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot—full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” That’s William Shakespeare on the type of nothing I DON’T want. I gleaned that little nugget of anti-life-affirming wisdom from last year’s English class, when I had to memorize Macbeth’s soliloquy. Public school can be a real shot of lithium, let me tell you. It’s crazy the pessimistic shit we’re made to memorize in school and then carry around in our skulls for the rest of our lives.

55

Maybe a better word is oblivious. She was mentally absent in a way that might be perceived as enlightened or transcendent maybe to the untrained eye, but really she had this disguised sham blind-eye head-in-the-clouds type of defense mechanism at work, which maybe fostered Asher’s sense of entitlement and general disregard for the emotional well-being of others—even his best friend at the time. Like one time we were in a T.G.I. Fridays–type restaurant and Asher kept pouring his soda into the huge clay pot of a palm tree close to our table and then raising his glass in the air and demanding endless refills from the waitress, yelling, “More soda!” across the joint. And even though Mrs. Beal must have seen him pouring the soda into the palm tree pot—everyone in the restaurant did, I know because people were shaking their heads by the end of our meal—Asher’s mom didn’t tell him to knock it off or even acknowledge what he was doing in any way at all. She just let him abuse the waitress, who was young and too busy (and maybe too dumb) to argue or do anything but bring Asher endless Cokes. He seemed to delight in abusing the waitress. He smiled and smiled like a boy king, and I hated him on that day even more than I usually hated him back then in junior high. When he turned evil, he really turned evil. It was like something inside him broke and could never be repaired again. He never used to be like that when we were in elementary school, before what happened began and changed everything.

56

Other than what I’ve heard on elevators.

57

It’s funny how much I simultaneously like and hate the fact that Mrs. Beal sings, seemingly oblivious to the rest of the world.

58

Which just may mute her singing forever.

59

This might sound weird, but watching Mrs. Beal sing reminds me of the Dickens Christmas Carol display they put up in the city every December. You walk through Victorian England peeping through the windows of miniature houses on fake cobblestone streets lit with gas lamps—and I’m pretty sure the little wooden people sing at some point—as you follow around the three ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future through the life of the miserly miserable Scrooge until he has his change of heart and it’s all Merry Christmas and huge-ass turkeys and God bless us every one. My dad took me to Dickens Village once when I was in junior high and therefore too old for such a kid-ish father-son event. He was too high to notice that all the other sons and daughters there were less than four feet tall. He was also too high to notice that he was kind of staggering bleary-eyed and everyone was staring at him. Ironically, my dad was a big fan of Christmas. It always got the bastard feeling sentimental, which forced him to do even more drugs and drink—two of his favorite activities.

60

Why is it that great guys almost always let you down just as soon as you start to believe in them? Is that a rule of the universe or something? WTF?