BY JORDAN WHITE
They started planning the shooting in September of 2018, the beginning of their junior year.
It gave Aidan a reason to live. It filled his days with murder fantasies and endless planning, drawing blueprints of the school on stolen algebra graph paper, schematics with firing lanes, max occupancy, exits, entrances. A sheet nearby to reference for break periods and lunch times. An open yearbook with Xs carved out of the eyes of the victims on his hit list. On his computer he kept open bookmarked tabs of homemade black powder videos and an endless playlist of Norwegian black metal artists who had committed murder. He imagined how they would set dress the scene in the movie based on his life, and wondered who would play him, who would write it, who would direct? Hopefully Tarantino.
It gave Spencer a reason not to kill himself. The Day of Judgment, the Day of Reckoning, the Final Day, the Day of Death. The date was set in stone from the beginning: 4/20/20, Hitler’s birthday and the 21st anniversary of the Columbine massacre. “She’ll be old enough to drink by then!” Aidan said. He loved to tease the date every chance he got, to joke without joking to anyone who would listen, about how he had big, big plans for that day. They were the Brothers of Death, the Lords of Violence, the Two Horsemen.
Spencer could never fall asleep at night. Sometimes while he was laying there, he would hold his breath and close his eyes and imagine that he was falling to the bottom of the ocean. He would pretend his eyes were open to the darkness, and he would imagine the cold and the pressure and a deep, dark, enormous emptiness. Down at the bottom were hideous monsters, all tentacles and teeth, dead eyes and gaping, putrid mouths. The deeper he went, the larger they became. They grew and grew, larger than him, larger than a house, larger than the school. And their faces grew more human, but also more grotesque, more consumed by the deformities of deep-sea predators. These were the monsters of the heart of the world. This is what the world was meant to make, how everything started. And then he got down to the very bottom, with his heart beating hard in his chest because he was still holding his breath, and there was only one creature down there. It loomed above Spencer in the chasm, with wide lidless eyes, a smiling mouth with no jaw, human hands with long black claws and horns growing from the top of his head. Looking at him felt like looking into the light-eating horizon of a black hole, absence as presence, a tear in the fabric of reality. He didn’t know what it was. Sometimes he thought it was the Devil, and sometimes he thought it was Aidan, and sometimes he thought it was his own true self. Whatever it was, once Spencer looked into his eyes, he could fall asleep.
They made the black powder for the pipe bombs from stump remover, sulfur, and charcoal they bought at the hardware store. They made a mess of Spencer’s mom’s kitchen and it took them seven tries and a handful of Youtube videos, but they finally got it just right, chef’s kiss from Aidan. They got the guns from Aidan’s dad’s hunting rifle collection and bought a few more from a kid at school named Scary Mike who stole them from his dead grandpa’s closet. The two of them went up to Aidan’s cabin up north for target practice in the woods almost every week.
“This is just shooting the breeze,” Aidan would say as they unloaded rounds into the forest. “Just wait until we shoot some flesh and bone.”
They made videos on a camera Aidan kept in a locked toolbox in his bedroom labeled “Manifesto” with bold red writing. They explained why they had to do it, why they hated the world so much, and everyone in it, and how this was the only option they had: to lay waste, to kill stupid assholes, to inspire other shooters to do the same, to cleanse. Aidan did most of the talking, he quoted Sun Tzu and Hitler and Donald Trump’s Twitter feed, and Spencer nodded along with him. It felt good to have purpose, to set achievable goals. Everyone else started talking about college, graduation and the parties in the summer that followed. Aidan thought about the smell of gunpowder, the sound of blood hitting linoleum tiles, throwing pipe bombs off the balcony overlooking the cafeteria. Spencer thought about blowing his brains out all over the books in the library, and then endless, dreamless sleep.
When the schools shut down over something called the Coronavirus, Aidan joked that they would raid his dad’s garage fridge and drink Corona Lite over the weekend and maybe have some girls over and get them drunk and rape them. But Aidan’s mom took the shelter-in-place orders seriously and he didn’t have anyone over that weekend, or any other weekend for the rest of the year. At first Aidan celebrated the high COVID death tolls world-wide, a new plague to deliver suffering to his worthless species. But it wasn’t long before he realized, with creeping horror, that the schools would stay closed. For everyone else it meant no senior all-night party, no prom, no walking at graduation. But for him, it meant the obliteration of what had become his life’s work, the Day of Reckoning would come, and he’d have no targets in a virtual classroom.
He attended school board Zoom meetings with crocodile tears to plead his case that the schools must be opened again, for the sake of his future and the future of all students like him, just trying to get their fair shake at a decent education. He screamed with impotent caps lock rage into the void of social media that the school shutdown was an infringement on American ideals of freedom, that he was being oppressed like the Jews in Nazi Germany. He even tried to organize his own “Senior Class of 2020 Early Reunion” party on school property through Facebook, but no one bit on the invites and in the end, he decided that shooting up a guest list of 4 Yes’s and 8 Maybes wasn’t going to cut it.
Spencer almost called it quits for good right away once the shutdown began, thought about slitting his wrists in the bathtub while his mom was out. But the restaurant she worked at closed down and she was around all the time after that, and he couldn’t figure out how to do it with her in the house so instead he didn’t. He kept putting it off. Being trapped in his home made him feel like a wolf hiding in his den licking his wounds. The world was still out there, still terrible, the jagged rocks that the ship of himself smashed against over and over again. But he could hide from it for a little while. He didn’t talk to Aidan anymore, they couldn’t hang out and Aidan wouldn’t talk on the phone. Spencer read books and played with his cats and walked around in the woods by himself and got Bs in virtual high school and the Day of Reckoning came, and then it went. And then it was summertime. Everything felt fucked up and confused and sick and sad all around him and since that was how he normally felt it was like he’d been dancing to music only he could hear for as long as he could remember but now everybody else had stepped into the dance as well. They were all going down together, apart. The world got more beautiful from a distance, a thing to behold instead of a thing that was crushing him, sucking the life from him. And after a while he didn’t think very much about killing himself anymore, or killing other people.
Aidan had said “Why are you applying to colleges, we’ll be dead by then,” but Spencer had done it anyways to make his mom happy. And in the Fall, he went away to school across the state, and it felt like traveling to a world in another solar system. He thought he would hate it, he’d imagined a frat boy roommate and stupid keggers and getting pushed into lockers in college halls instead of high school ones. But his roommate was a metal-head stoner weirdo who liked to talk about serial killers, and he went to poetry readings instead of keggers, and college hallways don’t have lockers. He even got a girlfriend who liked the same industrial metal bands he liked, and they talked about how depressed they were in high school, how they used to cut themselves and how much they hated the world back then, and they said it all in the past tense, and Spencer couldn’t believe it. And the only time he had trouble falling asleep at night, the only time he would go to the bottom of the ocean and stare into the eyes of the Devil, was when he thought about the camera Aidan kept locked in his room.
