The description accompanying my photo is along the lines of “Cheryl was a good student, friendly and popular”-and that’s about it. What a waste of seventeen years. Or is that just my selfish heart applying standards of the world to a soul that’s eternal? It is. But by seventeen, nobody ever accomplishes anything, do they? Joan of Arc? Anne Frank? And maybe some musicians and actresses. I’d really like to ask God why it is that we don’t accomplish anything until we’re at least twenty. Why the wait? I think we should be born ten years old, and then after a year turn twenty-just get it over with, like dogs do. We ought to be born running.
Chris and I had a dog, a spaniel named Sterling. We adored Sterling, but Sterling adored gum. We’d go for walks and all he’d do was sniff out sidewalk discards. It was cute and funny, but when I was in grade nine he ate a piece of something that wasn’t gum, and two hours later he was gone. We buried him in the backyard beneath the witch hazel shrub, and I put a cross on his grave, a cross my mother removed after my conversion. I found it in the garden shed between the 5-20-20 and a stack of empty black plastic nursery pots, and I was too chicken to ask her why.
I don’t worry too much about Sterling, as he’s in heaven. Animals never left God-only people did. Lucky animals.
My father works in the mortgage division of Canada Trust, and my mother is a technician in a medical lab. They love their jobs. Chris is a generic little brother, yet not as snotty or pesky as my friends’ little brothers.
At Christmas everyone in our family exchanged bad sweaters and we all wore them as a kind of in-joke. So we were one of those bad-sweater families you see at the mall.
We got along with each other-or we did until recently. It’s like we decided to be superficially happy with each other, which is fine, and that we wouldn’t share intimacies with each other. I don’t know. I think that lack of sharing weakened us.
Dear Lord,
I pray for the souls of the three killers, but I don’t know if that is right or wrong.
It always seemed to me that people who’d discovered religion had both lost and gained something. Outwardly, they’d gained calmness, confidence and a look of purpose, but what they’d lost was a certain willingness to connect with unconverted souls. Looking a convert in the eyes was like trying to make eye contact with a horse. They’d be alive and breathing, but they wouldn’t be a hundred percent there anymore. They’d left the day-to-day world and joined the realm of eternal time. Pastor Fields or Dee or Lauren would have pounced on me if I’d ever spoken those words aloud. Dee would have said something like “Cheryl, you’ve just covered your halo with soot. Repent. Now.”
There can be an archness, a meanness in the lives of the saved, an intolerance that can color their view of the weak and of the lost. It can make them hard when they ought to be listening, judgmental when they ought to be contrite.
Jason’s father, Reg, always said, “Love what God loves and hate what God hates,” but more often than not I had the impression that he really meant “Love what Reg loves and hate what Reg hates.” I don’t think he imparted this philosophy to Jason. Jason was too gentle, too forgiving, to adopt Reg’s self-serving credo. As my mother always told me, “Cheryl, trust me, you spend a much larger part of your life being old, not young. Rules change along the way. The first things to go are those things you thought were eternal.”
Getting married in Nevada in 1988 was simple. At noon on the final Friday before school started, Jason and I cabbed out to the airport and scanned the list of outgoing flights. There was one to Las Vegas in ninety minutes, so we bought tickets-cash-walked through U.S. Immigration preclearance, went to the gate and were on our way. They didn’t even bother to check our ID. We each had only a gym bag for carry-on and we felt like bandits. It was my first time flying, and everything was new and charged with mystery…the laminated safety cards, the takeoff, which made my stomach cartwheel, the food, which was bad just like they always joke about on TV, and the cigarette smoke; something about Las Vegas attracts the smokers. But it was all like perfume to me, and I tried pretending that every moment of my life could be as full of newness as that flight. What a life that would be.
The two of us had dressed conservatively-shirt and tie for Jason, and me in a schoolmarm dress; our outfits must have made us look all of fifteen. The flight attendant asked us why we were going to Las Vegas and we told her. Ten minutes later there was a captain’s announcement telling everybody on the plane our news and our seat numbers. The other passengers clapped and I blushed like I had a fever, but suddenly it was as if we were blood kin with all these strangers. At the terminal, the men all slapped Jason’s back and har-har’ed, and this one woman whispered to me, “Honey, I don’t care what else you do, but the moment he hints that he wants it, you give it to him. Doesn’t matter if you’re fixing a diaper or cleaning out the gutters. You give it, pronto. Else you’ll lose him.”
It was over a hundred degrees outside, my first exposure to genuine heat, Jason’s too. My lungs had never felt so pure. In the taxi to Caesars Palace I looked out at the desert-real desert-and tried to imagine every parable I’d ever heard taking place in that exotic lifeless nothingness. I couldn’t have stood five minutes out there in that oven, and I wondered how the Bible ever managed to happen. They must have had different weather back then-or trees-or rivers and shade. Good Lord, the desert is harsh. I asked the taxi driver to stop for a second beside a vacant lot between the airport and the Strip. There were some rental units on the other side of a cinder-block fence, some litter and a shedded snakeskin. I got out and it felt as if I were floating over the sharp rocks and angry little plants. Instead of feeling brand new, Las Vegas felt thousands of years old. Jason got out and we both knelt and prayed. Time passed; I felt dizzy and the cabbie honked the horn. We drove to Caesars Palace.
I knew we were goners when Dee knocked over an apple juice can. Clank. The three boys had been across the room shouting pointless fragments of pointless manifestos or whatever moronic ideas they had, but then, yes, the clank. It was so primal to watch their heads swivel toward us, and their eyes focusing-zeroing in like crocodiles in TV documentaries. Dee squeaked.
I heard Duncan Boyle say, “Oh, if it isn’t the Out to Lunch Bunch slumming with us, the damned, here in purgatory, School District 44.” Listening to the inflections of his voice, for just a second I thought to myself that he could sing if he wanted to. I could always tell that about people-if they could sing or not.
Just then, for whatever reason, the overhead sprinklers spritzed on. The boys were distracted and looked up at the ceiling. The water rained down onto the tables, onto the milk cartons and half-empty paper bags; it sounded like rain on a roof. Then it began trickling off the laminated tabletops and dripping onto my jeans and forearms. It was cold and I shivered and Lauren was shivering, too. I put my arm around her and held her to me, her teeth chattering like maracas. Then there were more shots-at us, I assumed, but Mitchell Van Waters blew out some of the sprinkler nozzles, shattering a large pipe, and the water came down on us in buckets.
There was a noise from outside the building and Martin Boyle shouted, “Windows!” He and Mitchell blasted out four large panes opposite us. Then Duncan asked, “Was that a cop I saw out there?”
“What do you think?” Mitchell was mad as hornets. “Rearm!”
The guns made more metallic noises and Mitchell blew out the remaining windows. The school was now like a jewel case encrusted with snipers and cops. Their time with their victims was drawing to an end.
Lord,
I know that faith is not the natural condition of the human heart, but why do You make it so hard to have faith? Were we so far gone here in boring North Van that we needed a shock treatment? There are thousands of suburbs as average as us. Why us then? And why now? You raise the cost of faith and You dilute its plausibility. Is that smart?
Dear God,
I keep on imagining what those kids under the tables must have been feeling and it only makes me
angrier and crazier at You. It just does.
Dear God,
I’m prayed out, and yet here I am, still knocking on Your door, but I think this could be the last time.
Dear Lord,
This is the first time I’ve ever prayed because I didn’t grow up with this stuff, but here I am, praying away, so maybe there’s something to it. Maybe I’m wasting my time. You tell me. Send me a sign. You must get a lot of that. Proof proof proof. Because to my mind, the school massacre could mean that You don’t exist just as much-if not more than-it could mean that You do. If I was trying to recruit followers, a school massacre isn’t the way I’d go about doing it. But then it got me here right now, praying, didn’t it?
Just so you know, I’m having my first drink here as I pray my first prayer-apricot liqueur, I skimmed off the top inch of my dad’s bottle. It tastes like penicillin and I like it.
I’ve never told anyone about the moment of my conversion in eleventh grade. I was by myself, out in the backyard in fall, sitting between two huckleberry shrubs that had survived the mountainside’s suburban development. I closed my eyes and faced the sun and that was that-ping!-the sensation of warmth on my eyelids and the smell of dry cedar and fir branches in my nose. I never expected angels and trumpets, nor did any appear. The moment made me feel special, and yet, of course, nothing makes a person less special than conversion-it…universalizes you.
But then how special can any person really be? I mean, you have a name and some ancestors. You have medical, educational and work histories, as well as immediate living family and friends. And after that there’s not much more. At least in my case. At the time of my death, my life’s résumé consisted of school, sports, a few summer jobs and my Youth Alive! involvement. My death was the only remarkable aspect of my life. I’m rummaging through my memories trying to find even a few things to distinguish me from all others. And yet…and yet I was me-nobody saw the world as I did, nor did they feel the things I felt. I was Cheryl Anway: that has to count for something.
And I did have questions and uneasy moments after my conversion. I wondered why it is that going to heaven is the only goal of religion, because it’s such a selfish thing. The Out to Lunch Bunch talked about going to heaven in the same breath as they discussed hair color. Leading a holy life inside a burgundy-colored VW Cabrio seems like a spiritual contradiction. Jason once joked that if you read Revelations closely, you could see where it says that Dee Carswell counting the calories in a packet of Italian dressing is a sign of imminent apocalypse. And yet we all possessed the capacity for slipping at any moment into great sin and eternal darkness. I suppose it’s what made me a bit withdrawn from the world-maybe I just didn’t trust anybody fully, knowing how close we all were to the edge. That’s not true: I trusted Jason.
Whenever I felt doubts I overcompensated by trying to witness to whoever was nearby, usually my family. And when they even remotely sensed religion coming up, they either nodded politely or they bolted. I can’t imagine what they said about me when I wasn’t there. In any event, I think in the end it’s maybe best to keep your doubts private. Saying them aloud cheapens them-makes them a bunch of words just like everybody else’s bunch of words.
I don’t think I fully understood sleaze until Jason and I entered the chilled lobby of Caesars Palace on that day of burning winds and X-ray sunlight. It stank of American cigarettes, smoky blue and tarlike, and of liquor. A woman dressed up like a centurion with balloon boobs and stage makeup asked us for our drink order. She reminded me of a novelty cocktail shaker. The thing is, we said yes, and Jason ordered two gin fizzes-where did that come from? They arrived within moments and there we stood, dumb as planks, while the most desperate sort of gamblers-I mean, this was August in the middle of the desert-slunk past us, serenaded by the endless rattling and dinging of the slot machines. I don’t think I’d ever seen so many souls teetering so precariously on the brink of colossal sin. Hypocritical me. We’re all equally on the brink of all sins.
We went up to our room: shabby and yellowing. I couldn’t figure out why such a splashy place would have such dumpy rooms, but Jason said it was to drive people down into the casinos.
Once the door was closed, it was a bit awkward. Until then, it had all felt like a field trip. We sat on the edge of the bed and Jason asked if I still wanted to get married, and I said yes-I’d caught a sliver of his naked behind through the bathroom door’s hinge crack as he changed into his other pair of pants.
As we sat there, we realized our clothes, even in the air-conditioned room, were far too hot for the climate. Jason shed his tie, and I replaced my all-concealing “skin is sin” dress with a jacket and skirt, the only other garments I’d brought-something like you’d wear to work on a Wednesday morning.
Sooner than I’d have liked we were out the door, appearing to the world as if we were headed to a $2.99 all-you-can-eat shrimp buffet or to lose ourselves for a few hours in front of the dime slots with the pensioners. We were alone in the elevator and kissed briefly, and then we staggered through the lobby bombarded again by a wash of noise and sleaze.
Outside it was nearing sunset. An ashtray on wheels picked us up. The cabbie was a fat guy with an East Coast accent and exactly one hair on his forehead, just like Charlie Brown. He slapped the steering wheel when we asked him to take us to a chapel. He told us his name, Evan, and we asked him if he’d be our witness. He said sure, he’d stand up for us, and for the first time that day I felt not just as if I was getting married, but also like a bride.
The chapels were itty-bitty things, and we tried to find one in which celebrities had never been married, as if a celebrity aura could somehow crush the holy dimension of a Las Vegas wedding. I don’t know what we were thinking. Evan ended up choosing a chapel for us, mostly because it included a snack platter and sparkling wine in the price of the service.
There was paperwork; our fake IDs aroused no suspicion. Out the little stained-glass window up front the sun was like a juicy tangerine on the horizon. Quickly, a dramatically tanned man in white rayon, who might just as easily have been offering us a deal on a condominium time-share, declared us legally wed.
Nearing the front door, Jason said, “Well, it’s not quite two hundred and fifty of our nearest and dearest, is it?”
I was so giddy: “A civil wedding. What would your dad say?”
We went outside, leaving Evan to his snack platter-out into the hot air scented by exhaust fumes, snapdragons and litter, just the two of us, dwarfed by the casinos and dreaming of the future, of the lights, both natural and false, appearing in the sky, and of sex.
I hoped that both the shooting of the windows and the flooding sprinklers would distract the three boys, but this didn’t happen. Instead, they began to fight among themselves. Mitchell was furious with Jeremy for wasting ammunition that could be more effectively used “killing those stuck-up pigs who feed on taunting anybody who doesn’t have a numbered sweater.” To this end, Mitchell fired across the room, into a huddled mass of younger students-the junior jocks, I think, but I can’t be very sure, because the tabletops and chairs blocked my view. I also didn’t know whether the gunshots scattered or formed a concentrated beam, but I clearly remember blood from the huddle mixing with the streams of sprinkler water that trickled along the linoleum’s slight slant, down to behind the bank of vending machines. The machines made a quick electrical fizz noise and went dead. From the huddle came a few screams, some moans and then silence. Mitchell shouted, “We know that most of you aren’t dead or even wounded, so don’t think we’re stupid. Duncan, should we go over and see who’s fibbing and who isn’t?”
“I don’t know-I could get a bit more pumped about all of this if saggy-assed Jeremy would start pulling his weight.”
The two turned to Jeremy, the least talkative of the three. Mitchell said, “What’s the matter-deciding to convert into a jock all of a sudden? Gee, won’t that make the Out to Lunch Bunch hot for you. A killer with a heart of gold.”
r /> Jeremy said, “Mitchell, shut up. Like we haven’t noticed that all your shots are missing their mark? The only reason you shot out the windows was because it’s impossible to miss them.”
Mitchell got angrier. “You know what? I think you’re jamming out, and you’re jamming out a little bit too late into the game, I think.”
“What if I was to jam out?”
Mitchell said, “Watch this,” and fired across the room, killing a boy named Clay, whose locker was four down from mine. “There, see? Killing is fun. Jam out now, and you’re next.”
“I quit.”
“No, Jeremy, it’s too late for that. Duncan, what would you guess Jeremy’s tally up to this moment has been?”
Duncan calculated. “Four definite hits and five maybes.”
Mitchell turned to Jeremy: “Ha! And you expect mercy from the world?”
“I quit.”
Mitchell said, “What do we have here-a Hitler-in-the-bunker scenario?”
“Call it what you will.” Jeremy dropped his weapons.
Mitchell said, “Execution time.”
Being married was wild. It was worth all the delays and pleas and postponement of pleasure, and you know, this isn’t some guidance-class hygiene film speaking to you-it’s me. I was me. We were us. It was all real, and wild, and it is my most cherished memory of having been alive-a night of abandon on the sixteenth floor of Caesars Palace.