Page 9 of I Will Ruin You
She’d also been able to tell me a little more about what LeDrew’d been up to since leaving Lodge High. He never did get his diploma despite efforts by our principal, Trent, to steer him into courses he’d be able to, if not ace, pass. His first job was at a fast-food franchise and he was fired from that for being belligerent with customers. He got a job with the city’s roads department for six months until he was laid off due to budget cutbacks. After that, he worked for a quarry up around Naugatuck. That would have been where he became familiar with dynamite, and it was believed he’d stolen the four sticks from there at some point—maybe even after he’d left—and studied online videos to figure out how to make his own device.
After he was fired from the quarry for consistent lateness, he had a series of other gigs. Stocking shelves on the midnight shift at a local supermarket, loading and unloading trucks at Home Depot. But Mark didn’t follow directions well, didn’t anticipate what needed to be done next, lacked an ability to focus on whatever task was at hand.
He lived with his parents and when he was between jobs spent most of his time in the basement watching slasher movies like the Saw and Hostel franchises. He’d become depressed, by all accounts, and had taken to writing online posts about how the world had screwed him over, how everybody was desperate for him to fail, that perverts and pedophiles were running amok, and one of these days he was going to find a way to settle some scores. He did not, in any of his diatribes, mention by name anyone he sought revenge against.
I hadn’t set foot in Lodge High since the police—Marta among them—finished questioning me at the school Monday and the paramedics tended to my injuries. Bonnie feared my return would be traumatic, and there was no reason to doubt that. I sure as hell had been traumatized. I spent the balance of Monday in a state of shock. I had a hard time telling the police exactly what had happened. The blast had jumbled my recollection.
Trent was able to fill in some of the details. I hadn’t been wrong when I sensed someone was behind me, watching my interaction with LeDrew. My principal was just inside the school office doors, and while he hadn’t heard all of the conversation, he got the general drift.
Maybe the most surprising thing was, Trent had been prepared to take action. And thank Christ he hadn’t.
School shootings had become so widespread that Trent, contrary to the board’s wishes and without their knowledge, had kept a handgun locked in the bottom drawer of his desk. When many on the far right had suggested arming teachers, Trent, a centrist, had never been one to immediately dismiss the idea. But I’d had no idea he kept a weapon on the premises, or that he had gotten it from his desk and was preparing to use it on Mark LeDrew.
In one of our conversations since the incident—Trent had come by the house to see me on Tuesday—he told me he’d been taking the gun back and forth between home and the school for the better part of two years. He said he’d considered shooting LeDrew, but wasn’t sure he could hit him while missing me. Had he managed a clean shot, LeDrew would only have been a few inches from me when his thumb came off the button, instead of several feet.
We came under a nationwide media spotlight.
CNN, NBC—an entire alphabet of networks—had wanted to interview me, but I’d turned down all requests, referring them to Trent.
This is what he’d told Anderson Cooper over a Zoom link:
“It was a horrible, horrible thing, no question. Our hearts go out to that young man’s family and what they must be going through now. But it could have been much worse. If it were not for the brave actions of teacher Richard Boyle, for his quick thinking, for the calm manner in which he handled the situation, I just... I shudder to think what might have happened. Our school got off lucky that day. God was watching out for us.”
I didn’t know Trent to be a religious man, and doubted the LeDrew family felt the same way about our heavenly father.
I’d done my best to relate to the police what Mark had said to me about Herb Willow, some unkind words about our guidance counselor, Sally Berwick, and the cryptic reference to a character from a science fiction/horror film, which made no sense to any of us. A lawnmower reference didn’t sound all that ominous, although I had a memory of a scene in a Stephen King novel where a policeman got run over by one.
What little Mark had said about Herb sounded credible. I’d heard him bad-mouth kids, to their faces and behind their backs. Were Herb’s insults a self-fulfilling prophecy? Even without Herb’s negativity, Mark LeDrew wasn’t destined to become a rocket scientist. Looking back, it was hard not to think he’d had a learning disability or psychological issue no one bothered to diagnose.
Mark’s grudge against Sally was less clear, but from what I’d heard, she’d followed Herb’s trail of breadcrumbs, steering the kid down a career path that didn’t require a genius-level IQ. But unlike Herb, Sally was well intentioned. She’d have done what she believed was best for Mark.
Bonnie, bringing me back to the present, said, “I could take today off. They’d understand. Mitch could take the lead.” Her vice principal. “We could pull Rachel from school, take the boat up to the lake, find a place to stay, make a long weekend of it.”
This was a generous offer, considering how things were between Bonnie and me. It had been building for a while. She blamed my parents, both long gone, whom I never seemed capable of pleasing despite my best efforts. Said I kept looking for approval from others, going beyond what anyone would reasonably expect.
It was pure dime-store psychology, but I was willing to concede there might be something to it. The evidence was overwhelming. Sending money to my down-on-his-luck cousin without talking it over with Bonnie first. Disappearing on a Saturday afternoon to help an inept, handicapped neighbor repair a busted fence when I was supposed to be taking Rachel to the movies. Inviting a troubled student to drop by the house to talk and being unable to find my wallet after she left. I had to cancel all my cards.
“You can’t get every kitten out of every tree,” Bonnie liked to tell me.
It’s not like Bonnie wasn’t kind and generous and empathetic. She was all those things, just not to a fault. She wouldn’t have been an effective principal without those qualities. But she understood we all have limits, and that we have to tend to our own before overextending ourselves. And she was having a particularly hard time with what I’d done Monday.
“You could have locked your door, called the police, stayed with your kids,” she’d said. “But you ran toward the danger. We could have lost you. You’re not James Bond. You’re not Jason Bourne. You’re not even my sister. You’re a goddamn high school English teacher.”
The best excuse I could come up with? It seemed like a good idea at the time. And at some level, she knew, had she been in the same situation, she might have done the same thing. Run to that door and tried to stop a kid with a bomb from getting into the building. But even acknowledging that, she couldn’t shake the fact that she had nearly lost me. No matter how much my supposedly selfless actions annoyed her, I know she didn’t want that.
Rachel had picked up on the tension between us, and not just in the last few days. She’d overheard the arguments, particularly after I sent three thousand dollars to my cousin Stan when he got fired from his meatpacking job in Duluth. I’d told him it was a onetime thing, and I’d stuck to that, but that hadn’t made Bonnie any happier.
So Bonnie coming up with the idea of taking off today for a long weekend was a nice, conciliatory gesture. But I shook my head.
“If I don’t walk back into that school today, I don’t know whether I’ll be able to do it Monday.”
She looked at me for a moment, then nodded. “Okay, then,” she said.
We usually left for work at the same time. Bonnie would get into her Mitsubishi crossover, usually taking Rachel and dropping her off at her school along the way, and I’d get into my Subaru Forester, which was parked closer to the street because the boat—a sixteen-footer with a fifty-horsepower Merc outboard bolted to the transom—sat on its trailer up close to the garage.
As I was getting into my car, Jack Marshall, our next-door neighbor, was coming out his front door and heading for his van. He’d been to the house after the incident to offer congratulations-slash-condolences-slash-thanks, and his wife, Jill (yes, that’s right, Jack and Jill), sent over a cherry pie, because nothing helps you get past witnessing someone blow up like pastry.
Okay, that’s dickish. People meant well, and didn’t know what to say. I mean, what would I have said to someone in the same situation?