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Being!
    Shoot someone else over there! Shoot me? No! Way!
    I could have stood up, shouted and caused a diversion andsaved a hundred people, or organized the lifting of our table to create a shield to ram into the gunmen. But I sat there like a meek little sheep and it’s the only thing I’ve ever done that disgusts me. Silence was my sin. I sinned as I cowered and watched three pairs of ocher-colored work boots tromp about the room, toying with us as though we were bacteria under a magnifying lens.
    I recognized all of the boys-working on the yearbook is good for that kind of thing. There was Mitchell Van Waters. I remembered seeing him down at the smoke hole by the parking lot with his fellow eleventh-grade gunmen, Jeremy Kyriakis and Duncan Boyle.
    I watched Mitchell, Jeremy and Duncan walk from table to table. Take away the combat fatigues and they looked like the kid who mows your lawn or shoots hoops in the driveway next door. There was nothing physically interesting about them except that Mitchell was pretty skinny and Duncan had a small port-wine birthmark inside his hairline-I knew about this only because we’d been looking at photos as part of paste-up and layout during class.
    As the three walked from table to table, they talked among themselves-most of what they said I couldn’t make out. Some tables they shot at; some they didn’t. As the boys came nearer to us, Lauren pretended to be dead, eyes open, body limp, and I wanted to smack her, but I was just mad at myself, perhaps more than anything for being afraid. It had been drilled into us that to feel fear is to not fully trust God. Whoever made that one up has never been beneath a cafeteria table with a tiny thread of someone else’s blood trickling onto their leg.
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    One contradiction of the human heart is this: God refuses to see any one person as unique in his or her relationship to Him, and yet we humans see each other as bottomless wells of creativity and uniqueness. I write songs about horses; you make owl-shaped wall hangings; he combs his hair like some guy on TV; she knows the capital city of every country on earth . Inasmuch as uniqueness is an arrogant human assumption, Jason was unique, and because of this, he was lovable. To me. First off, he was terrific with voices-ones he made up and ones he mimicked. As with the girls from my summer job, I was a sucker for anyone who could imitate others. Jason with even one beer in him was better than cable TV. He used his voices the way ventriloquists use their dummies-to say things he was too shy to say himself. Whenever a situation was boring and there was no escaping it-dinner with my family, or party games organized by Pastor Fields’s wife that incorporated name tags and blindfolds-Jason went into his cat character, Mr. No, an otherwise ordinary cat who had a Nielsen TV ratings monitor box attached to his small black-and-white TV. Mr. No hated everything and he showed his displeasure by making a tiny, almost sub-audible squeaking nee-yow sound. I guess you had to be there. But Mr. No made more than a few painful hours a treat.
    Jason could also wiggle his ears, and his arms were double-jointed-some of his contortions were utterly harrowing, and I’d scream for him to stop. He also bought me seventeen roses for my seventeenth birthday, and how many boys do you know who’d do that ?
    I was surprised when Jason did propose-in his dad’s Buick on a rainy August afternoon in the White Spotparking lot over a cheeseburger and an orange float. I was surprised first because he did it, then second because he’d concocted a secret plan that was so wild that only the deadest of souls could refuse. Basically, using money he’d stockpiled from his summer job, we were going to fly to Las Vegas. There in the car, he produced fake IDs, a bottle of Champale and the thinnest of gold rings, barely strong enough to retain its shape. He said, “A ring is a halo for