Lethal Passage Read Free

belly area … repeated acts of this type.”
    Dr. Wallace found that Nicholas had suppressed his anger and fear to the point where, that Friday morning, he experienced a “disassociative” episode. “He kept so much within him, like a pressure cooker,” Dr. Wallace said. “It built and built and then exploded,and that was the accumulation of all of the repressed and suppressed emotions.”
    One week before Nicholas decided to go hunting for Billy, he and the other boy got into another war of words, this time during gym class. This time, however, Billy’s taunting seemed to wrench something loose inside Nicholas. The taunting and teasing may indeed have been a perverse game indulged in equally by both boys, but suddenly it became something far more sinister.As Nicholas left the class, he shouted to Billy, “I’m going to kill you.”
♦ ♦ ♦
    “I can’t take him picking on me,” Nicholas told Adams. He had been afraid, he said, that Billy Cutter “would end up killing me. He always threatened me.… Like he would hit me in the back of my neck.”
    His mother interrupted, “You could have gone to the phone and called me at work.”
    “If he would have broke my neck,” Nicholas said, “my life would have been over. He kicked me. He hit me in the back of the neck.”
    “Not all people, bullies, can threaten you,” his mother said. “That’s what I’m telling you.”
    “But, Mom, he actually hit me and I don’t want my neck—if he would have broke my neck—”
    “I’m trying to reason with you. You could have gone to the office and asked the people to call your mom. The other kids do. You could have called me.”
    “You only use that for when you are sick, Mom,” Nicholas protested. “You can’t use it for being threatened. The teachers are supposed to handle it, but they don’t do anything.”
    Nicholas seemed able to find solace consistently only in his pet birds, and in guns. Everyone at school knew of Nicholas’s passion for firearms. It served only to widen the gulf between him and his peers.At lunch while all the other boys were reading skateboard magazines, he’d thumb through Guns & Ammo .His locker was papered with glossy ads depicting powerful handguns. In conversation,according to a fellow student, Nicholas loved to discuss “which bullets had more firepower.” His classmates worried about Nicholas.One told a Norfolk newspaper, “All the kids said he was going to shoot someone.”
    Even the guns became fodder for taunts from Billy Cutter, and from other students. “They were always making fun of me,” Nicholas told Adams. “They always said stuff: ‘You know so much about guns. You never even shot a gun in your life.’ ”
    His mother worried most about her son on Fridays, the day, she believed, when passions kept in check all week were most prone to be released. “Nicholas,” she said. “Why would you take a gun today? You said that Billy hadn’t hit you since Wednesday, so why would you take a gun on Friday? I told you how Fridays are. You lay low on Friday, because everybody is upset.”
    When she arrived at headquarters to meet Adams and her son, she was consumed with grief and guilt over Nicholas’s attack on the school.
    “I will be up praying all night, all day tomorrow,” she said, “I’m going to pray.”
    Nicholas, trying to rein in the day and get things normal again, abruptly shifted the conversation to matters of daily routine.
    “Are you going to work?” he asked.
    “No. I don’t want to go to work.”
    Genuinely perplexed, Nicholas asked, “Why not?”
    “Because that’s what got me, trying to work and earn, to try to keep my head above water and losing you.”
    “You can take my money out of the bank,” Nicholas offered.
    “Gaining the world,” his mother cried, “and losing my soul—”
    “It’s not losing me,” Nicholas pleaded. “It’s just people picking on me. That’s all it is. If God would have just stopped them—if I