A stupid and unrealistic but fun story I wrote

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1

My name is Lars Larssi Larson, and I’m a school shooter.

I decided to become one for many reasons, but I don’t remember how to express them. All I know is that right now, I’m sitting in the drunk tank at the local police station, waiting to go to prison.

When I was five, my aunts Isolde, Greta and Eva, my uncles Hans, Fritz, Adolph, Jan and Henk, my cousins Jens, Rudolph, Sven, Soeren, Sebastian, Konradin, Ben, Heidi, and Peter, my father’s parents Fenna and Borg, my mother’s parents Anneliese and Kristoffer, my mother’s aunt Dagmar and my father’s aunt Katrin, my father’s cousins Jorg , Helmut and Joern, and my mother’s uncle Nils all committed suicide.

They were living in a commune. My parents left with me because they found it too freaky. They had some sort of pact going on. My parents never talked about it except to say that it was stupid and to tell me never to join a cult or commune.

I wish I lived in a commune. You can’t seem to find the camaraderie anywhere else except maybe the army, which is probably full of the idiots the school was full of. I was so lonely for years; I wanted a commune full of people like me and not like the idiots the school was full of. I tried to make it happen in an online community full of people I thought were like me, but the truth is, even the ones who didn’t prefer school or work or their as*hole families to a commune said they couldn’t do it because they couldn’t afford it, because they needed to stay in society to seek medical treatment, because they didn’t like communes, because they’d been in a commune that was like a cult and that had scared them off communes for good, that they had been in a commune that hadn’t worked out, that it just wasn’t realistic.

I was tired of their negativity disguised as realism. If they weren’t going to make something happen to teach those idiots the school was full of a lesson, I would.

Hence my guns.

“Larson, your lawyer is here,” a cop says, opening my cell and quite violently pushing my lawyer in. He lands on the floor on his face. When he gets up, I see that his nose is bleeding. The officer has already slammed and locked the cell door and left.

“Give me a minute,” Jay breathes, and he takes out a notepad and paper and starts scribbling furiously. He goes on scribbling for about two minutes and five pages of notebook. I wonder if I shouldn’t ask him what he’s doing to gently remind him why he’s here. But then he looks up. “I’m going to sue them for bodily harm and misconduct,” he explains. Then he puts his notebook back in his bag and rummages in it for the big binder that contains my file.

“Lars, I never would have suspected that you had this up your sleeve,” he says. “When you contacted me and said you wanted to be able to speak to me at length anytime today or tomorrow, and I said I was free—I mean, I was suspecting something like maybe you going to prison, but I figured I’d just ask what was going on when I met you.”

Another officer opens the door. “Come on, Larson. You can’t stay in here; more drunks are coming in. Let’s go to an interrogation room in the back.”

“I just got here. Can I stay with him?” Jay asks.

“Of course. And by the way,” he whispers, “I’m sorry about Officer Ramirez beating you up. Are you okay? Do you need medical attention? Will you be suing?”

Officer Duncan. The one decent officer at the station. I’m lucky I was arrested by him. One of the others might have killed me. He hates working here at this station, but this is probably the only job opening available for him. Like hell his boss will give him a reference for another station. He probably thinks he’s too humane.

“Oh, he didn’t beat me up… just threw me on the floor,” Jay replies cheerfully. “But thanks for your concern. You seem decent.”

Officer Duncan opens a door to an empty room with a table and four chairs and we go in, then he nods at us and closes the door behind us.

“Alright, Lars, I’ve been talking to Judge Oprici; he’s agreed to be the one to take your case at the courthouse. He gave me a copy of this. He agreed…” he turns a few pages in his binder until he finds what he’s looking for, then takes it out and hands it to me—“that instead of staying here until your trial and then going to Kingston once you get convicted, you will first be subjected to a thirty-day evaluation at Deva Hospital. Does that sound cool? And can I keep that once you’re finished reading it? They’ll give you another one within a few days.”

I look at the three stapled-together papers. Jay or the judge must know someone who works at the Deva Hospital (one of the mental institutions in New Scandinavia, our small town), because they got that person to sign something saying that I was interviewed and that the findings were that I was depressed and homicidal. When I talked to Jay on the phone last night after he brought me in I said that I was still depressed and homicidal, and he must have gone to the judge right after that.

The cops let me go only grudgingly. Duncan insists on driving me to Deva. So do all the other cops. They all want to have one last go at me in the car. They probably don’t want to call their supervisor because the supervisor will want to drive me, so they fight amongst themselves, and eventually Duncan says “Come on!” as the other cops are taking drunken swings at each other, and Duncan, Jay and I run out the door, Duncan holding me by my cuffed hands and saying he’ll have to shoot me if I run away. His car is around the corner.

Me and Jay get into the back.

Duncan turns the engine on. “You know, I wouldn’t really have shot you if you’d run away,” he says. “I just had to say that for them. You know, I wish you luck. You know that, right?”

I say nothing.

“ When I was sixteen I stabbed a classmate in the cheek for picking on me,” he says. “So I have no hard feelings toward you. I know you just shot the people who were… picking on you. I talked to lots of witnesses.”

“Thanks,” I finally say.

Jay is allowed to come with me. That’s the law.

We arrive at a big old stone building with about ten floors.

“Stay put,” Duncan says. “I need to hold you by the arm or something and have the other hand on my gun so that they think I’m being careful not to let you escape.” And that’s how we walk up the stairs into the large hall, with Jay strutting confidently behind us.

The guard at the metal detector waves us through, looking at me curiously the whole time. I look back as we walk farther into the hall. He’s looking back at me. He turns his head back around when he realizes I see him staring at me.

The whole lobby seems to be staring at me.

We approach the desk, with about eight staff crowded around babbling excitedly about something.

“I hope he’s on my unit,” a black lady with long braids says, smiling the whole time.

“Why do you want him to be on your unit? Jesus!” a big bald black guy with a gold earring says.

“Who are we talking about?” asks a pale girl with waist-length curly blonde hair and glasses as she looks up from her work at the desk.

“The shooter.”

“The school shooter.”

“Hmm—what—oh my God, that guy!”

“He’s not coming here, is he?” pipes up a small dark girl who came after the first bit of the conversation and thus missed it.

“Yes, he is!” three or four of them shout excitedly almost in unison.

Duncan clears his throat.

“Oh, sorry,” the curly blonde says, looking up from her work and taking the pen out of her mouth. “Oh!”

“Is this him?”

“Is this who we think it is?”

I nod. One of them looks impressed with me just from my nod, for some reason.

“Okay, you’re on 2D,” the curly-haired girl says, checking a computer. She smiles at me. “You can go right upstairs since you were pre-registered.” She turns to the others. “Is anyone here from 2D and would like to escort the patient upstairs?”

“I’ll—I’ll do it,” the bald black guy stutters. But even his stutter is confident. It’s kind of difficult to explain. Anyway, he said he’d do it because all the others were looking at him.

And off we go: me, Duncan, Jay and the black guy, me still handcuffed.

I look back. The staff and half the people sitting on chairs and benches and couches in the lobby are staring at me. Most of them with dislike.

Oh, well. Some people like me. When you’re unattractive you sometimes have to settle for just a few people or nothing. You have to make sacrifices just to get those few people to like you. And respect you.

We go up to the second floor in an elevator, walk down a long hall, and arrive at a set of double doors with a big “2-D” in front of them on the floor. It’s cool. The letters and numbers that the units are named for are actually part of the floor, somehow fused into the smooth marble and made of marble themselves.

The whole time the bald black guy is holding me by my other arm and giving Duncan dirty looks, as though he thinks Duncan needs help keeping me from running and the black guy is angry that Duncan arrived alone with me and my lawyer with no other officers. Or maybe I’m just being paranoid.



2

On the unit, there’s an area with couches and a TV, long tables with chairs and benches, doors to the male and female bathrooms for staff and right beside them, doors to the male and female bathrooms for patients. There are also other doors leading out of this room. There are two telephones on the wall. The window goes from ceiling to floor and you can see across the courtyard into other units that also have dayrooms with floor-to-ceiling windows.

They bring me up to the desk, where there are five more staff chattering excitedly and very loudly, but there is no laughter or humor here. When one of them laughs, the other four look at him like he’s a criminal. I can’t hear what they’re saying but they must be talking about me.

As I approach the desk, they turn and immediately scramble for some work to do. A lady looks up from her computer and the process of admitting me begins.

They strip search me. They ask me if I know who the president of the United States is. They confiscate my car keys because I could slit my wrists with them, my shoelaces because I could use them to string myself up from the shower faucet, and my pen because I could jab it into my jugular. They take my bloody temperature and blood pressure, for Christ’s sake, and they ask me why I’m here as if they don’t know, and they draw some blood from me, probably for a souvenir to sell on e-Bay, though they say it’s to compare my blood before and after medication. So they’re going to medicate me. I should have known. They say it’s routine to take blood here. That’s because every patient that comes through these doors gets medicated.

I don’t know why they let me keep my pants. I could hang myself with them.

Duncan says goodbye and good luck, and scribbles his phone number on an empty cigarette box for me.

Jay stays. We go and sit down at a table. Patients sit at the tables laughing and joking, drinking coffee that’s probably decaf and playing cards.

And now it sinks in.

I’m trapped here. I need to get out within thirty days, before the cops come to take me to prison. If Duncan would have let me run away, why did he take me here? Why didn’t he take me somewhere else? A safe place to hide. The Mexican border. I guess he got cold feet and decided he didn’t want to be arrested. So he’s a coward like the rest of them. That’s nice to know.

Jay rambles on about legal stuff and the other patients are too crazy to notice who I am. Then a voice comes on the intercom saying visiting hours are over and he says he has to go.

I need to get out of here.

I need to get out of here.

One of the staff is banging on the doors in the four walls to this room and yelling “Time for dinner! Dinner’s ready! Time for dinner!” He’s an amusing-looking, friendly-looking chubby round-faced black man in sweatpants and a dorky-looking striped polo shirt. More people are coming in through the doors.

I get in line for dinner. They hand me a tray, I take a few steps away, and then I realize I don’t know where to sit.

It’s this again. Not knowing where to sit.

I always had problems finding a place to sit at school during lunch. Who would I sit with? How was I supposed to make friends? So I spent most of my lunch hours in the library. Reading about school shooters on the internet.

“Hey, are you the shooter from the TV?” I jump and nearly drop my tray. It’s a black guy with his baggy jeans pulled down to his knees.

I nod automatically, not thinking of the consequences of telling the truth until it’s too late.

“Sit with us, man,” the black guy says.

I turn to go sit with him, automatically. All the staff are watching us closely from the staff station.

I sit down and suddenly, there’s applause. People further down the long tables look to see what’s going on and then they start to applaud too. “Stand up for your riiights!” someone sings, and there’s even more happy, excited murmuring.

“Everyone, please eat and leave him alone. He’s a patient just like you all and we have to protect him,” one sharp-looking female staffer says loudly , sounding a bit annoyed and condescending.

“It’s okay,” I say, then I realize that she might think I just like the attention and want it to continue. Which, actually, is true.

They confiscated my pen, but they give us plastic forks, knives and spoons to eat with. I could break one of these and use its new sharp end to slit my wrists.

Maybe there’s hope yet. Maybe I can break out.

But then, they’re watching me so closely, I doubt that will happen.

“So why did you do it?”

It’s the black guy with the falling-down jeans again.

“Why do you think I did it?” I look at my food. It’s slop. I butter the roll and eat it, then say “You all can have any of this; I don’t want it.”

Nobody wants it. But they don’t mind not liking their food; they’re talking to me!

cool

I like it.