The gun is heavier than I expect. My mother once told me Gran emerged from her bedroom holding it one day when I was a toddler and threatened to shoot us all. I was there, but too young to remember for myself. Now, I finger the hole through which the bullet would have come and contemplate the hole it would have made in me. I think of John Everett, too, whether he felt the lead enter his brain. If he heard the shot. I didn’t know him well—he was a year behind me in school—but I never would have thought he’d try to kill himself. He was quiet and smart. A little angry, reminiscent of a nerdy Holden Caulfield, but Holden Caulfield didn’t commit suicide, just talked about it. Is that how it works—people who threaten suicide are pleading for help, but the ones who keep it a secret are the ones who follow through? Even so, I suspect I should hide the gun from my mother before I leave. But where? And how will she react when she notices? And doesn’t she still have the bottle of pills Dr. Maurer prescribes her?
I jump at the squeak of the glass door sliding open downstairs. I tuck the gun back under the puzzle books as my mother calls my name.
*
My roommate is from Eugene, Oregon. Kenzie flops on the bottom bunk, which she already seems to have claimed, having arrived from the airport an hour ahead of me. “North Carolina, huh? You must be glad to get out of there,” she says after my mother’s departure.
“Sort of,” I say. “I mean, I’m glad to be here.”
“I mean all the Confederate flags and stuff. The racism?” She surveys the Smirnoff and Crown Royal boxes in which I’ve packed my books and clothes. I want to explain they were just boxes free for the taking inside the door to the liquor store. Her belongings are packed in roller-bags and brightly colored duffels.
“The Outer Banks was actually part of the Union for most of the Civil War,” I say. “So, we don’t have any Confederate monuments there. We had a freedmen’s colony instead.”
“Huh.” Kenzie opens her laptop.
“What’s Oregon like?”
Kenzie shrugs. “I think it’s like everywhere—I mean, Costco and Target are pretty much the same wherever.”
“Yeah.” There is no Costco or Target on the Outer Banks. I’ve only been to the Target in Chesapeake twice. A scratched wooden bookshelf with four shelves lists in a corner. “Do you mind if I use part of that bookshelf?” I ask.
Kenzie doesn’t look up. “Sure, whatever.”
I unpack books and wait for Kenzie to resume the conversation, hoping she’ll ask me more about what the South is like, the way Quentin Compson’s Canadian roommate at Harvard does in Absalom. I wonder what I’ll tell her. Will I play Quentin’s part and retell the story of Thomas Sutpen as an answer, or will I step outside the story to explain the book itself as an answer? (So there’s this novel where a guy from Mississippi answers his Canadian roommate’s question about what the South is like with this complicated story about people obsessed with reconstructing a narrative of an imagined past, and it all boils down to a white guy who murders his halfbrother before the half-brother marries their sister, not because of the incest but because the half-brother is one-sixteenth Black…)
I don’t find out, because Kenzie doesn’t ask. She stares intently at her laptop, fingers tapping the keys, while I fill two of the four shelves and leave the rest in a box to tuck away in the closet. I don’t want to take up any more space than I feel I have a right to.