Why we homeschool our son: "Kennedy" by Kevin Wilson

Like a lot of people, I had more time in 2020 to watch television than I've had in past years. We're supposedly living in the Golden Age of American Television, and every week there's another series on all the four main streaming services that gets rave reviews, so there ought to be a lot to interest me. But I sort of feel like the Golden Age has already passed. Most of the shows everyone is praising seem to me now like a reiteration of some earlier show, an attempt to recreate the magic that has the form but not the soul that made the original worth watching. 

Some of the exceptions are shows about adolescents, like Netflix's Big Mouth and Hulu's PEN15. Adolescent shows have always been built around humor that takes advantage of the awkwardness of being a teen. These shows aren't an exception, but they also don't overlook how deep and lasting the psychological damage of teen years can be. Particularly the fourth season of Big Mouth, which just came out this month, is equal parts sex/scatological humor and also a sensitive portrayal of how what we tend to write off as routine nuisances of youth can lead to long-term psychological disorders. 

Kevin Wilson's "Kennedy," the next-to-the-last story in Best American Short Stories 2020, is another in this line of stories about adolescence that take what happens in the teen years seriously. "Kennedy," however, doesn't share the humor of the best shows tackling the subject. (Although much like PEN15, it features two friends, one of whom is Japanese in a town where there are almost no other Asian kids.) "Kennedy" gets dark fast:

John F. Kennedy was a boy in our high school, but he went by Kennedy. For a brief time, he made things pretty bad for us. We’d started our junior year without ever having exchanged a single word with him, had only seen him as he stalked the hallways, his long, greasy hair covering his face, his Coke-bottle glasses. He always wore this olive green military jacket with the name KENNEDY stitched across the right breast. Underneath that, he seemed to have every single Cannibal Corpse T-shirt in existence, a never-ending parade of skeletons and knives and blood and people with the skin ripped off their faces. He wasn’t allowed to wear the T-shirts at school, since they were against the dress code, so he wore the jacket over them, even when it was hot out, and if he sensed your weakness, he’d open his jacket and flash the T-shirt at you as he passed you in the hallway.

You'd think that naming the kid JFK would mean there was some kind of idiosyncratic humor on its way, but it's mostly absent. The story is a recollection of how the narrator and his best friend Ben allowed Kennedy to abuse them, terrify them, and, ultimately, to come between them. It's reminiscent of a lot of stories sexual abuse victims tell, mainly because of the way the victims find themselves too shell-shocked to fight. The narrator, Jaime, thinks it's maybe because he was coddled by his parents, leaving him "without street smarts, with no sense of how to navigate high school." 

Charles Baxter said that hell is full of great stories, and for many people, the closest they got to hell was high school (or junior high). 

Whatever the reason, when Kennedy throws a backpack at Ben and Ben doesn't complain, the psychopathic Kennedy realizes he can have his way with the two friends. There are a number of reasons they feel they can't complain to adults. One is simply that it will "embarrassing." Another is the apathy the adults demonstrate; the teacher in the art class where Kennedy deals out much of his abuse is recumbent on a recliner most of the time because of the pain in her back. As caring as their parents are, they don't know how to ask the right questions to find out what is troubling their children. Ben's mother asks about the first day of school, but Ben and Jaime don't give her an honest answer. "How would we even begin to describe Kennedy? What could be done?" they ask themselves. " And that was that. It was like, in missing that moment when things were still normal, we had given up any chance of controlling Kennedy’s effect on our lives. He had us. If he wanted us, whatever he wanted, he could have us."

There's a lot more of this kind of language in the story, all of it consistent with what many other survivors of abuse have told, the difficulty of explaining why you found yourself unable to resist. I've taken "resiliency training" before, and a lot of it had to do with learning to "get off the X," meaning how to not be a target for this kind of abuse. Abusers are experts at knowing who they can abuse and get away with it. It's actually a very normal human reaction, this freezing up, which is why this story is so consistent with what so many abuse survivors have to say:

Looking back on it, I want to take myself and just shake and shake, like, What the fuck is wrong with you? Why did you let that happen? But I can still remember those moments, when it felt like I was paralyzed inside my own body, like I had to pull myself deeper and deeper inside of myself, away from the surface, in order to stay alive. I think Ben felt the same way. We tried not to talk about it.

Invisibility

At one point, the narrator claims that now, as an adult looking back on it, he understands why he was unable to fight back. (He also claims at other points that he doesn't understand, but that's to be expected. Looking back on a traumatic event, you're likely to feel both epiphanies and subsequent undoing of the epiphanies.) He feels that he and his friend Ben had practiced being invisible for so long, they didn't know how to ask for help, because that would have involved trying to be noticed: "Now I understand it: we had stayed invisible for so long that we weren’t used to people noticing us, and so when Kennedy noticed us, shined a light on us, we simply froze, simply sat there and took it, all these little indignities, and hoped that he would fuck up in some other class and get suspended, a temporary reprieve."

Jaime likely meant that most high schoolers, unsure of who they are and terrified of the scorn of their peers, which seems to whirl around with the caprice of a prairie wind, find it safest to just keep quiet, go along, and not make noise. This is, in fact, the safest thing most of the time in high school, which is why it's so hard to realize when it's the thing that is putting you in danger.

But Ben and Jaime aren't the only invisible ones. The word "invisible" appears twice in the story. The second time, it's about Kennedy. "I wondered how he’d made it this far in school when it was so clear how little he cared, how he would dare anyone in authority to do something about it. But it was like he was invisible to people in charge. I couldn’t figure it out."

The narrator allows us to see reasons to have empathy for Kennedy without letting on himself that he feels this empathy. Maybe it's not the job of the abused to feel empathy for their abusers, but through Jaime's eyes, we, the readers, see plenty to pity Kennedy for. He has an abusive father, and he is obviously entirely alone. He desperately wants to connect, but has no idea how. When Jaime suggests killing Kennedy, Ben is there to immediately talk him out of it, but Kennedy has nobody to talk him out of it when he decides to kill his abuser. 

It's easy to see why the boys love video games so much, why the sense of power and competence they feel in their virtual world is so much more appealing to them than the real one. But at least they play together. Kennedy's escape, meanwhile, is to wear a fetishist's leather mask while he is sleeping, something that no doubt makes him feel he can disappear, but also something that increases his isolation.

Bug, not a feature

We decided at the end of eighth grade to homeschool our son, rather than send him to high school. For the last year, this decision has been moot, but before that, we definitely got an earful of gratuitous opinions on whether this decision was good for him. Most of the concerns were that our son wouldn't be ready for the real world, because he would have missed out on the interactions with peers, teachers, and administrators, both the good and the bad, that would prepare him for life. 

I understand this concern, and believe me, Mrs. Heretic and I thought long and hard about what he'd be missing out on. But I think all too often, society tends to treat the bugs of high school like they're features. Schools aren't supposed to be ignorant of abuse going on. Students aren't supposed to feel like they have no good options to stop it. This doesn't teach coping skills for later in life. It gives people pathologies that make it harder to survive later in life. It's like saying the best way for a military to prepare for a firefight is for everyone to practice getting shot. 

Teenage life isn't supposed to be like high school. High schools are insane asylums. We shouldn't act like some of the truly terrible things about it are the way it's supposed to be, like it's great preparation for the real world and that it's really part of the design to high school.

We overuse the word "trauma" in America (especially us political liberals). And even I am annoyed sometimes by how much hysteria is attached to some behavior that is actually normal teenage behavior, calling it "bullying," when in fact it's just annoying. I probably never faced actual trauma in high school, but I did learn unhealthy coping strategies. I vacillated between hiding by trying to be invisible and trying to hide in plain sight by being outlandishly weird, hoping I could become so weird that picking on me would seem redundant, because I did so well at picking on myself. Along the way, I learned some of the same things Jaime did, like how not to speak up when someone is treating you badly. That probably helped lead to other decisions after high school, like joining the Marine Corps, where I also learned that being invisible was a good strategy, and also vacillated between striving for it and trying to hide in plain sight by acting eccentrically. 

Good things can come out of bad experiences, of course. But there's good adversity and bad adversity, and just because high school makes students face terrible behavior doesn't mean it's good for building character or whatever we try to pretend it's good for. 

In the story, Jaime and Ben's friendship to one another is what allows them to survive. They fail each other in some ways, and although as readers, we can forgive their failures and even find they make the small courage the boys show for each other far more affecting, as adults, they've lost touch, possibly because to see one another would be to remember what Kennedy put them through and how they failed. One cannot see their friendship as a silver lining to the abuse, because they were friends before and stopped being friends not long after. It didn't make them become closer. The fire of adversity did not burnish the gold of their relationship.  

Is there hope for Jaime?

I'm no expert on trauma, but it seems to me that there are two things that might help Jaime, at whatever point in time he is looking back on this story, to heal from it. One is finding empathy for Kennedy and maybe forgiving him, and the second is coming to some kind of closure concerning Ben. The first might actually be easier than the second; Kennedy might be dead by now, or at least not living a happy adult life, and wherever he is, he can't hurt Jaime anymore. In Jaime's own recollection, we, as objective readers, see all we need to see in order to feel some empathy and forgiveness for Kennedy, so the seeds are there in Jaime's mind. But the final words of the story are about how much Jaime misses Ben. The reader wants to kick Jaime in the pants, much like while reading all the scenes of his abuse. Just do it! There's social media now! People are usually easy to find! Reach out! You're writing this story, so you must have some part of you that wants to find him, that's ready to remember. But Jaime still seems unable as an adult to get off the X, to take action, even when it's clearly what would make him happier. He's still so trained by the warped microcosm of society we call high school to not do what he clearly should do. 

I put a lot of myself into this look at "Kennedy," and even though that's not unusual for me, I did more of it here than in any other story I can remember analyzing. This is probably because of how personally and emotionally invested I was in this story. I read it with the same single-mindedness to get to the ending I've heard readers of suspenseful beach reads put into their books, but has never happened to me before. Once I saw what the story was about, I had to get to the end quickly. It's an utterly superb short story. But the fact that the dysfunction of American high schools around the time I was in them led to the creation of a great short story doesn't justify the dysfunction. 

For Karen Carlson's take on this story (she thought it was equally compelling), go here.