We Need To Talk About Kevin

Eva writes from Racine, where she is visiting her mother for Christmas. After Thursday, she accepted she and her mother have never attempted to understand each other. Her mother talked about Kevin constantly and showed little surprise after the tragedy.

Kevin stopped screaming soon after Siobhan quit. He was now completely silent at all times, which unnerved Eva. Once she got him to roll a ball back to her two times. Then he saw that she was happy about it and never engaged with her and the ball again.

She took Kevin to Dr. Fouke, desperate for him to diagnose Kevin with some sort of disability or developmental disorder. He did not, however. Eva began noticing Kevin’s coldness everywhere, even in his drawings, which were rarely more than furious black scribbles that covered the page.

When Kevin started talking, it was to say he doesn’t like the TV show Eva put on for him. Then he said that he wouldn’t call her mommy. Eva now thinks Kevin’s silence gave him an opportunity to eavesdrop and spy on them as he collected data.

She reminds Franklin of Kevin’s third birthday party, where he destroyed his cake methodically by scooping out the middle with his hands, as if he were disemboweling it. She recounts that she agreed to move to the suburbs if Franklin would let her take an AWAP trip to Africa. However, she doesn’t enjoy herself and misses Franklin while she is away. She was 41 years old and had to admit her life had changed. When she got home she realized she was most interested in Kevin when he was not there.

One day prior to this letter to Franklin, a man named Michael McDermott shot seven of his coworkers at a company called Edgewater Technology, possibly because of wage garnishments. Eva attends a party her mother holds with some of her elderly friends. After the McDermott shooting, the guests are desperate to talk about him. They ask Eva for insight, but she has no answers for them. Her experience with Kevin has not given her any insight into other murderers.

When Eva returned from Africa, Kevin grew agitated when she kissed Franklin in front of her. On the drive to a restaurant, Eva noticed the truck was covered with cheese doodles. Kevin is addicted to salt and hates sweets. He sucked the cheese doodles until they were gooey and then spit them out. Eva refrains from telling Franklin that while she was in Africa, she had resolved to spend more time with Kevin. 

At a restaurant, Kevin responded to everything Eva said with an aggressive “nyeh,” and then he covered a hamburger in salt. The waitress had a birthmark on her cheek, and Kevin asked her why she had poop on her face. Franklin accused Eva of always thinking the worst of Kevin. She took the chance at that moment to tell Franklin she was quitting AWAP to focus on Kevin. Kevin resumed the mocking “nyeh,” interrupting Eva until she slapped him. Kevin looked happy for a moment, then began to cry. Franklin then told her he bought a new house. Eva was disappointed he hadn’t included her. As they left the restaurant, she knew everyone was relieved to see them go.

Eva writes that she hated the house in Nyack immediately. She wanted an old house with personality. She thought of it as another couple’s dream home. It was only three years old and had no history, which bothered her. 

Eva tells Franklin in the letter that his parents’ tastes shaped him. She says they had more in common with Kevin than anyone. None of them knew what life was for. The difference was that Franklin’s parents justified their existence with relentless productivity and perfection in cooking and working. Kevin never fooled himself into thinking that productivity was the same as spending one’s time usefully.

Eva describes visiting his parents, alone, after Thursday. Her father-in-law had lost weight. She told them she asked the parents of Kevin’s victims if she could come to the funerals. A woman named Thelma Corbitt agreed. Over the phone, she told Eva about her son Denny and they cried together.

Franklin’s parents were surprised when she said she hired an expensive lawyer for Kevin’s case. Her father-in-law said that prison could keep Kevin from hurting anyone else. Eva told them Kevin could be tried as an adult but admitted she sometimes wished he would get the death penalty. Later she regrets this conversation because Franklin’s parents use it against her in a deposition. Before she left, her father-in-law asked if she understood why Kevin did it. She says the answers to questions like that are unsatisfactory and that her reply only kept him from asking questions like that again.

Eva writes to Franklin that George Bush wins the case of the election recount. She recalls being questioned by lawyers about Kevin’s upbringing. She was bored and sleepy as she talked about television, parental controls on the Internet, and friends. 

They watched Braveheart as a family and the torture scene didn’t bother Kevin. Eva saw that he was unable to imagine the horrible events in movies as happening to him. He could not empathize.

She reminds Franklin that they let Kevin have a squirt gun, although they had originally agreed that they did not want their child playing with replicas of weapons. When they moved to the new house, Kevin squirted the crotches of the movers while wearing a wooden mask Eva had brought him from Kenya. Franklin took the gun and squirted Eva with it, and he and Kevin laughed. Franklin gave the gun back to Kevin, who proceeded to squirt Eva in the face. She took the gun away, and Franklin blamed her for spoiling a fun day. In the moving truck, Eva held the gun up so Kevin could see it, and he pretended not to care.

At the new home, she hid the squirt gun in a cabinet. Kevin built a tower of boxes and climbed up to get it when Eva surprised him. Franklin admired Kevin’s ingenuity, carried Kevin out of the room, and told Eva to lighten up. That night, Kevin squirted her favorite white caftan with grape juice. 

As they decorated, Eva covered the walls of her study with beautiful maps. Kevin sad they were dumb. He didn’t understand why she cared, and it outraged him. She said she loved them. Her study was special to her. When Eva returned to the study after a phone call, her maps were covered in black and red ink. Kevin was refilling the gun with ink and told her that now her room looked special.

Eva writes that some Parkinson’s patients kill themselves after treatments that stop their tremors; they can’t bear being like everyone else and not receiving sympathy for their symptoms. She worries she is attached to the stark change Kevin brought into her life. 

Eva describes having coffee with Thelma Corbitt a week after Denny’s funeral. Thelma hadn’t asked “why,” but the question had been there. Eva misses being more than the mother of KK, which is how the media often refers to Kevin. She isn’t sure she knows why Kevin perpetrated the atrocity of Thursday or if she really wants to understand. Kevin tells her during their visit that he admires some of the other shooters, but he detests those who show remorse or who blame external influences for their crimes.

Eva describes the tiny clothes he wears at Chatham and reminds Franklin he started wearing clothes that were several sizes too small when he was very young. She always thought he did it to make people think his parents didn’t care about how he looked. She asks Kevin if he blames her for his life. He asks why she should get the credit for his achievements. She then asks why he wore diapers until he was six. Kevin doesn’t answer her questions, but he says he is proud of her for how she made him stop. He reminds her of the ruined maps and asks why she never took them down. Eva tells him that the maps reminded her that his malice wasn’t in her head.

Eva has a trial flashback that she describes to Franklin. When asked if she or Franklin had ever abused Kevin, she said no. She’s not entirely sure this is accurate, however. The diapers always embarrassed Franklin once Kevin was no longer a baby. A teacher, Miss Fabricant, called from Montessori kindergarten to tell Eva that the other kids were complaining about Kevin’s smell. He made the other kids uncomfortable, and some of them had regressed into wearing diapers themselves.

At the school, a little girl called Muffet received a beautiful tea set. During a class tea party, Kevin dropped a cup and broke it. Following suit, the other kids dropped their cups. Eva tells Franklin that she asked Kevin how he would feel if someone broke something he loved. “Like what?” he said. She couldn’t come up with anything except for the squirt gun. He hadn’t cared about that because Franklin immediately replaced it after she stomped on it. 

She writes to Franklin that one day she went to pick Kevin up at school, and they couldn’t find him. They discovered him in the girl’s bathroom with a girl named Violetta. She had horrible eczema and was never allowed to scratch her scabs no matter how much they bothered her. She was covered in blood with a rapturous look on her face as Kevin whispered something to her in the bathroom. There was no proof that Kevin touched her; she could have done it to scratch her itches, or he could have convinced her to scratch herself.

Franklin is soon at his wit’s end with Eva, and he tells her so. In the letter, she reminds him of the many incidents where parents withdraw their kids from the play group with Kevin. Franklin had said Kevin told him everything and that Eva was ignorant. Eva said they were in a war but Franklin didn’t know it.

Kevin graduated from kindergarten in June. One day in July, she changed his diaper twice within 20 minutes. Then in his exercise book, she saw he had written that everyone at school thought Eva looks old. Then she smelled him again—somehow, he had already dirtied another diaper. She threw him across the nursery. Kevin hit his head on the changing table and his arm broke.

When Kevin opened his eyes, he almost smiled at her. At the hospital, Kevin told Eva to wait while he talked to Dr. Goldblatt alone. However, Kevin didn’t tell on her and on the way home Eva apologized to him. At home, Kevin told Franklin he broke his arm because he fell. Eva now felt she had ransomed her soul to Kevin. After coming home, Kevin quickly stopped using diapers and was instantly potty trained. Eva thought Kevin was rewarding her for hurting him.

He had power over her all summer, and she deferred to him on everything. Eva and Franklin stopped communicating, and she was jealous of the time he gave to Kevin, all while never acknowledging how difficult their son could be.

One day Roger Corley, a neighbor, knocked on their door. He was angry because Kevin laughed at his son after he got hurt falling off his bike. One of the releases on his wheels was open and Roger accused Kevin of doing it. After Corley left, Eva told Franklin she wanted to have another child—a daughter. Franklin angrily refused and told her she was always picking on Kevin. 

Eva tells Franklin she recently read about a sleep deprived electrical lineman who gets electrocuted. She then reflects on the Armenian genocide and how Kevin has shaped her worldview. She is shocked by small kindnesses, not genocides. After the accident with the bicycle, Eva became sexually ravenous. One year later she was pregnant; she stopped using on diaphragm without telling Franklin. She admitted it wasn’t an accident. He relented because he had no choice, and he asked her to get the test that would determine whether the embryo might have a disability such as Down’s Syndrome. Eva lied to him and told him she got the test. Kevin told her she’d be sorry about the new baby. 

Celia was born on June 14. Eva writes she had a light blue aura, which contrasted with Kevin’s shrieking red. Celia nursed gratefully and acted like a normal baby, though Franklin was cool toward her. In the hospital, Kevin put his hand in a glass and let water drip onto Celia’s face in a mockery of a baptism. When Eva returned home, she noticed a picture of her, taken when she was in her 20s, was missing.

Eva writes that she could have handled everything if she could have kept Celia. She thinks that Franklin resented Celia because everyone loved her. She barely cried, loved toys, and was easy to please. She was also very feminine. However, Celia was often inexplicably frightened. At night she often woke one of her parents to help her use the bathroom, even at four years old. Celia struggled when she started school and lived in fear of letting her parents down. She adored Kevin. 

One day Eva found Celia strapped into her booster chair, covered in vomit, and sitting before a mixture of Vaseline, mayonnaise, strawberry jam, curry paste, and mashed balls of bread. Eva was baffled by Celia’s inability to harbor a grudge. She never admitted Kevin was cruel to her, and she never tattled on him, even when he put bagworm eggs in her backpack and let them hatch or when he left her on a high tree branch after piggy-backing her up.

Eva writes to Franklin that it was always hard for her to watch Kevin manipulate him and that it was always so easy for their son because Franklin was so credulous and good-natured. She describes two weeks during which Kevin was very ill at age 10. Kevin thanked her for tucking him in and asked for his favorite pajamas. He withdrew from Franklin during the illness as if he did not have the energy to portray the boisterous fictional boy he pretended to be for his father while healthy.

While Kevin was sick, Eva read to him from a book of Robin Hood stories, which he loved. When he recovered, he became horrible again, but one day she caught him reading the book on his own. She reminds Franklin they bought him the archery set shortly afterward.

During a visit at Chatham, Eva sees that Kevin is bruised as if he has been in a fight. While they talk, he mocks the most recent school shooters as incompetent or cowardly. She reminds him about Thursday and asks why he chose which students to send his invitations to the gym. Kevin says he whittled the list of prospects down from 60 and that a movie about him is in development at Miramax. 

She asks why he chose the students he killed, but the reasons he gives are all petty. One boy enjoyed basketball too much. Another was obsessed with cinema. These irritations were enough for Kevin to condemn them. He describes shootings as a tradition not as rampages. Eva says she thinks he liked Laura Woolford and says she probably rejected him, which is why he put her on the list. She remembers he shot Laura right through the heart. As Eva studied the victims, she realized they each had a passion. Kevin found life meaningless and couldn’t abide those who found meaning in activities and hobbies.

Eva chaperoned an eighth-grade dance in the gym when Kevin was 14 years old. She stayed away from him at the dance. He hung out with an unlikable boy named Leonard Pugh and Eva noticed how obsequious he was with Kevin. There was 10 feet of space around the two of them, as if everyone knew they should stay away. A girl whom Eva calls Alice was the first to start dancing. She was homely and wore a tacky dress, but Eva was impressed by her lack of inhibition. Kevin approached Alice and whispered something in her ear. She danced self-consciously for the rest of the song but then hurried off the dance floor. Eva thinks he told her how tacky her dress was. She considers Alice Kevin’s first assassination.