English version
This ebook, in origin “Zed Experiments series”, was published as an experiment in English language with Zed Lab.
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Carla Cucchiarelli
I killed Bambi
www.quellidized.it
Exams
Copyright © 2012
Zerounoundici Edizioni
Published by Zerounoundici
Cover: Picture Shutterstock.com
Ho ucciso Bambi
Copyright © 2012
Zerounoundici Edizioni
ISBN: 978-88-6578-148-7
Cover: image by Shutterstock.com
Any reference to actual events, places and people is purely coincidental, being the result of the author’s imagination.
"... The silicon chip inside her head
Gets switched to overload
And nobody is gonna go to school today
She’s gonna make them stay at home
And daddy doesn’t understand it
He always said she was good as gold
And he can see no reason
‘Cos there are no reasons
What reason do you need?
Tell me why I don’t like Mondays
Tell me why I don’t like Mondays
Tell me why I don’t like Mondays
I wanna shoot the whole day down..."
("I don’t like Mondays", Bob Geldof)
Surprise party
"In my stomach I am always alone, in your stomach, you're always alone, what I feel, what you feel, they'll never know... at least say if the trip is unique and if it's sunny there, if you're laughing, I won’t mind though, why why not an answers to my whys why don’t you at least make me try on your beautiful waistcoat.”
("Hai un momento, Dio?" Ligabue)
"Then I decided. Let’s do it tomorrow, my birthday, at least we finish with a bang."
"It was about time Silvia. Surprise party?"
"Yeah, it will really be a surprise for everyone."
"OK. Let's check the list then."
"Okay, Debby. But this is the last time, I’m fed up of making plans. We must act."
"What about Sara?"
"Come on. What are you thinking? Saturday she passed me her school test, she’s not a nuisance and she’s nice too. My dear darling..."
"OK, one less. Marina?"
"Are you kidding? Marina is untouchable. She brought me to the last rave party in Viterbo, and you know how badly I wanted to go. Marina is a friend."
"And... Eleonora?"
"Come on... the party is for her. Little miss perfection will have a blast."
Debby smiles with her satisfied-cat look. The party will be done, I’m sure.
We already played the yes-and-no game a hundred times. Let's say it's our last obsession. I pass her a joint. I rolled it a little while ago. Meanwhile, she neatly writes the names on the sheet of a notebook she split in two halves with a crooked pen line. Yes on one side, no on the other. She’s serious, she looks like a diligent child doing her homework. Instead she sits as we like to, knees crossed on the chair and chest thrust forward. She seems to be lying on the large white desk, where makeup tools, crayons and three ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts chase one another. Anyone happening to come into my room would be aware of being in the bunker of a teenage western female, of average tastes and culture. I can’t help it, I am a daughter of my time. I am the Queen, and I love my world. I wanted it this way. Two large posters of Ligabue dominate the pink walls, the stereo blares rock music at full volume. On the floor – I count them in my mind – there are a pair of pants, two shirts and some socks thrown at random. On the bed, resting on a tray, two giant Coke-sized glasses, standing next to two half-empty backpacks. Not far away, lying on a small heart-shaped red plaid, my kitten. It is a Persian, all gray, my father gave it to me a year ago and I called it Cocaine. My father laughed. What the fuck was there to laugh?
Here we go again, Debby starts again, going right to the chase.
"What is the minimum score?"
"Eight, if they’re less than eight we’ll seem like two assholes."
"And for a strike?"
"Twenty-two, no, better twenty-three, it brings good luck. We can settle for twenty-three. We will be on the front page of every newspaper. Can you imagine? They will talk about us for days. We’ll be famous. Sure, the Korean did more than thirty, but he was a professional and he had twenty thousand students available in Virginia. Lucky him. We have but a hundred."
"Well, the Norwegian, I never remember his name, killed more than ninety."
"Come on, don’t be mystified. It was not a student and we are no racists."
I almost laugh as I say it. It’s true, we are no racists. We only bear a grudge against Her and the world. Deborah doesn’t answer. She’s not following me anymore. She’s grabbed a professional make-up mirror and she’s applying eyeliner with determination. Debby is not beautiful, she’s not in tune with the times. She’s too fat, I keep telling her that, but she dresses in black like me and she has a small feminism symbol tattooed on her right hand. Right now, quite unusually, she’s smoking.
"Are you sure we’ll become as famous as the people at Columbine?"
She asks the question absently. I know she wants it as much as me.
"Come on. Eric and Dylan are inimitable. They were the first."
"Yeah, but we’re gonna be the first too. The first women to carry out a slaughter in a school. We’ll finally show that we can really be like men. Bad like them. Strong like them. Let me see the creatures. Have you hidden them between the books? They’re there, aren’t they?"
She’s jumped up and approached the library, discreetly rummaging through my stuffed animals and the books I dutifully catalogued, with numbers on the covers. One "Satanic Crimes", two "Massacres in schools over the past decade", three "The drawings of the serial killer", four " I haven’t yet killed anyone today", five "How to build a bomb in your house". I haven’t been reading anything else for two years. Slaughters cannot be improvised, they are created.
"You're so neat! I’m shocked."
"Maniac, you mean. But only for sacred texts. The maid does the rest. You know what a drag, cleaning all day? Come on. She has such a life..."
Deborah laughs as if struck by a sudden thought. Hers is a high, shrill laugh that resembles the neighing of a horse. It always makes me happy.
"What about her too? Sending her with everybody else?"
"Come on, no kidding. At least Daddy will have someone to count on when I'm, like, busy with other things. So, have you got at least twenty-three on the list? Say yes and I take the creatures."
This time it's my turn to get up and walk across the room with the unsteady gait.
"Shit, you made me drink too much", I tell her, turning around to look at her with a mock air of reproach, then I resume walking.
With her, there is never the risk to contain oneself. I mean from the point of view of tonics. Food, tobacco and alcohol to the nth degree. I barely reach the large white wardrobe, covered with multicoloured writings – "hooliganism final frontier" is my favourite – I open a doo
r and I virtually enter the cabinet. I am thin. Of course, I haven’t been eating for two years. Fasting must well do something. Here I am, coming out. I am holding a large yellow cardboard box containing a similar, but smaller, one, which in turn contains a package wrapped in a pink and yellow scarf. Deborah leaps and snatches away the envelope from me.
The two guns are now on the floor. In front of us. Deborah starts caressing one with the tip of her fingers, slowly, gently. She likes to, God how she likes to.
"It's beautiful", she says with an ecstatic expression.
This is love. We hug, smug and excited. The room is slowly turning into a gas chamber, invaded by the pungent, very intense smell of hashish. But who cares. We have the creatures.
"Are you sure your father won’t come back?"
"Come on. Again? Haven’t you understood?"
I play acting as a model across the room, a set expression and a cigarette in my hand. Debby is not like me, she’s always late to the point.
"He wouldn’t even notice if I smoked a joint in front of him. He's out! Since when my mother left, he’s been living like a zombie. And anyway he’s in Milan until tomorrow. A business trip he says, but you think he works on Sunday? Guess he has an affair with some Nordic."
Deborah keeps playing with the gun in front of the mirror. She stretches out her arm and points the gun at her reflection, aiming for the heart.
"So, what do you say? Don’t I look like the incredible woman?"
"Wonder Woman. Yes, yes. That's who you are. I can’t wait to see Elenonora’s face tomorrow. How about a murder party? Come on, let’s put more music on. What do you want now? Marilyn Manson or the Killers?"
"Whatever you want. I'm too happy. It's too cool!"
And while she’s talking, Deborah has started to dance, clutching the gun in her arms like an imaginary partner. She draws pirouettes in the air, smiling and showing her tongue irreverently. Cocaine, as if bothered by the smell and volume of the stereo, moved to another wing of the house some time ago. It left only its Persian hairs in the air and on rug.
"I swear Debby. We’ll look great."
"Another joint?"
Here is my incredible girl. In a flash she is again sitting at the desk and burning the small butt of smoke left with a lighter. She's compulsive.
"I think we won’t make it ‘til tomorrow like this. Already I can’t keep my eyes open", I say, worried and resigned.
When Debby starts, she starts. And there's no way to stop her, like with eating. She smokes and eats the same way. But I don’t want to argue today.
"These are our last. Why do you care?"
We stopped suddenly, as if struck by lightning, and now we look into each other’s eyes. I don’t know what dying means. But surely dying is better than living.
"Dying for an idea. To show that we are equal to males. Isn’t it bullshit?"
"No."
"Come on. Aren’t you afraid?"
"No."
"Well. About males. Did you put Alessandro in the list? I can’t stand him. He tried to grope my ass. His breath reeks, surely his feet too. And he dresses like vomit. You have to kill him."
"Keep cool Silvia. We have the list, we’ll stick to it. Now let's go over the plan. Shortly before recreation, you ask to go to the bathroom, once out you take the creatures from the backpack, and get ready. I come and you give me mine. We open the door, enter the classroom and start shooting. If we are lucky we clean up at least two or three classrooms."
"Come on. Sure you're not afraid?"
"Stop it!"
"Good, ‘cos if you change your mind I’m gonna kill you myself."
I seriously think so. We can’t go back, everything is already written. We decided, it’s our big chance, we won’t have a chance like this ever again. However – I can’t tell Deborah – I am a bit afraid. What if things don’t go as we planned, if there is even one unexpected event, a mistake, a problem we haven’t considered? But I mustn’t think about that now. Now I've got perpetual motion, I started walking again around the room with my unsteady gait, and I wish I were a thousand miles away. I look out the window, watching the houses of the opposite building. It’s dinner time by now, there are women laying the table, little hurried gestures tasting like home, quiet lives, habit. I wish I was there, in one of those rooms, playing at being a good girl with her mother. But I'm a bad girl. I don’t stop, I go. Deborah doesn’t understand, she shakes me by an arm and brings me back to the here and now by simply passing me her cell phone. If you look at a phone you know at once what kind of person is the one who chose it. Debby’s is pink, plump, anonymous. Like her.
"Let’s watch the video again, so tomorrow morning, before leaving, we load it on Youtube."
"The Finnish nicked our idea."
"Yes, but ours is better, Silvia. You're a genius."
"Come on. It was child’s play."
Really a joke, far too easy. I took the video I shot last year in the garden of the nursery school next to my house. I wonder why that scene struck me so much. It gave me a sense of peace and recovered tranquillity. There were a dozen girls with white and blue aprons playing ring-a-ring-o’roses, singing serenely. They laughed as if nothing could touch them. I edited the video at the computer for hours and hours, trying to obtain a fading effect. In the end I just froze the picture, leaving the screen black and adding the sound of distant gunfire, the music of "Death of the Swan" and then the sentence "No longer different". I had to be a film director, not study Latin and Greek. I am cinema.
"Child’s play for you!"
"Are you sure they will show it?"
"Are you kidding? You're a legend!"
I'm happy again. We both are, we hug, we go back to sit at the desk and finish the Bayles stolen from the cocktail cabinet as our eyes slowly start to close. I probe the ground a little more.
"So tomorrow I will be seventeen and have a nice party with lots of fireworks. The most beautiful of all!"
"You can bet on it."
Debby is totally stoned and serene, I got up again, I feel like a caged lion. Now I am in front of the big orange billboard where the photos of a lifetime are collected. My first cry in Mom’s arms, my first day of school, my first boyfriend, the trip with the scouts, the first miniskirt. Fuck. I want to spit.
"Come on. You see this? It’s my mother a few centuries ago, when we looked like the Mulino Bianco family. Me, her and Dad. Pathetic. Then that guy came and brought her away. Tomorrow, exactly tomorrow, it will be two years since I last saw her. She even gave me a brother I don’t know. And he's super-rich, he lives in a mansion in London. You see? I don’t even have a moped... Wow, look at this picture, I'd forgotten it. Look carefully, it’s me, three years old, with a toy gun in hand."
"Can you imagine those psycoeverything assholes? They will say you were born for this, that you have the serial killer syndrome."
"Let’s hope they take me for Joan of Arc. We go to bed?"
"Yes, my eyes are closing."
We’ve settled on the bed, fully dressed, on the covers, one with her head on one side, the other lying in the opposite direction.
"Happy birthday Silvia."
"It will be the best party in the world."
"I promise. But promise me that tomorrow morning, before going to school, no matter what, we make ourselves up."