Sure to Shine

Skylar was right: they didn’t walk far. Sniggering all the way, Skylar had pushed Eric along through the park, across the road, over the fence into the cemetery opposite, and through the overgrown, winding paths which led through it.

Eric felt like he was in some bad horror movie, but with a gun in his back, he didn’t dare try to be wise about it.

"Sit," Skylar eventually commanded, and although sitting on the cold, hard ground was the last thing Eric wanted to do, he obeyed.

Eric was soon shivering violently. He could hear Skylar behind him, rummaging around, but still Eric didn’t dare move. He couldn’t outrun a bullet.

Skylar returned at that point, and dropped something on the floor in front of them both. There was a flash as he struck up his lighter and held it to what was on the floor. To Eric, it looked like a lump of plastic, but when it quickly caught fire, he realised it was one of those portable camping fire logs.

"You just hide those things everywhere?" Eric asked, his teeth chattering. Skylar laughed.

"You could say that," he said, sitting down next to Eric.

For a while, there was silence, all apart from the crackling of the fire. Eric loved the sound of fire. When he had been small, he had spent many hours sitting in front of the safety fence at his grandparent’s house, watching their real log fire crackling and popping. Ever since then, when he had heard the sound of a fire, it had given him happy memories.

Eric thought about how different things were now. Instead of sitting at his grandparent’s house at Christmas or Thanksgiving, smelling the turkey cooking and watching the logs in the fire glowing red, he was sitting in a graveyard with a strange young man who happened to be armed. Skylar looked even more intimidating with the different colours of the fire dancing over his face. His eyes remained dark, glittering slightly when the firelight hit them right. The green in his hair took on an eerie, distorted colour.

Skylar glanced up and caught Eric watching him. He didn’t say anything, only nodded above the fire, to what was opposite them.

Eric followed his gaze. They weren’t sitting near a grave; they were actually sitting on the grass covering it. The stone was just out of arm’s reach. Eric read it, squinting slightly in the unpredictable firelight. He wasn’t surprised to see who the grave belonged to.

BENJAMIN MURDOCH
September 9th 1979 – November 18th 1997
Beloved Son, Brother, Grandson, Uncle, Cousin and Friend
We Forgive You

Eric looked at the grave for a few more minutes, and then sighed and turned to Skylar.

"You come here often?" he asked.

"Sometimes," Skylar shrugged.

"Why did you feel the need to bring me here at gunpoint?" Eric asked, making sure that Skylar knew he was angry, but trying not to antagonise the unpredictable young man.

"Like I said earlier, you need to realise some things," Skylar said, turning his head to stare intently at Eric. "Ben used to be a normal kid, you know," Skylar added. "Just like you and me. He lived in this neighbourhood all his life. In elementary school, he had loads of friends; he was always at birthday parties and things like that. He was smart and got brilliant grades. He even managed to keep that up through two years of high school. But something was going wrong. For those two years at high school that he managed to put a brave face on, something was going on underneath."

Eric listened quietly, wondering where this was going.

"Kids in high school are different to kids in elementary," Skylar said. "Even when they’re the same kids you grew up with. They change. They change horribly. In elementary school, you find yourself looked up to when you’re smart. Kids ask you questions, you give them answers; they respect you and think you’re awesome. In high school, being smart is just a liability. Kids hate you for it. They don’t like the way you always get everything right. They might be jealous, or they might just be annoyed that you’re the smart ass with all the right things to say. Either way, they tease you for it. You can’t be yourself anymore, and that’s what happened to Ben. His intelligence was what made him who he was, how he identified himself. When he realised the very thing which made him himself was the one thing which was driving everyone away, he floundered. For those two years he tried to strike a balance, but he couldn’t. He lost himself. He began to hate everyone for what they did to him."

Eric was now listening not because he had to, but because he was intrigued. Skylar seemed to understand Ben better than anyone who had written about him on the internet.

"Everything around him started to change," Skylar continued. "His friends all abandoned him. He wasn’t comfortable anywhere anymore. His parents split up, and that meant a change of home, less money. More things for the kids to tease him about. He grew bitter at the world. He got angry. He hated the stupid kids for having everything; having their hands held through school, having friends and social lives. He was bitter that he was being victimised for the sole reason that he was himself. He couldn’t relate to anyone, he felt like an outsider, so he began looking for a way out."

Skylar turned to Eric.

"Most kids would just kill themselves, but Ben didn’t want to just fade away. He wanted the people who had made him like this to suffer, and so he decided he would take them out, too. He had no intention of surviving that day. He had every intention of dying. He looked forward to it, almost welcomed it. So the morning of November 18th, he walked into Jefferson High armed with one of these," Skylar held up the small gun he was in possession of and nodded to it. "And also with a sawn-off shotgun. For a short, glorious while, he was free. He didn’t have to turn the anger and hatred inwards anymore. He didn’t have to despise himself. For a short while he wanted to kill other people, and in that short while he could. But after every high there’s a low, and Ben soon realised that the fun was over."

Skylar paused and sighed, looking down at the gun he held in his left hand.

"He went into the library and locked himself in there for a while," Skylar explained. "I don’t know what he was doing. Perhaps he was thinking of escaping? Perhaps he was thinking about killing himself? Perhaps he was just thinking about nothing in particular? But we all know what his final decision was. His final fuck you to the world. He stood up, went into the centre of the room, and –"

Skylar suddenly put the gun barrel deep into his mouth and pulled the trigger. Eric jumped up, yelling curse words louder than he ever had done in his life, before he realised that Skylar was very much alive, and laughing hysterically.

"You fucking bastard!" Eric screamed, kicking him hard in the side. Skylar didn’t seem to feel the pain, but he grabbed Eric’s leg and pulled him back to the ground with a hard thump. Eric kicked out at him again, and Skylar let go, still snickering.

"That was lucky," he commented. "There’s only one bullet in here. Like a cosy game of Russian roulette, eh? Want a go?"

"No I fucking do not!" Eric yelled, his heart still thumping so fast he thought it was going to give out at any minute. "What the fuck is wrong with you? Are you totally fucking mad?"

"Perhaps," Skylar shrugged. "Calm down, you crazy shit. I’m alive, aren’t I? Just a dramatic ending to a dramatic story, that’s all."

Eric pulled himself back up to a sitting position and shuffled away a little, glaring at Skylar. He wanted to beat the crap out of him, but remembered what Skylar had said about there being one bullet in the gun. One bullet would be all it would take if Skylar aimed it right.

"In all seriousness, though," Skylar said, his voice back to the monotonous tone it had been as he had told the story. The mood calmed again instantly, and although Eric was still angry and possibly in a mild state of shock, he found himself listening again. "It was a pretty tragic way to go. Luckily there was enough left of his head to not scar his parents for life. Would have been a different story if he had used the shotgun. Not a lot of people know all of that about Ben Murdoch. They blame it on the parents, on the TV, on video games and music and school cliques. No one seemed to notice that sometimes, the greatest danger to someone comes from within them."

Eric felt a soft shiver go up his spine, despite his close proximity to the fire. As he watched the orange and red light dance across the gravestone in front of him, he realised that what Skylar had said was true. Sometimes a person was their own worst enemy, and most of the time, they didn’t even realise it.

"You look so much like him," Skylar said. "But your personalities are totally different."

"I know," Eric replied. "I’ve looked it up."

"But I bet you were so fixated on his personality that you failed to look at anyone else’s?" Skylar asked.

"What are you getting at?" Eric asked, and Skylar shrugged.

"Tell me a bit about yourself," he said. It wasn’t a suggestion, it was a demand.

"Well, what do you need to know?" Eric asked awkwardly. "I’m … I’m pretty average, I guess. I get good grades, I have a good group of friends, I’ll occasionally get into a bit of trouble but it’s never anything I can’t bluff my way out of. Every so often me and Adam might get drunk or whatever but that’s usually the most mischief we’d get up to."

"You’re not usually so angry, either, are you?" Skylar asked.

"I’ve rarely angry and show it," Eric said. "I only get a little pissed off when some idiot nearly blows his brains out right in front of me."

Skylar chuckled.

"So what do you do when you get angry?" he asked.

"I rant about it," Eric shrugged. "Unless something absolutely needs to be said to the person, I just rant about it to Adam or Dad or to myself, if no one else will listen."

"See, you’re no Ben Murdoch," Skylar said. "But you already know that. You know who you are?"

"Who?" Eric groaned, rolling his eyes.

"You’re an Eric Harris," Skylar told him, and Eric blinked. "Your parents picked your name right. You were so busy obsessing over Ben that you didn’t look further afield, and let me tell you that you and Eric Harris have a lot in common."

"No we don’t," Eric muttered. "Apart from our names."

"I’ve done the research, and I see him in you," Skylar said casually. "But don’t take it as anything to worry about. I see someone in most people. This is what you’ve got to understand."

Skylar fixed Eric with a piercing look, and Eric felt himself grow slightly uncomfortable.

"What you need to understand," Skylar said, and his voice had changed again. It was a no-nonsense tone, the sort of tone he had been using when Eric had first caught up with him near the park. "Is that there is a monster in all of us. Each of us thinks that we’re not like these people, these killers, these psychopaths, but they’re more like us than we want to know. The difference between them and us – the only difference – is that they listened to their instincts. We’re animals, Eric, and we all have an animal instinct which would kill if it needed to. When people are put in certain situations, they’ll start killing the weakest ones and eating them. Murder, rape, theft, it’s all people listening to their animal instincts and taking what they want, what they need. And there’s that person in every single one of us."

Eric felt his chest tighten slightly. For some reason, Skylar’s words were making him nervous, making him question his own mental stability.

"What’s to say one day you won’t snap?" Skylar asked quietly. "How do you know that you haven’t all ready? People are so stupid, thinking that they’re different from these kinds of people, but they’re more alike then they’ll ever understand. People like me, and now you, see this. We’re all psychopaths, Eric. We’re all inhumane, insane monsters. People just hide it under a façade of manners and social desirability. But some don’t. That’s what you’ve got to understand. It’s not that people aren’t monsters. It’s that they fight everyday to ignore it."

There was a short pause.

"One day," Skylar said quietly. "They can’t ignore it anymore."

The fire crackled and gave a loud pop, but Eric didn’t jump. His mind was elsewhere, desperately grappling with the fact that, as much as he hated to admit it, Skylar was right.

There was a monster inside of everyone, and he was no exception.

"Eric Harris had a lot of interesting things to say," Skylar said softly. "He realised this as well. You know what he said once?"

"What?" Eric asked, his voice slightly hoarse.

"If it lives," Skylar said quietly. "Shoot it. If it doesn’t, burn it down."

"Destroy everything," Eric muttered.

"Exactly. Let our instincts take over, and get back to basics. Become what we’re always been, animals. Let nature take its course. Natural selection. Darwinism. Out with the weak and in with the strong. Re-make society."

Eric shivered though the fire was warm.

"There’s a thin line between society and animalistic anarchy," Skylar said, "Things like this," he gestured to the grave in front of them. "Are merely evidence that we all have it in us, and one day, we’re all going to crack."