School Shooter’s Girlfriend

I didn’t go to high school.
I stayed with the janitor instead.
He kept me in the boiler room.
I was a kind of pet, I guess.
It was my father’s idea. 
He had no faith in me as an academic.
He was looking ahead to my future.
It was hard to see, he said, squinting hard to see it as he said it.
I didn’t realize it at first but the janitor was teaching me how to be a school shooter.
He said he was too old for the job himself.
I slept in a box by the boilers on top of some old coats from the lost and found.
The janitor smelled like tuna fish.
I mean when I put my face between his legs.
The rest of the time he smelled like cobwebs and mold, like any room no one had been in for a very long time.
I told him I was no good as a school shooter.
I told him I could only be a school shooter’s girlfriend.
He said he would work on it.
He found a tall doughy-looking kid no one remembered existed.
He looked a little bit Chinese but he wasn’t.
I don’t know what he was.
He didn’t either. 
He said he wasn’t really a school shooter either. 
I said I wasn’t really a girl.
He said his name was Wesley.
We bonded right away. 
The janitor banged his wrench on some pipes in frustration.
It was just like home all over again.
He felt stuck with the both of us.
Then he got a bad cough that just kept getting worse and worse until it turned into lung cancer and he was forced into retirement because no one wanted him to keel over and croak in the school hallway.
One day they had a big ceremony in the gymnasium for something or other.
It would have been a perfect time and place for a school shooting.
During the ceremony, they gave the janitor a plaque or something for his many years of selfless service.
It was his last hurrah, his last hope for us to come in with guns blazing.
We missed the ceremony.
I don’t know where we were.
I don’t know where we ever were.
We weren’t having sex because we didn’t know how.
All these things made us perfect candidates to be school shooters.
But something was missing.
Something was always missing in us, everyone agreed.
We were never really in school, for one thing.
We didn’t give a shit about school or anyone in it.
Not even enough to shoot them.
The janitor didn’t last long.
He tried to shoot the cancer out of himself.
I guess we disappointed him.
Maybe his disappointment killed him.
We were failed Frankenstein monsters.
That’s what we felt like, anyway.
I hung around with Wesley for a while and then he kind of drifted away.
I don’t know what became of him.
Nothing, I guess.
Same as me.
I don’t know what becomes of people like us if we won’t become school shooters.
No one else does either.
You pay your taxes and get your refund and no one ever hears from you again.
School shooters never go to their high school reunions even if like us they didn’t shoot up the school.
No one ever knows who they are.
Their pictures fade away from everyone’s nervous system and from the high school yearbooks, too.
They probably never got their picture taken in the first place.
They were always out that day.