How It All Goes Down
- At the beginning of her letter, Eva tries to assure Franklin that Kevin would have committed mass murder even if Franklin hadn't bought the crossbow. Kevin would have used something else.
- Then Eva flashes back to April 8, 1999. A Thursday. The Thursday.
- Everyone is getting ready for school. It's a normal morning. Except for the fact that Kevin is dressed like a normal person.
- Normally Kevin wears weirdly tiny clothes. Today, his clothes fit perfectly.
- Franklin starts telling Kevin he'll teach him to use a camera, and Kevin pretends to be interested.
- Until he can't anymore.
- Kevin yells at Franklin to shut up, and then he lays into him, saying he hates everything his dad tries to get him to care about.
- Eva has to go, so she hugs Celia goodbye and tells her that she loves her.
- Eva reminds Kevin he has independent archery study and he needs to take his gear to school.
- Then, because it's Kevin's birthday in three days, she asks what he wants to do for it?
- "I might be tied up" (27.34), he says. The busy schedule of a seventeen-year-old.
- Later that day, Eva sees the story online: "Fatalities Feared in Gladstone High Shooting" (27.43). She races to the school.
- In her letter, Eva tells Franklin that despite thinking Kevin was a horrible person almost every day of every year, that day, "not for an instant did [she] imagine" (27.46) that Kevin was a killer.
- Eva goes into ghastly detail about what Kevin did, but we'll keep it short here.
- Kevin sent letters of recognition to nine students and a teacher, telling them they would get an award in the gym. When they arrived in the gym, Kevin chained the door shut with impenetrable bike locks.
- Then, using his crossbow, Kevin shot them all.
- Two people survive, two are killed instantly, and the rest bleed to death slowly, while Kevin waits and watches.
- That day, Eva arrives at the school and realizes Kevin is the one who did it.
- Eva is in shock, unable to get angry with Kevin.
- Eva tries desperately to get hold of Franklin, but he's not answering his phone.
- Eva goes to the police station, where she files a statement.
- When the cops ask if Eva wants to speak to Kevin, she says no, and she leaves without talking to him.
- Eva goes home, and she learns why Franklin wasn't answering the phone.
- Before Kevin left for school, he killed both Celia and Franklin.
- Eva finds Celia pinned with arrows to a tree and Franklin lying in a pool of blood nearby.
- In her letter to her dead husband, Eva wonders what Franklin thought when he realized that Kevin wasn't who he thought he was.
- Eva sees Franklin's last facial expression on his dead body, and "It was so disappointed" (27.170).