makeup isn’t making people look like monsters, it’s finding the person inside the monster. Because every monster was a person first. Every school shooter was a little boy whose dad wouldn’t buy him a Captain Marvel action figure. Who was taught that it’s more manly to fire bullets than to shed tears.
“And I’m not saying we give boys a pass. Girls have always had it worse. Plus, there’re racial issues, like how white boy shooters are lone wolves while brown boys are terrorists. But if we’re serious about ending school shootings, then we gotta stop pretending the problem is with the guns and admit that the problem is with us.
“We have to get better at seeing the person inside the monster. And maybe if we stop filling boys’ heads with so much nonsense, they won’t turn into monsters at all.”
I shrugged and got up, feeling a little embarrassed for rambling. “I don’t know if that answered your question.”
I turned and walked back to my podium.
Dean’s voice cut through the silence that followed, and I thought he was gonna add something or rebut what I’d said—I knew he could; he was an amazing debater. But instead, he said, “I’m sorry for speaking out of turn, but I think we can all agree Dre won that round.”
Dean
DRE WAS SITTING beside me in my father’s car—which I hadn’t strictly mentioned I was borrowing, though my father had never refused my requests before—playing with the infotainment center like he’d never seen one before. In the span of only a few minutes, he had managed to delete all of my father’s preset stations and changed the navigation voiceover to a genderless British person.
And I couldn’t stop smiling.
“You did great today,” I said as I drove us back to my house. I’d decided to take the long way because while I was excited to be alone in my house with Dre, I was also terrified to be alone in my house with him.
“I kicked your ass.”
“I wouldn’t put it that way.”
“Because you’re a poor loser?”
I laughed out loud, which put a smile on Dre’s face. “Are you sure you haven’t thought about going into politics?”
The idea seemed to cause Dre to grimace in disgust. “I’m not that person,” he said. “You are and my dad is, but I’m not.”
“That’s why you’d be good at it.” When Dre gave me a confused look, I said, “I think a lot of people who are supporting McMann are doing so because he’s not a politician. Because he’s different and offers solutions no one else has.”
“Okay, his solutions are bonkers, though.”
I nodded. “Very much so. But yours wasn’t. Everyone else sees the problem of school shootings as a gun problem, but you see it as a people problem. The solution may not be as simplistic as you made it out to be, but I think it’s a great place to start.”
I think I was embarrassing Dre because he turned toward the window and tried to make a joke out of it. “Copyright Andre Rosario. You know, so your mom doesn’t steal my idea.”
“That wouldn’t work for her,” I said. “It’s her military background. She thinks solutions start at the top and that it’s everyone’s job below to carry it out.”
“My dad’s kind of the opposite. He worries how something will affect every single person, and he stalls out if he thinks someone’s gonna be mad at him.”
We pulled through the gate of my house, and I waited to make sure it closed behind us before pulling up the long driveway to the garage.
“Oh shit,” Dre said. “You never told me you lived in a mansion.”
Now I was the one getting embarrassed. “It’s not a mansion.”
“Looks like a mansion to me.”
My parents had bought the house before my mother’s term as governor had ended, and they planned to keep it even if my mother won the election. It wasn’t nearly as big as the Florida governor’s mansion, but it still had more rooms than we needed. The front was landscaped with native Florida plants to provide as much privacy as possible.
“I’m sure your house is just as big.”
“It’s all right. Let’s see inside.”
After Dre’s reaction to the outside of the house, I was kind of nervous to show him the inside. I wasn’t embarrassed by it, but I didn’t want to look like I was bragging either. I’d always understood that my family was well-off, and that most of the money had come from my dad. Some of it he’d made,