Behind the Tragedy, the Despair of an Outcast

I think I have some inkling how Andy Williams felt on Monday morning.

Monday morning meant another week of school. Another five days of hearing yourself called dork, freak, geek, nerd. Five miserable days among teenagers bigger and older and cooler--the brash, self-assured boys, the pretty, laughing girls.

Even when Andy warned some kids that he’d get even, even when he threatened, “I’ll show you one day,” they just laughed. Told him to his face that he didn’t have the guts. Shoot somebody? Wimpy little Andy? Yeah, right. Uh-huh.

“One day” turned out to be Monday. Authorities say Andy packed his dad’s .22-caliber revolver and went off to turn the hallways of Santana High into a shooting gallery. The two students he allegedly killed, the 13 people wounded, were more than likely strangers to him. Santana High, with its nearly 2,000 students, has almost half the population of the entire Maryland town where Andy had lived for most of his life.

For me, the news arrived in two thunderclaps of sorrow, one extricable from the other: first, the tragedy of the dead and the wounded, and then the deja vu despair of Andy Williams. My childhood was marred less by Sturge-Weber syndrome, which caused the birthmark that stains my face, than by what others said because of it. In dreams I still hear the casually cruel remarks that sent me burrowing deeper into my room and my books. I must have read “The Ugly Duckling” a dozen times, trying to believe it. I loved “The Count of Monte Cristo”--now there was a wronged man who knew how to mete out revenge with style.

Just wait, was the message. Your time will come. Wait and see, my family said. You’ll show ‘em.

The very same words Andy Williams used, to mean something very different.

Honestly, can any of us, savaged for how we look or talk or act, really say that revenge never crossed our minds? Maybe we imagined dishing it out personally, like the 12-year-old boy, another Sturge-Weber case, who broke his hand punching the one-kid-too-many who had mocked him. Or maybe cosmic justice simply hurled its thunderbolts on our behalf. One way or another, in fantasies, the bullies get their comeuppance, usually in the same humiliation they dished out.

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We grow up, we cover up. The wheel does turn. At the high school reunion, the class jock may be a bum, and the prom queen runs to fat. The chess club president is on his second million, and the shy girl from the physics lab is on the Nobel short list. Bill Gates, who pathetically designed his high school schedule so he could at least sit in the same classroom with the prettiest girls, is now the richest man in the world.

But how do you tell that to a teenager, for whom “the future” is next weekend, and a high school campus is all the known world?

How do you tell it to Andy Williams, a well-liked boy back in his old school, suddenly the lowest snack in the food chain at the new school? He was the kid anyone could pick on and get away with it, swiping his skateboard, stealing the shoes off his feet. He tried to earn their regard. The other kids drank, he drank--badly. They skateboarded, he skateboarded--

ineptly. “Cool” was beyond his reach. Revenge was not.

President Bush called the shooting “a disgraceful act of cowardice.” Cowardice there may have been, but in this potent recipe, there were far bigger portions of anger and desperation and pain.

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Three days before Andy Williams went gunning, an Internet service provider shut down www.SchoolRumors.com, a San Fernando Valley-based Web site. It offered virtual scrawlings on a bathroom wall, and in two weeks it let 67,000 students into that bathroom for a peek.

The stuff was scurrilous and vicious, cyberspace blood sport. One girl was reportedly ready to kill herself because of what the Web site said about her. Andy Williams may have killed because of what others said about him.

Amid all the Web site slams was a message posted by Wise One: “Don’t be so judgmental . . . think how you would feel if you were being called these names . . . it’s painful, also think of how your words affect people.”

Not every kid who gets ridiculed gets over it. But not every kid who gets ridiculed gets a gun. What made this time and this boy different? Teachers and investigators and parents and reporters will be following the threads of Andy Williams’ life back to the loom in search of a coherent pattern.

They already know all about the perils of drugs and booze. Now it’s time to take a look at this other poison, the one we all carry with us, the venom of our own manufacture.

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Patt Morrison’s e-mail is patt.morrison@latimes.com.