A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip (18 page)

He finds a seat next to Ethan Carpenter, who plunges straight into Bill Cosby’s Lone Ranger bit. “Tonto, go to town,” he says, and “Kemosabe, go to Hell,” Kevin answers. It is the best and most foul-mouthed line on the record, and then “All right,” Kevin says, scouting around the lunchroom. He doesn’t want anyone to overhear them. “Listen to this.”

Right away Ethan begins struggling against his face. He
compresses a smile into the far corner of his mouth, shakes his head, and releases a few coughlike sounds of amusement.

“Dude,” he says at the end of Kevin’s story, “that’s disgusting.”

“Yeah, I’m so proud.”

“Do you think someone actually ate it?”

“Of course.”

“Dude,” again, “that’s disgusting. Who do you think it was?”

Christian Gann is unwrapping one of the little square burgers from the vending machine. Randy Garrett is widening his lips around a Funyun. Everyone is a suspect.

“Actually—” The first lunch starts at 11:50, the second at 12:40, with twenty-five minutes of overlapping class time in between. “I bet it was one of the older guys. I’m gonna say it’s still waiting in the bag to be eaten. Just—you know—fuming in there.”

“You’re sick.”

“Stewing.”

“Gross.”

“But not for long.”

The faculty lounge squares out into the room like an aquarium. The way the teachers drift around behind the flatness of the windows, forming quiet shapes with their mouths, makes it easy to believe they can’t hear anything, but when some ninth-graders start jostling one of the snack machines to unsnag a bag of chips, Principal McCallum opens the door and says, “Come on now, fellas. Calm down.”

Scrape the skin from his voice and you’ll always find an implied
for Pete’s sake
.

“I can guarantee one thing,” Ethan says to Kevin.

“What’s that?”

“Nobody’ll want to eat your lunch again after today. Not even you.”

“Actually I’m kind of starving.”

Ethan slides him a Tupperware bowl of green grapes. “Knock yourself out.” Some of the grapes are still bunched together. Kevin loves the tiny
snikt
of separation they make as he plucks them loose from their stems.

He is picking a bit of wood from his tongue when Kenneth comes flowing over and drapes an arm around his shoulders. “Kevin my friend! I’ve got a question for you. Why did you ask Thad to spend the night?”

A voice on one side of him and a hand on the other, and instinctively Kevin pivots toward the hand. Thad and his gang are a few tables away, Shane and Clint and the others, their eyes razoring directly in on him. They look the way people in movies do when their minds belong to someone else—like clones, things from outer space, brainwashees. All this time they must have been wondering what they could force him to say. He can practically re-create the whole scenario: Thad telling them about the phone call, then suggesting, “Do you know what would be hilarious? If we went over and asked guy about it,” and someone else adding, “Oh, I bet he’ll do that blinking thing he does,” and Kenneth volunteering, “I don’t care. What the hell. I’ll go.”

Now he sinks his weight onto his arm and says, “Let me rephrase. Why did you call Thad last night? Had him on your mind, did you?”

“I don’t know. Obviously it was a bad idea.”

Suddenly Kenneth’s tone softens. “Hey there. No need to get upset. We’re just curious, that’s all.”

By some miracle Kevin controls his face. Just like that, though, his hunger dematerializes, and his feeling of victory fades away. He is himself all over again. He stands and says, “Thanks for the grapes, Ethan.” The echo of it rises from the other table:
thanks for the grapes, grapes, thanks for the grapes
. Who knew that
grapes
was such a funny word? It is news to him.

He brushes past Stacey Leavitt, who is unzipping her jacket in the doorway. If she notices him, it is only as a blur of clothing, some white shoes and some plaid sleeves, the smell of soap or deodorant, whatever it is he smells like. He remembers that time, years ago, at recess, when he accidentally kicked her soccer ball into the street just as a semi came monstering through the intersection, and they all listened as it flattened the ball and then flattened it again in the notch between its immense rear tires. It would never have occurred to him that something could pop more than once.

Last week in science Mr. Garland told them that atoms are mostly empty space—ninety-nine-and-a-bunch-of-repeating-nines’ worth—nothing but fleeting waves of energy and force attracting and repulsing each other. The universe is a sinkhole, the universe is a tube slide. It is the kind of day where Kevin feels as if he might slip through the vacuum of the ground and never stop falling.

In SRA, Chuck Carnahan sits behind him poking the back of his head with a pencil, leaving small silver indentations on his scalp. Kevin pretends not to notice, which makes Chuck laugh. It is a game, a joke, one they are playing together, as if Kevin’s head is all leather and bone and he has no nerves whatsoever. Mrs. Bissard busies herself at the chalkboard. You can do anything you want in her class as long as you do
it quietly. After six or seven thrusts, Kevin hears Chuck say, “Matthew. Matthew. Check this out,” and
peck peck peck
, he goes. Kevin sits stone still. The crazy part is that he doesn’t mind. He would find it hard to explain why Kenneth whispering so nicely to him is spiteful while Chuck jabbing him with a pencil is friendly, but that’s the situation.

Two bells later and the day is almost over. He sits on the bleachers waiting for PE to start. He can still feel the marks on his skull, exotic darts of sensation that keep sparking off into numbness and then re-erupting. Is he hurt? he wonders. Are they real? Maybe your skin simply tingles a certain way if you pay enough attention to it. That’s probably it, he decides, because as soon as Coach Dale blows his whistle to send everyone to the locker room, the twinges seem to stop. Kevin is at the front of the herd, rushing past the seniors benching weights and studying their veins in the mirrors, their skin salts wafting into the hallway. Until now he had no idea how badly he wanted to run, to throw off his clothes and change into his T-shirt and shorts. The last few kids have barely reached the benches, and already he is nearly dressed out. He has been getting faster and faster. These days no one can touch him. Twenty, thirty seconds and
wh-shaw!
—he is done.

The other coach, Coach Strand, comes roostering through the door to say, “Cease and desist, folks. Class meeting in the weight room. Come on Boothby, come on Cushman, don’t just stand there lolling around with your arms hanging—hustle!”

Kevin stomps back into his shoes before following the others outside. He is like a magician whose big instantaneous trick is to enter a cabinet wearing one color and exit wearing another. The seniors can scarcely believe it. He isn’t sure
which of them says, “Nuh
-
uh
,” and which, “No way. You can’t change that fast. That’s impossible,” only that for a moment, in his tiny way, he is famous.

The class is halfway through its wrestling unit. Yesterday they finished practicing holds and throws, and today my friends, today compadres, they are actually going to fight. The meeting is about the President’s Physical Fitness Test, the results for which have finally arrived, and as soon as it is over and everyone has dressed, they gather at the far wall of the basketball court, where they unstitch the mats from their Velcro bands and heft them onto the floor. They land heavily, sending a great smack of air into the room. With a noise like that, you know that something has happened.

In a few weeks, right here in the gym, CAC will be hosting a lock-in. Kevin can’t get over it—how this very space, buzzing with exercise and light, will be blanketed in darkness, filled with hundreds of girls and hundreds of guys swimming in a giant sea of sleeping bags. Turn the lights off and there’s nothing that can’t be different. Maybe Kevin will find a girlfriend. Ann Harold will whisper, “Over here, you.” Noelle Batch will mistake him for someone else. Sarah Bell will tow him off by the wrist and fall in love with him.

It is time for the lightning tournament, and gradually, two by two, the other featherweights in the class end up clapped together on the mat: Sean Hammons and Caleb Kellybrew, Jim Boothby and Mike Beaumont, Matthew Sesser and Peter Vickerel. As soon as one fighter pins another, the coaches call the match with a “Rimmer!” or an “Arendt!” and select the next pair. Name by name the roster dwindles. Matthew LeDoux. Sean Lanham. Randy Garrett. Michael Berridge.
Kevin stands on the sidelines watching the Twister-shapes they make out of their bodies. Levon Dollard. Shane Roper. William Carpenter. James Dexter. And there goes the last of the small kids. Ethan Carpenter. Thad Brooks. Barry Robertson. Adrian Phipps.

Kevin knows it is going to happen and then it does. A prickling feeling chases itself up his legs, until suddenly, with a celebratory little rising drawl, Coach Strand says, “Last round. Brockmeier! Grundon! You’re up.”

Of course everyone laughs. Kevin is as thin as a paintbrush, at most eighty-four or eighty-five lubbs—why isn’t it pronounced that way?—while Jake Grundon looks the way his name sounds: swollen to the stitches with muscle.

Ordinarily in PE Kevin tries to mouse around without being noticed. Oh sure, he lets himself flash into view in the locker room, but as soon as the athletic stuff starts, he does his best to vanish again. A few weeks ago, during a game of bombardment, he managed to shrink and fade and hush his way into becoming the last surviving member of his team. Balls have always seemed like missiles to him, flying fast and hard. Not tools. Not playthings. Weapons. By the ordinary logic of sports he simply doesn’t matter. He is narrow, though—wily—and that day, as the clock ticked out its circles, he was able to dodge throw after throw with a quick twist of his arms or hips. When the other team strung themselves along the line and coordinated their attack—“On the count of three we aim all at once, understood? One, two, three”—he dropped flat and the barrage bounced off the wall above him. There was a popcorn of drumming, and a few of the balls leapt out of bounds. He was so surprised to be alive that he actually laughed out loud.

The trouble is that wrestling takes more than cunning. It takes leverage, muscle, and Kevin is nothing but scrawn, so skinny you could lay his forearm on a table and roll a marble down the tendons.

He decides to treat the match like a joke. Surely that’s what the coaches are expecting. Why else would they pair him with a bulldozer like Jake Grundon?

He walks to the edge of the mat and gives Jake the death-finger. Then he rolls his neck until the joints crack. “Neutral positions,” Coach Dale announces. “Readyyy—” The moment the whistle
fweets
, Kevin lowers his head and charges at Jake like a bull. Jake bends over, takes him by the ankles from behind, flips him upside down, and drops him on his head.

Coach Strand winces. “All right, Jake. None of that André the Giant stuff.”

“Sorry, Coach.”

Jake falls to his knees, and his palms staple Kevin’s collarbones to the mat. Kevin bucks his legs, but it is like trying to flip a sack of cement off his shoulders: useless. Coach Dale counts down the seconds, and then “Match to Grundon!” he says. He gives a muffled clap, as if he is wearing cotton gloves. “Good try. Good try. Shake it off, Kev.”

Kevin would rather have won, he can’t deny it, but losing and losing badly brings with it a perverse feeling of accomplishment. Dead last is better than the middle of the pack. Dead last is a kind of second place. The excitement of the match lingers in his body, a fizz of nervous adrenaline that persists through the final bell and the long car ride over the river.

He doesn’t realize he is sore until he has unlocked the kitchen door and deposited his books on the counter. He
writes his name in the condensation on a Big K bottle:
K
is for
Kevin
. He feeds Percy a handful of Bonkers: Hello, cat. Then something in his head begins to float, and he crashes onto the sofa. The refrigerator makes a ticking sound. He is so glad to be home. He has sixteen hours until school starts.

Probably he will never know who ate the sandwich.

Probably Thad will never spend the night with him.

But the kitchen is next to the living room, and the bedrooms are lined up one-two-three, and the sunshine paints the shapes of the doors onto the hall. Here beneath these rooms it is solid ground all the way to the bottom of the universe.

“ ‘Which one of the letters does not belong in the following series? A—D—G—I—J—M—P—or—S’?”

“I have no idea. G?”

“No,
I
. It goes one letter on, then two off, then one on, then two off. A—b-c—D—e-f—G. Like that. Okay, how about ‘ “If some Smaugs are Thors and some Thors are Thrains, then some Smaugs are definitely Thrains.” This statement is true, false, or neither’?”

“I’m gonna say neither.”

“Nope. False.”

“But how do you know that?”

“The important word is
definitely. Maybe
some Smaugs are Thrains—not
definitely
. It could be that the only Thors that are Thrains are the ones that aren’t Smaugs.”