A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip (3 page)

In kindergarten, when they were little, he and Thad used to play
Star Wars
on the jungle gym during recess, one of them the morning Han Solo, the other the afternoon. In third grade, they told elaborate lies during show-and-tell, Thad inventing Scooby-Doo stories about his dog Clarence, a coward and a mischief-maker, while Kevin reported the dreams he pretended to remember from the night before. Once, in fifth grade, the two of them showed their middle fingers to a whole squad of teenagers at the State Fair, escaping through the midway by the barest slip of space. And last year, nearly every Friday night, they met up with Kenneth and Bateman and a few of the others at Eight Wheels, where the younger kids skated the blue-lit oval of the wooden rink while the older kids stood around flirting in their high-tops. It was Kevin’s job, each week toward nine o’clock, to run out front and intercept whichever parent had agreed to fetch them while Kenneth and Thad finished making out with their girlfriends behind the building.

“Honestly, I just don’t want anything to change.”

“Me either,” says Thad.

“I’m sick of things being different all the time.”

“Me too.”

And then it happens again, the same way it has happened a hundred times before, with the gaps between their answers growing longer and longer until their voices can barely leap
over the stillness. Soon neither of them quite remembers what the other has said or whose turn it is to speak. Kevin is swooning into a dream of girls and dark rooms when his leg twitches and wakes him back up. A car goes roaring down the street toward the cowboy bar. Its headlights brighten the window. Then the glass seems to hitch in its frame, and the brightness pops loose, curving and flashing across the ceiling before it vanishes behind the dresser. He has missed his chance, his one chance, to dive through it and find out where it would have taken him. He turns onto his left side, his sleeping side, and lies there listening to the whoosh of the air conditioner. The day keeps coming to light again in bits and pieces: the jellyfish-like burst of the pine tree letting go of the hillside, and the sound of bottles shattering on the asphalt, and Tes-ti-clees the ancient Greek god, and suicides of Coke and Sunkist and Dr Pepper, and the poor bird draining from its egg into the grass, and the tingle of his sweat cooling in a humming rectangle of air, and who liked him and how much and why? One by one his thoughts flow from their outlines like a cloud, and then the cloud rolls over him and he is asleep.

Sunday passes as it always does, with church and Wyatt’s Cafeteria and the slow TV hours of the afternoon. Then it is Monday, and his mom is driving him across the river into the trees, and as they crest the hill and coast into the parking lot, the school grows gigantic in the windshield. They pull to a stop at the entrance. Something like a bird shoots out of his heart. Then he steps out onto the patio and becomes a part of it all. The blue sky and the glass doors and the white tile floor that blazes in the sunlight. The lockers crashing shut like cymbals. The high school guys punching each other’s
shoulders, drafts of cologne and deodorant mixing between their bodies. The high school girls with their hair belled out around their necks. The black streaks of tennis shoe rubber on the floor of the gymnasium. The glass walls of the front office. The Reeboks and Levi’s, Izods and bomber jackets, jelly bracelets and Swatch watches. The football players in their jerseys. The band kids with their instrument cases. The chalkboards with their eraser-shaped smoke signals
—poof
,
poof
,
poof
. The pay phones in the foyer where the popular girls wait for the first bell to ring. The concession stand with its rolling metal gate. The stairwell with its stack of folding chairs. The couples kissing behind the doors of their lockers, pretending that no one can see them. The chopping and rolling noise of five hundred conversations happening all at once, like a river relaxing along its banks and then plunging ahead, over and over again. The butcher paper banners reading “
WELCOME TO MUSTANG MOUNTAIN
” and “
STAYIN’ ALIVE IN 85
” in gold and purple, the school colors, which are everywhere, everywhere. The vending machines with their coils of chips and candy. The desks with their attached chairs. The long hallways of open classroom doors, their doorstops like curving brass hoofs. The coaches and the teachers, the principal and the guidance counselor, the janitor in his plaid shirt and dark glasses. The other students, all of them older and bigger, standing in clusters against the walls and the lockers, their eyes sliding past the seventh-graders as they look for their buddies, their teammates, for their girlfriends and boyfriends, for someone who knows them, someone they recognize.

The gym stands on one side of the hall, Mr. Garland’s class on the other, and every day, after first period, the girls finishing PE and the boys finishing Bible meet in the middle, twisting around each other like the tails of two kites. Sometimes, if Kevin paces himself just right, he will fall into step with Sarah Bell and her friends—the lip-gloss girls—with brush furrows in their wet hair and Guess triangles on their jeans. He basks in their incense of sweat and shampoo, thinking, This will be the day, the day I tell her a joke and graze her arm, a throwaway touch with the back sides of my fingers, nothing much, just quick and cool, as if I don’t care, but then a locker slams shut or a voice cuts through the air and once again the tiny comforting thought caresses his mind: Tomorrow. You can be brave tomorrow.

The high school is all noise and unrest, as different as can be from the churchlike hush of the elementary school. Between periods the building fills with people shouting and running and flicking each other’s knuckles with pencils, with choir kids singing, photographers snapping pictures, drill-teamers cocking their hips, with couples bending hard into each other’s bodies. In class, they all become the quietest possible versions of themselves, but in the hallways everyone is either a swerver or a strider. The swervers move this way
and that, leaning and swaying like tops, taking the quickest route possible through the obstacle course of other people’s bodies, while the striders choose a single path and follow it like a marble rolling down a chute. Kevin is a born swerver. He likes the sensation of bobbing beneath someone’s upraised arm, slipping sideways past a big clump of juniors and seniors, that wonderful feeling of swiftness and intangibility. No one can catch him, no one can touch him. He could be a ghost rushing through a brick wall, a motocross racer, almost anything.

One day, just before the end of first period, the chemistry teacher, Mr. Shoaf, seeds the corridor outside his room with sulfur pellets, hundreds of little yellow beads that pop open with the earthy stink of rotten eggs. The odor washes through the northern wing of the school, and after the bell, as the boys in Kevin’s class step into the hallway, their faces take on the startled looks of sunbathers doused in cold water. They cough theatrically or give bewildered laughs. They tack their hips to the side as if they’ve cut a fart. Sarah, walking just ahead of them in her denim skirt and white ankle socks, says, “Barf,” and tugs the collar of her shirt up over her nose to mask the smell. That mouth, those breasts—Kevin wants to make a little bed between them.

“Shit, man,” Levon Dollard says, taking an instinctive whiff. “This place fucking reeks.”

And
ting!
—That’s what you get when the girls take PE, Kevin thinks.

There is funny ha-ha, and there is funny peculiar, and beneath a trapdoor in Kevin’s mind is a place where the two blur together, the place of jokes, churning so furiously that
frequently, when it kicks up a line, he has no idea what it will turn out to be. He has discovered that whether a joke is truly witty doesn’t matter—only the glow in his voice, the glitter of invention. But Levon is one of the new kids, from Sylvan Hills or Geyer Springs, a tall ropy football player who isn’t familiar enough with Kevin to take it for granted that he is funny, so he bungles the delivery. “The girls. PE. You know, all that sweat.”

No one laughs. It is funny embarrassing.

Then Jess Watts says, “Or maybe it’s your upper lip, Kevin Brockmeier,” which everyone finds hilarious.

Kevin is baffled. He understands the implication, that he is the one who stinks,
he who smelt it dealt it
—but his upper lip? Why? Surreptitiously, he runs his fingers over his mouth, but they come back clean, smelling of soap, pencil lead, and the leather strap of the camera satchel he uses for a book bag. Nothing disgusting.

On the staircase landing, he calls out to M.B., who answers, “What did I say? I’m going by
Michael
now. Write it down.
Michael
.”

“Whatever. Hey, do you see anything on my upper lip?”

“Like your nose?”

“Yes. Exactly. Like my nose. Very helpful, M.B.”

“No problemo.”

The intercom makes its electronic bell sound, a shrill tone with a strange dust of static at the beginning, and they hurry into their classes. In English, Miss Vincent fills the left side of the chalkboard with adjectives, then asks them to add their own words to the list: “Give me five adjectives—five attributes—you would use to describe yourself to a
stranger.” Kevin is (1) scrawny, (2) oversensitive, (3) unathletic, (4) mouselike, and (5) girlfriendless. No, no, he is (1) friendly, (2) clever, (3) imaginative, and (4) likable. He is (5) awesome-beyond-all-adjectives. He is a good student, a fast writer. He charges through his assignments like a runner sprinting down a track, then sits at his desk daydreaming or reading novels, making up stories or mapping out dungeons.

For the rest of the day, in Coach Dale’s geography class, Mrs. Dial’s math class, Mrs. Bissard’s SRA class—and why don’t they just call it
reading
?—he fills his spare time puzzling through Jess’s wisecrack. Either she just chose a part of his body at random, or there is something special about his upper lip, something he can’t figure out. The question, then, is what makes his upper lip unique? He has noticed that it has a tiny discoloration just off-center, soft and pale, like a cut immediately after it has finished healing, but how would Jess have seen that? He spotted it only a few nights ago himself, and solely by chance, studying his face in the bathroom mirror to see if he could make his tongue ripple. What else? His upper lip is pink and slender, much thinner than his lower lip. It is shaped like a bird in a landscape painting, that bowlike symbol preschoolers learn with their very first box of watercolors: an
M
with its legs pulled flat. In the winter sometimes, when he forgets to wear ChapStick, the skin above his lips becomes so red that it looks like the stain from a cherry popsicle—but that’s in January and February, not the second week of September. Brother. His ideas are getting less complicated by the minute. Let’s see: his upper lip is above his chin and beneath his nose. It is part of his mouth. He talks with his mouth, he sings with his mouth, he eats with his mouth, he
drinks with his mouth. He uses his mouth to smile, to pout, to whistle, to yawn, to spit, to breathe, and to kiss. And that, he finally decides, is it. His upper lip or his lower lip, it makes no difference—he uses them, uses them both, to kiss.

Jess’s putdown meant that he had kissed something repulsive. He is an ass-kisser—that’s what she was saying.

He feels the satisfaction of cracking the code, a fine warm body-lightness that causes his fingers and toes to tingle. Simultaneously, though, he can’t help but wonder: Is Jess right? Is he an ass-kisser, a suck-up? And how would he know if he was? The truth is he spends thirty minutes of every hour suspecting he has missed some essential clue about himself. And not only himself—he has a recurring fantasy that one night, while he was asleep, the entire world was transformed into an alien planet, but no one bothered to tell him, and he didn’t have the instinct to figure it out, and here he is now on a wild new Earth, walking around like an imbecile, as if everything he knows hasn’t fallen away behind him like a river plummeting over a precipice.

At 3:30, the final bell rings. He returns to his homeroom to collect the overnight bag containing his clothes and his toiletries. Then he follows the crowd to the buses centipeding across the parking lot, a half dozen idling old athletic vehicles, their yolky orange color faded by the sunlight.

It is a golden Friday afternoon, the very last minute of the school week, and for a moment he simply stands there at the edge of the weekend. The days and nights make a quiet sound of possibility, rustling and ticking like a dark forest. The campground at Lake Bennett, forty miles up the highway, is hosting a sleepaway for everyone at CAC, seventh-graders
through seniors, permission slips required. Who knows what could happen between now and Monday morning?

The teachers are busy directing people to their assigned buses:
Eighth grade, I’m looking for the eighth grade! Yo, SOPH-mores! Juniors right here—come on, folks, let’s get a move on!
Thad, Kenneth, and Bateman have already packed themselves into the long bench at the back of the seventh-grade bus, along with a couple of new kids, Shane Roper and Joseph Rimmer, who seem to Kevin like the same shaggy, drowsy cutup ladled into two separate bodies, one brown-haired and the other blond, both of them laughing all the time at some private joke they’ve exchanged with a twitch of their eyebrows. Thad says to Kevin, “Sorry, neeg-bo, no room in the rear for you,” and in his dirtiest voice Shane repeats, “In the rear,” and Joseph says, “Up the butt,” and Kenneth says, “Holmes, did you just call dude
neeg-bo
?” and the word echoes against the walls as Kevin walks away:
neeg-bo
,
neeg-bo
,
neeg-bo
.