A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip (5 page)

They are pedaling past a knot of trees when they become aware of two girls quarreling with each other on the shore. One says, “That’s not what you promised me,” and the other, “I already told you. It wasn’t my decision, it was Jennifer’s,” and the first again, “Jennifer, my ass. This is totally humiliating for me, don’t you get that?” and he knows that it is Sarah because he knows.

The argument grows louder as the cove angles into sight. As soon as their boat putters past the trees, Clay spots the girls and points them out—Sarah and Jess, standing chest to shoulder by the struts of a wooden dock.

“Jess,” Sarah begs. Then she says it again as if it were a command:
“Jess. Look. I already
told
everyone. You-know
-who
is going to be there. For once in your life, can’t you have a little compassion?”

“It’s out of my hands, I’m sorry.”

“What, do you want me to say
please
? Okay—please.”

“Sugar, you’re not getting the picture.”

The boat is sliding past so quietly that neither of the girls has noticed it. “You know what? Fuck you,” Sarah says, and Jess tosses back the newest answer, which is, “Fuck yourself, save a quarter, this machine is out of order.” Then she pivots around and marches away.

“Fine, then!” Sarah yells. Her body makes a fluttering little inhalation, as if the back of her hand has glanced against a hot iron. “Oh come on! And now I bit my lip!” and she launches a kick at one of the dock pilings.

It is the last thing Kevin sees before the water takes her away from him, and the sun emerges from behind a cloud, and the laketop is transformed into a million dots of white confetti.

It is too warm for a bonfire, but that night, after sunset, the seniors are allowed to build one anyway, a small, square box of logs and newspapers that burns at a slant because of the wind, turning white on the lake side and black on the land side. The spectacle of the sparks chasing each other through the air draws half the students in school to the fire. At first they just stand around mesmerized by the light fletching through the logs, their bodies leaning toward the flames, their faces wincing slightly at each explosion of sap, but then Coach Dale leads them in a handful of hymns, “Stand Up and Shout It” and “Teach Me, Lord, to Wait,” “Seek Ye First” and
“Kum Ba Yah,” and afterward, as a gag, someone strikes up the Christmas carol from
The Grinch
, “Fah who foraze, Dah who doraze,” and what could it be but a kind of enchantment that makes everyone bump around and sway, singing along before the whole tune falls apart in laughter?

Right now, Kevin’s mom must be waiting for her toenails to dry, the polish saturating her bedroom with its fumes. His brother must be sitting on the living room floor watching the last few minutes of
Airwolf
, eating honey-roasted peanuts out of a Dixie cup on a marble coaster. Percy, their cat, must be lying on top of the TV, making occasional blacked-out sighs as he absorbs the heat from the cable box.

A scrap of newspaper lifts off from the fire, its colors burned inside out, so that the background paper is as dark as coal and the letters are a scorched silver. It floats around for a while, then goes kiting off to the other side of the semicircle. Kevin watches it touch down on one of the older kids from the bathroom.

Blank. Now. This. Here. There
.

He still can’t decide what he should have said to them.

Gradually the fire sinks in on itself. The embers give off a drowsy orange glow, the kind that reminds him of a railroad crossing, blinking this-side-that-side, this-side-that-side. He is returning to the lodge when it comes to him finally, the ideal comeback.

Or maybe it’s your upper lip
.

He imagines himself saying it out loud and smiles. He can almost hear the response, an admiring chorus of
damn
’s and
cold’
s and
bro, you got blistered
’s. No doubt about it—it would have made an excellent impression.

By the time he reaches his room, the thrill of the joke is gone. He is changing into his sleeping shirt—
FRITZBUSTERS
—when a blur drifts over his eyes. He feels himself smacking hard up against his fatigue. He barely has the energy to finish putting himself to bed, but once he does he finds that he is too exhausted to relax. His mind is still full of noise and commotion, a rolling white wave of hyperactivity. Usually, on nights like this, he will lull himself to sleep with a sexual fantasy. Some days, midway through the afternoon, he will concoct one so promising that he will save it up for hours, waiting until he has turned out the lights and reeled off his Our Fathers to deploy it. And here’s the thing: no matter how tantalizing the stories he invents, he can never quite seize hold of them. They sheer and whirl and drop from sight like a puff of feathers riding a breeze. He finds it terrifically soothing. How many times has he lain in bed thinking of Sarah, his erection tightening and softening as his mind wanders this way and that? He cannot say. But summoning her up after overhearing her argument with Jess feels disloyal to her somehow, to the way she kicked so stiffly at the dock, like someone who had never kicked anything larger than a dandelion. Instead he pictures himself with Meredith Hopps, a girl he barely knows and does not love, imagining the two of them pressed together in the darkness, playing with each other’s nakedness through their clothing.

A chilly lunchtime in mid-October, and Shane Wesson is pinching the head off a blade of foxtail grass. “Hey, you want to see something? Here, put this in your mouth.”

Kevin lays the foxtail on the centerline of his tongue. “Now what?” He has scarcely spoken before the prickle of fuzz picks up the tremor and starts crawling toward the back of his throat. He coughs and gags, nipping at it with his teeth, but the more he chases after it, the more quickly it flees. Soon he has no choice but to swallow. He can feel the thing scratching its way down his windpipe like a cylinder of twitching bug’s legs.

Shane leans forward, giving his big batty laugh. “It’s like it turns into a caterpillar, am I right?”

“It stings!”
Tunk, tunk
—Kevin smacks his breastbone. “It stings right here. Jesus shit, man, what’s wrong with you?”

Shane shrugs. “If you reverse it when you put it in, it’ll crawl the other way. Nobody ever reverses it, though. People just plant it on their tongue like gardeners or something.”

Already it is a quarter past noon. Lunch is nearly over. Between the first and second bell, Kevin stands by the upstairs restroom monopolizing the drinking fountain, taking one huge gulp after another as he tries to wash the foxtail down.

Shane! The guy is a total prick. The guy has a serious problem. He tells lies, and he spills secrets, and he likes to hyperventilate himself, folding his torso over and gasping like a long-distance runner, then snapping upright so that a million sparks cascade through his head. He does it all the time. He’s probably damaged that asshole brain of his.

Thinking about the spike of grass shedding its seeds inside him makes Kevin feel sick to his stomach. For the rest of the day the weedy taste lingers in his mouth, thinning out and then intensifying, as if he is walking through his neighborhood on one of those sunny spring Saturdays that lifts all the moisture from the grass, tweezing dandelions through the soil and sending fleets of gas mowers out onto the lawns. Is he just imagining it? He doesn’t think so. He keeps showering his tongue with sprays of peppermint Binaca—a new thing: like a handful of Tic Tacs—until finally, in SRA, Mrs. Bissard says, “Who’s doing that? Your hair looks fine, girls. Quit primping.”

That evening, at home, during a block of commercials, Kevin goes to the bathroom to investigate the inside of his mouth. As far as he can tell, the foxtail has come and gone without leaving a mark. At first he is standing at the mirror with his face spread out around his lips. Then a gear seems to turn, and he is standing at the mirror with his face spread out around his lips
noticing
himself. His bulbous canines. The pinpricks of his freckles. He has a fantasy dating back to preschool that all the mirrors in his house are secretly windows, magic spyglasses for the girls in his class. How often has he pictured them somewhere, at their sinks or by their vanities, casting their girl-spells and peeking in on him? How
often has he imagined them gazing through the polished silver squares and ovals on his walls as he combs his hair or changes his clothes or darts down the hall on his way to the refrigerator? And why? Why would they do it? Sometimes, stepping out of the shower, Kevin will catch sight of his reflection and shy off to one side. He embarrasses him, that kid, slouching around with his budlike penis, with his thin chest ridged like the roof of a dog’s mouth. He doesn’t want anyone looking at him.

Cheers
drifts to an end, its last tired piano notes wrapping an inexplicable golden sadness in their hands, and then he hears the air pocket of perfect silence that always announces the beginning of the next program—which on Thursday nights, on NBC, at 8:30, is
Night Court
. He bounds past the chain of empty bedrooms—one two three, Mom’s and Jeff’s and Kevin’s, lined up like dice in a dice box—and reclaims his spot on the living room carpet. In this world there are
Cosby Show
people,
Family Ties
people,
Cheers
people, and
Night Court
people. Kevin’s friends are more important to him than his family, which rules out
Family Ties
, and also rules out
The Cosby Show
, and he prefers bright rooms to dark rooms, soda to beer, and nearly anyone else in the world to Shelley Long, which rules out
Cheers
. He is a
Night Court
person: quick-thinking, whimsical, bizarre. He likes to stay up late:
Night Court
. His hair is a fiasco:
Night Court
. And he is actually funny:
Night Court
. His favorite character on TV is Bull the bailiff, his favorite video a-ha’s “Take On Me,” his favorite commercial “Parts Is Parts.” His best friend is Thad and sometimes Bateman. He can’t wait for the State Fair, which starts this weekend, and where he and the others
stayed out till eleven last year winning
Ghostbusters
mirrors and KISS bandannas and Mötley Crüe pins from the squirt-the-bull’s-eye game, which was an utter cinch.

Two days later he is standing at the mirror again, this time pressing his finger to his cheek to remove an eyelash, a strange black fly-bristle, of a thing when his mom’s voice goes hydroplaning up-up-up to say, “
Kev-
in, they’re
he
-ere,” and he grabs his jacket and speeds outside. A white Fiero is idling in the driveway, and Bateman’s mom is at the wheel. She is allergic to gold, Bateman once told him—it turns her skin green. The car is a two-seater, so small that he has no choice but to buckle himself onto Bateman’s lap, which jogs around beneath him as they gun off toward Roosevelt and the fairgrounds. “Ow, man, you’re nothing but bone,” Bateman complains.

“Shut up, man. You’re nothing but fat. Hey, those can be our nicknames: Nothing Butt-Bone and Nothing Butt-Fat.”

The silliness of the idea or the rat-a-tat of the words or maybe even just the two
butt
s—one butt is funny, two butts hilarious—Kevin doesn’t know why, but the joke seems to work. Bateman catches himself laughing, then realizes how idiotic the line was and laughs even harder. Kevin knows the feeling. Occasionally, once or twice a month, the absurdity of a bad joke will make him laugh until he forgets to breathe, until the laughter itself becomes a kind of breathing, stretching back through time to fill his life, and he is convinced that it will never stop. The same thing happens with crying sometimes.

Between gasps Bateman shouts, “Mom, stoplight! Mom! Mom! Speed bump!” and in her cigarette-voice his mom says, “If you take them fast enough, you don’t even notice they’re
there,” and Kevin rocks back and forth with every turn in the road, every pothole, like the spring-headed cat on the dashboard.

Thad and Kenneth are already waiting inside the gate for them, hands stamped and tickets purchased, fixed to the pavement in their high-tops. “Where have you effers been?” they say, and, “We got here twenty gee dee emms ago.”

It is a game of first letters.

“Yeah, dudes, sorry,” Bateman says. “My mom took forever getting ready.”

“In the bathroom? Taking a pee?”

“Nah, on the phone.”

“
On
the pee.”

“On the pee talking some ess.”

“Just essing around with some jaying tee dee.”

“
What
? What the fuck does that mean?”

“I have absolutely no idea.”

Everyone but Kevin wants to ride the Zipper straightaway—he would rather stay right side up, thank you very much; he’s declaring this an official no-barfing day—but he doesn’t mind standing in line with the others. They inch along until they reach the rail where the operator is tearing tickets, and then Kevin steps aside to watch the small metal cages slant into the air and spin on their axes. It is an oddly sunless fall afternoon. The sky is the color of oatmeal with lots of milk. For a while he tries to zero in on Thad’s blond hair, on Bateman’s green shirt, but loop-de-looping his eyes around makes him dizzy, and eventually he just lets his gaze drift down the midway, listening for the great swooping arm of the ride to creak to a stop.