A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip (7 page)

He could be a champion, a star.

If only someone were watching.

Joseph Rimmer spots Kevin in his Dolly Parton getup and nudges Shane Roper, who says, “Man oh man! Thad told me you were all fagged up today, but I had no idea.”

To which Kevin has no answer. He tries, “The few, the
proud, the umpteen,” and Shane says, “
Umpteen
? Pray tell me, good sir, who is this
umpteen
of which you speak?” and Joseph says, “Umpteen Dumpteen sat on a wall,” and they both break up laughing.

“It’s like a bunch, isn’t it? ‘Umpteen’?” This from Sean Lanham, whose small round skull has inspired Coach Dale to name him Peahead. Nearly half the football team has been rechristened by the coach. Joseph Luigs is Moose; Barry Robertson, Curly; Randy Garrett, Hitman; Peter Vickerel, Pickle. With his thin arms and wheaty mustache, Coach looks too slight to be an athlete, but his voice seems to rumble up from somewhere far belowground, and the uncommonness of it, the surprising density, makes the nicknames he concocts sound affectionate rather than insulting. Let’s face it: nicknames are cool. Kevin has always wished someone would give him one. But his real name, his full name, suits him too well already.
Why hello there, Kevin Brockmeier. Oh my God, did you see what Kevin Brockmeier’s wearing? Mrs. Dial, Kevin Brockmeier keeps kicking the back of my chair
. He has never been—wait a minute. All fagged up?

Mr. Garland taps for quiet on the microphone, and Kevin finds himself wondering—did he understand Shane correctly? Did Thad call him a faggot? He remembers a conversation the two of them had once about the Bible, when Thad said, “It seems unfair that God would make someone gay and then send him to Hell for it,” and before Kevin could answer added, “Shut up. I’m not a fag. Shut up.”

It takes Thad two full periods to notice that Kevin isn’t speaking to him. Today Kevin is the guy in the dress—that’s what he’s doing. He could suffer an epileptic seizure in total
invisibility.
Look at those boobs heaving around on the floor. Look at that wig jerking back and forth
. Midway through lunch, Thad unwraps a giant Tootsie Roll, sets it on the bench behind Annalise, and points it out to the table. In his Goon voice he says, “Chocolatey chew.”

Kevin gives a flat “Ha ha ha,” and Thad makes a face. “What’s got you so pissed off?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe something about you telling Shane I’m gay?”

“What? What the frick are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about me being quote-unquote ‘all fagged up.’ ”

Honestly? Kevin appreciates the chance to act indignant. Sometimes jokes float into a conversation like soap bubbles—there they are, and you have to pop them. It’s irresistible. He understands that. Kevin is wearing a dress, so he’s gay—voilà!—joke accomplished. But if he gets angry, or if he has the right to be, then Thad will have to apologize, and what’s the difference, really, between someone asking for forgiveness and someone asking for friendship?

“Just a minute now,” Thad hedges. “Don’t you remember at the fair, when you said we wouldn’t believe anyone who lied about us?”

“So Shane’s lying—is that what you’re saying?”

“I’m saying we made a promise and—wait, you know what? Fuck off.”

“Me fuck off?”

“Yeah, you, Islands-in-the-Stream.” Clearly he has been holding the name in reserve. “Fuck off. You don’t want to believe me, don’t believe me.”

“Fine. I don’t want to believe you.”

“Fine.”

Outside, by the bluff above the field house, Shane Wesson is practicing his pitching, using clots of dirt he has pried from the bare ground at the treeline. He twists around on himself, then whips forward, over and over again, as if his bones are made of braided metal rope. One by one the balls disintegrate in midair, pattering down on the slope of brush and leaves. Kevin walks to the edge of the hill. There is a fringe of unmown grass beneath the rim. It nods in the wind, flexing up over the school lawn with the sound of someone dusting flour from his palms.

Kevin inserts himself in the sea of blue sky Shane is using for a strike zone. This time he knows exactly what will happen: the confrontation, and the shove, and that remarkable watched feeling of falling. The long rest of the day and the long rest of his life.

“Hey, man, what are you doing?” Shane says. “Get out of the way already,” and Kevin faces him and says, “But I’m enjoying the view. It’s such a beautiful day. Why should I go anywhere?”

Then the big hands are on his chest, and his dress blossoms up around his waist, and the weeds pour over him in a rush.

A dragon and a unicorn are playing tag, galloping past a man in a tunic and a demon with scaly green skin.
Myth Directions
, the book is called, and according to the list in front, it is the third volume in a series, after book one,
Another Fine Myth
, and book two,
Myth Conceptions
. Kevin found it in the checkout aisle at the grocery store, racked with the horrors and romances, all those fat glossy paperbacks in their tilting columns of black and cream. From the illustration alone—the flabbergasted expression on the man’s face, the towelliness of the demon’s bathrobe, the way the dragon was thrusting his tongue out—he knew he would love it, and he was right. It is amazing, enthralling, mythterious, mythchievous, unmythable.

At home now, lying on the floor with his head propped against his bedframe, which draws a hard indentation along the back of his skull, he interrupts his reading again to glance at the book’s cover. He keeps waiting for the story to correspond to the picture. The dragon is named Gleep, the man Skeeve, the demon Aahz. So far there is no sign of the unicorn. Every chapter begins with a made-up quote, like “ ‘That’s funny, I never have any trouble with service when I’m shopping.’ —K. Kong” or “ ‘This contest has to be the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen.’ —H. Cosell.” It is totally hilarious—or supposed to be, anyway—and even when it isn’t, it is at least
agreeable: funny in a jokey-uncle sort of way. It makes Kevin feel clever for getting what the
K
stands for, and the H. Ever since junior high began, several times and for no reason at all, he has woken in the small hours of the morning with the conviction that he’s far from home and that his room, his posters, his comics, his record player—that none of it belongs to him. His desk is like an ancient altar on some faraway hilltop, standing beneath the ruined white moonscape of his ceiling. Where could he be? How did he get there? But he is never more comfortable, more at peace, than when he’s stretched out on his carpet in the quiet of the afternoon, reading by the light of the window, the sun making the pages of his book glow like milk in a clear glass. He feels as if he was born here, right here, between his bed and his dresser. As if he has never moved so much as an inch.

After church on Sunday, he finishes the
Myth
book and puts it in his satchel with his worksheets, folders, and notebooks. He has never lost that old elementary school show-and-tell impulse, the sense that every cool new thing he discovers immediately becomes a part of him, a hallmark of his personality, with its own little interior ribbon-cutting ceremony. He has to carry it around with him, whatever it might be, or how will anyone know who he is?

In Bible the next day, before the bell rings, he shows the book to Ethan Carpenter. “This,” he says, “is the single best thing I’ve ever read. I’m talking,
in my life
.”

“Sweet. Can I borrow it?”

“What? No.”

Mr. Garland has stepped across the hall to talk to Mr. Shoaf, and Leigh Cushman—a guy with a girl’s name—is pacing at the chalkboard, smacking his palm with the back of his hand
like a substitute. “You kids’re in big trouble. Take your seats. Stop talking right now, or you’re all going to D-Hall. I mean it! This instant! That’s it, every one of you’s going to D-Hall. I’m giving you all checks. One check. Two checks. Corn Chex. Wheat Chex,” and maybe in the end it was just a reflex, Kevin thinks, but if he had to guess, he would say that the reason he doesn’t want to loan the book out, to Ethan or anyone else, is because of the part of his personality that is one gigantic record-keeping system, a complex sifting and filing scheme that dictates what goes here and what goes there, turning his life into so many marks on a tablet. His mind would busy itself with the book’s whereabouts every second it was away. He knows it would.

“Okay, yes, you can borrow it, but Ethan? Look. You have to be careful.”

“Dude …” Ethan says, meaning,
You’ve seen my comic books, haven’t you?
His collection is as big as Kevin’s—bigger even. He keeps it in a row of long white boxes he tends like a garden, gently maneuvering each issue into a clear Mylar bag with an acid-free board, then taping it shut, vertically not horizontally, so that the tape doesn’t fray or separate, and arranging it with the others in alphabetical and numerical order. Side by side his comic boxes have the quality of giant Japanese fans, their slats closed
chock-chock-chock
. Kevin wouldn’t be surprised to find out that Ethan dusts them.

He surrenders the book across the aisle as Mr. McCallum begins the morning announcements. Just like that it vanishes into Ethan’s backpack, throwing a few scattered dots of color through the mesh of the front pocket.

For the rest of the day, Kevin feels the way he did that time he locked himself out of the house and saw his house key
resting on the kitchen counter. The book is behind a window. The book is his, but he cannot touch it. Part of him would rather bike back to Kroger and buy another copy than wait for Ethan to return it. He is
Like That
, always
Like That
. He is no good at hiding it. A few Saturdays ago, sitting by the fountain at the JCPenney end of the shopping mall, he realized he was missing the bag with his butter mints and his pop-its and his
Song Hits Magazine
, and Kenneth said, “Kevin. Stop it. Good Lord. Look,” gesturing to the ledge where he had set the bag while he was tying his shoes. “You’re about to cry, aren’t you? Why are you
like that
all the time?”

In SRA, Mrs. Bissard—Mrs. Bizarre, everyone calls her: it is irresistible—gives them a reading comprehension test, and as soon as Kevin has finished, he begins working on a detective story, the kind he has been writing ever since the first grade, hypothesizing that someone he knows, usually a kid from his class, has vanished, and he has been appointed to solve the crime. The Case of the Missing Sarah Watts. The Case of the Missing Craig Bateman. Or this time, for a change, a teacher: The Case of the Missing Miss Vincent.

He plunges into the mystery with, “The authorities were baffled,” then sketches the facts of the case—how two days before, in fifth period, Miss Vincent had discovered Clint Fulkerson snoring at his desk and, when she couldn’t wake him, left to fetch the principal.

“Aaaaaahhh! It was a scream, and, no doubt about it, it was Miss Vincent. The scream brought the whole school running. Clint had even awoken. When we got to the stairs, though, all we found were some ink stains. Miss Vincent had been teacher-napped!”

It’s always the same for Kevin, the story gusting along
before him with its sails stretched tight, a boat seized by some strange and incredible wind. He relaxes his hold on it for PE, but only reluctantly. The whole time he and Alex Braswell are heaving the big leather boulder of the medicine ball back and forth, its casing scuffed and velveted like a walnut’s, he continues to unravel the mystery’s details. That evening, at home, he returns to his notebook. He assembles a list of suspects from the five students who were away from class when the abduction took place: Tommy Anderson, Chris Pickens, Scott Freeman, Sheila Watts, and Annalise Blair. Each of them, it turns out, was given a hall pass for exactly the same reason: to dispose of a leaky pen.
Aha! Ink! Like the ink in the stairwell!
he thinks. He deduces that Clint Fulkerson must have been drugged with sleeping powder, but when he investigates the filing cabinet in the office for evidence, he uncovers only “some confiscated candy, gum to be precise, and a paddle with a peculiar stain on it.” The case seems hopeless. Then, suddenly, the criminal delivers a note to Kevin’s locker:

You, he thinks.
U! The U Hobby Shop!
And sure enough, that’s where he finds her, bound to a post in the basement. She tells him she was struck from behind, spilling her can of Diet Coke as she fell unconscious. It happened so fast that she cannot identify her assailant—but Kevin can.

The next morning, in chapel, he claims the microphone
from Coach McAteer and explains everything: how Clint was disabled with tranquilizers to drive Miss Vincent from the classroom, how the pens were sabotaged and the stairwell doctored with ink as a ruse, but how the criminal forgot one crucial piece of evidence: the paddle with its brown splashes of Diet Coke. And whose trademark drink is Diet Coke? Miss Vincent’s. And who uses a paddle? The principal: Mr. McCallum! His villainy is inarguable, and he knows it. In desperation he brandishes a gun, but Kevin disarms him with a karate chop. “The police took Mr. McCallum to jail,” he concludes. “I had succeeded and somehow knew this was only the beginning of my career as a detective.”