A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip: A Memoir of Seventh Grade

  And Asa. And Chuck. And Alex.

  “Twenty.”

  “Twenty.”

  “Yeah, twenty.”

  Sometimes Kevin wishes he could take time like an egg and crack it. A year ago, the six of them went to different CACs—Bateman, Shane, and Kevin to Pleasant Valley and Asa, Alex, and Chuck to Sylvan Hills. Twenty miles of trees and pavement lay between them, full of Krogers and Burger Kings and the bending rope of the Arkansas River, green in the summer and brown in the fall, with four concrete bridges he had no earthly reason to cross. Kevin’s brain has always been a kind of banker, slotting the nickel into the nickel tray and the quarter into the quarter: Bateman and Shane are old to him, Asa, Alex, and Chuck are new. Or: Bateman, Shane, and Asa have pale lips, Kevin, Alex, and Chuck have red. Or: Asa, Alex, and Chuck have sisters, Kevin and Shane have brothers. (Bateman is an only child.) Or: Shane is the tallest of them, Chuck the second tallest, Alex, Bateman, Asa, and Kevin the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth. His mind won’t stop shuffling through the possibilities. But the only division that really matters is the first. Not so long ago he had never spoken to the Sylvan Hills kids, and neither had Shane or Bateman. He’s thinking that there must be a version of the world where the discussion they’re having now happened back then, in sixth grade, before they actually met, a version where half of them stood around talking to the ghosts of half the others, and no one knew what was going on, and it was so confusing that it didn’t matter how many laps Kevin said he had run.

  Suddenly 3:30 rings out over the parking lot. Though the bell is powerless this afternoon, it breaks the moment anyway. Thank God. Kevin slips out of the circle to change. The showers have been running nonstop. Their clamminess covers the locker room in a slick transparent film. The concrete floor glistens beneath the lights, gray like a bad tooth. Kevin has a hole in the knee of his blue jeans large enough to accept half his toes. The first time he tries to punch his leg through, his foot gets caught halfway down in the net of unraveling cotton. Even wearing socks, he can feel the threads flossing his toes. It’s a good thing he isn’t racing anyone.

  “Dang it!” he complains, and someone repeats it from the other room, “Dang it!,” using an angry little squeak-voice that sounds the way he sounds to himself on tape.

  Some weeks go by as one long battle with anything he touches—every last cereal bowl, phone cord, and ballpoint pen. The entire world, it seems, is waiting to fall or break or tangle. Then one morning he wakes up and with no explanation he’s Mary Lou Retton.

  He sits down and gives his jeans another try. The coolest jeans are black or acid washed, followed by gray, followed by faded blue. Holes are cooler than no holes, buttons are cooler than zippers, Levi’s are cooler than Lees, Lees are cooler than Wranglers, and Wranglers are cooler than Toughskins. It has taken him longer than average, but he is learning.

  He has nothing to do after he dresses, and for a while he simply roams the halls of the building. He feels like a mouse taking a tour of its maze. Most of the school is quiet, with sparse groups of people in stairwells or open rooms producing sudden fanfares of laughter. He stops to stow his PE clothes in his locker. Behind the gym door hundreds of voices are boiling in conversation, but when he steps inside and surveys the court, he doesn’t see any of his friends, just a bunch of older kids. On a whim he ducks under the bleachers, picking his way through the cat’s cradle of metal reinforcements. Down here his footsteps, his coughing, his breathing, even his shirtsleeves brushing against his arms and his shoelaces tippeting over the floor, sound fuller than usual, rounder, like the echoes of other noises, great big distant booms of activity. He can hear two guys talking on the bleacher benches: “It was your fault anyway.” “Fuck you it was my fault.” “Well, it wasn’t my fault, and it sure as shit wasn’t Cordell’s.” He wonders if every building has a hiding place like this, some little pocket of space where you can listen in on people as they say whatever they say and do whatever they do. That would be totally awesome. If Kevin could vanish and reappear, if he could remain in the middle of things without anyone ever knowing, if that was his superpower and he could use it whenever he wanted, his life might be pretty good.

  Hey, what if this was where he and Ann hid during the tornado. On second thought—no. The foxhole beneath the stage is better. Darker. A tighter fit.

  Say say say what you want. Do what you do when you did what you did to me.

  Eventually he ends up in the lunchroom, where Ethan and some of the others are sitting around with their butts planted flat on the tables. It’s the perfect gesture of freedom, since they are defying the rules, no question, but not so badly that they’ll get in trouble for it.

  Kevin must have arrived in the middle of an argument about UFOs because “Here’s the deal,” Sean Lanham is insisting. “Let me tell you what the Bible has to say about life on other planets: nothing. Nada.”

  “Well,” Ethan says, “no. What about Elijah’s chariot?”

  “What about it?”

  “Some people think it was a spaceship.”

  “A spaceship! Dude, those were angels.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Angels are all over the Bible. Aliens from outer space aren’t anywhere. The Old Testament: not one word. The New Testament: not one word. Don’t you think God would have mentioned life on other planets if it existed?”

  Kevin doesn’t, and he dives in with, “God doesn’t mention asteroids either. And what about dinosaurs? Automobiles, cigarettes, Indians, tacos. He doesn’t mention all sorts of things. It’s not like the Bible’s an encyclopedia.”

  “Yeah, but what He does say is ‘God created the heavens and the earth.’ One earth. This earth.”

  Ethan is exasperated. “You can’t possibly know that. The other planets are part of the heavens, right? Well, maybe some of them are inhabited. I’d be willing to bet on it. Maybe they have their own Bibles, who are you to say?”

  All day long Kevin has been feeling twinges of barbed wire in his stomach whenever he thinks about the lip-synching contest, and “Hey,” he asks all of a sudden, “has anyone seen Sean Hammons?” He hasn’t forgotten last fall and the laryngitis incident. It would be just like Sean to get sick and go home without telling him.

  No one has spoken to Sean since the bell rang. Kevin sets off to find him with a soldierly stride, his shoes announcing themselves up and down the hall, their hard slaps so forceful he thinks they should leave holes in the floor. He is prepared to march through every room of the school if he has to. But barely fifty feet away he sees Sean exiting the library, checking left and right as if for cars, with Miss Vincent stalking close behind him. And oh my God. She looks the way a mushroom looks after it rains, padded to the skin with herself, like something that was never meant to fit inside the space it was given.

  “Hey! Sean!”

  Sean rasps out some sort of hello to fill the pause, and with his eyes he says to Kevin, It’s not my fault. “Um, we were just trying to find you.”

  Miss Vincent crosses her arms and says, “I understand the two of you have prepared a song.”

  “Uh-huh,” Kevin answers.

  “And I’m involved somehow?”

  “Yeah,” Kevin admits, and he fires a message back at Sean: It was supposed to be a surprise. Then he says it out loud: “We wanted it to be a surprise. Don’t worry, you’ll like it, though.”

  “Yes. Well. I think I’ll need to make up my own mind about that.”

  “Oh. Yeah. You bet.” Kevin leads the two of them to Mr. Garland’s room. The shades drawn over the windows aerosol the air with a fine orange haze. To Kevin’s eyes the desks and the trash can and the overhead projector appear to be hibernating. He could flip the switch and they would blink and stretch their limbs.

  He slips the poster boards from behind one of the cabinets, standing them upright on the makeshift prop of yardsticks and cardboard he has rigged to the back. Voilà.

  Miss Vincent is so quiet he can hear her breath siss
ing through her nostrils. Her straight skirt buckles as she cocks a hip to the side. She examines the illustration. The teeny red costume that clings to her body. The stockings with their black lines windowscreening her legs. The bunny ears rising in two pink puffs from her hair. On the poster her face is all circles and curves, dotted with black eyelashes, green eyes, and red lips, but the real one looks so flat you could paste it to the wall.

  She lets out a dry little nut of a laugh. “You cannot,” she says, “absolutely cannot use that thing.”

  “What?” Kevin is incensed. “Why?”

  “It’s not remotely appropriate, for one.”

  “But that’s not fair! Our routine doesn’t make any sense without it. We practiced!”

  “So sing your song. Sing it posterless.”

  “You can’t do ‘Hot for Teacher’ without the teacher.”

  “Be that as it may,” she says, and nabs up the drawing.

  He is sure she is going to carry it off with her, but at the last second she changes her mind and hands it over to him, firmly, like the baton in a relay race. No one has ever left a room more decisively.

  He listens as her footsteps fade away, then spins around. “Sean!”

  “Sorry, man. Someone told her.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “Drop out, that’s what I say. We’ve got like half an hour until the contest starts.”

  But dropping out isn’t the only alternative. It can’t be.

  “No. Come with me. Get your boom box.”

  In Kevin’s locker is the cassette tape containing “Hot for Teacher,” a copy he recorded from the radio. He owns five or six identical blue Kmart tapes and it’s possible this is the wrong one, but as soon as he fast-forwards past the final guitar licks of the song, past the crackle between tracks, and hears that staticky sound of wind and rain with those ah-ah-ahs hiccuping up from underneath, he knows immediately how he and Sean are going to win the competition. First comes the last thirty seconds of “Darling Nikki.” Then comes the same thirty seconds in reverse, spun by hand from Kevin’s Purple Rain album so that he could capture the backmasking: Prince is fine because he knows that the Lord is coming soon. And then comes their golden opportunity, “Let’s Go Crazy,” which Kevin transferred from the LP at 45 RPM, watching the needle whirlpool to the center of the turntable at double its normal speed, Prince and his helium-voice singing about elevators and the afterworld, purple bananas and Dr. Everything’ll be alright.

  “Okay,” he says. “Here it is,” and he explains the plan.

  Sean gives him a pins-and-needles look. It’s not his eyes—not exactly—that seem to buzz with lack of feeling, but whatever air-drawn imaginary nerves connect him to the rest of the world.

  “Sean,” he says, and then again, “Sean,” and finally Sean sighs and says, “If you make me do this, we’ll look like total idiots.”

  “That’s a yes, though, right? It’s a yes, isn’t it?”

  “Well …”

  It is, and hardly a minute seems to pass before the two of them are standing in the stage lights, Sean on the guitar and Kevin at the microphone, while “Let’s Go Crazy” races through its verses. The organ sounds like a tin whistle, the guitar like a chainsaw biting wood, the drums like a litter of stones rolling downhill in a barrel. Sean stands dazed at the curtain, strumming his tennis racket. Kevin bends out over the audience, chasing down faces. In the crowd he sees seniors, girls, teachers. Shane and Bateman are there, and Thad and Kenneth. He wants them so badly to want to be him. Two years ago, in fifth grade, Bateman hosted a lip-synching contest at his Halloween party, and a week before, from out of nowhere, a rumor took hold of the class that Kevin was an expert lip-syncher, destined to win with his performance of “The Longest Time.” For the next few days he rehearsed like mad, perfecting every doom-bah-doo-wah and fingersnap until he almost believed it himself. No one was more disappointed than he was when he came in third. Whatever happened, he wants to know, to the hat he won at the party, with the yellow foam lightning bolts at the temples? What happened to spending the night with his friends, drinking Cokes and playing Pitfall until they passed out on the living room floor? What happened to the apartment where he and his mom lived on Sturbridge? To the house where he and his dad lived on Lakeshore? To the big brick Church of Christ building where he spent every day of his school life—in the sun when the sun was shining, in the rain when the rain was falling—with the turflike sheets of carpet in the halls, and the metal freezer filled with cartons of orange drink, and the straight line of kindergartners walking duck by duck to the water fountain? Whatever happened to two years ago?

  The song ends with a last little cat-growl. Kevin leaves the stage to a smattering of applause.

  Ethan lays a hand on his shoulder. “That,” he says, “was truly bizarre.”

  And right then Kevin knows that they have lost, but when Principal McCallum counts down the winners, what he knows makes no difference, all that matters is what he wants, and he half-expects to hear his name called anyway. Third runner-up. Second. First. Only when the grand prize goes to someone else does the blood stop beating in his fingers. He shoves a hand in his pocket, fishing through the change for a Kleenex. “Well damn,” he says.

  Ethan sounds like a wise old man filled with his customary disappointment. “Perhaps the world simply isn’t ready for Fast-Forward Prince.”

  And just like that, Kevin hardly cares that he lost. “Philistines.”

  “Give them time, give them time.”

  The two of them have been eating lunch together nearly every day, spending the night with each other nearly every weekend. Nothing is easier than for them to fill a few hours talking about girls and movies and comics. Colossus vs. Wolverine. Sarah vs. Annalise. Kevin buys a Sunkist and a Pay-Day from the vending machines, Ethan some Doritos and a Sprite, and they play a hunch that tonight, for once, they can roam the building eating and drinking and no one will give them a demerit. In some of the classrooms the overhead lights have been left burning. With the black sky hanging behind the windows and the floors gleaming up at the ceiling, the rows of desks and chairs seem fixed in a weird bright stillness, like trees emblazoned by lightning. Kevin zips his fingers down the fins of the lockers, creating a musical stumbling sound. The muscles in his legs, so loose at the ankles and so stiff everywhere else, make him feel like he has spent the day roller-skating. Everyone keeps calling him “eighty-one”—“Hey, eighty-one,” “What’s happening, eighty-one?”—and at first he has no idea why. Then all at once, in a silvery flash, he figures it out—eighty-one laps—and ugh. It is the wrong nickname if ever there was one. He hopes it doesn’t last.

  An hour or so after sunset, a teenager comes drifting through the parking lot, testing the door handles of cars. He is dressed in the blue pajamas and soft-soled slippers of a BridgeWay escapee. Kevin has never actually visited BridgeWay, and neither has Ethan, but like everyone else, they know it is out there, a jail-like building on the far side of the woods, filled with criminals and drug addicts. Crazy people. An insane asylum.

  Coach Dale hears them say so and corrects them: “Psychiatric clinic. It’s a psychiatric clinic.”

  “Yeah. Like Arkham,” Kevin says.

  “Like the Holiday Inn, but for kids who need help.”

  As usual one of the grown-ups phones the police, but by the time the car arrives, its blue lights flickering against the side of the school, the pajama-kid has climbed the chain-link fence behind the football field and picked his way across the interstate.

  It is 11:30 before everyone is corralled back onto the basketball court, and midnight before they settle into their sleeping bags. The girls are given the home side, the boys the visitors’, and the teachers form a barricade along half-court. The weather is so nice that as soon as their voices die out they can hear the insects chirring through the walls, a vast sea of hopeful vibrations. Three hundred pairs of ears, Kevin thinks, and all of them listening to the same song.
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  He is not yet asleep, but very nearly, when everything suddenly makes perfect sense. He feels himself sailing on some great wind of thought, his mind tacking across the open water, and both of them as silver as aluminum foil, and then, in an instant, he realizes that the planet is made up of squares, blocks, cartons, boxes. He could take every piece of it—all those cereal bowls and phone cords and ballpoint pens, plus the trees and the fields, the rivers and highways, the wrenches and fire hydrants and oranges and skyscrapers, the toy trucks and weather vanes and compasses and swans, the grain silos, the mattresses, the egg crates, the elephants, the binoculars—and stack them one on top of another. They would lock together like bricks in a wall. It is so hard to describe, but important, important, he is sure of it.

  The secret neatness of the world.

  The plans, the blueprints.

  What happened today? someone might ask him.

  This, he would say.

  A wall of radiation is sweeping across Little Rock. Kevin pedals as hard as he can to outrace the fallout. His bike slices like a knife down the streets. On one side the plants are a bright May-green, their leaves twitching and swaying with every undulation of the air. On the other they hang limp and brown, as slick as tobacco slime. Slowly, ever since Chernobyl, a barricade of atomic dust has been advancing across the planet. This morning he learned from the radio that it had leapt the Mississippi into Arkansas. He wants to reach Melissa Reznick’s house before the world is extinguished and the Rapture begins. He knows exactly where she lives. He lays his bike in her yard and runs to the porch, the afros of the dandelions exploding against his sneakers. “Let me in!” he shouts. “Hurry! Melissa! It’s coming!” And all around him, so loud that he cannot hear his fist on the door, the sound of fire and trumpets.

  He closes his eyes, then opens them. Above him he sees his bedroom’s vinyl shade, carved into squares by the windowpanes and the sunlight. On his stomach the cat lies heavy as a bag of flour. It is morning, and the birds did not die in the night. Sometimes, right after he wakes up, he can feel his bed rotating brokenly beneath him, hitching back into place again and again, as if his room is tracing a thousand identical beds in the air. For a while he was somewhere else, and now he is— now he is— now he is here again, where being alive is all it takes to make him dizzy.