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

  “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: qui
ck-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 butts—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.

  When his friends climb back out, Shane Wesson is with them. It is as if the Zipper has somehow given birth to him. Watching him stride over the asphalt, his cheeks red from the wind, Kevin has the impression that the ride has shaken something loose from him, and from Kenneth and Bateman and Thad and all the others, the thirty or forty people following the rail to the exit, so that whatever it is that usually keeps their minds hidden from view is gone, and every thought they have seems to pop right out of their faces. Holy hell, that was fast. I should have worn the sweater instead of the windbreaker. Never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever again. He wants to turn to the person next to him and say, “Look, do you see that?” but he doesn’t. The sensation vanishes as quickly as it arises.

  He supposes he should still be angry with Shane, but the foxtail trick feels like a lifetime ago, and the truth is he has flat stopped caring.

  All at once, Kenneth laughs and says, “I think some kid started crying on there,” and Shane says, “Hey, Kev man, where’d you come from?” and Kevin says, “I don’t know about you all, but I’m saving my emm for the gee.”

  “Say huh?”

  “The Gravitron. My money for the Gravitron.”

  “Uh-huh.” Shane drops a look. “So are you like high now, or are you like black?”

  There is a mechanism inside Kevin that fixes an answer to every question, even the rhetorical ones. It moves forward a notch. “Whatever’s awesomest,” he says.

  Now there are five of them, and they set off through the prize booths and the concession stands, past the barns that smell of sweat and hair and grass and corn and leather and milk and manure, past the thrill rides with their waves of colored lightbulbs. Music thumps up through their legs, a new song every thirty yards or so, booming out of the Himalaya and the Fireball, the Twister and the Screamin’ Swing. Some of the rides turn in simple circles. Some rise straight into the air and plummet straight back to the ground, like a hammer centering on a nail. And others are less like rides than science experiments, Spirographing people through a complicated trajectory of loops and curves and rings-in-rings that Kevin could never reproduce on paper, not with a million tries. There is a game that involves dropping five metal disks into the outline of a circle that none of them can figure out how to win. There is a vendor wearing faded blue overalls who is selling fresh fruit and fried pickles. Kevin spends a good chunk of his allowance on a foam lizard attached to a long leash of coat-hanger wire, which scurries around like a live pet even if it does cost him four dollars. Four dollars, he thinks. That equals five comic books with three cents left over. Four dollars, which equals something like eleven candy bars. So much money. And he is so sure he will mislay the lizard in the tide of the crowd that eventually he does.

  “How you doing with Mr. Lizard over there?” Bateman asks him, and Thad tries out a half-formed joke, “Mr. Lizard’s World,” and that’s when Kevin realizes it is gone.

  “I lost it.” His eyes are as hot as coals. “Damn it, I lost it. Stupid fucking unbelievable shit. I cannot fucking believe this.”

  Kenneth corrects him: “It’s right there in your hand, Kevin. Jesus.”

  And he’s right—it is.

  And the UFO whirs past overhead.

  And the riders scream their midair screams.

  And later he is inside the Gravitron, pinned to the cushion by centrifugal force, his scalp tingling under his hair, his feet floating up from the footrests, as the wall spins faster and faster. He can see himself in the mirrored column at the center of the platform, his jacket batwinged open beneath his arms. Beside him, a woman in a Panama Jack shirt tied in a high knot to display her stomach hollers along with the music. He looks on, first in the mirror and then in real life, as the tassel from her pants slides past her navel like a raindrop rolling up a windshield. She has the fallen-into-bed posture of a model in a perfume ad. It seems barely possible—a magnificent contest between gravity and centrifugal force—that the tassel will stretch far enough to slip beneath her shirt and touch her breast. Somewhere in back of the mirror, Sarah Bell is watching him tilt his head so that he won’t get caught staring. She can tell what he is thinking. Anyone could.

  After the ride, Thad distorts his face, making Pringles lips, and in his Goon voice, all strange and pipey, says, “I want to eat a fried pickle.” The Goon voice is a total mystery. Kevin has always assumed that it is somehow connected to the Goon from Popeye, that great bald brute with the banana-squash nose, though how or
why is hard to fathom. One thing: using the voice allows Thad to turn any remark, no matter how ordinary or sincere, into a joke. “I’m pretty sure that disk game is rigged, y’all.” “My dad said he was gonna kick me in the crack of the ass.” “I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna ask Annalise out. No, Thad. But we can still be friends, Thad. Go away, Thad. Go away and leave me alone.” The voice is his superpower. It reminds Kevin of Shadowcat, his favorite X-Man after Wolverine, whose intangibility lets her phase through walls and force fields.

  Shane says, “Who would want to fry a pickle in the first place?”

  “Whoever, I want to shake that man’s hand.”

  “I want to shake his pickle.”

  “I want to pickle his shake.”

  “I want to fry his hand.”

  “Oh my God, did you just go, ‘I want to fry his hand’?” Kenneth says, and it is two points to Kevin for the winning line.

  Everyone else is sidetracked by the funnel cakes and corn dogs, but Kevin and Thad continue on to the fried pickle stand. Sometimes Kevin has no idea why he says the things he does. Why, for instance, as the two of them eat pickles from a paper plate behind the trailer, where a giant fan thickens the air with the smell of cooking oil, does he nudge Thad with his elbow as if he were passing him a note in class and go, “Hey, if the others start telling lies about us, like you were putting me down or I was putting you, we won’t believe them, will we?”

  In his Goon voice Thad answers, “What did that kid want with you anyway?”

  “Kid?”

  “When the rest of us were on that bus-looking thing that flipped over in midair, and you said if you rode it again you’d throw up—you know, that kid.”

  “Him.”