A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip (10 page)

“Yeah, is that hot girl still your girlfriend? Why haven’t you introduced us to her yet?”

Hard to believe he has heard the same voices coming from two ragged old sleeping bags on the floor of his bedroom—Kenneth and Thad, the best of his best friends, mimicking Coach Dale, or warbling that Freddie Krueger song, or arguing over pinup girls: Heather Locklear or Heather Thomas?

Kenneth says Kevin’s name again, and Thad asks him what’s wrong, is something wrong, pal, he sure hopes nothing is wrong. They pursue him past the cars at the end of the
lot, and then over the crooked line of pavement that vanishes into the dirt, and then around back of the building, where the PE class has been playing horseshoes in the afternoon, flinging U’s of steel at the two notched stakes of rebar in the soil. If they reach the first stake, Kevin says to himself, he will stop walking. He will face them and demand they leave him alone, because it’s not going to work, Thad, he won’t let you bait him, Kenneth, he’s one hundred percent totally fucking serious.

His voice will not break. He will keep himself from flinching.

Okay, if they reach the second.

“You didn’t answer us, Kevin. What’s wrong?”

“ ’Cause we’re only trying to help. How can we help if you won’t talk to us?”

“I have an idea. Why don’t we share some M&M’s?”

“M&M’s make friends.”

Kevin whirls around and says, “Why are you doing this? Leave me alone. I’m dead serious.”

Kenneth makes scare-hands. “Deadly!” he says. “I’m deadly! Total deadliness!”

Thad starts blinking with a queer sunburnt expression. It looks as if he’s waking from a poolside nap, becoming aware little by little of the sting in his senses. Kenneth says, “Perfect. That’s perfect,” and duplicates the expression.

There they are, their eyes glimmering with imaginary tears, their mouths open just wide enough to show that their teeth don’t meet, and the awkwardness, the fretfulness, the amazement in their faces—Kevin realizes that it is their imitation of him. They must have practiced it, and carefully, when he wasn’t around.

This is the big premiere: Kevin About to Cry. Lights. Music. Curtains.

“Is it crying time?” Thad says.

“It’s time to cry,” Kenneth says. “Time to cry, guy.”

“Go the fuck to hell,” Kevin says. “I mean it.”

Then the bell for fifth period rings, and they shadow him inside, repeating, “Go the fuck to hell, go the fuck to hell, go the fuck to hell,” the most hilarious joke they have ever heard in a long lifetime of hilarious jokes.

He can’t believe he still has half a day of school to survive—math and SRA, then PE and the locker room, then the slow parade of parents in their vans and Broncos and station wagons, with Thad and Kenneth waiting beside him on the sidewalk for their rides. For all he knows, they might decide to start the whole routine over again. Kevin’s mind won’t stop replaying the details.
Snack time gas station Crystal Light Dolly Parton la la la Eight Wheels is something wrong, guy?
Worse, he keeps confronting the sight of himself on their faces. He’s not vain or conceited or anything. It’s not like he stands at the mirror every day brimming with tears to examine what it does to his reflection. And the truth is that unless you count that age-old photo of him on the toddler train at the amusement park, sobbing in his white shirt and red denims, today marks the first time he has seen how he looks teetering on the verge of crying. So
that’s
him, he thinks—a little kid blinking at the unfairness of it all.

Lately he has been seeing the kind of person he is more and more clearly. He could never be anyone but himself. Who would have guessed, though, how much of himself he did not yet know?

IN-the-halls. EV-ery-one. SEEMS-to-be. Staring-at-HIM.

ALL-right-boys. TIME-to-start. BOM-bard-ment. Go-get-dressed-OUT.

SOME-thing-wrong. MIS-ter-B? DO-you-need—? No-Coach-I’m-FINE.

And the most humiliating thing of all is how long the two of them must have been storing up their material. Kevin imagines a thousand conversations about him, stretching back through Thanksgiving and Halloween, homecoming and Mazzio’s, the countless arcade trips and sleepovers of the summer, back as far as Mississippi, as far as sixth grade. He can practically hear their voices:
Have you seen the way negro looks when he’s trying not to cry? I know, and he has to have a favorite everything. A favorite state capital. A favorite monster. “It’s gotta be the werewolf.” The werewolf! “Oh, yeah, it’s gotta be the werewolf.” And Holy Christ, what’s with that “la la la” crap?

That night, in bed, though he stays as quiet as he can, he can’t help producing a funny faint animal noise, like the rickety breaths the footballers make in the weight room, which is okay, he supposes, as long as his mom doesn’t hear him. Finally, some membrane or fiber in his throat seems to snap like a piece of chalk and he falls silent. He didn’t realize his body could make such a sound. What the hell was it?

The next morning Kenneth’s mom is on carpool duty. Kevin can’t explain why, but something about the way Kenneth slouches in the passenger seat, fast-forwarding through the sucky songs on a Night Ranger tape, makes Kevin guess that the lesson, or experiment, or punishment, or initiation—he doesn’t know what to call it—the ordeal. He guesses that it’s over. Bateman says something about Mrs. Bissard, and Kevin
makes the usual joke, “Mrs. Bizarre,” and Kenneth cracks out a quick note of laughter.

And that’s when Kevin is sure of it: it’s finished, exhausted. He’s officially out of danger.

At lunch, though, when he approaches their table, Kenneth and Thad begin their interrogation again—“What’s up, guy?” “How ya doing, guy?”—and Oh God, he thinks, where is he supposed to sit?

They get up and follow him as he tries to leave. This time he stakes out a deserted patch of wall beside the lockers.

“So what about that girl from Eight Wheels, Kevin? You two still going together?”

“Damn, man, that chick was fine. What did you say her name was?”

“Yeah, Kevin, you told us her name, now didn’t you? What was it again?”

“Cheryl?”

“Wanda?”

“Priscilla?”

The first two are obviously fictitious. The third is the name Thad uses for his fat-lady jokes.

“It’s Sonya,” Kevin tells them, and maybe it even sounds plausible, but in reality he made it up last year when he decided to trick everyone into believing he had a girlfriend. Sonya liked to call him every night at 8:45—8:45 on the dot. Sonya told him about all the films she recorded off HBO, Showtime, and the Movie Channel, mainly musicals—
Grease 2
and
Eddie and the Cruisers
,
Annie
and
The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas
, plus her favorite,
The Pirate Movie
. Sonya liked him because he was smart and funny. She was
one of the older girls who had colonized the pinball machines at the skating rink, the same machines Kevin and the others adopted on dares to deliver battery-shocks to themselves, standing deep back between them and bridging the current with their fingers. She is real, but he has never actually spoken to her. “And like I said, we broke up.”

“Oh,
tha-at’s
right. You broke up.”

“They broke up.”

“Unfortunately,” Kevin says, “yes. We broke up.”

“So did you two ever make out?”

“Is she a tonguer? I bet she’s a tonguer.”

“Did she give you a hickey?”

“Did she rub you off?”

“Did you suck her protrusions?”

He doesn’t understand it. He watched them so intently during chapel, roosting just a few feet away, and that’s the most bewildering thing of all—how they could sit there praying and singing as if everything was normal and the middle of the day wasn’t looming ahead of them like a giant stone wall. Even now they don’t let any obvious cruelty show, only camaraderie, agreeability, the most genuine curiosity. What’s wrong, Kevin? What? They’re just flicking questions at him. They’re barely touching him. This? It’s just a chuck on the shoulder, pal. Don’t mistake it for a punch.

The next day, Thad greets him in the hallway before science with, “
Buenos días
, Detective Kevin,” and by lunch he and Kenneth have added the name to their volley of questions. Sometimes it is difficult to tell what is a taunt and what isn’t.
Detective Kevin
counts but not
buenos días
, the gas station but not the mall,
guy
but not
man
, Steak-umms but not comic books—why?

“Buying some Fritos, Detective Kevin?”

“Fritos fan?”

“Hey, maybe we can eat some Fritos together the next time we spend the night with you.”

“And you can show us your
TV Guide
collection.”

“Yeah,
TV Guides
kick major ass.”

“So when can we spend the night with you again? Friday?”

“Or how about Saturday?”

“Hey, Detective Kevin,” Kenneth says, “whatever happened to those chips you used to bring in the plain silver bags. You know the ones—”

“Mystery Chips,” Thad answers.

“That’s right! Mystery Chips! Perfect! A mystery! Detective Kevin is on the case.”

The day after that, they move on to the girls in the class: “Man, Kevin, you won’t believe this, but I heard that Annalise Blair really likes you.”

“Yeah, I heard that Rachel Brierley likes you, too.”

“Honor Shelton said that you were hot.”

“Noelle Batch wants to have your babies. Twins, didn’t she say, Kenneth?”

“Yep. Twins.”

“Twins. Sonya and Priscilla.”

Every room is like a math problem. Thad in one desk plus Kenneth in another equals Thad and Kenneth. Thad tapping the lid of a soda can plus Kenneth raking his hand through his hair equals Thad and Kenneth. Occasionally, if Kevin moves silently, unassumingly, and stays out of their line of vision—if he sits with Ethan, say, or Bateman—they will fail to notice him, or choose to ignore him if they do, but usually some muscular reflex seems to seize them as soon as he passes
by, and with barely a pause, like ghosts in a video game, they are up and after him.

“Why, hey there, Kevin.”

“Where you off to, Detective?”

“Feeling kind of la la la today?”

“What’s up, Detective La?” and the name is so entertaining, so surprisingly fitting, that it takes over the conversation. “Oh, Detective La, that’s great. That’s the best one yet. So is it going to be M&M’s or Fritos today, Detective La?”

“Sarah or Melissa, Detective La?”

“Hey, dude, give Detective La some room. He’s got to weigh his options.”

One afternoon Kevin blocks Thad’s path through the lunchroom and asks, “What’s this all about? Thad, tell me. You have to tell me. Why are you guys doing this?” but Thad keeps listing back and forth at the waist like someone struggling to stay upright, glancing at the wall or the mainstays, anywhere but at Kevin, and “No,” he says. “I can’t. Man, leave me alone,” as if Kevin is cheating, and all his appeals, his sad grasps at the past—what is he thinking? He should know better. That shit isn’t part of the game.

After school, Clay’s mom collects the carpoolers in her station wagon. Kevin climbs over the rear seat onto the cargo shelf. As they pull away, he flashes his finger at Thad through the back window. “Whoa,” Kenneth says, impressed. “He honestly looked shocked by that.”

But by the next morning, the gesture is just another part of their routine, the two of them contorting their hands in outlandish palsies, holding their middle fingers as straight and as slender as candles on a cupcake. Apparently, when you
flip someone off, you are supposed to use your index and ring fingers as a sort of pedestal, bending them both at the first knuckle. Kevin does it wrong. It makes him look queer.

At lunch, Thad and Kenneth find him drinking from the water fountain in the foyer and come lunging over with their fingers extended. “What does
this
mean? Hey, Kevin, what is
this
supposed to mean?”

Before he can stop himself, he has said it again, “Cut it out,” and they have struck up the chant: “Cut it out. Cut it out. Cut it out. Cut it out, guys.” This time Shane Wesson is with them.

They trail Kevin into one of the stairwells, calling him Kevin-guy and Detective La and asking, “What time is it? Do you know what time it is? Pardon me, but by any chance do you think you can tell me the time?” The stairs smell of Pine-Sol and shoe leather. Shane lifts him up off the floor and pins him against the wall, giving a bullish grunt of exertion. He means no harm, not really, or if he does, it’s only because he always means a little harm, thinks it’s funny to mean a little harm. He is taller and stronger than Kevin—considerably—but there is a guilelessness to the way he overpowers him, clashing up against him for the sake of the joke. He sees heaving Kevin into the wall as his role in the performance, just as Kenneth’s and Thad’s roles are to make crying faces, and Kevin’s is to pretend he’s being bullied. The situation demands it of them.

And the crazy part is that Kevin is often barely a hair away from imagining that Shane is right, as if, out of boredom or whimsy or some sharp new teenage impatience, Thad and Kenneth have made up their minds to put on a cloak of hostility,
and he is playing along with them because they are his friends and it seems to make them happy. He could put a stop to it with a single word. He is ninety percent sure. But then the two of them will select some incident from a few weeks or months or even years ago, one he never would have guessed they remembered, much less found foolish or contemptible, and present it to him with all the edges sharpened. The hurt of it will hit him sudden and hard. His life will become real again. It always happens the same way. There are days when he is lucky enough to evade them, but not many.

One lunchtime midway through December, when the sky is spitting just enough rain to keep everyone inside, he spots them craning their necks for him in the hallway, and he retreats upstairs to the quiet row of classrooms where the senior high kids are working. It is Miss Vincent’s free period, and she is eating a sandwich at her desk. He knocks on her open door and asks, “Do you mind if I hang out here until the bell rings?” She has just taken a bite, and she beckons him inside with a feint of her chin.