by Simeon Mills
I too had a blank sheet of paper sitting before me, but I had avoided Mrs. Asquith’s attention by giving it an anguished yet thoughtful expression. A pencil fixed between my teeth was the finishing touch. Mine was the visage of the artist, frozen in that fateful moment just before inspiration hit him like a falling piano. Little did Mrs. Asquith know I had no intention of drawing a picture. I was still trying to write a single humorous line of prose (eventually an entire story) for my muse, seated across the room from me. I had an unobstructed view of Brooke Noon’s entire body, divided in half by her art table.
Between gazes at Brooke, I glanced at a recent issue of Sports Illustrated I’d grabbed from Mrs. Asquith’s “Idea File,” an old cardboard box filled with cut-up magazines. I’d found an interview with the dazzling Olympic figure skater Kristi Yamaguchi. The first question for her: “Are you a robot?”
“I’m an athlete,” Yamaguchi answered. “Ask my mom and dad. Ask my brother and sister. They’ve seen me compete at everything I’ve ever done. So what am I? Just an athlete. A competitor. Pretty soon, I hope, a gold medalist.”
I’d heard the rumors, like everybody else, that Kristi Yamaguchi was a robot. She lived in Northern California, for one, the most robot-friendly chunk of the country, known for its cryptically advertised gasoline bars and grease transfusion spas. Surely everyone in her hometown knew her as a robot, though Kristi was wise to play coy for a national audience. I hoped it was true. I had an Olympic-size crush on her. I closed my eyes and replayed a TV clip I’d seen of her on the ice. I loved her powerful legs. I loved that she was an artist among mere technicians in her sport. I loved that she wore the tools of her medium on her feet. And I loved, after her airtight routine, that huge, genuine smile for the camera, Kristi gasping for oxygen between her beautiful teeth . . .
I opened my eyes. There was Brooke Noon.
Below her art table, she wore her favorite wintertime outfit of leggings, huge wool socks, and her dirty pink All Stars. In art class she drew maps of Earth taken from space. She hunched over them in extreme focus. This caused the shoes to slip from her feet. If I was lucky, sometimes Brooke even removed her wool socks too, allowing her bare toes to tap the dirty floor as she drew. Today, wholly absorbed in her cartography, Brooke exposed even more skin by mindlessly tugging her leggings up over her kneecaps, and, with a pair of art scissors, gently trimmed the hairs on her shins.
From across the room, as my arousal transferred from Kristi Yamaguchi to Brooke, I saw Mrs. Asquith lean down next to her: “Ms. Noon? Is that an appropriate use of art-room tools?”
The scissors clacked to the floor. Brooke yanked her leggings down to her ankles.
God, what I would have done to feel the shaven spots on her legs . . . and that’s when I looked down at my paper and saw an unexpected line. I had drawn it without thinking: the line of Brooke’s leg with all the correct curves. Her hip bone, the lightly curved line of her thigh, her semicircular kneecap, neither too big nor too pointed, the straight line of her shin, and then her foot, which ended with five little nubs, her toes, each one smaller than the one before it. The line ended there, at the tip of my pencil, yet I still had room at the bottom of the paper. Boldly, I continued the line downward, straight off the paper, a sock hanging from Brooke’s toe. I felt obscene, looking at such a long sock on such a short and beautiful foot. But I couldn’t look away. All of a sudden, it was my most prized possession—a piece of art whose sole purpose was the primal thrill of one viewer: me. I scribbled my signature at the bottom of the page.
“What’s that?” asked Kanga.
I tongued a phantom bit of grass from the inside of my cheek. “Nothing.”
“Let me see it.”
“No.” I slipped the drawing into my math folder and set it on the floor under my stool. At that moment, class was interrupted by three soft knocks on the door.
The Ceiling Fan leaned into the room. “May I borrow Kanga for a moment?”
“Indeed!” said Mrs. Asquith.
Kanga bounded into the hallway, and the door clicked shut.
On the last page of its “Parenting” section, The Directions warned robotic mothers and fathers to mostly ignore the voice in their processors telling them they’re doing a horrible job raising their children. For instance, if the voice in your processor says, You just yelled at your kids? Wow I bet those kids are going to grow up and murder everyone in your apartment building, understand that that’s probably not going to happen. However, if the voice says, Where are your kids? In the other room watching TV? Wrong. They’re probably getting KIDNAPPED!, moms and dads should drop whatever they’re doing and make sure their kids aren’t getting kidnapped. The Directions was very clear about kidnapping, over and over reminding parents that if their kids get kidnapped, it’s all the parents’ fault.
The Ceiling Fan had just kidnapped Kanga. I glanced across the room at Mrs. Asquith, who was working with Ben Finney on his drawing. She had commandeered Ben’s pencil and was joyously reworking his mistakes. “Let me just add a touch more shading to that nose,” said Mrs. Asquith. “Or is that an ear?”
I slipped into the hallway. It was empty, but there was no mystery as to where the Ceiling Fan had taken my brother. I rounded the final corner just as Mr. Virgil’s closet door closed. Kanga and the Ceiling Fan were inside together.
The hallway light fixtures rattled, and I knew the Ceiling Fan was crawling to his spot above the women’s bathroom. Kanga would soon appear in the hallway to serve as lookout. I needed to play this perfectly.
The door inched open. Kanga stepped into the hallway, his eyes rolling in their sockets, working independent of each other, scanning all directions for possible enemies. They stopped on me. “What are you doing here?”
“Kanga!” I whispered, as if trying to contain my excitement. “I have great news!”
“Get lost.” He positioned himself to block me from Mr. Virgil’s door. His fists were clenched. Then, when it seemed he might take a swing at me, his demeanor changed. His face softened with concern. “Darryl. Go back to class. I’ll explain later, but right now”—he glanced at Mr. Virgil’s door—“you’re gonna get us both in trouble.”
I almost broke down and told him everything—about my own meeting with the Ceiling Fan, about poor Mrs. Clinow. I almost told Kanga. But I didn’t. I stuck to my plan and said, “She’s coming.”
“Who?”
“Mom. Right after you—”
“Mom?”
“Right after you left, Mrs. Asquith got a call from the office. They called us both down there because Mom is on her way to pick us up. She’s driving to school right now!”
“Mom,” he breathed.
“We’re supposed to wait outside. By the front doors. We’re supposed to—”
Kanga fell in the direction of the front doors, tripping over his feet. Then he was bounding.
• • •
Step one of my plan was complete. Now for step two.
I found Mr. Virgil rebagging the trash barrels in the cafeteria. He was halfway down a barrel himself, placing a new bag just so, when he heard me coming. He straightened up and eyeballed me. “What is it this time? Somebody take a dump in your locker?”
“No. Somebody’s in the ceiling.”
“What ceiling?”
“The ceiling in your closet. I saw the guy go in there. It’s a man, actually. He’s—”
“Again.” There wasn’t a hint of surprise on his face. “So Simms is in my closet? In my ceiling? You saw him go in there?”
“Yes.”
“Did you go in there with him?”
“No!” I shouted. “I just saw him go in there. He’s alone. I figured I should tell you, so you can do something about it.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Get him. Tell Principal Moyle. Call the police. Do whatever it takes to get him kicked out of school, so he can’t be our basketball coach anymore.”
“Just like that, huh?”
I suddenly missed Dad. He and Mr. Virgil had a similar way of widening their stance and flexing their knees when their processors were churning through a problem. Sometimes I imagined Dad and me as a father-and-son bank-robbing team. Just before pulling his ski mask over his face, Dad would give me a life lesson in surviving alone if he ended up taking a bullet to the abdomen.
Mr. Virgil had no interest in life lessons. His processor had already solved the problem I’d presented him, the solution being to push past me to the next trash barrel.
“You’re just going to let him go?”
“Hell.” He looked down at me with eyes as deep as shower drains. “Let’s say I do something. Let’s say I go in, and I pull him out of that ceiling. Big hero, huh? And Simms is just gonna walk outta here and say nothing? Play it out. Use what’s in your guts, kid. All Simms’s gotta do is shout, loud and clear, everything he thinks about me. Just gotta say his bad word once. How many ears are in this school? Look around this cafeteria. Look at all the food they got in piles. Let’s say somebody says, ‘Virgil, eat this hoagie and tater tots, and prove you ain’t one of them.’ And even if I eat it, they’re still never gonna look at me the same. I’ve been scrubbing this place nineteen years, and it ain’t because I read some book about it. I used my eyes and ears. My damn instincts. I adapted on the fly. Otherwise I’d be toast.” He knuckled me in the chest. “Your book got a chapter on dealing with Ceiling Fan Simms?”
“My book?”
“You ain’t even imagined this through for a minute, have you? They catch a grown man in the ceiling, peeking at ladies, they’re gonna call the parents of every kid Simms has ever talked to. The police’ll be showing up at your house. It’ll be all over the news. Your fat-ass book got any instructions about being on the news? Huh, Darryl? Or how about your folks? They any good in front of TV cameras?”
“You know about The Directions? And me?”
Mr. Virgil grabbed a fresh bag for the next trash barrel. “I don’t know a damn thing you’re talking about.”
• • •
On my way back to art class, I passed by the custodian’s closet and walked straight into the Ceiling Fan. He was in mid-conversation with Mrs. Zweer; he must have said something hilarious, as the veteran teacher was laughing heartily. She touched his shoulder. “Jason,” she said, “you always did love basketball. I’m glad these young men have you as a role model—or maybe I should be worried!” She laughed again.
“We have fun,” he said. Then he noticed me. “Darryl! Tell your brother he needs to work on his persistence!”
Mrs. Zweer looked at me too, exhibiting the standard blank expression, neither inviting nor threatening, teachers use with students they haven’t taught. We were just outside the women’s bathroom.
“I’ll tell him,” I said to the Ceiling Fan.
A minute later I was back on my art stool. Mrs. Asquith hadn’t noticed my departure. She was in the same spot as before, collaborating with Ben Finney, who had scooted his stool back, allowing Mrs. Asquith to lean over his drawing: erasing it, shading it, smudging it, perfecting it, until the bell rang.
My plan had been a failure. Mrs. Zweer was debased. The Ceiling Fan would continue his vile acts with impunity. Worst of all, I had exploited Kanga’s deepest vulnerability.
He was waiting outside by the curb. I could see the doubt in his posture as he gazed down the road for any trace of Mom. The other students were pouring past him, eager for the freedom of the weekend, and it seemed the slightest bump might knock Kanga to the ground.
I held out his backpack for him. “Come on, brother. Let’s go.”
Requiring no further explanation, Kanga followed me to the bike rack. I’d been bracing for a blowup. A punch in the belly. A kick to the knee. At the very least, a barrage of insults, threats, and obscenities. I even welcomed all of it, just to get it over with. But Kanga showed no emotion. Nothing. He stared straight ahead, mouth slightly ajar—a typical fourteen-year-old boy. Half of me wanted to praise his composure, his maturity. But there was another half of me too, the half that remembered Dad’s words, one of the last things he ever said to me about Kanga: We got piss-all of an idea what’s programmed in his head or when it’s gonna blow.
We stood beside our bikes. “I’m sorry,” I blurted. “The reason I lied was—”
He held up a hand, stopping me. Without a hint of malice, Kanga stepped behind me and unzipped the backpack on my shoulders. I could feel him sorting through my books and folders, as though searching for something he’d placed there himself. He finally removed my math folder.
Kanga pulled out my drawing of Brooke Noon’s leg and foot.
I almost snatched it back from him, to protect Brooke’s bare foot from the February cold. But I didn’t. This was my punishment. Back in art class, Kanga had noticed my obsession with the drawing, though he couldn’t possibly know the drawing’s inspiration, and now he would destroy the thing before my eyes. Fine. I would take it like an adult. I played it out with what was in my guts, just like Mr. Virgil had advised. I would suffer now, but it would repair my relationship with my brother, if only slightly.
“Rip it up,” I ordered him. “Then we’ll be even.”
Kanga folded the drawing in half. He folded it again and put it in his pocket. He mounted his bike and headed for home.
16
THE APARTMENT WAS KANGA’S NOW. All you had to do was listen to the crumpling of Cobra Burger bags, the blub blub blub of milk jugs, the rattle and gush of aerosol deodorant cans, the stomp of his shoes, the machine-gunning of the basketball, the hiss of the shower . . .
To escape him I camped out on Mom and Dad’s bed with The Directions. After my encounter with Mr. Virgil, I tried to reread the book with a critical eye. First of all, no way was it written by just one person, with its rampant fluxes in word length and word frequency, its concentrated overuses of and, so, and therefore, and its random passages with semicolons sprinkled around like salt. I scanned one chapter that was so spartan in its sentence structure, I guessed the writer to be an early-model robot himself. But I had my favorite writers too. Top of the list was whoever wrote the subchapter on grooming habits. She (somehow I knew it was a woman) dared us robots to “relish the recklessness” of letting our hair grow long. At least once she suggested we should be the kid in class whose hair “sat up top like weedless, well-watered grass.” This foray would result in our “pity for the peer who schedules his haircuts down to the hour of the week, down to the pathetic sixteenth of an inch, so his hair appears indefinitely haircut-less—”
My reading was interrupted by a knock on our apartment door.
Who would be bothering us at six thirty on a Sunday night? I rolled off the bed and darted down the hallway to intercept the intruder, but Kanga was already there. The front door was open, and my brother said, “Come on in.”
To my horror, James Botty responded: “They did it, Kanga! All five of them started!”
He was the first “friend” we’d ever had over. The Directions strictly forbade it. I strictly forbade it. But when Kanga and James high-fived, and the bully took a seat on our couch, I asked myself: What would Mr. Virgil do? Adapt. There was no James Botty chapter in The Directions. I had to assume the worst about him. James was here on behalf of the Ceiling Fan, collecting intelligence on two potential robots. I’d have to use my eyes and ears—my guts—to get rid of him.
“The Fab Five, man,” James continued. “They’re gonna go down as the best team in history. You should’ve seen what they did to Notre Dame today. Smashed the suckers. The Fab Five started—every single guy. The Fab Five scored every single point for Michigan. Man, they ain’t losing this season.”
“I love the Fab Five,” said Kanga, “man.”
“That’s gotta be us. We gotta be the Fab Five.” James had already begun the transformation. On his worn-out Nikes, he’d drawn a block M, symbol of the Michigan Wolve
rines. Though he still had on regular-size basketball shorts, James had tugged them lower on his hips, giving the appearance of the looser, baggier style of the fabulous freshmen. Then there was his hair—or what was left of it. To mimic the look of his favorite players, James had shaved (or gotten a toddler to shave) the sides of his head. Only a slight film of hair remained up top, from which he’d removed a random divot, causing his scalp to resemble those of Chris Webber, Jalen Rose, Juwan Howard, Jimmy King, and Ray Jackson.
He looked ridiculous. But only because, sitting alone on our couch, James was still an outlier. Were he to persuade four more Hectorville Birds to morph along with him—he would need Kanga as an initial convert in order to convince the other three—then he’d be a trendsetter.
“They’re bugging out over at my place.” James snatched our remote control from the floor and flipped the channel to the NBA All-Star Game. “So I gotta watch this here.”
Kanga slid in beside him, pretending it was no big deal to have a friend over, but I could feel his anxious excitement. Despite my brother’s newfound confidence, deep down he was still in James Botty’s thrall. “I was just about to turn on the game.”
“Look at their shorts!” James laughed at the professional players on the screen. “These guys got no game anymore. I bet the Fab Five could beat them.”
“Yeah,” said Kanga.
James made no mention of our apartment’s state of distress—the pile of dirty clothes, the empty milk jugs stinking up the kitchenette, the basketball smudges on the walls and ceiling. Nor did he wonder about our parents. It seemed perfectly logical to him that they would be gone on a Sunday night. He just stared at the TV, occasionally taking a swig from the two-liter of Red Pop he brought with him. It was halftime when James yawned and said, “What do you guys got to eat around here?”
Kanga glared at the balled-up Cobra Burger bags on the floor, knowing he couldn’t offer their spoiled contents to James. However, “nothing” was just as unacceptable. As a last resort, he looked to me.
“Tacos,” I said. “Let me whip some up.”