by Simeon Mills
“Please!” said the Cheerbirds captain. “I just need ten more seconds!”
Mr. Belt met her intense stare with one of his own, then nodded.
All eyes were on Staci as she proceeded with the final demonstration. She created a bubble of space for herself between the chalkboard and the first row of desks, extending her arms out to either side, hands limp at the ends. One white shoe was placed before the other, knees bent. I recognized this pose from the sideline of the basketball court. It meant you’d better keep watching. She took a quick glance at Kanga. She commanded the class: “Watch my hair.”
Kanga disobeyed her. He was staring at Stickzilla’s empty terrarium.
I disobeyed her too. Rather than watching Staci’s hair, I was focused on her green skirt, which usually hung to the middle of her thigh but now, as she spun on her toe, had risen to expose the green underwear all Cheerbirds wore, which, by some glitch in human societal rules, it was okay to stare at. When she came to a stop—the green skirt stopping a moment later—she smoothed it against her legs and said, “What my hair just did was centrifugal. Any questions?”
Kanga stood up, his eyes darkened. “What I don’t understand is how we’re just supposed to walk around every day, looking at each other, talking to each other, eating, doing everything we’re supposed to do, and pretend we couldn’t just die at any moment.” He shook his finger at Mr. Belt. “What’s keeping us alive? Dumb luck? What’s to stop something from getting stuck inside us?” His fingers were massaging the air near his belly, as if performing a spell.
“Excellent question, Livery,” said Mr. Belt. “My answer is to always keep your game face on. Which is exactly what you’re doing. Good job. Everybody look at that face!”
Kanga closed his eyes.
“May we all approach life, and indeed death, with such a game face.”
• • •
It was lunchtime. Kanga sat against our locker, rocking onto either butt cheek, his eyelids quivering like he was a human passing gas. I stood down the hallway, near a trash can, watching. I’d found a small baggie of purple grapes, and I was positioning them between the tips of my new finger and thumb and waiting for them to burst. I loved the moment just before the explosion, when the grapes would shake slightly, as if their slimy guts were capable of fear. This was the exact sort of thing Kanga would have loved to see too. Before. Now I didn’t dare approach him. I was about to take off when Staci Miles appeared before my brother, flanked by two other Cheerbirds.
“Close your eyes,” she said, staring down at him.
Through gritted teeth, he said, “I’ve got something stuck in my stomach.”
“Just close your eyes. Please,” she grunted. “Then we’ll leave you alone.”
Kanga closed his eyes.
“You better not look.”
Kanga rocked on his butt cheeks.
“Watch him,” Staci told her friend. “Make sure his eyes don’t open.”
“We’re watching him,” said a Cheerbird.
“Okay, Kanga. You have to do what I say. That’s the rule. Here’s the first thing I want you to do. Imagine a girl standing in front of you. The girl is a foot tall, head to toe. It’s a girl, okay? Not a boy. She’s one foot tall. Can you see her?”
Kanga nodded.
“Point to the girl’s head with your finger. But keep your eyes closed.”
Kanga hung his finger in the empty space above his lap.
“Good. Now point to her feet. Remember, don’t look.”
Kanga pointed slightly lower.
Staci continued: “Now I want you to point to the girl’s . . .”
“Do it, Staci!”
“Yeah! We had to do it with our basketball players. Now you have to!”
“Go on, Staci! Do it! DO IT!”
“I’m doing it! Shut up! Just gimme a second . . .”
“If you don’t do it—”
“I’m doing it.”
“Then go.”
“Don’t push me!”
I could smell her ChapStick.
“Okay, Kanga, point to the girl’s vagina.”
When it was over, Kanga hadn’t moved his finger at all, but now the finger was wet, because Staci had kneeled down and put her mouth on the end of it, reluctantly sucking Kanga’s finger a fraction of a second before yelling, “FOUND IT!”
The Cheerbirds danced away.
I should have stopped them. They didn’t realize Kanga was no longer a hulking, self-assured basketball star. He was lost. He was in pain. He was aching for his mother. He was—
It ain’t nothing. I forced myself to walk away too. Kid’s fine.
• • •
The Hectorville High School library was the Cave’s evil twin. Its dark, clean carpeting performed a curse on all entrants, muting the natural sound of their bodies and sucking any mischievous thoughts from their heads. The bookshelves were ancient walls, arranged in a claustrophobic web. The ceiling was low, only inches above them, pressing down like the moon’s underbelly, whispering for tall boys to reach up and feel its mysterious texture—and get immediate detention for it. Luckily, my goal for the rest of lunch period was right near the library’s entrance: the student-friendly computer, which sat across from the checkout desk. Unluckily, at the checkout desk sat Ms. Harris, the librarian.
Being a freshman, I had almost no background with Ms. Harris. An advantage. My plan was to adopt a persona that would force the librarian to give me both computer access and solitude.
She swooped over immediately. “How may I assist you, young man?”
“I got a research project I gotta do,” I explained in a slow voice. “For social studies.”
“What is this project about?”
“Memphis.”
“Very good. What exactly are we focusing on in Memphis?”
“Uh . . . Everything?”
She pursed her lips. “We have several books on Memphis, and I can show you to the Encyclopædia Britannica, our most useful resource for general information.”
“But my teacher said I gotta use computers. Computers is worth thirty points. Will you find all those Memphis books for me while I look it up on a computer?”
“Do you know how to use a computer?”
“Uh . . .”
She sat me down at the computer, then explained what the important buttons on the keyboard did as the machine glowed to life. Then, when it was fully awake and blinking, she leaned over me—she smelled like rubber bands—typing rapidly on the keyboard, a snake of green words reflecting off her glasses.
“Wow,” I said. “Computers are awesome!”
“Memphis,” she said. “Read these four articles first. Use the arrows to find the article you want. Then press Enter. When you’re done reading, press Escape and use the arrows to choose a different article. But don’t print anything without asking me first, is that understood?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know how to print an article?”
“Uh . . .”
“Very good.”
She stood behind me as I carefully pecked the keys (with my left hand, as the right was hidden under the table), making my way to the first article about Memphis. “This is so cool!” I hunched forward until my face was three inches from the screen. I read the article for two minutes, demonstrating to Ms. Harris that I would need at least fifteen more minutes to finish it. But she was still right behind me, watching. So, without turning around, I said, “Can you find all those books for me about Memphis so I can check them out?”
She exhaled through her nose.
“Please, so I don’t get an F?”
“Don’t print anything.” She disappeared into the stacks.
Alone, I popped Brooke’s disk into the drive. Escape, Escape, Escape, Escape. I arrived at a blank screen with a flashing green cursor. I typed the command for WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS, the program I knew Brooke used. The screen became a beautiful electric blue. I typed Command-F for “File.” I used the a
rrows to find “Retrieve.” After having spent so much of my audio receptors zeroing in on Brooke’s distinctive keyboard tapping, I knew these to be the right commands. The screen showed me a single file on Brooke’s disk. Brooke. She had named her novel after herself. I moved the cursor over her name and pressed 1. Brooke’s words filled the screen.
Ms. Harris was still finding my books about Memphis. My time with Brooke’s novel was limited. I blinked my eyes to get them ready. I pressed the down arrow and scanned Brooke’s brilliance as it flew upward . . .
Reading the entire document took four minutes and twelve seconds. 92,208 words. One paragraph. Her prose style would best be described as obsessive-compulsive.
My critical conclusions were as follows. First, it was a memoir, not a novel. Second, the memoir was remarkable in that it had two main characters instead of one: Brooke and her mother, whose name was Janet. Third, while most memoirists seek to create a full portrait of themselves, thoroughly investigating a variety of themes, events, and reflections in an effort to, by the memoir’s end, force the reader to step back and say, “Heavens, what a life [insert author’s name here] lived,” Brooke’s memoir focused on a single day. Actually, only a morning. And really, Brooke’s entire memoir was an exhaustive study of the events that transpired between the Noon family residence, in the city of Le Roy, Michigan, and the front entrance of Le Roy Elementary School, approximately 8:19 a.m. to 8:41 a.m., on the morning of September 7, 1982, Brooke’s first day of kindergarten. That is not to say Brooke didn’t try to address other moments of her life. Indeed, her prose piqued my curiosity as she began to depict, for instance, her father explaining to her that she was a robot, her friendship with a girl named Dahlia in second grade, the first time she stole something (a pack of shoelaces) from a store, the first boy she touched shoes with, exploring the bottom of Sanders Lake, the second through seventeenth boys she touched shoes with, driving her father’s car to Ypsilanti, etc. Yet none of these events got beyond the first several seconds before Brooke began telling—scratch that—retelling the experience of her mother walking her to school on the first day of kindergarten. Here is the incident, in brief: Brooke and Janet Noon leave the house holding hands, walking down the sidewalk in the direction of Le Roy Elementary School, which is six blocks away; at the end of the first block, however, Janet releases Brooke’s hand and says to her daughter, “You know the way,” and stops walking; without looking back at her mother, Brooke walks the remaining five blocks to Le Roy Elementary School; she arrives before the bell and takes her seat in Mrs. Edgar’s classroom.
The first time reading this anecdote I found it moderately revealing that Janet Noon failed to supply her daughter with the most basic form of support—her mere physical presence—on Brooke’s first day of school, a moment of great anxiety for young children. However, I also noted the lack of anxiety Brooke exhibited as she walked to school free of her mother. She petted a neighborhood dog. She squinted into the sun through the tree branches. She stopped at the corner of Peeler and Wright, looked both ways, let a car pass, then crossed the street. At Le Roy Elementary School, when asked by Principal Rhoades if she was lost, Brooke replied, “I know the way.” In Mrs. Edgar’s classroom, Brooke removed her pencil box from her backpack, shoved her backpack into a cubbyhole (identified by a sticker with her name on it), found her desk (also identified by a sticker with her name on it), took her seat, arranged her pencil box on the corner of her desktop, and waited for class to begin. Mrs. Edgar had been so busy soothing other students traumatized by separation from their mothers that she did not acknowledge Brooke for the first eleven minutes of class, not until roll was formally taken, and Mrs. Edgar looked up from her roster and inquired, “Brooke Noon? . . . There you are! A quiet one.”
I heard Ms. Harris’s noiseless footsteps advancing through the library stacks. There was a note of panic in her gait, that of a mother whose child suddenly disappeared in a parking lot. In this case, Ms. Harris’s child was the student-friendly computer.
As she came into view, her arms piled with books about Memphis, her glasses filled with rage. “What did you do?” she screamed in a whisper.
“I tried to print my article, but it wouldn’t print, so I unplugged the computer.”
“You unplugged—” She set the books down beside the computer and then yanked my chair away from it, spilling me to the ground. Brooke’s disk was already in my pocket and, luckily, undamaged from the fall. “Follow me.”
At the desk, I gave Ms. Harris the student ID number of a kid on the basketball team, and she checked out the materials to his account, stamping the book cards with the force of a karate sensei. I asked, “What happens if I get taco stains on them?”
These words damaged Ms. Harris’s soul, and she couldn’t even look at me. A tiny node in my processor almost felt sorry for her. And for me. In a different world, where I was simply smart-but-not-too-smart Darryl Livery, I would have enjoyed chatting with this earnest, awkward, highly intelligent adult about books and computers and the possibility of accessing vast amounts of information through phone lines (a developing practice on which I was certain she was well-read). But we lived in the world of Brooke Noon, Memphis, and obsolete parents, and I would never see Ms. Harris again.
• • •
With a few minutes left in lunch, I ditched the books on a cafeteria table and ended up in the Cave. The court was empty. The basketballs were caged up. I stood at the free-throw line.
I hadn’t seen Brooke yet today, but my processor could somehow smell her as it reviewed each disparate account of her first day of kindergarten, inspecting the tiny variations for meaning. A dead worm on the sidewalk. Her mother clearing her throat. A pebble that materializes in Brooke’s shoe, only to disappear three steps later. The hissing of a garbage truck. A single droplet of rain hitting her wrist from the cloudless sky. None of these details contradicted her overall story, yet with each retelling I found myself yearning for Brooke to do something different. Anything. To look back at her mother and say, “I hate you.” To venture through a neighbor’s backyard to a mysterious destination. To get yelled at by Principal Rhoades for throwing her backpack across the school steps. To steal another kid’s pencil box and dump the contents out. For Mrs. Edgar’s first words to Brooke to be “Young lady, settle down.” I yearned for Brooke to simply be Brooke.
The truth smacked me like a backpack to the belly. This was Brooke. Just before she changed. That walk to school had twisted the dials in Brooke’s processor, setting her up for a childhood of manic, antisocial deviance. This was every parent’s worst nightmare: a moment of casual neglect getting trapped in their kid’s mind, causing them to obsess over it for years, ruining the rest of their life.
But Brooke’s life wasn’t ruined. Maybe to some people it was. Her mother. But not to me. Brooke had a chance to make her life exactly what she wanted, and now that I had the key to her processor, maybe I could help. All I had to do was go find her and—
“How’s the damage, Darryl?” Mr. Belt appeared in the Cave. He was holding a basketball. “How’s school? You get all the”—he twirled a finger near the side of his head—“things figured out?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Because we need you tonight. Well. We need your management. By that I mean balls. Don’t forget to bring enough basketballs tonight.”
Mr. Belt looked at me expectantly. It seemed he was waiting for me to say something because when I didn’t, he got down on a knee and stared me in the eyes.
“Darryl, you have to ask yourself: How bad do I want it? The number of balls you have is the answer to that question. They’re metaphors, Darryl, these balls. But sometimes life has nothing to do with balls. What I’m saying is, there’re kids all over school pressuring you to use their drugs. Keep your nose away from those kids. Stay clean. I was your age once. I’ve also been to college. When you get to college, come talk to me, and I’ll set you straight.”
Mr. Belt stood up and shot the ball.
He missed. We watched the basketball bounce toward the Cave door and roll into the school hallway.
“Here’s one thing I never had to burn your ass about, Darryl.” Mr. Belt pointed to the clock on the wall. “Always on time for games. Early, even. Maybe you got a stomach virus, but you love game day. That’s a feather in your cap. If I could crack open your head and yank out the part of your brain that makes you never late for games, and then cook that part up and feed it to the rest of the guys, well, then we’d have something to hang our hats on.”
The bell rang. Lunch was over.
A moment later, I finally saw Brooke in the hallway.
She was outside the band room, gloating in victory over Andrea Imhoff, the previous first-chair clarinetist in the Jazz Band. Apparently, the transfer of power had just occurred, and Brooke was cornering Andrea near the drinking fountain, consoling her rival by listing all the reasons Andrea didn’t deserve first chair. “Your bottom lip is all wrong. You’ve got to put more mouthpiece in your mouth. Your tongue’s not planting firmly enough. You chew when you play—”
“Congratulations, Brooke,” I whispered, suddenly apprehensive, finding it hard to square that mild-mannered kindergartener sitting quietly at her desk with the wrecking ball before my eyes. There wasn’t even a trace of the vulnerable robot I’d connected with last night. If we were about to build a new life together in Memphis, why did Brooke care so much about Jazz Band? Was this all a clever disguise?
She ignored me. “—your right thumb is too far under the thumb rest. Your fingers are floating instead of hovering. You’re not getting enough air . . .”
• • •
Just before art class, I found Kanga staring into our open locker as if confronting a tormenting abyss. “I’ve got to get inside myself,” he whispered. “You’ve got to help me. I’ve been thinking. We need to go in the back way.” He reached for a wire shirt hanger he’d hidden inside our locker and began twisting it into a long arm with a hook at the end. “Remember that video we watched in health class? With that dentist using his sickle to scrape those teeth? I want you to go in the back way, and when you hit something hard, just start scraping until you—”