by Jill Malone
Somehow, each run, he catches the same spot of the rail, though his board changes positions—he might catch the rail with the center of his board, or either end, and sometimes he turns the board around with his hands, and sometimes he shifts his legs and rides backward. I shoot from his approach, and his descent, from beneath him, and above. We work our way down the stairs, and then I climb the cement base of the streetlamp, midway down the staircases, and shoot several descents. I’m finally starting to relax, when suddenly the board shoots away, and he skids to a halt on his ass.
“Are you OK?” I run to him.
“Sure,” he says, grinning. He chases down his board, and then walks up the staircase as easily as he has every other time. He’s not even winded. Mine is the heart racing, mine the uncontrollable pulse.
“I’m hungry,” he says.
I nod. “Me too.”
“There’s a good sub shop two blocks from here.” His face is chapped, and the way he’s smirking at me, I kind of want to punch him. “That helmet,” he says, “makes your head look humongous.”
I haven’t even closed the front door when I hear Mom call from the kitchen, “How was the photo shoot?”
“It was OK,” I say.
“Don’t say OK,” Meghan says from the dining room, where she’s setting the table.
“OK,” I submit. “The camera had such a fast shutter that I mistimed about half a roll of film.”
Mom brings in the CorningWare dishes of green beans and pork chops. The applesauce is already on the table—she makes it herself, so the first serving is always warm. “What does that mean?” she asks. “Will you have to do the whole thing over?”
“Not the whole thing,” I say, and try not to be irritated that she thinks I’m an idiot. “We’ll have to do another shoot, but in class tomorrow, we’ll be able to tell how well the others turned out.”
“What are you photographing?” Meghan asks.
I’ve already debated this one in my head, and have decided that it’s better to be honest about the shoot, though maybe not about the location and the trick. So I say, “A skater. We’re telling the story of a skate trick.”
“What’s the trick?” Nigel asks from behind me.
“A rail slide.”
“Who’s the skater?” he asks. Paused beside me in his socks, I realize that he’s catching me up; another year and this kid will be taller than I am. He’ll never be a big, broad guy like Nate, but his skinniness makes him seem even taller, and his baby-face pudge is gone.
I turn to face him, and I can’t tell what he’s up to, why he’s asking. “Christian,” I say.
Then he sits at the table, and puts his napkin in his lap, and says, “Are we eating?”
Since I’ve already had a sub, I only eat one pork chop, and a couple of servings of green beans and applesauce.
“So,” Meghan says to me, while Nigel clears the plates, “I’ve got one for you: exsanguinate.”
“To make pale,” I guess.
“Oh, that’s a good guess,” she says. “You’re thinking of sanguine as ruddy, right?” I nod. “But think of it as blood.”
Bloodless would just be another way to pale, wouldn’t it? Unless, and then I have a weird shift in my belly. “Without blood,” I say.
“Out of it, yes.”
“I’m glad,” Dad says, “that I’ve just eaten pork chops.”
“Exsanguinate,” I say. “Exsanguinate.” It’s a round word in the mouth.
Nigel serves us bowls of chocolate pudding.
“It’s a new recipe,” Mom says. “I have no idea how it’ll be.”
Rich, creamy, delicious, and gone much too quickly, I think. Nate excuses himself the moment he’s done. My parents grounded him for a week—no Sega, no television, and no phone privileges—for missing family dinner. Nigel told me Nate and Dad were shouting, and Nate only got one week because Mom intervened.
“Well,” Meghan says, and looks to either end of the table at each of my parents. “As I said on the phone, I’ve designated myself the negotiator here.” She glances at me. I have no idea what she’s planning. Until this moment, I didn’t even know that she’d phoned my parents. “Cole has been approached to play guitar, and sing lead in a band.”
I close my eyes for just a moment, and hear that word again, exsanguinate. I think maybe my blood has drained away.
“For Doggy Life?” Nigel asks.
We all stare at him. Nigel has a gift, really. It comes from being the quietest person. He sits, observes, and you forget he’s even there until he speaks.
“Yes,” I say.
Nigel looks at my father. “They’re really good.” How does he know this? “Doggy Life is Joe’s band.” He looks at my mother. “Joe came to Cole’s field hockey games.”
“What kind of band?” Dad asks.
“They play pop songs,” Meghan says, “but I think, if Cole joins, they’ll play some originals too.”
Oh god. She can’t seriously be doing this.
“Originals?” Dad asks.
“Cole writes songs,” Meghan says. “Very good songs. If she joins the band, she’ll have practices two to three times a week, as well as gigs, and she won’t have time to play basketball.” My mother has yet to speak. We all know that the ultimate decision will be my father’s, but if my mother disapproves, whatever Meghan is proposing dies on the table.
“Cole would like to join the band,” Meghan continues. “She knows her teammates, and probably her school, will be disappointed, but she has an opportunity here, with the band, and she’s excited about this opportunity.” Meghan turns to my mother. “I don’t want you to worry about her being at gigs, and so I’d like to volunteer to chaperone. My parents are bringing my car up when they come for Thanksgiving; I’ll be able to drive Cole to gigs, and practices. I can study there as well as in the dorm—better maybe.”
“You want to quit basketball,” my dad asks me, “and play in a rock band?”
“Yes,” I say.
“You’re fifteen,” my mother says, which is a totally absurd argument; I’ll be sixteen in three weeks.
“Dad played in a dance band in junior high,” Nigel says. “He didn’t get home sometimes until four in the morning.”
Mom looks at Nigel like he’s a traitor. The dance band thing is true, though, and we all know it. Dad played trumpet in a dance band from junior high through high school. Nobody mentions he also played basketball that entire time, and that one didn’t exclude the other, not even Dad.
Pragmatic. Practical. Adjective. The archaic definition is meddlesome, isn’t that weird?
The photos of Bangs are fucking glorious. In one, the camera is practically underneath him, and he’s crouched, with a hand on his board, well above the railing like he has just been fired into the air. Seven of the photos are mistimed, and a couple are soft, but there’s one where his body is fully extended, with one arm raised above his head as though he’s hailing a taxi, and the board just beyond his feet and it’s the most striking of these shots, almost balletic.
“These are good,” he says, viewing our negatives. “I wasn’t sure there’d be a story, but there is. It’s like this impossible trick.” He points out three negatives, which might be successive in terms of time lapse, though they were shot from three different runs, three different vantages. “It’s like this slow-motion lie.”
Bangs and I pick twenty negatives to print, to allow even more flexibility with the final order of the story. We work through lunch and after school, and hang the final shots during class the next morning. The entire class is working on this project, and we’re all squeezed into the darkroom to try to get the photographs printed before the weekend, as we still need to assemble them, and presentations are on Tuesday.
After Spanish on Friday—Senor Fernandez (he wears a suit jacket all the time, and is really old and distinguished) assigned us two chapters of homework, but promised we’d be spared any over Thanksgiving break—I rush to the lab to pick up
our prints; afterward, I’ll meet Bangs, and his buddies with the van, to catch a ride to his house to finish our project. The classroom is empty, but in the darkroom, I find Kelly looking at our photos—once they dry, they’re taken off the line, and set aside in a tub. She glances at me, and then goes back to examining the photos.
“These are so good,” she says. She hasn’t spoken to me in three weeks.
“Thanks.”
“They’re almost choreographed, like a dance or something.”
A dance; so she sees ballet too. It’s the focus of his athleticism—the concentrated power—that makes his skating reminiscent of dance. His grace on a wheeled board is improbable, if you’ve met the slouching boy around school.
She hands the photographs to me. “Have a good weekend,” she says.
“Sure,” I say, tucking the prints into a portfolio. “You too.”
Even off base, yellow bows are everywhere—like somebody wrapped all the trees in Jersey. In the two-toned brown van, with three boys besides Bangs and me, nobody says anything. Seriously. We’re in the van long enough to drive to Woodmere, and nobody speaks. This suburb of Colonials with siding and patches of lawn has traffic in every direction, but aside from honking horns, an indistinct recording of Smiths’ singles is pretty much the only sound in the van.
We pull into a wide, paved driveway, in front of a two-car garage, and Bangs slides the van door shut after we’re out. He doesn’t say thanks, or wave.
“Do I make them nervous?” I ask.
“What?”
“They’re so quiet.”
He nods, pulls a key from the long metal chain around his neck, and unlocks the garage door without taking the chain off. Inside: skis, a black Mercedes, a tricked-out silver dirt bike, and several small wooden ramps piled along the farthest wall. Now, in this garage, I realize that Bangs didn’t steal that camera equipment; he’s rich.
“My sister’s home,” he says, opening a door that leads into the kitchen. “She remembers you.”
She remembers me? I didn’t even know he had a sister.
The kitchen is tiled and cold. “Split a pizza with me?” he asks.
I nod. He preheats the oven, then leads me through the kitchen, down a long hallway to a sunken great room, and then up two flights to another hallway, and finally to a closed door with a giant hand painted on it—the hand is palm out, and so detailed that the lines and veins are evident.
While he stashes his board and bag in the corner, I pace his room. On the wall opposite the door, characters from Alice in Wonderland are painted around a boxing ring where Alice and the Mad Hatter, in boxing gloves, are poised on tiptoes. On the wall by his bed, Marvel characters skate a ramp—Rogue is inverted, and smirking; some chick engulfed in flames maneuvers a hand plant. Above his closet, a snake twists in glimmers of purple and green.
The room itself is cluttered with two amps, an electric and acoustic guitar, four pedals, two mic stands, two wooden stools, a love seat, a double bed, a television and Sega console with games piled on the floor, and a computer on the desk by the window. On the bed he has fishing line, and clips, and black poster board.
“I was thinking,” he says, “we should make a mobile.” He points to the bed, and I try to follow his idea. “You know, like those things they hang above cribs.” I nod. “We’ll mount the photographs on the poster board, and then use the clips and fishing line to hang them so they revolve. They’ll tell a bunch of different stories, you know, at the same time.”
“Mount them back to back?” I ask.
“Yeah. Yeah, exactly.”
I cannot use scissors to cut a straight line. If I glue something, you can tell: the glue bubbles at the edges, and ridges underneath like shifting plates. So, pretty much, I hand Bangs the photographs, and encourage him while he puts the whole thing together. We take breaks to eat pizza, and play a little guitar. I’ve been excused from family dinner, though I need to be back before seven to babysit for the Thorns.
The door to his bedroom is closed, and locked, and I would be killed if I tried anything like that with a boy in my room. We’re on the floor, in our socks, the project spread in front of us—and from the stuff in his room, he could be any boy, Nigel or Nate or Doug, with the same crap they all seem to have; no one else is as austere as Jeremy, but his dad’s Lutheran—when it occurs to me that I’m having a good time. That I’m not tense or worried, or, and it takes me longer to understand this, excited. I’m not excited to be alone in a room with Bangs. I’m too comfortable to be turned on. We could be buddies. Maybe we are buddies. And as soon as I think this, I want to laugh, and I want to go straight to Jeremy’s, and tell him that I understand, that he’s the one that makes me feel sick and nauseated, and that I really like that he doesn’t have so much shit in his room, and talks when you’re in the car with him, and that when it finally happens, one night in my room, I want him to be the one. I want him to be the one who changes me.
The knock against the door freaks me out—I actually spring up and glance around like maybe I’m going to leap through the window. Then a girl’s voice calls, “Christian?”
He opens the door to a girl I recognize instantly—the straight blonded-brown hippie hair, the long gypsy skirt, the bangles, and the black Mary Janes: Gabby, last year’s president of our Amnesty International Club.
“Hey, Cole,” she says as she hugs me. “I haven’t seen you in a while.” She’s a small, cuter version of her brother. He seems almost painfully gaunt, like a whippet, next to her. But they have the same upturned tip of the nose, the same freckles, the same mischievous expressions. As they stand side by side, the resemblance is startling.
“I’m on my way to class,” she says to me, “and I thought I’d offer you a ride home if you’re done with your project.” She looks at the project now, spread out on the floor, and admires it warmly. Everything about this girl is earnest and heartfelt. There were rumors that she and the black-haired girl she hung out with all during high school were witches. On warm days, they both walked through school barefoot, their shoes rested on the pile of books they carried like a baking sheet of cookies straight from the oven.
“Sure,” I say. “It’s not like I’m helping much anyway.”
“You took all the photos,” Bangs says.
He carries my bag down, and I’m trying to imagine Gabby driving a Mercedes, but I really can’t. I never guessed either of these kids came from privilege.
Instead of heading toward the garage, we detour through the great room, and out the front door. She drives an old red Volkswagen bug with dings all over it.
“See you Monday,” Bangs says.
And then his sister drives me away in her bug, chattering about her classes at Brookdale Community College, and careening all over the road like traffic signs are really just guidelines.
Erudite. Learned or scholarly. Adjective. One of the synonyms is sapient, which, frankly, is a much cooler word, with a much cooler definition: having great wisdom and discernment.
After my guitar lesson Saturday morning, I finish reading this short story that Overhead assigned, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, and I have to say that Hemingway is kind of dirty and mean. We’re supposed to be thinking about irony while we read it. Overhead is in love with irony.
Last night at the Thorns, I finished both chapters for Spanish, and the take-home quiz for Geometry, and after I write my response to Hemingway, I’ll have History and Biology chapters to read and respond to, and the Spontaneous Speech on Monday to worry about—a three-minute impromptu speech on a subject we’re handed on our way to the podium. Three minutes! I can look like an idiot in half that time. Jeremy is coming for me this afternoon at two; we’re going to see a movie, and have dinner, and, in the note he gave me yesterday, he promised a surprise.
This morning Leroy taught me a sweet lick. He’s trying to make me play lead, but I’m really a rhythm girl. Lead is hard to play while you’re singing. After I’d played the notes a bunc
h of times, and could do it without looking, I noticed Leroy had his eyes closed, and his head cocked, and nodded along with me like he could feel it. He’s a reverent guy, Leroy. Sometimes, when I’m with him, I think I’ve never really heard music, anyway not like he hears. It shudders through him, like Karen Thorn when she’s laughing, like maybe he’s made of it: composed of music.
This old spiritual we sing on communion Sundays, Let Us Break Bread Together, has the same kind of reverence. The song’s so plaintive that my heart hurts when I sing it. Eventually, Leroy echoed the lick back to me, varying the rhythm, and then the key, and I echoed his variations and it was call and response, and improvisation, and then this crazy fast challenge. And he’s singing, “Come on. Come on now.” I get a little high, playing with Leroy, a little rapturous.
On the wall, the intercom beeps, and Dad says, “Cole?”
I hop up to answer.
“Can you come down for a minute?”
What’s the point in protesting? He’s in the kitchen, leaned against the counter, with a giant mug of hot chocolate held in both hands like an offering. In the narrow room, between the oven and the counter, we’re about two feet apart. Over his shoulder, a stained-glass cardinal hangs in the window, and beyond the cardinal, rainfall.
“I just heated some water,” he tells me, “if you want something hot.”
I shake my head. His eyes are weak, and he’s still in his robe, though it’s after noon, and Dad never lounges.
“Are you sick?” I ask.
“Just tired.”
More like ragged, I think. He sets the hot chocolate on the counter, and rubs at his face. Last year, Mom bought this robe for Dad to wear in the hospital after his hernia operation. When he got home he had to walk up and down the hallway like seven million times, squeaking every floorboard in that cheesy horror movie way, and when I complained about the squeaking he totally tore my head off, and I officially hate this robe. I’m angry just looking at it.