Nothing in the world is one hundred percent certain.
Really? You and I are both here talking to each other—isn’t that one hundred percent certain?
Maybe ninety-nine-dot-nine-nine-nine percent. Everything could all be a dream.
So what you’re saying is that the trouble you’ve been having might in fact have been your fault? It’s possible, you’re saying?
Not at all. You’re distorting my words.
And just like that Kevin is lost in a reverie of debate.
That’s not what I meant, he says, and you know it.
Yes, technically, sure, anything is possible, he says, but so what? Possible isn’t the same as true.
Well, sir, he says, if you’re looking for absolute proof, I can’t give it to you. No one can. Prove one thing absolutely. Go ahead. I’m waiting.
But as soon as Mr. McCallum guides him to one of the padded chairs by his desk and lowers his gaze to listen more carefully, encouraging him to “Take your time now, son. Go ahead. Talk to me,” the argument in Kevin’s head ceases, and a surge of confession billows through him. He can’t help it. A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. On my honor, I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country, to obey the Scout law, to help other people at all times, to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight. Adults make Kevin uneasy. They always have, and they always will. With teachers he knows how to be a good student, with parents a good kid, but beyond those borders is a no-man’s-land of bullets and broken earth. The sight of it stretching in at him from the distance, so gigantic and impenetrable, frightens the living hell out of him. He has never been able to have a difficult conversation with a grown-up without leaking nervous tears—tears of shock, not sadness or pain—and this time is no different. The room seems to flicker through a projector. He can feel his cheeks becoming wet. He tries to restrict himself to a bare handful of important facts, the stairwell and the parking lot and Cut it out, guys, but each detail reminds him of another, a third and a fourth and a fifth, and with every tiny particular, his memories grow further out of their shape. The story is such a hard one to be his.
Mr. McCallum wants to know more about the time Shane Wesson heaved him against the wall, of all things. “Stop right there, Kevin. Did anyone else grab you, trip you, push you, or hit you? Physically, I’m talking. With their hands.” He seizes the air like a pair of shoulders.
“No, just Shane.”
But what, Kevin wonders, does that have to do with anything? Shane isn’t the problem. Shane didn’t hurt my feelings. Shane didn’t even mean it.
“So no one else laid a hand on you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“It was Shane and Shane alone?”
“Yeah.” Blink. “But he didn’t bother me so much.”
“All right. Continue.”
“Thad and Kenneth were the actual instigators,” he says, and the time has come to describe the la la la’s. It was their most perfectly engineered bit of teasing, he tells Mr. McCallum, perfect because it was so simple, just the two of them adding la’s to the conversation, one after another, like bricks, and Kevin trying to speak around the corners, until before long, in the quiet of his imagination, he began adding the word himself: la la, la la, la la la. They had done something to the word so that it was not itself anymore. He could hear it faintly behind everything he said, and sometimes he still can, and maybe he will forever. The bell sounds the same in the office as it does in class—not any softer and, surprisingly, not any louder. The noise of students fills the hall like a flock of birds shotgunning out of a tree. Though Mr. McCallum seems not to notice the commotion, Kevin has to stifle the urge to collect his books and take off at a stride. He will be the last person across the building: the loser.
“You know SRA’s fixing to start. I’m about to miss roll.”
“SRA … that’s Mrs. Bissard, right? I’ll give you a tardy pass. Mrs. Bissard will understand. Anyway, we’re nearly done here, aren’t we?”
Kevin’s not so sure, but “I guess so,” he says.
A few minutes later, when he leaves the office, Thad and Kenneth are already waiting in the outer room. They pretend not to notice him, unlike Shane, who arrives with his backpack slung from his shoulder, wearing the snow-day look of someone without a care in the world. He says, “Hey, what’s up, K.B.? Where you been?” as he passes Kevin in the doorway. Then he frogs him cheerfully on the biceps. It is the usual harmless jab, the one all the guys trade with each other in the locker room, and if it bruises Kevin, that’s only because he is puny.
That night, during Kevin’s last few minutes of phone time, Bateman calls to tell him about the punishment the principal handed down: a week’s detention for Thad and Kenneth and a two-day suspension for Shane. “Two-day vacation, more like,” Bateman says. “Hell, two full fucking weeks.”
Christmas begins on Friday—that’s what he means. It will be 1986 by the time Shane returns to school. “So what will it take for you to get me suspended, too?” Bateman asks. “I figure (a) I can shove you against a wall, or (b) you can catch me drinking beer at school, or (c) doing drugs, or (d) I can stab you.”
Bateman says: “I’m easy. Take your pick.”
He says: “There’s also electrocution.”
He says: I’m joking so the hard part is over.
He says: We’re still friends, you and me.
Percy is trotting across the kitchen toward his water dish, his tiny steps so exact and unvarying that Kevin always imagines the floor is simply sliding into place beneath his paws, like a giant moving sidewalk. The microwave shows 9:00 and then 9:01. From the VCR he hears the first tinkling music-box notes of All My Children. Before his mom can tell him it’s getting pretty late, isn’t it, my goodness, will you look at the time, he says to Bateman, “Hey, man, I gotta go. See you tomorrow,” and Bateman says, “Okay. Stab you tomorrow,” and Kevin returns the phone to its cradle.
He shakes a few chicken-flavored Bonkers into his palm. Percy changes course, snapping the treats up, then harvesting the spice from Kevin’s fingers with his tongue. Kevin scratches his brow, that funny flat spot where it looks as if styling gel has been combed through his fur. He is a long silver muffler of an animal, so agreeable that sometimes Kevin walks around the house wearing him draped across the back of his neck, his little round head perking this way and that. Once, in the middle of the night, playing on top of the washer-dryer, Percy tipped the laundry basket down around himself, meowing from behind its bars until Kevin woke up and let him out. And last week, aiming for the Christmas tree topper, a kind of dunce cap with a big silver star, he landed a foot too low, clambering through the branches until the whole construction came crashing to the carpet in a hurricane of lights and tinsel. For once Kevin is going to keep him overnight. Jeff, home from school with a fever, has been monopolizing him all week. Does Percy get bored, Kevin wonders, watching him read a West Coast Avengers and change into his sweats? What would he say if he could speak? As usual, at bedtime, Kevin tries to get him to stay under the covers, but he would rather trot along the bedspread and bat at the lumps of Kevin’s feet. Eventually, he cozies up against the backs of his knees. Kevin can feel his purr rumbling into him through the layers of sheets and blankets. Either that or he simply hears it so clearly he imagines he can feel it. The sound keeps softening and escalating with Percy’s breathing, like a car navigating a switchback. The restfulness of it makes Kevin’s mind hum. It is almost enough to make him believe he has never felt any other way.
The next day, before Bible, Thad crouches next to Kevin’s desk and asks him if he still likes Billy Joel. He pronounces the name with the penned-up destructiveness of someone cracking an egg against a frying pan: Billy-Joel tack-tack.
Kevin can’t believe it is starting again. “Billy Joel’s a hell of a lot better than Mötley Crüe,” he says, and braces himself for the repe
rcussions, but Thad just stares at him and “Jeez,” he says, “I was only wondering. Bite a guy’s head off, why don’t you.”
Boothby, Braswell, Brockmeier, Brooks: Thad’s seat is right behind Kevin’s. He takes it without another word, and why not? The way he holds Kevin’s gaze says everything. Kevin likes Billy Joel. No one but gaybaits likes Billy Joel. Figure it out.
Maybe—probably—the only reason Thad stays so quiet is because he doesn’t want to get in trouble, but that’s okay with Kevin. He’ll take circumspection over open abuse any day.
Following English, just as the bell is releasing everyone to third period, Miss Vincent gives him a greeting card with a drawing of a hippo standing on its hind legs. She hands it across his desk unassumingly, offhandedly, like homework, and no one pays much attention. Though the caption looks handwritten, it isn’t: “When everything really starts to get to you, DON’T DESPAIR! DON’T GIVE UP! Just do what I do,” and on the inside, “Eat.” There beneath the punch line is the blue ink of her cursive, full of circles, like the pattern at the corners of a fancy napkin: “Hope you are feeling better about things today. Things will get better, just be patient. Have a good day! Love— Ms. Vincent.”
The words make a kind of drumbeat in Kevin’s head.
Things, things. Better, better. Love.
Things, things. Better, better. Love.
For nearly an hour he listens to it, opening the card every so often to read the note again, and then geography has ended, and he is surveying the lunchroom. Where should he sit? The Thad table is an impossibility, and so are the girl tables. And the majority of the others are already taken by older students, eighth- and ninth-graders who have known each other for most of a lifetime.
Kevin shoulders up against one of the pillars. Too many people aren’t his friends. He feels as if the sheen of paint on the walls, the fluorescent lamp sputtering above the door, the shadows of the tree branches on the windows are all whispering a secret to him, one he could hear if the rest of the kids would just be quiet, something about time and school and where his life is taking him, but instead there is only the popcorn of everyone’s voices, bursting and bursting and bursting.
He decides to sit with Leigh Cushman and Mike Beaumont. He finds a barnacle of gum on the underside of the table and picks at it with his fingernails. Before long Saul Strong joins them with his sandwich bag and his Ruffles and “Hey there,” he greets them. “It’s the Tough Guys,” which is the name they have given their volleyball team in PE. They’ve even invented a chant:
We’re tough guys! We don’t take no crap
When we deliver our TOUGH RAP!
“How’s it going with y’all?”
“How’s it going?” Leigh complains. “I’m totally gonna fail this Bible test, that’s how. Are you gonna fail it? ’Cause I am. All those begats and he-dieds and crap.”
“See, you just don’t remember memory verses. That’s your problem.”
“My point exactly! I only remember things I already know. That’s what they should have: knowing verses.”
“ ‘ ’Cause knowing is half the battle,’ ” Mike says.
“Meep meep,” Kevin adds.
Saul shakes his head. His feathered hair does a little landslide. “Man, that’s the Road Runner, not G.I. Joe.”
“No, no, there’s this episode where Shipwreck kicks a coyote into a canyon, and when it lands, he says meep meep. It’s a Road Runner joke, not a Road Runner mistake.”
“My whole life is a Road Runner joke,” Leigh says.
“My whole life is a Road Runner mistake,” Kevin says.
He’s not sure what he means, or if he even means anything at all, but the tone of sad-sack defeat in his voice gets him a laugh.
The result is incontestable. That’s who he is: funny.
The rest of the day passes somehow, and then he is lying on his bedroom floor staring at the blades of the ceiling fan, edged with ruffs of gray dust, and there is only Friday to finish before Christmas break.
He spends most of the evening working on the lyrics of a Christmas song—“Deck the School,” he calls it—the kind of parody he has written by the dozens ever since he started buying Mads and Crackeds from the magazine rack at Kroger. The verses ascend through the school grades, each one landing squarely on a big-name student, a Beau Dawkins or a Bryan Plumlee, a Matthew Connerly or a Doug Odom. The next morning Kevin deposits the page anonymously on Mr. Garland’s desk and waits for him to read it. You never know with Mr. Garland. You just never do. He is half jester and half grouch. Telling a joke in his class is as likely to earn you a demerit as a laugh. But after the bell rings and the quiz begins, when he finally lays his fingers on the page, he chuckles silently with his mouth closed, exercising one side of his face as if he is working the sugar off a jawbreaker.
In chapel, sitting with the rest of the seventh-graders at the far end of the bleachers, Kevin watches him take the microphone and announce, “The kid who wrote this actually included all the fa-la-las, but I’m just going to give you the good stuff.” Mr. Garland delivers the lines like wisecracks, pausing to let the laughter burn down to ashes. The loudest reaction comes from the eighth-graders, for “When we get back, there’ll be no lickin’s / Assuming that there’s no Chris Pickens,” and then from the seniors, for “Can you hear the women screamin’? / There’s mistletoe and (gasp!) Scott Freeman.”
Afterward, in the thick of the applause, a voice shouts out, “Who wrote it?” and Mr. Garland tacks the paper to the stand with his finger. “Sorry, folks. ‘By anonymous.’ ”
Someone once told Kevin that if a hummingbird’s wings stop, its heart will explode.
That afternoon, following seventh period, Ethan Carpenter invites him to a Friday-night movie with his youth group. Kevin calls his mom from the pay phone in the foyer to ask permission.
“To spend the night, you mean?”
“Can I?”
“Yes. I suppose. If it’s all right with Ethan’s parents. Have them call me.”
There is no better place to sleep than away from home. He and Ethan wait at the loop for Ethan’s dad, watching the cars vibrate slowly down the carpool lane, Kevin tolling the big metal school bell gently with one of his knuckles. They go shuddering through town in the old Chevy van Ethan’s dad uses to deliver cigarette cartons. The carpets are saturated with the mushroom-and-cinnamon smell of tobacco, and Craig O’Neill is DJing on KKYK, and Ethan can’t get used to Spider-Man’s new black costume. “I don’t know. Call me a sucker for tradition. Spider-Man isn’t supposed to be the Punisher.” His dad leaves them at the foot of Ethan’s driveway, pulling away with a cheep of his horn. Other people’s houses are always too bright or too dark. Ethan’s is somehow both, with its small square cave of a living room and its bedroom glazed white with sunshine. “I’m hungry,” he says. “You hungry? Let’s see what we got here.” They eat pudding pops out of the freezer, and corn dogs out of the microwave, and then Ethan’s mom drops them off at the big brown moon-dome of the Cinema 150, with its giant screen curving across the auditorium like a tipped-over rainbow. Sarah Bell sits one row behind them, between Jess and another girl. Every so often Sarah’s clothing will rustle as she recrosses her legs, Sarah’s knee will jog the back of his chair, Sarah’s stomach will produce a bearlike rumble, and Jess will say, “Hungry much?” The movie is about Sherlock Holmes as a high school student, and Kevin and Ethan both agree: take away the gargoyles and the stained-glass knight, and what’s left? It’s no Raiders, no Jedi. It can go away. Goodbye.
“So we’ve got this party at the youth minister’s house,” Ethan says. “We can catch a ride out there with someone, or I can call my folks to pick us up. What do you think?”
“Who all’s gonna be there?”
“Pretty much everyone you see.”
Which means Jess and Margaret and Tara and Kristen and Julia, all the Pleasant Valley Church of Christers.
“Everyone?”
Ethan has the face of so
meone wresting his tongue around for a sesame seed. A “yes” filters out of him like a sigh. “Yes. Sarah’s going to be there.”
They take a bench in one of the church vans. Their breath is whitening the air, and their hands are jammed in their pockets, and the heater begins to blow, and the tires whisper over the asphalt, and a half-moon hangs low in the sky, and the traffic exhaust makes the stoplights look like open paint cans, round glosses of color with little coils of light inside, and it is not so hard to believe that anything can happen on a cold night, at the beginning of Christmas, with girls. They roll up University, past House of Hobbies and Discount Records and TCBY, and “I’ve gotta tell you,” Kevin says, “I’m kind of surprised the church would take you guys to a PG-13 movie.”
“Wait, that was PG, wasn’t it?” Ethan says.
“PG-13,” one of the older kids says, “for violence.”
“And pipe-smoking,” someone adds.
“And lameness.”
“Anyway,” says Ethan, “there aren’t any rules against that sort of thing. We’re all thirteen.”
“You’re not.”
“In two weeks! Give me a break!”
Kevin’s family used to be Catholic, but now they are Methodist. He has never attended any church other than St. James—not since he was a little kid—but going to chapel at CAC has taught him that the Church of Christ is against all the same things his is, plus a few random extras: organ music, dancing, co-ed swimming. Back in October, during a sermon, Superintendent Diles outraged some of the kids when he divided the school’s Church of Christers and its non–Church of Christgoers into two separate categories, “the Christians here and all the rest of you.”
A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip: A Memoir of Seventh Grade Page 10