A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip: A Memoir of Seventh Grade

by Kevin Brockmeier

  “Because I like arguing. I’m good at it.”

  “You are?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “Kevin, you can’t just say prove it and expect to win cases. The phrase is reasonable doubt, not demented and annoying doubt.”

  He replays the conversation as he rummages through the comics. Prove it. Demented and annoying. Prove it. Is it just his imagination, or does the browning paper smell stronger in the winter than it did in the summer? He holds an old Marvel Two-in-One up to his nose and ruffles the pages. Woody, dusty, plastery. Like a scratch-and-sniff peanut sticker. Maybe there’s a difference between how strong comics smell in the heat and how strong they smell in the air conditioning. It’s a good idea for a science experiment.

  I see what you mean now, Kevin. How could I have been so obstinate? This court pronounces the defendant innocent of all charges.

  Bateman is clearly wrong, and Kevin is clearly right.

  He pays for his monthlies at the register. This time, though, Grant refuses to keep the change. “No, man, look, you gotta start taking your money with you. Hell if I’m gonna let you bump me into a higher tax bracket.” That’s how he talks, a grown-up among grown-ups. Kevin seals his comics in their Mylar bags and slips them into a brown paper sack, squaring the edges off so that he has a perfect little floppy rectangular package he can stow between his belt line and his coat. Plastic, paper, and cotton—three layers of wrapping. Bateman could lay his bike down in a skid of sparks, send it tumbling like a playground jack over the asphalt and the grass, and it wouldn’t matter, Kevin thinks, his comics would be absolutely fine. Hell if the accident would even scour the gloss from the covers.

  The two of them go dragonflying up Kavanaugh, accelerating over the hills and kicking at the pavement on the curves. By the time they reach Kevin’s driveway, his mom is already home from work, his brother home from the creek or the playground. The place mats are set, the frying pan sizzling on the stove. For dinner there is Steak-umms and macaroni salad, and for TV there is Highway to Heaven, and then Kevin has gone to sleep and woken up, and it is finally Thursday, and he has locked himself in the bathroom, coloring his face and his neck, his hands and his arms, with the shoe polish his dad gave him for Christmas. The paste appears against his skin in raised streaks, blackish-brown bands that remind him of the currents of slush in a freezing river, cooler and denser than everything around them. He does his best to buff them smooth with a rag.

  “Are you sticky?” his brother asks. “You look all, like, gummy.”

  “And you’re absolutely sure you’re supposed to dress like this,” his mom says.

  By the time he meets the carpoolers in his clothes and his wig, he has begun to wonder if the whole Darnell thing might not be a mistake. Will anyone else dress up? Will anyone actually know who he is? The shoe polish has been drying slowly through its range of browns. He’s not sure his skin is even the right color anymore. What a bad idea.

  He holds his breath and opens the carport door, forcing himself to conquer his nerves, and climbs into the backseat of the little red sports car Kenneth’s mom drives. For a moment he feels as strange as he must look. Why does he keep taking school and transforming it into a situation? Inside himself he experiences a yanking sensation, as if someone has done that tablecloth trick and he has fallen without actually moving, his body clinking into place like silverware. Then Kenneth catches his eye in the mirror and says, “Oh—my—God, Kevin. Tell me you’re not Darnell Robertson,” and Kevin’s makeup stiffens around his smile. He can’t help himself. His entire life, whenever anyone has said his name, his feelings have flown shining right out of his face. Kevin, he hears, and he is like a baby in a playpen.

  He answers the way he imagines Darnell would: “You know it, my man.”

  “Good Lord.”

  Plenty of other seventh-graders are wearing costumes, but it looks as if Kevin is the only one who’s chosen a specific senior. In his classes there is no one else like him. He is like a fire or a mirror: everyone who sees him has to decide—do they turn toward him or away?

  After Bible, in English, Miss Vincent leaves a tiny gap of air between the mis- and the -ter in “Mr. Brockmeier,” like a dirt racer taking a ramp.

  “That’s me,” says Kevin.

  “Another semester, another costume, another meeting,” she says.

  “I don’t get it.”

  “You keep creating these … predicaments. And the administration keeps talking them over.”

  “Well, yeah, see, it’s homegoing week. The seniors are supposed to be seventh-graders, and the seventh-graders are supposed to be seniors. I’m Darnell.”

  One of her cheeks dimples. It is the opposite of an expression—an expression bricked up before it can escape.

  Everything is a secret Kevin doesn’t understand.

  At lunch his friends won’t stop pretending he’s actually Darnell, the real thing, eighteen and ready to graduate, except for Leigh Cushman, who insists that Kevin looks more purple than black and keeps asking him if the milkshakes are ready.

  “Look,” Kevin says. “Does the Grimace wear glasses and a button-up shirt? No. Is the Grimace a senior at CAC? No. Does your joke make any sense at all?”

  “Yes,” Leigh says, and he tacks the table with his finger. This is what he does—decrees a joke again and again until it becomes funny.

  Saul Strong, Mike Beaumont, Leigh Cushman, Sean Lanham, and James Dexter—Kevin has been eating with the same group of guys since Christmas. He would never ask any of them to spend the night, would never even call them on the phone because he doesn’t know them well enough, hasn’t known them long enough. But even if they aren’t his old friends, they are still his friends. He considers the spot on the bench where he arranges his feet around the table’s metal legs his own private corner of the lunchroom. Sometimes, if it’s cold or if it’s raining, Asa Stephens and Danny Morgan will join them, too, but today, though the sky is yellowing with clouds and the wind keeps making these great inhalations, a thousand of them one right after another, so that if the air had buttons they would have popped by now, Asa and Danny are eating outside, in the courtyard between the buildings, or maybe on the grass by the bluff.

  “What brings you to the lunchroom at this hour, Darnell?”

  “Tell me, Darnell, what are your plans for college?”

  “How does it feel to be black, Darnell?”

  “How does it feel to be purple, Grimace?”

  “Can I touch your hair, Darnell?”

  “Let me see your palms.”

  “Do you get tanned in the summer?”

  “Wait,” James Dexter asks, “has Darnell actually seen you yet?”

  “I don’t think so,” Kevin says. “In chapel he was looking for someone in the bleachers, but as far as I know his eyes skipped right over me.”

  “I bet he’s gonna kick your ass.”

  Someone accidentally jostles the door, and it swings halfway closed before the doorstop’s rubber toe catches it.

  “Don’t laugh,” James says. “I’m serious. I bet he’s gonna kick your white ass.”

  Something washes through Kevin’s face. He would be willing to bet he is blushing, even if no one can tell. He sees his life as an endless series of but whys. Thad says you’re a liar. Kenneth isn’t speaking to you. Sarah will never kiss you again—it was only an accident of circumstance that she kissed you in the first place. It’s too late for you to become a different person. You’ll never be tall, and you’ll never be strong. You’ll always run fastest when no one is watching. You’re not our friend anymore. Your family is fucking strange. We want you to leave, right now. Leave, Kevin. I’m not kidding. Stickers are over. Mad Libs are over. Comics are over. That stuff is for fags. No one has liked that shit in years. They never will again. Nothing you love is going to last. It’s impossible to rewind the grades on their spool, impossible to pause them, impossible to replay the good parts. Billy Joel isn’t cool anymore—Mötley Crüe
is. Mötley Crüe isn’t cool anymore—Yngwie Malmsteen is. You’re an idiot if you haven’t heard of Yngwie Malmsteen. You can’t walk around dressed like Dolly Parton. You can’t walk around dressed like Darnell Robertson. Darnell is going to kick your white ass. But why?

  He hardly knows Darnell, doubts Darnell has ever so much as spoken his name, but one of the other seniors must have told him about Kevin’s costume, because half an hour later, in math, something in the room’s attention shifts toward the door like a sheet of water listing across a pan. Kevin glances up to see Darnell at the window, staring hard at him from behind the gold frames of his glasses. Amazing how unobstructed a thought can be. I’ll be goddamned, Darnell is thinking—not amused, not resentful, only intent. I’ll be goddamned. Each word is so forceful and direct that Kevin would swear he is speaking out loud. Darnell flattens his fingertips against the window like some sea creature testing the glass of an aquarium. Then he notices the roomful of people watching him and allows his expression to twist. He spotlights Kevin with his eyes, mugging for a laugh. I can’t believe this crazy shit I’m seeing. That’s what his face says now, but it’s an act, a routine. Whatever he is genuinely thinking has vanished into the privacy of his mind and drawn the darkness around it.

  Mrs. Dial laughs along with the others. She tries to make a joke, “Should I ask our friend if he has a hall pass?”

  But the window is suddenly empty, and the water spills back across the pan, and for the rest of the period, bent to their worksheets or sharpening their pencils, everyone keeps cocking their heads to see what Kevin is doing. He loves it. Darnell is the star, Kevin the co-star, and what could be better, he wonders, what could be better? Switch off a TV and its screen will bloom with static electricity, a strange soft force field of it that scatters at your touch. That’s how he feels: you could swipe your palms over him, and his skin would sizzle audibly into the air. The tingle covers him from head to toe. It lasts deep into SRA, melting away only after Mrs. Bissard hands out a pop quiz and his head fills with trues and falses.

  An hour later, on his way to PE, he is passing Miss Vincent’s door when she calls out, “Good news, Mr. B. You’re off the hook.”

  He back-steps and says what he always does: “Absolutely.”

  He’s not sure when it started, this absolutely phase of his. Weeks ago? Months? All he knows is that it has the broken-in feel of a word he has been using forever. A few weekends ago, for an hour or two, just to annoy him, his brother began echoing every absolutely of Kevin’s with an absolutely of his own. Only then did he realize how frequently he has been resorting to it. Surely if he tried he could strip it from his vocabulary, he thought, but instead he has adopted it, consciously and officially. It is his answer to everything now, whether he understands it or not. He likes the way it rolls off his tongue—absolutely, BUM-buh-BUM-buh—like a child skipping along the sidewalk.

  “So,” continues Miss Vincent, “you can consider your situation resolved.”

  He has to hurry. PE is on the other side of the school. “Yeah. Absolutely. Resolved.”

  She should be smoking. When she laughs, the sound should puff from her nostrils in three separate bursts of white. “All right then, Kevin, I’ll see you tomorrow. Cosmetics-free, I trust.”

  In the gym Shane Wesson is limbering himself up against the bleachers. “This,” he warns Kevin, “is the day,” and he grunts, stretching his hamstrings, “you go down, my friend. You think you can dress out? You can’t dress out. We’ll see who can dress out in here.”

  “Dressing out—please,” Kevin says, but he is faking. He knows the contest isn’t real, knows he shouldn’t care, but he can’t help it, he does. Somewhere inside him stands a hyperactive little guardian-figure, squeaking with anger and waving a hamburger sword, protecting any small thing he believes Kevin has gained, no matter how trivial. It’s probably this zeal of his, this inability to shrug his shoulders and say whatever, that inspires Kevin’s friends to race him to the counter, to challenge him for the shotgun seat, to mess with him. Once, in first grade, Thad asked him how he had learned to run so quickly, and Kevin told him that he practiced by sprinting twenty times around the house every day—a total lie. He was fast back then, that’s all, a Corvette going sixty on the highway. His speed belonged to him and him alone. Thad couldn’t have it. No one could.

  Coach Dale arrives in his shirt and tie. Name by name he works his way through the alphabet, from Joseph Arendt to Jake Grundon, Steve Mollette to Barry Robertson. Shane inches to the edge of the bleachers, flexing the sole of his high-top against the polished wooden riser. It is the closest he can come to an on-your-mark stance while sitting down. As far as Kevin can tell, he does it without attracting an atom of attention.

  It is raining now, hard, and a thunderclap detonates across the sky, leaving smaller and smaller rumbles behind it until no one could guess what they are—the thunder or the rain or just some flaw in the gym’s lighting.

  “All right, kiddos,” their other coach, Coach Strand, says. “We were going to have you run the loop today, but that’s out, for obvious reasons, so what we’ve got for you is some indoor calisthenics. Gonna get those little hearts pumping.”

  At the sound of the whistle, Shane uses his long legs to outpace Kevin to the locker room. By the time the rest of the class gets there, he has already whipped off his belt and started on his shoelaces, but it is a pretty dinky head start, and in ten seconds flat Kevin has caught up with him, trading his shoes and his jeans for his gym shorts and his shoes again.

  There’s no time to unbutton his shirt, so he yanks it over his head. His wig and his Darnell glasses—he had forgotten he was wearing them—fly pinging into the wall like bobby pins. He is in the lead now, but Shane is right behind him, and for once everyone cares, or at least pretends to. Shane Roper of all people—Mr. Sarcasm—starts chanting, “Go, go, go,” and in all likelihood he is just doing it to amuse himself, but a few of the others join in, Joseph Rimmer and Matthew Connerly and even Kenneth and Thad, and Kevin can feel his whole body responding to the chant, his nerves hurrying him on, and I’m off the hook, he thinks, I’m off the hook, and what in the world does that mean?

  He has never noticed how short the sleeves of his T-shirt are. The hems barely touch his biceps. Immediately above his wrists are two ragged lines where the shoe polish fades into unpainted skin. Beneath the humming blue fluorescents of the locker room his hands look unusually brown, his arms unusually white.

  Shane is still tying his shoes—a mistake: wasting time with shoelaces—when Kevin finishes dressing, smacks the doorframe, and shoots off for the gym. The basketball court is empty, hangarlike. Neither of the coaches is anywhere to be seen.

  He reaches the purple-and-gold mat Velcroed to the wall behind the hoop, and “Yes!” he shouts. “Hwuh! In your face!” And maybe this will explain it: the rafters don’t absorb his voice but instead widen it, strengthen it, so that it takes on the shape of the room. He feels as big as the gym, as big as the school. He is not a normal person anymore. He could be Giant-Man or Galactus, the Rock Biter with his good strong hands, a senior getting ready to graduate and go to college, to meet a girl and get married, to stride out into his life.

  Not Darnell maybe, but someone like him.

  Most Spirited.

  Best Smile.

  By 3:30, when the station wagon arrives, Kevin fits inside himself again, but his heart is still galloping, the rain still falling loud and heavy. The car goes plowing through the lake that forms where Bridgeway meets Crystal Hill Road. Then it braves the torrent of the highway, the windshield blurring and clearing, blurring and clearing. He finds the rhythm of the wipers oddly soothing, a strange kind of machine music. At home he takes a Little Hug and a Peanut Butter Bopper and settles into one of the lawn chairs on the back porch. He fixes his gaze on the corrugated plastic roof, where the water draws braided gray strings along the ribs. The rain striking the fiberglass sounds like fingers snapping. He can see it boiling i
n a thousand tiny circles. His face feels tight enough to crack.

  Jell-O Pudding Pops that preserve the wavelike peaked shape of your lips. Little Debbie Fudge Brownies that break in half along a groove in the frosting. Summer sausages like #2 pencils, cling-wrapped together on a Styrofoam platter. Strawberry Fruit Wrinkles that scent your fingers if you don’t pour them directly into your mouth. Squares of American cheese sealed so tightly their wrappers show little pale lagoons of trapped air. Chocolate Pop-Tarts sprinkled with shards of something that tastes like sugar but looks like rock salt. Doo Dads floured with cheddar, great masses of leftover peanuts hiding at the bottom of the bag. Little Debbie Nutty Bars, two per wrapper, their sides pasted so lightly together that they separate with the sound bath bubbles make when you whisk through them with your finger. Monster Pops popsicles in three different styles—Satan holding a pitchfork, Frankenstein clutching a skull, and Dracula grasping his chest with eight riblike fingers—made with the kind of ice that splits apart in chunks rather than sunbursting loose from the stick in layers. Blueberry Toaster Strudels with snake trails of sticky icing. Crystal Light powder in frosted plastic tubs. Bon Bons ice cream nuggets in bells of melting chocolate. Capri Sun pouches you can reinflate once they’re empty, squeezing the bottom to launch the stiff little arrow of the straw across the room. Bugles corn treats that you eat in fives—that everyone eats in fives—using them to make lion’s claws or witch’s fingers before you suction them loose with your lips: hwoot, hwoot, hwoot, hwoot, hwoot. Little Debbie Pecan Spinwheels and Little Debbie Swiss Rolls and Little Debbie Star Crunches and Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pies.

  Usually Kevin marauds through the snacks as soon as he gets home from school, stuffing himself in his room, but today is different. Today he is on a reconnaissance mission. He taps his way slowly through the cabinets and the refrigerator, studying the possibilities box by box. The granola bars. The Fruit Roll-Ups. Someone at school has been stealing people’s lunches from their lockers—including, for the fifth time now, his. He needs a new plan, since obviously the potato chips didn’t work. That was his tactic on Monday, shaking a bunch of Ruffles into a clear plastic sandwich bag and then rigging the packet with a mousetrap, the snap kind, with a hook and a bar and a coil. In the morning, before first period, he tucked the chips into a brown paper sack and used them to booby-trap his locker. By noon, when the bell rang, the sack had fallen over, and there were shards of Ruffles everywhere. Which meant that the thief must have popped the door open, taking Kevin’s lunch by the edges, and “Sweet,” the guy had thought, “Score,” but before he could make his getaway, the trap had sprung, showering him with potato chips—a chips-plosion. And out loud he had said, “Holy shit!” And the bar had caught the tip of his finger, and he had panicked and wrenched his hand loose, dropping the sack into Kevin’s locker before he slammed the door shut, gave a quick glance left and right, and went spurting off down the hallway. And for the rest of the day his friends had asked him, “Why do you keep sucking on your finger, man? You look retarded.” And when he showed them the crack in his nail, and the sealed plane of beet-colored blood, they cringed and said, “Ah sweet Holy Christ, what’d a car door get you or something?”