Except that it must not have happened that way. If it had, Kevin’s lunch wouldn’t have been stolen again.
He wrings the last few drops from the fantasy.
That looks gruesome, man.
Dude, you should go to the office with that thing.
Now what did you do to yourself again?
The open refrigerator hums, shudders, and gives off a cut-grass smell. The grapes and the apples, the ketchup and mustard, sit there sharp and bright, throwing their colors out at him, as if it is always noon inside the refrigerator, on April the third, and everything is drenched in sunlight. It is hard to tell sometimes whether he is hungry or just plain bored.
A snack equals one Pop-Tart, one popsicle, or one Dixie cup full of Doo Dads or Bugles, though occasionally, when no one else is home, he will cheat and have two.
That evening, after TV, he does his geography, then lies on his back clutching Percy to his stomach. After which comes the part where Percy decides whether or not to muscle free of him. He lowers his ears, rearranges his weight, and stiffens his spine, then jumps a little invisible hurdle and trots from the room purring.
The dishwasher is bathing the dishes. The VCR is playing All My Children. The sound of a car decelerating around the curve reminds Kevin of Thad for some odd reason—how, when he used to spend the night, Kevin’s mom would drop them off at Breckenridge and they would pocket the money she gave them for the movies, striding off into the yellow-lit darkness to hang out with girls. The shopping center’s walkways were framed with X-shaped wooden beams, and Kevin would lounge in the fork of one looking cool, keeping his left leg rigid and letting his right dangle like a cat’s tail, and beneath him, on the ground, Thad would take whichever girl he had picked to be his girlfriend and wrap her in kisses, and the trees would rustle in the wind, and the beetles would pankle against the lightbulbs, and it seems to Kevin that he was more grown-up on those chilly Friday nights than he has ever been since. He had a different best friend then, a different school, and though he didn’t know it, he was at the peak of something.
Who can say what possesses him, but hardly a minute passes before he is calling Thad to ask if he wants to sleep over on Friday. Why shouldn’t his life turn the other way for once? Why can’t things go backward?
Thad seems guarded, suspicious, as if he is anticipating a prank. “Yeah? What do you want?”
“I was calling to see if maybe you can spend the night this weekend. Maybe Friday? After school?”
A T-shirty, smothered sound, a little hum of noise, and then, “Mom says I have to ask Dad, and Dad’s not home. I’ll let you know tomorrow, good?”
“That’s cool. It’s casual.”
“Yeah. Right. ‘Casual.’ ”
“I thought we could hang out at Breckenridge if you want. You know. ‘See a movie.’ ”
“Uh-huh.”
“Or go to the mall.”
“Yeah, look, I’ve gotta go, so—bye.”
Kevin is already singing Chicago’s “Stay the Night” by the time he hangs up. He fixes his upper lip flat against his teeth like Peter Cetera, trying for that pulled-taffy voice of his. The words slide right out of him: “No need to hit me with an attitude, because I haven’t got the time.” He has the kind of brain that unearths songs all day long, one after another, harvesting them from books, movies, sermons, lessons, conversations, and announcements. The slightest scrap or echo of a lyric and boom!—there he’ll be, reconstructing some twice-heard melody, verse, chorus, and verse. He does it with so little thought that sometimes he’ll find himself hours deep in a song with no idea where it began. This time, though, the source is unmistakable. Spend the night, so stay the night.
Back in his room he runs his fingers down the rows of his tape box. Chicago is sandwiched between Van Halen and John Cougar Mellencamp. Funny how their titles sound like a quarterback calling hike: 19! 84! 17! Uh! Huh!
More than half of Kevin’s tapes are music club releases, six for the price of one from RCA or eleven for a penny from Columbia House. Every time he resurrects his membership, another big rattling cardboard brick of them will appear in his mailbox. Music club tapes are a bleached white plastic like candle wax, with a smell totally unlike the fruit-sugar scent of the tapes he buys from Target or Camelot, the see-through kind with the frosted lettering. He plugs Chicago 17 into his stereo and rewinds it to the beginning. He has just enough time to listen to side one before he has to change for bed.
He goes to sleep with no plans, no ideas, yet locked in his mind the next morning is a strategy for revenge. No one’s going to steal his lunch. He wakes like an athlete diving into cold water, with the same breath of excitement he remembers experiencing as a kid on Saturdays. There is a deadness to the house, a tingling moon-quiet. He feels as if he is somewhere he has never been, separated from the curving streets and grassy slopes of his neighborhood by light-years and miles—whole mountains away, whole galaxies away.
At first he is sorry to disturb the stillness, but then he hears the tick of the water heater as his mom turns on the shower, hears Percy scratching at the litter box, and instantly he is back home again. He pads to the kitchen to begin his work. Step one he makes a bologna-and-cheese sandwich. Step two he takes the top slice of bread, the undressed slice, into the bathroom, and pinches hold of the corner to douse it in urine. Step three: he bakes the bread dry with a hair dryer—it stiffens weirdly in the heat without ever quite toasting. And finally, step four: he writes “I peed on this sandwich” on a scrap of paper and plants it between the cheese and the lettuce.
He bags the sandwich up and takes it to school. The problem is that none of the lockers at CAC have real locks, just latches that slide open with a hard steel chock. What they are is unlockers. Take-what-you-wanters. Welcome-on-iners. The idea seems to be that since stealing is unchristian, Christians won’t steal. Some theory. Kevin loads the morning’s books into his camera bag, then puts his lunch on the backpack shelf—so long, you, and good luck—and cuts through the gym. Stretched out behind the basketball court is the stage the school uses for concerts and plays. It’s a strange thing, that stage, able to fire pins and needles into him just by existing. Its curtains bulge and deflate in the air-conditioning. The lights turn to fuzz on its polished boards. If his life were a TV show, he thinks, it would be an episode of Amazing Stories, and the twist would be that the stage was actually alive. The stage has plans, he imagines. The stage knows what it wants. It wants to maneuver him up one of its skinny sunken mini-staircases, giving him intangible little bumps and plucks with its intangible little fingers. It wants him to put on a show. Butterflies: that’s the nervous feeling you get in your stomach before a performance. But what do you call it when the performance is entirely in your imagination? Caterpillars maybe. Moths.
The first bell rings while he is still at half-court. By the time he reaches Bible, Thad has already claimed his seat. Kevin tries to attract his attention, but something else keeps catching his eye, something just to the right or the left, flea-hopping away whenever Kevin moves in for an interception.
Thad is asking Brandon—Drale, not Ostermueller—about a movie they both saw on TV. “Did you watch the Showtime version or the USA version?”
“USA. Why? What’s the difference?”
“R versus PG. You know that massage scene where chick thinks dude’s a girl?”
“Ooohhh yeah.”
“You gotta see the Showtime version. That’s all I’m gonna say.”
Thad fiddles with his gold chain, triggering the clasp click click click. Not until Mr. Garland has taken roll does Kevin finally manage to signal him. He mouths “Friday?” and Thad creases his brow and mouths back “What.” Then he makes a revolving-door motion with his finger—turn the other way—and just like that Kevin remembers that they are no longer friends.
Of course. He is such a kid. It kills him that their days of kicking the soccer ball around are over, kills him that he never knew how little it would take to sma
sh them. Nothing. Nothing. A split second. A white lie. In his memory he hears Cut it out, guys, and Detective La, and suddenly he feels the blur of heat in his eyes. He hopes no one sees him, though he would bet a hundred dollars they do. Sometimes his feelings run so hard in him he’s sure they must pour from his skin. And sometimes he’s surprised that other people notice him at all.
An hour later, for instance, in English, Miss Vincent reads the class a story and “The End,” she says. “Show of hands. Who’s an ant annnnd—who’s a grasshopper? Kevin! A grasshopper! Why’s that?”
Clearly the ant should have shared his food—that’s what Kevin thinks, and he says so. He has a way of taking an answer and, without hammering or tugging at it, making it sound like an election speech. After he has finished talking, he notices Lisa Minton staring at him from across the circle of desks, slouching so low in her chair that the shoulders of her jacket engulf her neck. She is puzzled enough to ignore the silence of the room and ask, “What’s it about that you’re crying all the time?”
He realizes that he is still sniffing and blinking. “I’m not sure.” The truth is that he always thought he would outgrow it.
“Do you have like allergies?”
“Bee stings.”
“No, I mean like pets or dust or pollen.”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“Are you sick then?”
“Let’s talk about something else.”
“Yes,” Miss Vincent agrees. “Let’s,” and because she laughs, everyone else does, too.
Someone’s footsteps go beating down the hallway like an Indian drum. How it works who knows, but all of a sudden Kevin imagines his locker door springing open with a pop and a shiver. His palms begin to sweat. There are two things happening today—Thad and the sandwich—and if one of them doesn’t go right, he thinks, surely the other will. He spends the next few hours concentrating just hard enough to do his work. After science and before geography, the brown paper bag is right where he left it, but forty-five minutes go by, and when he joins the lunch crowds, it is gone—snatched! He gives his locker a triumphant smack. His throat makes a crowlike cackle. It is unlike any sound he has ever heard himself produce. Walking past the classrooms and the bulletin boards, he feels a wonderful lifting sensation, as if space has flip-flopped around him and a whole world of things are rising that should be falling. Someday this is how he will die, he imagines, so full of happiness he will burst from his life a rocket.
He finds a seat next to Ethan Carpenter, who plunges straight into Bill Cosby’s Lone Ranger bit. “Tonto, go to town,” he says, and “Kemosabe, go to Hell,” Kevin answers. It is the best and most foul-mouthed line on the record, and then “All right,” Kevin says, scouting around the lunchroom. He doesn’t want anyone to overhear them. “Listen to this.”
Right away Ethan begins struggling against his face. He compresses a smile into the far corner of his mouth, shakes his head, and releases a few coughlike sounds of amusement.
“Dude,” he says at the end of Kevin’s story, “that’s disgusting.”
“Yeah, I’m so proud.”
“Do you think someone actually ate it?”
“Of course.”
“Dude,” again, “that’s disgusting. Who do you think it was?”
Christian Gann is unwrapping one of the little square burgers from the vending machine. Randy Garrett is widening his lips around a Funyun. Everyone is a suspect.
“Actually—” The first lunch starts at 11:50, the second at 12:40, with twenty-five minutes of overlapping class time in between. “I bet it was one of the older guys. I’m gonna say it’s still waiting in the bag to be eaten. Just—you know—fuming in there.”
“You’re sick.”
“Stewing.”
“Gross.”
“But not for long.”
The faculty lounge squares out into the room like an aquarium. The way the teachers drift around behind the flatness of the windows, forming quiet shapes with their mouths, makes it easy to believe they can’t hear anything, but when some ninth-graders start jostling one of the snack machines to unsnag a bag of chips, Principal McCallum opens the door and says, “Come on now, fellas. Calm down.”
Scrape the skin from his voice and you’ll always find an implied for Pete’s sake.
“I can guarantee one thing,” Ethan says to Kevin.
“What’s that?”
“Nobody’ll want to eat your lunch again after today. Not even you.”
“Actually I’m kind of starving.”
Ethan slides him a Tupperware bowl of green grapes. “Knock yourself out.” Some of the grapes are still bunched together. Kevin loves the tiny snikt of separation they make as he plucks them loose from their stems.
He is picking a bit of wood from his tongue when Kenneth comes flowing over and drapes an arm around his shoulders. “Kevin my friend! I’ve got a question for you. Why did you ask Thad to spend the night?”
A voice on one side of him and a hand on the other, and instinctively Kevin pivots toward the hand. Thad and his gang are a few tables away, Shane and Clint and the others, their eyes razoring directly in on him. They look the way people in movies do when their minds belong to someone else—like clones, things from outer space, brainwashees. All this time they must have been wondering what they could force him to say. He can practically re-create the whole scenario: Thad telling them about the phone call, then suggesting, “Do you know what would be hilarious? If we went over and asked guy about it,” and someone else adding, “Oh, I bet he’ll do that blinking thing he does,” and Kenneth volunteering, “I don’t care. What the hell. I’ll go.”
Now he sinks his weight onto his arm and says, “Let me rephrase. Why did you call Thad last night? Had him on your mind, did you?”
“I don’t know. Obviously it was a bad idea.”
Suddenly Kenneth’s tone softens. “Hey there. No need to get upset. We’re just curious, that’s all.”
By some miracle Kevin controls his face. Just like that, though, his hunger dematerializes, and his feeling of victory fades away. He is himself all over again. He stands and says, “Thanks for the grapes, Ethan.” The echo of it rises from the other table: thanks for the grapes, grapes, thanks for the grapes. Who knew that grapes was such a funny word? It is news to him.
He brushes past Stacey Leavitt, who is unzipping her jacket in the doorway. If she notices him, it is only as a blur of clothing, some white shoes and some plaid sleeves, the smell of soap or deodorant, whatever it is he smells like. He remembers that time, years ago, at recess, when he accidentally kicked her soccer ball into the street just as a semi came monstering through the intersection, and they all listened as it flattened the ball and then flattened it again in the notch between its immense rear tires. It would never have occurred to him that something could pop more than once.
Last week in science Mr. Garland told them that atoms are mostly empty space—ninety-nine-and-a-bunch-of-repeating-nines’ worth—nothing but fleeting waves of energy and force attracting and repulsing each other. The universe is a sinkhole, the universe is a tube slide. It is the kind of day where Kevin feels as if he might slip through the vacuum of the ground and never stop falling.
In SRA, Chuck Carnahan sits behind him poking the back of his head with a pencil, leaving small silver indentations on his scalp. Kevin pretends not to notice, which makes Chuck laugh. It is a game, a joke, one they are playing together, as if Kevin’s head is all leather and bone and he has no nerves whatsoever. Mrs. Bissard busies herself at the chalkboard. You can do anything you want in her class as long as you do it quietly. After six or seven thrusts, Kevin hears Chuck say, “Matthew. Matthew. Check this out,” and peck peck peck, he goes. Kevin sits stone still. The crazy part is that he doesn’t mind. He would find it hard to explain why Kenneth whispering so nicely to him is spiteful while Chuck jabbing him with a pencil is friendly, but that’s the situation.
Two bells later and the day is a
lmost over. He sits on the bleachers waiting for PE to start. He can still feel the marks on his skull, exotic darts of sensation that keep sparking off into numbness and then re-erupting. Is he hurt? he wonders. Are they real? Maybe your skin simply tingles a certain way if you pay enough attention to it. That’s probably it, he decides, because as soon as Coach Dale blows his whistle to send everyone to the locker room, the twinges seem to stop. Kevin is at the front of the herd, rushing past the seniors benching weights and studying their veins in the mirrors, their skin salts wafting into the hallway. Until now he had no idea how badly he wanted to run, to throw off his clothes and change into his T-shirt and shorts. The last few kids have barely reached the benches, and already he is nearly dressed out. He has been getting faster and faster. These days no one can touch him. Twenty, thirty seconds and wh-shaw!—he is done.
A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip: A Memoir of Seventh Grade Page 13