The other coach, Coach Strand, comes roostering through the door to say, “Cease and desist, folks. Class meeting in the weight room. Come on Boothby, come on Cushman, don’t just stand there lolling around with your arms hanging—hustle!”
Kevin stomps back into his shoes before following the others outside. He is like a magician whose big instantaneous trick is to enter a cabinet wearing one color and exit wearing another. The seniors can scarcely believe it. He isn’t sure which of them says, “Nuh-uh,” and which, “No way. You can’t change that fast. That’s impossible,” only that for a moment, in his tiny way, he is famous.
The class is halfway through its wrestling unit. Yesterday they finished practicing holds and throws, and today my friends, today compadres, they are actually going to fight. The meeting is about the President’s Physical Fitness Test, the results for which have finally arrived, and as soon as it is over and everyone has dressed, they gather at the far wall of the basketball court, where they unstitch the mats from their Velcro bands and heft them onto the floor. They land heavily, sending a great smack of air into the room. With a noise like that, you know that something has happened.
In a few weeks, right here in the gym, CAC will be hosting a lock-in. Kevin can’t get over it—how this very space, buzzing with exercise and light, will be blanketed in darkness, filled with hundreds of girls and hundreds of guys swimming in a giant sea of sleeping bags. Turn the lights off and there’s nothing that can’t be different. Maybe Kevin will find a girlfriend. Ann Harold will whisper, “Over here, you.” Noelle Batch will mistake him for someone else. Sarah Bell will tow him off by the wrist and fall in love with him.
It is time for the lightning tournament, and gradually, two by two, the other featherweights in the class end up clapped together on the mat: Sean Hammons and Caleb Kellybrew, Jim Boothby and Mike Beaumont, Matthew Sesser and Peter Vickerel. As soon as one fighter pins another, the coaches call the match with a “Rimmer!” or an “Arendt!” and select the next pair. Name by name the roster dwindles. Matthew LeDoux. Sean Lanham. Randy Garrett. Michael Berridge. Kevin stands on the sidelines watching the Twister-shapes they make out of their bodies. Levon Dollard. Shane Roper. William Carpenter. James Dexter. And there goes the last of the small kids. Ethan Carpenter. Thad Brooks. Barry Robertson. Adrian Phipps.
Kevin knows it is going to happen and then it does. A prickling feeling chases itself up his legs, until suddenly, with a celebratory little rising drawl, Coach Strand says, “Last round. Brockmeier! Grundon! You’re up.”
Of course everyone laughs. Kevin is as thin as a paintbrush, at most eighty-four or eighty-five lubbs—why isn’t it pronounced that way?—while Jake Grundon looks the way his name sounds: swollen to the stitches with muscle.
Ordinarily in PE Kevin tries to mouse around without being noticed. Oh sure, he lets himself flash into view in the locker room, but as soon as the athletic stuff starts, he does his best to vanish again. A few weeks ago, during a game of bombardment, he managed to shrink and fade and hush his way into becoming the last surviving member of his team. Balls have always seemed like missiles to him, flying fast and hard. Not tools. Not playthings. Weapons. By the ordinary logic of sports he simply doesn’t matter. He is narrow, though—wily—and that day, as the clock ticked out its circles, he was able to dodge throw after throw with a quick twist of his arms or hips. When the other team strung themselves along the line and coordinated their attack—“On the count of three we aim all at once, understood? One, two, three”—he dropped flat and the barrage bounced off the wall above him. There was a popcorn of drumming, and a few of the balls leapt out of bounds. He was so surprised to be alive that he actually laughed out loud.
The trouble is that wrestling takes more than cunning. It takes leverage, muscle, and Kevin is nothing but scrawn, so skinny you could lay his forearm on a table and roll a marble down the tendons.
He decides to treat the match like a joke. Surely that’s what the coaches are expecting. Why else would they pair him with a bulldozer like Jake Grundon?
He walks to the edge of the mat and gives Jake the death-finger. Then he rolls his neck until the joints crack. “Neutral positions,” Coach Dale announces. “Readyyy—” The moment the whistle fweets, Kevin lowers his head and charges at Jake like a bull. Jake bends over, takes him by the ankles from behind, flips him upside down, and drops him on his head.
Coach Strand winces. “All right, Jake. None of that André the Giant stuff.”
“Sorry, Coach.”
Jake falls to his knees, and his palms staple Kevin’s collarbones to the mat. Kevin bucks his legs, but it is like trying to flip a sack of cement off his shoulders: useless. Coach Dale counts down the seconds, and then “Match to Grundon!” he says. He gives a muffled clap, as if he is wearing cotton gloves. “Good try. Good try. Shake it off, Kev.”
Kevin would rather have won, he can’t deny it, but losing and losing badly brings with it a perverse feeling of accomplishment. Dead last is better than the middle of the pack. Dead last is a kind of second place. The excitement of the match lingers in his body, a fizz of nervous adrenaline that persists through the final bell and the long car ride over the river.
He doesn’t realize he is sore until he has unlocked the kitchen door and deposited his books on the counter. He writes his name in the condensation on a Big K bottle: K is for Kevin. He feeds Percy a handful of Bonkers: Hello, cat. Then something in his head begins to float, and he crashes onto the sofa. The refrigerator makes a ticking sound. He is so glad to be home. He has sixteen hours until school starts.
Probably he will never know who ate the sandwich.
Probably Thad will never spend the night with him.
But the kitchen is next to the living room, and the bedrooms are lined up one-two-three, and the sunshine paints the shapes of the doors onto the hall. Here beneath these rooms it is solid ground all the way to the bottom of the universe.
“ ‘Which one of the letters does not belong in the following series? A—D—G—I—J—M—P—or—S’?”
“I have no idea. G?”
“No, I. It goes one letter on, then two off, then one on, then two off. A—b-c—D—e-f—G. Like that. Okay, how about ‘ “If some Smaugs are Thors and some Thors are Thrains, then some Smaugs are definitely Thrains.” This statement is true, false, or neither’?”
“I’m gonna say neither.”
“Nope. False.”
“But how do you know that?”
“The important word is definitely. Maybe some Smaugs are Thrains—not definitely. It could be that the only Thors that are Thrains are the ones that aren’t Smaugs.”
“Okay. Fine. Are we almost done?”
“Actually, that’s it. The last question. So, let’s see, you got twenty-eight—plus one, two—thirty correct, which means your IQ is … ninety-six. And that makes you … average.”
Kevin is barely friends with Sean Hammons, and to be here at his house, in the weird incense of his family’s cooking, on the couch that preserves the curves and valleys of their bodies, is bizarre. Not half as bizarre, though, as quizzing his mom with the IQ test he bought at B. Dalton last week. In her eyes Kevin catches a waspy look, a quick slant of anger. And you know what? She’s right. The test is hard. He could swear that some of the questions have multiple correct answers. Take the one with the five pictures—no words, just illustrations—(a) a saw, (b) a knife, (c) a spoon, (d) a shovel, and (e) a screwdriver. And “Which one of the five is least like the other four?” At first Kevin guessed (e) the screwdriver, because it joins things together, while saws, knives, spoons, and shovels all take things apart, but the proper answer was (b) the knife, since knife starts with a k and the other four start with an s. But what if the knife was a steak knife—s? Or the saw was a handsaw—h? What if the issue was whether the object in the picture sloped this way or that way? Or whether it could be used as a murder weapon? It’s tricky, a question like that.
From the driveway comes
a crackle of broken concrete. At a distance it sounds the way potato chips sound when you’re chewing. Mrs. Hammons glances outside and says, “Well hey, I think that’s gotta be your mom’s Subaru. And your bag’s right there in the corner. And don’t forget your poster boards.”
“I won’t.”
Sean lives in an area of Little Rock that Kevin has never visited before, a tiny hidden drawer of a place, so far from the hills and curves of Northwick Court that even the spacing between the trees seems strange. The grown-ups say their hellos on the front porch, pretending to laugh about the things that grown-ups pretend to laugh about. Then the car closes its doors, and the house closes its, and Sean and his mom vanish back into the bricks and the carpet, and Kevin and his mom drive away together, mazing through the side streets that never quite intersect with the highway.
Barely three weeks of school remain: the last week of April and the first two weeks of May, plus Friday—tomorrow—a clean little pocket of woodsy air waiting to rush like a deep breath into everyone’s lungs. The walkathon will start after lunch, the lock-in as soon as the final bell rings. But the centerpiece of the night will be the lip-synching contest. Kevin is practically sure of it. To win, he and Sean will need a gimmick, like that guy from Puttin’ on the Hits who split himself into Diana Ross and Lionel Richie, painting his face two different shades of black.
“Hot for Teacher”: that will be their song. They’re going to serenade the Magic Marker drawing they made of Miss Vincent, all tall and hourglassy, with a red swimsuit, bunny ears, and crisscross stockings. The two of them used up the first part of the afternoon kneeling over a couple of poster boards, darkening her lines and then filling in the colors. They couldn’t remember whether her eyes were blue or green or some watercolory in-between shade, so they flipped a quarter to decide. The second part they spent in Sean’s backyard, listening to the song, then rewinding it and listening again. At first their moves were sloppy, embarrassing. Sean kept sawing around like Eddie Van Halen with his tennis-racket guitar, doing his impression of a virtuoso making the notes blur—DOWnannanaDOWnannanaNOW. Maddening. But Kevin insisted that they rehearse their choreography until they got it down pat: “Okay, I’ll go over here and sing, ‘I brought my pencil,’ and then you can go over there and sing, ‘Give me something to write on, man.’ Ready? Let’s try it.”
“Wait, so do I go right or left?”
Still, as late as seventh grade, Kevin can’t remember which is which. They should be immovable, he has always thought, like the Golden Gate Bridge and the Statue of Liberty. What was it Coach Dale taught them about how to read a map? West is weft. Kevin envisioned the United States in midair. “Left,” he said.
“Gotcha.” Sean pierced the strings of his guitar with his index finger and gave it a wobbly spin. “Left.”
“So are you ready? We need this thing to be perfect if we’re going to win. You’re not going to pull another Case-of-the-Missing-Miss-Vincent on me, are you?”
“No. Jeez. I’ll be there. How many times do I have to apologize?”
The power lines at the corner of Sean’s roof opened out over the grass, printing a bisected V onto the air. A miserable little collection of lifeless-looking birds had gathered there to watch the clouds blow through the sky. Occasionally their trance was interrupted by some high-pitched squeal or another—a burst of feedback from the boom box, or a car applying its brakes—and they would lift their feet as if to shake the stiffness from their knees, trading noises like CB chatter. Sometimes that’s how birds sound: electronic. Sometimes they sound like a swing set creaking against its chains. Sometimes they sound like water plinking into water. Kevin has always hated camping, hated the dirt and the smoke and the rooty ground, but once a month he sets off into the woods anyway with his Scout troop, and the birds wake him first thing in the morning, early enough that he has nothing to do but lie in his sleeping bag making comparisons while the tent gathers its soft orange light.
That one: rock salt grinding against a tire.
That one: an infant cooing for its mom.
That one: a pair of scissors shicking open.
It takes forever to drive home. The evening feels less like spring than summer—dry and insecty, neverendingly sunlit. Kevin spends it in his room with his stereo, his lips shaping their way through “Hot for Teacher.” Should he drop to his knees during the guitar solo? And when he says, “I brought my pencil,” should he flash a yellow #2 at the crowd, like that kid with the sunglasses does in the video? Nah. Kevin owns six or seven pencils, maybe as many as a dozen, but in second grade he had scores of them, hundreds, a giant collection he accumulated by thievery. Back then he believed that as soon as an object fell to the floor, it was lost, officially. Coins, pencils, beads, barrettes—all finders-keepers. One day several kids complained that they didn’t have a pencil to write with, and Jim Babb said, “That’s because Kevin stole them all,” and Miss Jordan made him open the pocket of his book bag, where they lay emitting their graphite smell. If only someone with a movie camera had been there to capture what her face did. For a long time it stayed poised at the edge of something, like dominoes just before they topple. Then Kevin explained that he would never have started collecting pencils in the first place if everyone else hadn’t kept losing them, and her eyes, her cheeks, her jaw, her mouth—down all at once they cascaded.
It is one of those nights like a locked room, when it is impossible to imagine that time will ever pass, but time always does, and before Kevin knows it, he is circling the track that rings the football field, watching grasshoppers fling themselves out of the brush.
He has already done the fund-raising rounds, convincing his parents to make their friends, bosses, and coworkers pledge a quarter or a dollar per lap. The problem is that he doesn’t care about laps—not remotely. He cares about grades and merit badges and about the thought-beams he sends out the window to Sarah Bell at night: I love you. Pay attention to me. He cares about Marvel and a little about DC. He cares about girls and making them laugh. That might be why he is having so much trouble monitoring his progress around the track: girls. He keeps bolting ahead to join one group, then dropping back to join another, sliding his way into the mix of a conversation for precisely as long as it takes him to pop off a joke. There are a thousand ways to be wanted, and this is his: to be amusing. Melissa Reznick says that her cat helps her stay warm at night, and Kevin tells her she’s hot for creature. Was that three laps or four? Better say four. But four isn’t a round number, so five. A few minutes later, on the highway side of the football field, with a different set of girls, he repeats the Raggedy-Ann-and-Pinocchio riddle from Truly Tasteless Jokes, and Margaret Casciano says, “Oh quit it you,” brushing his wrist with the tips of her fingers. How can so glancing a touch feel like a bite? It’s a mystery to him. He half-expects to find toothmarks on his skin. Surely he must be up to ten by now. Ten or twelve at least. He stops to tie his shoes, and Margaret glides away with Cathy, Kristen, Jennifer, and Tara, shrinking to half her size on the track’s conveyor belt of white dirt and gravel. Kevin falls into step with Ann Harold. Ann is easy: all he has to do is power up his Coach Dale routine, and in an instant she’ll be struggling not to laugh. This time she keeps herself from cracking a smile, but just barely, coming so close that her lips go all sour-lemony with the effort. Maybe at the lock-in the tornado sirens will howl, and every inch of wall space will be commandeered by other people, and the two of them will be forced to curl away together in the storage cabinet beneath the stage, wrapping themselves up in each other’s arms and legs, a tight little bow-knot of body parts. Okay. The last time he counted, he was at twelve or fifteen, and that was a few laps ago, so by now he must have reached eighteen, and eighteen might as well be twenty. Twenty-one. Let’s say twenty-five.
By the time another hour has passed, Kevin has counted seventy-five laps. Most of his friends are already hiking up the trail to school. The class schedule is broken for once, irrelevant, and since nobod
y is hectoring them to go inside, they stop wherever they want, on the patio or at the unpaved end of the parking lot, like anyone would anywhere. This is how a school looks when no one has anything to do: a Fourth of July party on a sun-drenched afternoon, clusters of kids layered across the landscape like figures in a View-Master reel.
A few of the guys are hanging out where the asphalt meets the dirt, some in blue jeans and some in gym shorts. Kevin edges into the circle. Right away the tailgate of a pickup begins toasting his legs. Each diamond of chrome spreads its own little thistle of light. Not until just now did it cross his mind that he should have worn his street clothes. With his shirt untucked and his shorts bagging around his thighs, he looks like he’s dressed for a nap.
“What about you, Kev?” Alex asks. “How many laps did you finish?”
Kevin hopes he doesn’t sound like he’s bragging when he answers.
“Pffft,” Shane Wesson scoffs at him. “No way. There’s no fucking way on God’s green fucking earth you’ve done eighty-one laps. Four laps equals a mile. So what you’re basically saying is that you’ve run from here to Conway.”
“I don’t know what to tell you. That’s how high I got.”
“Man, you weren’t even running all that time. I saw you. You were walking.”
Kevin weasels a rock out of the dirt with his toe. He can feel the back of his neck reddening. How many laps did he finish? Everyone is waiting for him to answer. He ticks through his getaway options. An insult. A story. A joke. A change of subject. Nothing he can imagine would end this moment and begin another. It seems possible he will stand here prickling with self-consciousness until he dies.
“Well, how many laps did you do?” he asks Shane.
“Twenty-seven.”
Then Bateman says, “Twenty.”
A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip: A Memoir of Seventh Grade Page 14