by John McNally
Mrs. Davis, my Reading teacher, flipped off the lights once we were all seated. I had brought along a paperback book titled Beyond Belief: Eight Strange Tales of Otherworlds with the hope that reading something, anything, would be encouraged, but it was too dark to see the teacher at the head of the room, let alone words on a page. I wondered if maybe we were all part of an experiment and if one day I would appear in a medical book as “The Boy Who Wouldn’t Stop Going to School.”
“Mrs. Davis?” I called out in the dark. “Mrs. Davis?”
Lisa Sadowski walked over to the exit and turned on the lights. Mrs. Davis wasn’t even in the room. At some point she had slipped out, perhaps through the door that joined the library, which also remained dark.
During recess, I watched Ralph and his troop perform a battery of synchronized activities, many of which involved slowly approaching an invisible person and choking them. “Now again!” Ralph shouted, and they did it once more.
From behind, someone grabbed my neck and started choking me. I managed to break away, only to discover that it was Lisa Sadowski. She laughed and said, “You didn’t think I was really going to choke you, did you?”
“How should I know?” I said. “Nothing else is making any sense.”
Lisa shrugged. “I think I’d have liked school if it was always this way.”
“What way?” I asked. “This way? With no rules?”
“I guess,” she said.
Until then, I’d admired the fact that Lisa had continued coming to classes, same as me, but I realized now that she was as crazy as everyone else.
“I kissed a girl last night,” I lied, hoping to hurt her. “We were in a closet, and when her father found us, he threatened to shoot me.” When Lisa didn’t say anything, I said, “He had a gun.”
Lisa stepped up close to me and kissed me on the lips.
“You have a wild imagination,” she said. “That’s why I like you.”
She kissed me again, longer this time.
“It was at an Amway party,” I whispered, although I had never been to an Amway party.
Lisa said, “You don’t stop, do you?”
“It’s true,” I said, still in Lisa’s grip, our mouths almost touching. “Amway is short for the American Way, and the girl I kissed was named Wycherley.”
“Wycherly? Now I know you’re not telling the truth,” Lisa said.
“Wycherly Wozniack,” I breathed.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ralph watching us. Lisa kissed me once more and then backed up. Ralph yelled, “Now again!” and everyone took three creeping steps, reached out, and choked the air in front of them.
On our way home, I asked Ralph how his Skylab project was coming along, but Ralph wasn’t interested in talking about it. He said he was more interested these days in teaching survival skills to Ralph’s Raiders.
“Ralph’s Raiders?” I asked. “What the hell’s that?”
“You’ve seen them,” he said. “We train on the blacktop.” Ralph stopped walking and said, “Actually, you were looking right at us today when you were with…now, tell me her name again?”
“Anan?” I said, trying out my new vocabulary word.
“What?” Ralph asked.
“Eh?”
Ralph glared at me.
“What is it?” I said.
Ralph shook his head.
I started walking and said, “I used to take karate lessons with my dad.”
Walking beside me, Ralph snorted. “Karate’s a good way to pass an afternoon, I suppose, but I put my trust in the U.S. Army Combat Skills Handbook. Did you know that a nuclear blast will crush sealed objects like food cans and fuel tanks? Nuclear radiation hits, and there goes all your food and water. Tell me how a karate chop to the left shoulder blade is going to get you out of any of those pickles.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I would just die then.”
“Not an option,” Ralph said. I couldn’t tell if he was the one crossing the line between mentally stable and mentally unstable, or if it was me. He must have noticed my expression because he smiled and said, “Don’t worry. I’ve got your back, buddy.”
“Good,” I said. “I appreciate it.”
“Oh, and don’t think I’ve given up on Skylab,” he said. “We’re going to find us a piece of that baby if it’s the last thing we do on this sad, doomed planet.”
On Friday, the final day of classes, I put on my “Class of 1983” T-shirt and my favorite pair of Toughskins. I probably looked like someone from the future, already privy to what the next several years held for me. I wanted my teachers to say something about what a good student I had been and how I would no doubt excel in high school. I wanted girls to see me and ask to touch the iron-on, which sparkled from some kind of glitter in the decal itself. Most of all, I wanted Lisa Sadowski to tell me how much fun we were going to have together in high school, the two of us. I was determined to make the first move today. I would hug her, the way John Wayne had hugged Maureen O’Hara in The Quiet Man, and I would pull her close to me and press my lips against hers. I wouldn’t care who saw us, either. I was a man from the future, already sure of the moment that would mark the end of my shy years, ready to embark upon four glorious years of reckless abandon.
When I showed up at school, no one was there except for a few teachers, and they hung out in the hallway and gossiped with each other, or they wandered off to the teacher’s lounge for hours at a time. The only other kid at school was Roark Pile, whose hair never looked washed and who always smelled vaguely like meat on the brink of going bad.
Roark saw my shirt, pointed at the year, and laughed. “Good one,” he said.
“It’s not a joke,” I said.
Roark squinted at my shirt, then looked up at me, and said, “Yeah, but…” He seemed hesitant to break the news to me. “We’re class of 1979, Hank.”
“I know,” I said. I felt like weeping, but I didn’t.
I left Roark alone in the art classroom, where he was considering putting his schoolbooks in the kiln and turning it on. I wandered the halls until I found Mrs. Dunphy, the school’s nurse. She was a short, almost entirely round woman whose gums were black instead of pink.
“Excuse me,” I said, “but do you know why Lisa Sadowski isn’t in school today?”
I realized that my question was a preposterous one, since practically no one was in school today, but Mrs. Dunphy looked up to the ceiling, as though maybe Lisa Sadowski had passed on. “Lisa,” she said finally, thinking. “Lisa Sadowski. She’s got mono, I think.”
“Mono?”
“The kissing disease,” she said. She smiled, exposing her black gums.
My heart pounded.
“You didn’t kiss her, did you?” Mrs. Dunphy asked, raising her eyebrows expectantly.
“Me? No. Why?”
“Because it’s contagious,” she said. “If you kissed that girl, you should probably go home.”
“Is that why no one’s here?” I asked. “Did everyone kiss her?”
“It’s entirely possible,” Mrs. Dunphy said. “A lot of your classmates have mono.”
“Thank you,” I said.
Mrs. Dunphy placed her hand on my forehead, as if checking for a child’s fever were an instinct, and said, “My pleasure.”
I waited until two o’clock—one hour before the end of my grade school career—before calling it quits and heading home. I couldn’t tell if my throat hurt or not, so I poked at my lymph nodes until they started growing, and then my throat started pulsing.
Outside, walking past all my old classrooms, I saw Roark Pile in the room where I had left him. Using a giant pair of tongs, he was pulling something burnt and flaking from the kiln. When he saw me, he opened a window and yelled, “Loser!”
I tried yelling something back, but a coughing fit overtook me, and I had to keep walking, half bent over, my hand over my mouth.
The next day, I stayed in bed. Twice, my sister looked in on me and
said, “Yep, you’re dying.” She looked pleased. Long ago, Kelly had vowed to outlive me. “You’ve got a week,” she said. “Two weeks, tops.” But the next day, I was up and about. Whatever I’d had, it was gone. I would live, after all, much to my sister’s disappointment.
Graduation came and went in a blur of relatives, cake, and too-stiff shoes. I saw nearly everyone at the ceremony, including Ralph, despite his claim that graduation would be for him a private affair held in the principal’s office, but most of the girls I saw, including Lisa Sadowski, were too busy getting their photos taken or squealing with their best friends to say hello to me.
It wasn’t until July that I saw Lisa Sadowski again. On that particular day, Thursday the twelfth, I was so bored I biked to Rice Park to watch a Little League game. For the past month, no matter where I went, I would hear “My Sharona” by The Knack playing on somebody’s radio, and every time it came on, people stopped what they were doing to snarl and bob their heads super hard. And that’s what Lisa was doing now, snarling and bobbing her head to “My Sharona” playing on her transistor radio. She was wearing her yellow tube-top and blue jeans that had been made into shorts with a pair of scissors. A thousand white threads circled her tanned legs. She was wearing flip-flops and eating a corndog.
“Lisa!” I called out. “Over here!”
Lisa looked right at me, still snarling, head bobbing, but it was as though she had no idea who I was.
“It’s me!” I yelled. “Hank!”
She squinted, but the sun must have made it difficult for her to see me, or maybe her eyesight had weakened since graduation. Maybe she was blind now. I was about to yell her name again when a man with a mustache and a gold chain around his neck walked up beside her. He was holding two cans of Coke. She raised up on her tiptoes and kissed him, and then she tried to force-feed him the corndog. He laughed and backed up. His shirt was unbuttoned almost to his brass belt buckle, and he wore a pair of aviator sunglasses on top of his head, as if there were a second set of eyes peeking up through the hair on his scalp.
“Here, take this,” I imagined him saying, handing her the Coke. “You’re one crazy chick, you know that?”
That’s when I noticed that all the other girls from eighth grade were with much older guys—guys smoking cigarettes, shirtless guys, guys with incredibly bad acne. Who were these guys, and where had they come from?
I said hello to some of the other girls as I biked away, girls who used to be happy to see me, but either they didn’t recognize me or they were ignoring me. I wanted just then to get the hell away, so I stood up on my pedals, but before I pushed down to leave, I saw what appeared to be a small army approaching Rice Park from the dirt hills.
The hills were where tough kids went to race mini-bikes and make out with girls, a place my parents had warned me to stay away from. As the army approached, I saw Ralph at the front leading his soldiers toward the ballpark. Here were Ralph’s Raiders, and they were carrying something long and shiny.
“We found it!” Ralph yelled, and all the girls who had ignored me, girls who were now hooked up with older men, rushed over to see what wonderful and glorious thing Ralph had found.
Ralph was happy, truly and undeniably happy, for the first time since I had known him. The Raiders marched in unison behind him, exhausted from their mission but clearly exhilarated. A few of the boys whose fathers worked construction wore hardhats.
The closer they came, the clearer I saw what they were holding. It was a severely mangled bumper from a car and not a piece of the famous space station, which I’d heard had crashed into Australia the day before. At Ralph’s command, his army raised the bumper triumphantly over their heads, as though it were an enormous trophy and they were the victors.
“Behold!” Ralph said to the approaching mob. “Skylab!” As more people rushed over, Ralph yelled, “Don’t touch it! Back up! Don’t crowd us!” but he was trying not to grin, and I figured he was imagining how to spend all the money he thought would be coming his way.
I wanted to tell everyone that it was just an old bumper, but who was I to take away their fleeting moment of joy? Who was I, of all people, to tell anyone what truth and happiness really were?
I walked over to Ralph to shake his hand, but he wrapped both arms around me instead. He whispered, “What a year, Hank. What a strange and wonderful year.”
When Ralph let go, I saw in his eyes that he already knew the truth about the bumper but that it didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was what people thought it was. And so I lifted my arms into the air to touch this shiny thing that had brought us all together. I stretched and stretched, hoping to feel the magnetic power of something ordinary while Ralph, raising his arms beside mine, yelled, “Hallelujah! Hallelujah!”
19
It was early morning, a few weeks before the start of high school, but I was back at my old grade school with a can of spray-paint. There was still dew on the grass, and the sky was shot through with pink. I shook the can and then, crouching, got to work. When I was done, I stood and backed up.
Over the place where someone had sandblasted away Ralph’s drawing, I drew the same man standing behind the counter of a wig store.
“Wigs in stock!” the man was saying out one side of his mouth. Out the other side: “All the hair you want!”
I snickered and stuffed the can of spray-paint in my back pocket, but then I shivered. I couldn’t help it. I had a feeling that someone was standing behind me, that someone had been standing behind me the entire time I was out there, and I expected to turn and find Ralph there watching me, but when I spun around, no one was there except for an old, bald guy across the street walking his toy poodle, and even they didn’t see me.
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank Victoria Barrett, publisher of Engine Books, for starting the conversation about this book, and Andrew Scott, editor of Lacewing Books, for carrying it forward.
Several chapters in this book first appeared, in somewhat different form, in the following publications: the Sun, G. W. Review, Punk Planet, Sleepwalk, the Florida Review, Third Coast, Sun Dog: The Southeast Review, bandit-lit: The Journal of Empirical Literature, the Idaho Review, Crab Orchard Review, Natural Bridge, Chelsea, Annalemma, Whiskey Island, Knee-Jerk, Booth, Long Story Short: Flash Fiction by Sixty-Five of North Carolina’s Finest Writers edited by Marianne Gingher (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), and New Sudden Fiction: Short-Short Stories From America and Beyond, edited by Robert Shapard and James Thomas. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007). A significant portion of this book comprised my novel The Book of Ralph, originally published by Free Press/Simon & Schuster in 2004. I’d like to thank all of the editors with whom I worked over the years on this book. There are many.
About the Author
John McNally is the author of three novels, two short story collections, and two books about writing. He has edited, co-edited, or guest edited seven anthologies. His stories, essays, and book reviews have appeared in over a hundred publications, including the Washington Post, One Teen Story, and the Sun. He grew up in Burbank, Illinois, a southwest suburb of Chicago, and now lives in Lafayette, Louisiana, where he is Professor and Writer-in-Residence at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.