by Lisa Ko
He sat, legs dangling. “Ready?” Up he went, higher, swing squealing past the pockmarked asphalt, the slide flaked with curls of rust. A hot glob of lunch dribbled up inside him and the next thing he knew he was no longer clutching the chains but flying, soaring like a brick, and before he smacked into the asphalt he saw the pavement tilt sideways, blotting his vision, a concrete eclipse.
He’d awoken in a strange room with the worst headache of his life, lying on a cot next to another cot with an old man in a diaper and an IV drip, mold stains blotched across the ceiling tiles. He heard crying babies and saw white static. A sign on the wall said URGENT CARE.
His mother flipped through a magazine. When she saw him moving she jumped up, grabbed his hand. “You’re awake.”
“What happened?”
“You slipped, Kid.” She squeezed his hand harder.
“I did?”
“I was so scared. You were out for a minute. Seemed like forever. How are you feeling? Are you hungry?”
A nurse spoke about recovery, said Deming should rest. Here were white pills to take, and he needed to drink them with water.
He looked at his mother’s pouched and tired face, the brown splat of mole on her neck, and his eyes filled with bright, stabbing light. When he closed them he saw dark stars, and he questioned what he remembered. Maybe she pushed him too hard, or maybe he’d jumped, heeding an urge to leap and flap. Superhero dreams.
Leon had said it was an accident, Deming was a big boy and big boys didn’t get hurt easily. “Got to be more careful next time. Boys are energetic. Hard to keep you still.”
At the apartment, Deming woke again to his mother, at the edge of his bed, watching him in the dark. “Mama?” In the yellowy shadows of the streetlights filtering through the curtains, he saw the outline of her nose and chin, hair matted and uneven from sleep.
She ran her nails against his scalp, scratching lightly. He heard her whisper: “It’s important to be strong.”
DEMING AND KAY WATCHED the other moms across the parking lot of Ridgeborough Middle School, their baggy shin-length pants, mushroomy haircuts, and pastel cardigans. The other moms matched; their kids did, too. Other moms attended PTA meetings, had gone to one another’s baby showers, were elated when they found out their sons and daughters would one day be classmates. Ridgeborough parents worked at the hospital or in the prison, and none of the other kids had a mother and a father who both taught at a college.
The other moms stood in a tight circle by their cars, their voices jigsawing across the asphalt. They talked about their husbands and children, made plans with one another’s families for the upcoming weekend, and Deming noticed a hungry look on Kay’s face as she shook her keys. “They’re probably discussing scrapbooking and cookie recipes,” she said. “And voting Republican, for whoever their husbands vote for.”
Like him, Kay was a crumb, and like him, she didn’t want to be friends with the mom equivalents of Cody Campbell and Amber Bitburger. But unlike Deming, Kay had no friends, aside from her and Peter’s co-workers at Carlough. At least he had Roland.
Instead of friends, Kay and Peter had books they read in bed at night. They left articles for each other, clipped out of news magazines, on one another’s pillow, with underlined paragraphs and notes in the margins: Think you’d like this. Thought about you! Did you know?? The tall shelves in the living room were stuffed with hardcover books on subjects like war and economics and the electoral college. The most intriguing thing in the house was the stereo system from Peter’s brief bachelor days, with mustard-yellow speakers, a silver hi-fi tuner, and the crowning glory, a record player with a turntable wrapped in a soft cloth. The cabinet below the record player housed a small record collection, along with an eraser-like object used to clean the records.
ONE AFTERNOON, DEMING WAS at home by himself. He knelt in front of the stereo and, simultaneously daring himself and accepting the dare, pushed the cabinet door open. The records’ covers were throbbing and bright, bands he’d never heard of, and inside the cardboard pockets were hard black discs, slick and coated, with circular rings, what alien trees might be like if you sliced their trunks open.
When he saw Peter’s car pull into the driveway, Deming closed the cabinet.
Peter put his bag down on the couch. “How was school today, Daniel?”
Deming got up from the floor. “It was fine.”
“Why don’t you choose a record and we can listen to it?”
Conscious of Peter watching him, Deming opened the cabinet again. He took out the record he had been looking at, Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced, the words written in a psychedelic leer, as if the letters had fingers and feet. On the cover was a picture of a Black man standing with two white men.
“Hold it by the edges. You don’t want to scratch the surface.” Peter lifted the lid of the record player, Deming set the disc down, and slowly, the record spun, the needle lowering itself with a resolute crackle.
Peter turned the volume knob up in one circular motion. Then came the opening notes. The music filled the room with color, a punch with a grin. Deming hovered by the speaker. Peter twisted the volume knob higher, and they stood there, basking in sound.
“What—” Kay held her car keys, the front door open, and Deming felt a breeze stream into the house, as if the guitars were fanning him. “It’s really loud,” she said.
Peter turned the volume down, and when Kay left the room, he said to Deming, “Your mother doesn’t appreciate music the way we do.”
On Peter’s old headphones, puffy, silver, with a curly black cord, Deming listened to Are You Experienced after school, lying on the living room floor. He counted the heartbeats during that little catch between songs, savoring the delicious itch as the needle dropped and the melody snuck its toe out from behind a curtain. The disc of a record was hardier yet more delicate than plasticky CDs. A record was to be treasured, its circle scratches a mysterious language, a furtive tattoo. Deming walked the hallways of Ridgeborough Middle with lyrics scrolling mad loops in his mind: Hey Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand? He translated the lines into Fuzhounese and snickered as other kids gawked. He repeated the line in Mandarin as a group of eighth graders passed, looked at one another, and said, “What the?” Headphones delivered shapes and notes directly to his bloodstream. A drumbeat’s taut assault gave him a semi-boner.
How he had missed music, how he craved it! The city had been one long song, vivid, endlessly shading, a massive dance mix of bus beats, train drums, and passing stereos, and in Ridgeborough its absence was flagrant; before he found the records he would turn up the little clock radio in his room and point it toward the window to receive weak signals from a station that played scratchy techno music and another that played scratchy Spanish music, but the reception was spotty and the songs flashed in and out. In Ridgeborough there wasn’t enough sound to produce any colors but the weakest, haziest ones.
Peter gave him a pair of tiny earbuds and burned a couple CDs. Kay gave him her old Discman and a pack of batteries. Deming preferred Peter’s old headphones because they were a bigger buffer to the world. The blank streets and large trees became comical when paired with a soundtrack, made him an action hero instead of an abandoned boy, and Planet Ridgeborough blew up. Platinum flowers morphed into oscillating lines and dancing triangles, electric blue snare drums punctuated a chocolate bass line topped with sticky orange guitar, turquoise vocals whipped into a thick, buttery frosting. He played and replayed, played and replayed. As he walked down Oak Street he shut his eyes and pretended he was in the city with his mother.She looked like him, he looked like her, they looked like the other people they saw on streets and trains. In the city, he had been just another kid. He had never known how exhausting it was to be conspicuous.
HE CAME HOME FROM school the next day expecting to find the house empty as usual, but when he unlocked the door, he heard voices. Kay was in the living room with the television on, scooping apple slices into a jar
of peanut butter. The TV played a soap opera, an older woman scolding a younger woman in front of a window overlooking a beach.
“Television stunts development,” Deming said. He’d heard her and Peter say it before.
“At least someone’s been listening to me, unlike my undergraduates. I couldn’t handle office hours today, so I played hooky. Don’t tell anyone.” Kay patted the couch. “Look, these women are about to find out that they’re married to the same man. Come watch with me. Eat apple slices and peanut butter. We’ll stunt our brains together and become a pair of blathering idiots.”
Deming settled in, luxuriating in the noise. Jaunty keyboards on detergent commercials bathed him in rainbow waves. The couch was a forest green plaid, its cushions smooth and shiny.
“How’s school?”
“Okay.”
“I’m going to talk to that Mrs. Lumpkin about getting you extra help in math. After dinner, let’s go over your homework.”
“I hate math,” Deming said.
“It’s not that hard. I know you can do it. You need to get over that mental block, the one that says, ‘I hate math. I’m not good at it.’ ”
“But I hate it and I’m not good at it.”
Kay picked up the peanut butter and angled her apple slice inside, scraping the sides of the plastic. “My mother believed girls were naturally bad at math. Bad at school, even. She still doesn’t really understand what I do. My father was more encouraging, but they assumed your Uncle Gary would be the one to go to college and work a respectable profession, like in accounting or pharmacy. But Gary barely graduated from high school. Now he works in a Home Depot outside of Syracuse. That’s the city I grew up in, we’ll go there for Thanksgiving. He’s been divorced twice.”
“What’s a Home Depot?”
“It’s a big store, where you buy tools. And wood.” She crunched her apple. “They were hard on Gary. Hard on both of us. You know, your father had it hard, too. He had a lot of pressure put on him at a young age. His father was a respected lawyer who wanted him to take over his law practice. Your father wanted to travel more, see the world. He got a scholarship to go to UC Berkeley, out in California. But his parents didn’t let him go. They said he had to go to Dartmouth, because that was where his father went. His only rebellion was to go into academia, instead of law. His father never forgave him for that.” Kay recrossed her feet, right over left. “Anyway. I guess what I’m saying is that you might have internalized, I mean, you might have been told that you aren’t good at math. Or even that you aren’t good at school. So you need to tell yourself, ‘Self, that’s not true.’ ”
Deming scooped a wad of peanut butter with his index finger. The soap opera switched to a commercial with bright, arching music, two children and their parents dashing toward a castle, giant animals and adults dressed like dolls skipping alongside them. Disney World, the screen said. The Magic Kingdom. Orlando, Florida.
The peanut butter dangled from his finger as he gaped at the screen. His mother had wanted to take him to Disney World.
“Do you want to go there?” Kay asked.
She could be looking at this castle right now, Tommie at her side. “No,” he said. “It’s stupid.”
“Well, thank God.”
BY OCTOBER, HE WAS a quarter of an inch taller since August, according to the growth chart Kay was marking with a pencil on the dining room wall. When he looked in the mirror his jawline seemed more pronounced, his eyebrows bushier. He didn’t know if his face was still echoed in Mama’s. He had no pictures of her, no evidence.
Roland’s mother, Ms. Lisio, worked at Carlough, too, in human resources, a phrase that confused Deming. She would leave out Food Lion brand cookies and jugs of fruit juice for Roland and him. They could have watched three hundred channels of cable TV at Roland’s house, but instead they played Grand Theft Auto 2.
After Deming showed Roland his Discman and headphones and played him Hendrix, Grand Theft Auto was abandoned. They spent a month of Sundays listening to a shoebox of cassette tapes that the deceased Roland Fuentes, Senior, had left behind. In Roland’s room, they rewound his father’s life on an old tape player, debated whether they’d rather sing or play guitar, and which was better, Ozzy solo or Black Sabbath (ever the classicist, Deming was Sabbath all the way). Roland’s parents were in their early twenties when he was born—they had met in college, moved to DC and Montreal, and somehow ended up in Ridgeborough—and Roland and Deming listened to tapes of Adam Ant, the Ramones, the Clash, AC/DC, Van Halen, the Pixies, New Order, Jane’s Addiction. From there it was hours of web searching for related bands. Each song was theirs to discover; they had been previously schooled in nothing.
“That’s so green,” Deming said, as they listened to a mixtape Roland’s mother had made for Roland’s father before Roland was born, with a collaged cover of magazine cutouts and a label that said HIGH LIFE.
“Yeah,” Roland said, “so neat.”
“No, green. The guitar is the color of grass.”
Never had there been a time when sound, color, and feeling hadn’t been intertwined, when a dirty, rolling bass line hadn’t induced violets that suffused him with thick contentment, when the shades of certain chords sliding up to one another hadn’t produced dusty pastels that made him feel like he was cupping a tiny, golden bird. It wasn’t just music but also rumbling trains and rainstorms, occasional voices, a collective din. Colors and textures appeared in front of him, bouncing in time to the rhythm, or he’d get a flash of color in his mind, an automatic sensation of a tone, innate as breathing. The candy red of a Wurlitzer organ made him want to retch, yet it repulsed him to even consider the possibility of it being any other color. A particularly nefarious jingle for a used car dealer produced the most evil clash of greens, and there’d been one summer when he couldn’t even turn on the TV, afraid the jingle would be ready to pounce. A two-line refrain he heard from a boom box on Fordham Road re-created the lapping blues of the river in Minjiang so completely that it would haunt him for years, until he tracked down the song and listened to it until it grew thin. He would learn how to create music, matching tones to shades to feelings and translating them back to melody. The purest and most inept form of communication. He’d craft songs that conveyed exactly what he wanted to say, yet he was the only one who could understand them. The rest of the world heard only sound. His efforts would always fall flat; the gift would always be his.
Deming chased after music with a hunger that bordered on desperation. Why didn’t other people have the same need, how could Kay prefer the low, modulated voices of NPR in the car when she could as easily choose to blast the blowout world of Hendrix or the bright angles of Prince or the sunglare of Bowie (water, Deming would see when he listened to “Sound and Vision,” water water water)? When he was a grown-up with his own car, he’d never be so boring. Binge-listening to a good song was better than binge-eating a bag of Hershey’s Miniatures in the pattern of Mr. Goodbar–Milk Chocolate–Krackel–Special Dark (there had been one glorious, motherless Bronx afternoon when he and Michael had done exactly that). Music was a language of its own, and soon it would become his third language, a half-diminished seventh to a major seventh to a minor seventh as pinchy-sweet as flipping between Chinese tones. American English was loose major fifths; Fuzhounese angled sevenths and ninths.
He made up band names on his walks home, sketched out their album covers and song lyrics: The Toilet Plungers, “Floaters or Flushers.” Dumpkin & Moore, “I Shot the Food Lion.” Necromania, “Brains on a Spike.” Roland, delighted when Deming showed him the list, scribbled the fake band names onto the fronts of his notebooks, and when other kids asked about them he would feign shock and say, “You don’t know that band?” They’d shake their heads. “Hey, Daniel, you get that new Necromania album yet? I like that first track, ‘Brains on a Spike.’ ” In the middle of the hallway, around the corner from Principal Chester’s office, Roland belted out the lyrics Deming had written: Brains on a spike / Yu
m yum burp / Heart on a spike / Damn that hurt. Deming wanted to correct Roland. It was heart on a knife, not spike. “I heard they’re playing at the Dunkin’ Donuts next month,” Roland said aloud, to no one in particular. “Necromania! I’m getting tickets. Don’t want it to sell out.”
Cody Campbell, who played soccer with Roland, came up to Deming in Homeroom and said, “I heard about the band you’re in. Roland’s band. Necro . . . mania.”
“That’s my band, not Roland’s,” Deming said. “I started it.”
IN NOVEMBER, PETER AND Kay asked Deming what he wanted for a birthday gift. “An electric guitar,” he said. On the morning of his twelfth birthday he awoke to find an index card on his bedside table, with a note in Peter’s handwriting: It’s time to play some Hendrix.
“It’s a treasure hunt,” Peter said, clapping his hands together. “You go the place you think is being referred to on the card in order to find the next clue, and so on. The clues lead to your birthday gift.”
“It’s a Wilkinson tradition,” Kay said. “Every year on our birthdays, we make treasure hunts for one another. On my last birthday, your father set up clues that led to a restaurant near Syracuse. Now it’s your turn.”
Deming went downstairs and lifted the lid of the record player. On the turntable was another card that said What word comes after ‘surprise,’ alphabetically? He took the dictionary down from the bookshelf, flipped through pages until the next card fell out.
After being led to the linen closet, the china cabinet, and the dishwasher, he followed a clue that said Put your socks away to the hamper, and opened it to find a box wrapped in silver paper, topped with a plastic bow. It was a big box, but not big enough for a guitar.
He brought it to his bedroom. “Open it!” Peter cried.
It was a new laptop, white and glimmering. “All yours.” Kay kissed him on the cheek. “Happy birthday, Daniel.”
Deming pierced the plastic wrapping with his fingernail. The plastic clung to the cardboard, then slowly unfurled. He opened the box, lifted the lid of the computer, and plugged it in, wishing that Michael could be there so they could watch videos together, wanting to show it all to Michael: the laptop, the records, the tapes, the Discman, the town full of white people. Where was Michael, why wasn’t he here? It was Roland he invited to his birthday dinner with Peter and Kay, at Casa Margarita in the strip mall on the highway, where they ate fajitas and drank virgin margaritas with paper umbrellas tucked in the slush. The waiters led the room in singing and Deming blew out the candles on his ice cream cake. When Roland saw the laptop, he whispered, with a reverence that made Deming proud: “Your parents are cool.”