by Andrew Smith
I have always believed that teachers see a formless mass of consciousness when they look at their students, anyway—so why would any of us kids ever need special treatment under any circumstances? This was middle school, after all, the place where kids need to figure it out on their own, learn how to manage setbacks and be tough, and just grow up.
So it was pretty much as soon as Coach Bovard locked me and James Jenkins inside the impenetrable CAVERN OF DOOM that my heart began to race. Hearing the dead bolt slide into place, I could no longer catch my breath, and my vision began to go dark around the edges.
I can’t remember too much after that, because the next thing I knew I was lying curled up on my side on the floor of Coach Bovard’s messy office, and at that moment James Jenkins the murderer, who for reasons I could not understand was only in his underwear, was holding up my head, trying to roll me onto my back. And James Jenkins was looking directly into my eyes, asking me if I was okay, while Coach Bovard screamed at us for (excuse me) screwing around in his (excuse me) damn office.
Then, after he calmed down a bit and stopped shaking, Coach Bovard ordered me and James to go directly to the principal’s office, without even letting us get dressed back into our school clothes. At least he allowed us to put on T-shirts, and he let James get into his PE shorts. There are strict rules at Dick Dowling Middle School about walking around campus in your underwear and with no shirt on, after all.
But that’s how I ended up in after-school detention with James Jenkins.
I had never gotten in trouble at school in my life.
It was like falling into a well all over.
Once again, I was sure that I’d ruined Mom’s and Dad’s (and now my little brother’s and sister’s) lives for good.
At least it wasn’t Science Club day, so I was spared the humiliation of serving detention in front of Karim and Bahar, or Michael Dolgoff, the worm farm kid who wanted to make bugs fight in an arena. But James Jenkins and I had to spend the last two hours of the school day in the principal’s office in our PE clothes while all kinds of grown-ups and kids we didn’t know looked at us, and then sat for an additional hour after school in our homeroom—Mr. Mannweiler’s classroom—while Mr. Mannweiler pretended to pay attention to us, although he was obviously reading a magazine about basketball.
James Jenkins and I were also both given half sheets of photocopied instructions. The papers told us we had to write a full two-page essay on what rules we broke, why we felt motivated to break them, and what our plan of action (our P.O.A., as Dad would say) would be, in order to not ever break those rules in the future.
I raised my hand to get Mr. Mannweiler’s attention, but he was too engrossed in his basketball magazine, so I kept my arm up until it hurt. Finally, Mr. Mannweiler noticed. He sighed and looked at me without saying anything, which was enough to tell me that he didn’t want to be bothered by me.
I said, “Mr. Mannweiler, do you have a thesaurus I could use?”
Mr. Mannweiler looked at James Jenkins. Then he looked at the bookcase where all the science textbooks were stacked.
Mr. Mannweiler sighed. He said, “Use easy words, Abernathy. It’s detention. There’s no Pulitzer Prize in detention.”
I guessed that meant no.
James didn’t even look at his instructions. He obviously didn’t need to. He went right to work on his essay while I toiled over crafting a captivating opening paragraph. In fact, it was with a reasonable amount of jealousy and doubt that I viewed James Jenkins when he finished his full two-page essay in less than twenty minutes.
I was still on page one.
I figured that, unlike with other things they do, murderers must write fast, and that they’re probably not concerned about neatness, spelling, or grammar. But, without moving his head, James Jenkins straightened up in the desk right next to me, brushed the eraser crumbs away from his paper using the blade of his right hand, then slowly stood and walked across the room to Mr. Mannweiler’s desk.
James Jenkins dropped his essay into the wire basket with a sign on it that said IN.
Mr. Mannweiler didn’t say anything. He just glanced at the clock.
We had forty minutes to go.
James Jenkins turned around without moving his head or saying anything to Mr. Mannweiler. Then—like a murderer—he walked very slowly toward me and sat down once again at his desk.
I figured by this point James Jenkins probably had a memorized formula for his after-school-detention essays. He probably only had to change key terms like “murdering a kid at recess” to “talking while in my underwear.”
“How did you do that so fast?” I whispered.
Let me explain that I normally would not have said anything to James Jenkins, but ever since Coach Bovard screamed at us in his office I found myself wondering why it could have been that James Jenkins would have apparently been trying to help me—as opposed to trying to murder me, which is probably what he would have done if Coach Bovard had not returned when he did.
James Jenkins had his hands flat on the top of his desk. He moved his eyes (but not his chin) about one-tenth of an inch in my direction, and, facing toward the front of Mr. Mannweiler’s classroom, James Jenkins said this: “I like to write.”
This was information I was unprepared to deal with.
James Jenkins had flunked eighth grade. He couldn’t possibly like to write. He had to have been messing with me. Maybe I was still a bit out of it after what happened in Coach Bovard’s office. Maybe James Jenkins really only liked to write ransom notes, or instructions about where bodies were hidden, or cheerful little reminders to people telling them joyful things like You’re next.
I think James Jenkins must have noticed (out of the tiniest corner of his unmoving eye) that I was staring at him in a kind of puzzled disbelief, because with no prompting from me at all he added, “I like to read, too.”
Then James Jenkins said this: “What’s your favorite book?”
This really put me on the spot. I never for a moment would have guessed James Jenkins would have asked me a question about books. I was so confused. Maybe it was something that murderers do—confusing their victims, I mean—kind of like what cobras do, or something.
I actually touched the side of my head to reassure myself it had not exploded.
“I. Uh.” I couldn’t even think. “Dune Dune is my favorite book,” I gasped.
I was so completely confused.
James Jenkins nodded. It wasn’t a real nod; it was the kind of nod a murderer who appreciated science fiction would do, which is to say he moved his chin downward about one-thirtieth of an inch.
“Dune is awesome. One of my favorites for sure,” James Jenkins said. He looked directly ahead. He did not move.
I glanced over at Mr. Mannweiler. He had no clue James Jenkins and I were talking. About writing. And books.
But an eighth-grade student who reads a book as heavy as Dune couldn’t possibly flunk out of school, right? James Jenkins had to be messing with me. I considered asking him the timelessly effective question What was your favorite part of Dune, James Jenkins—MURDERER? but then I realized that might be a really good way to get myself killed, so instead I said, “But you flunked eighth grade.”
Which, as soon as the words left my mouth, I thought they would probably get me killed too.
“I didn’t flunk,” James Jenkins said. “I was held back.”
I didn’t understand. I always thought being held back was the nice way of not having to admit you flunked. Because, after all, you get held back when you can’t pass your classes, which equals flunking, right?
Then, almost as though he felt the need to clarify the matter, James Jenkins added, “My father thought it would be a good thing for me if he held me back one year.”
James Jenkins could not possibly be more of my opposite than he was, I thought.
And I desperately wanted to ask him why his father thought it would be good for him, but I couldn’t get the words out
of my throat. It struck me that being held back a year because your father thought it was good for you had to be just as awful as being skipped ahead—maybe even worse than being skipped ahead—but it was something that I never thought about until James Jenkins told me that. Another thing I hadn’t really thought about was my essay, because all of a sudden Mr. Mannweiler flipped his basketball magazine shut and said, “I’m letting you guys go fifteen minutes early so you can get dressed. Get out of here. I need to go take a dump.”
(Excuse me.)
James Jenkins got up faster than I’d ever seen him move, which was still really slow. I guess freedom has that effect on murderers and essayists. And although I wasn’t finished with my essay, I decided to bring it to a quick close, so I wrote THE END halfway down the middle of page two. I rationalized that you don’t get grades for detention, so it probably didn’t matter that my essay was terrible.
Like Mr. Mannweiler said: There are no Pulitzer Prizes in after-school detention.
So I flipped my paper into Mr. Mannweiler’s IN basket and left detention, hopefully for the last time in my life.
James Jenkins was outside in the empty hallway, spinning the ticking tumbler very slowly—click . . . click . . . click!—for the combination on his locker, which happened to be right next to mine. Naturally, he didn’t look at me as I opened my locker.
It was still raining outside, and I needed my coat for the walk home. I already knew I’d be in trouble if Mom found out why I was so late. Maybe I could hang out at Karim’s for a while, I thought—practice a macaroni and cheese recipe or something. Dad would still be at Lily Putt’s, which never shut down because of weather, on account of the fact that we had an entire second course that was indoors.
But I needed to know more about James Jenkins’s story. There was something about the kid who nearly murdered me during a game of Spud seven years ago that didn’t make sense. The James Jenkins I had long imagined was not holding up to the James Jenkins who tried to help me in Coach Bovard’s office—or the James Jenkins who spoke to me in complete sentences about writing, and about reading books.
James grabbed a backpack and his coat from his locker, slammed the locker door shut, and started walking away from me—down the deserted hallway and toward the boys’ locker room. The stiff rubber soles of James Jenkins’s Converse sneakers tap-tapped like the drumbeat accompaniment to a condemned man’s walk to the gallows.
I grabbed my coat and followed him.
I swallowed hard and thought about the meaningless content of my great-grandmother’s song “I Will Walk with Him in the Garden of Blood,” which is something I usually thought about when I also thought I was about to be murdered. I especially thought about it now that I was walking with James Jenkins in the empty hallway of linoleum at Dick Dowling Middle School, on our way to the very creepy and empty boys’ locker room.
I said, “Um. James. I forgot to tell you thanks for trying to look out for me today in Coach Bovard’s office.”
James didn’t react beyond saying something with his mouth closed. It sounded like, “Hmft.”
So I added, “I get claustrophobia really bad sometimes.”
James Jenkins stopped moving. It was like he was having a stare-down contest with the sign that said PUSH on the door to the locker room. After about twenty seconds—when the stare-down with the sign had apparently ended in a draw—James Jenkins pivoted his entire upper body (but not his chin), so he was looking directly at me (which made me think he was about to murder me), and said, “I bet you do. It must be really awful.”
James Jenkins leaned his upper arm into the locker room door and slowly eased it open.
I said, “Yeah. I do. And it is. So, thanks. Um. Thank you. James. Jenkins.”
James Jenkins shrugged, which is to say he raised both of his shoulders approximately one-sixtieth of an inch. He said, “No problem, Well Boy. Blow-vard hates you anyway. And I thought you stopped breathing, besides.”
I inhaled, just to make sure my air bags still worked. Then, with some degree of disgust, I said, “Oh. Would you have done mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on me?”
I was horrified.
James Jenkins said, “Well. I do know how to do it, if I have to. I took a course.”
I nodded—a normal, non-murderer nod, one where your chin actually goes up and down.
I’ll admit it: I didn’t really want to be alone in an empty locker room with James Jenkins, who would have done mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on me (probably only to revive me enough so he could murder me), but there was no way I was going to walk all the way back home in my PE uniform either. I thought about just putting my coat on and going to Karim’s and borrowing clothes from him, but when you’re in eighth grade, coming home from school wearing a different outfit than you left home in is not a workable plan. That would mean trouble for sure.
Having nobody in there with us made the locker room seem even more creepy and dungeonlike than if Coach Bovard were breathing down our necks and making sure there was no talking or gum chewing. Half the lights were turned off, and there was a steady and menacing drip, drip, drip coming from inside the showers. It was the kind of scene no one would be surprised to see in a movie about a murderer.
I sat down on the bench next to James Jenkins, slipped off my tennis shoes, and opened my gym locker. I started pulling out my school clothes, listening to the dripping sounds that echoed in the concrete cavern.
Grateful to still be alive, I slipped my arms into my school shirt and said, “Well, I’m just curious, but why did your dad think holding you back in eighth grade would be a good idea? I didn’t think anyone ever got . . . um . . . held back in middle school.”
And that was when I found out the first enormous truth about James Jenkins.
Because James Jenkins told me this: “My father did it for football.”
I didn’t understand. I thought everyone in Blue Creek believed James Jenkins was going to be a star in football, so why would Kenny Jenkins keep his son from going to high school, where he could be the star of the team everyone in our little town worshipped as some sort of hundred-legged, fifty-headed god?
“But I thought he wanted you to play football for Blue Creek.”
James Jenkins was tying his shoelaces. Slowly. He didn’t move his chin. It was almost as though he were talking to his foot. He nodded. Well, I thought James Jenkins nodded. The movement was so slight, it may have been just the pulse in his neck. I couldn’t be sure. James said, “He does. And he wants me to be one year bigger than any other high school quarterback in the state. It’s the plan for getting me into the University of Texas and playing for the Longhorns. That’s why he held me back. So I could grow.”
That sounded like some kind of science experiment from a horror film.
I finished getting dressed, trying to calculate whether or not I had ever heard anything dumber or more unfair in my life than holding your own kid back—making him flunk—just so he could grow twelve months bigger than other kids who wanted to play a (excuse me) stupid game.
I hadn’t.
I said, “Oh my gosh. Excuse me. That sucks.”
James Jenkins continued to talk to his shoe. He said, “Yeah. It doesn’t matter. I hate football, anyway.”
My head spun. This was all too much, trying to deal with a new reality in which James Jenkins enjoyed writing, actually read books, and hated football.
“You do?” I said.
I had known James Jenkins pretty much all my life. While it was true that I’d never really talked to him after he caused me to fall down the well when I was four years old, I at least thought I knew who James Jenkins was. The James Jenkins I thought I knew was in many ways the collective beliefs of everyone who lived in Blue Creek. And the collective beliefs of an entire town had to be right, right? This kid tying his shoes next to me in the locker room at Dick Dowling Middle School was not the James Jenkins I had nightmares about.
“I can’t stand football. I hate everythin
g about it. I hate watching it on TV. I hate seeing guys paint longhorns on their bellies. I hate Gatorade, especially the green kind. I hate thinking that I can’t do what I want to do,” James Jenkins said. “My father forces me to play.”
I was suddenly very sad, for so many reasons that all jumbled up in my head.
Then James Jenkins said, “You know what, though? When I go to stay with my mom during summers and at Christmas, she signs me up for dance class.”
James Jenkins’s mother lived in Austin.
I nearly passed out. Maybe James Jenkins and I had accidentally slipped into another dimension or something. Maybe Coach Bovard’s office was the portal to an alternate universe. That had to have been the explanation.
James Jenkins and I broke the universe.
“You . . . um . . . dance?” I asked.
“I love to dance,” James said, watching the door of his locker as he snapped it shut. “My dad won’t let me do it here. There’s not enough time, due to football season, he says. And in Blue Creek, football season never ends. I hate football.”
Then James Jenkins stood up, very slowly.
Without looking at me, he said, “Do you have to walk home? I’ll go with you.”
I felt dizzy.
I said, “I don’t have an umbrella.”
James Jenkins may have shrugged, possibly, and said, “Neither do I.”
IN WHICH WE BREAK THE UNIVERSE