by Andrew Smith
I read the entire feature about James, and once again I was surprised my head did not explode. The reporter who’d written the article obviously spent a lot of time watching James train and talking to him about dance. And if I didn’t already know that James Jenkins loved to read and write, some of the things that supposedly came out of his mouth and ended up between quotation marks in the Austin newspaper would have struck me as being complete fiction.
Because in the article, James Jenkins said this: “I think it’s time to reexamine the narrative which suggests that dance—ballet in particular—is not a masculine pursuit. The whole idea of discouraging a boy from doing something because fifty or a hundred years ago some uptight white man in America decided it did not fit with the construct of manliness is stupid and offensive.”
That was the same James Jenkins who flunked eighth grade, or got held back, or whatever else he was told happened to him.
The article made me sad and angry at the same time, and as soon as I finished reading it I made up my mind about what I was going to do.
So I became my father. Well, in name only, because I would never be as into wearing kilts and eating garbage as Dad was. But in that moment, I transformed into Dave Abernathy, the one-time honorary mayor of Blue Creek and owner of Lily Putt’s Indoor-Outdoor Miniature Golf Course. Also in that moment, I wished I were better with words, like James Jenkins was, because where did he come up with saying things like “narrative” and “construct” without borrowing a thesaurus from (excuse me) dumb Mr. Mannweiler, who encouraged me to only use “easy” words?
And it took me nearly an hour just to write a one-paragraph e-mail to Acceleration Dance Studio that sounded grown-up enough to have come from a small-business owner named Dave Abernathy, who was inviting the studio to come to Blue Creek Days, and asking specifically, maybe you could have that James Jenkins kid in the newspaper article, you know, the ballet boy wonder (since he comes from Blue Creek and all), and some of his dance partners put on a little demonstration for the people of our little town.
In my (Dad’s) e-mail, I even included the following spectacular closing:
The people of Blue Creek Town love ballet even more than we love biscuits and gravy!
Sincerely,
Dave Abernathy
Owner, Lily Putt’s Indoor-Outdoor Miniature Golf Course
Honorary Mayor of Blue Creek, 2015–2016
I realize it was laying things on a bit thick, because getting between a Blue Creeker and his Sunday morning biscuits and gravy was like trying to get between a pair of cubs and their grizzly-bear mom: You were bound to end up with tooth marks. But I was hoping for my (Dad’s) enthusiasm to convince Acceleration Dance Studio to surprise us all with something nobody in our town would ever have expected.
I for one never expected what ended up happening as a result of what I did.
THE MUSTANG MILE
“Are you trying to start something?” James Jenkins asked.
Let me explain.
First off, it was difficult for me to answer him because I was afraid that I was about to be murdered. And again I found myself in the precarious position of potentially being murdered no matter how I answered James’s question. Thirdly, it was hard to say anything on account of the fact that James Jenkins had my back pinned beside the doorway of the (excuse me) stupid boys’ locker room, and I was pretty sure he was about to punch me, and I have never been punched by anyone in my life.
Also, I was worried because we only had three minutes to change into our PE clothes, James Jenkins was using up precious non-talking and non-gum-chewing getting-dressed time, and trouble just seemed to always find me and James Jenkins when it came to the locker room, PE class, and Coach Bovard.
I had grossly miscalculated James Jenkins’s reaction to my e-mail invitation for his dance school to come out to Blue Creek and have James give the town a show. And I could see by James’s expression that he was afraid. It also looked like he was on the verge of crying, and one thing you never want to do to a murderer is make him cry in front of you, because a crying murderer is probably the most scary kind of murderer that ever existed.
“I . . . I’m sorry . . . Um. James. I thought it was something you wanted to do,” I said. My words didn’t even sound convincing to me, though.
James Jenkins didn’t say anything. He just inhaled—deeply and very slowly—through his nose, like a sad murderer would do. His face was red and his eyes were wet.
So, taking advantage of the delay in my being murdered, I continued, “Really, James. When I saw those pictures, and you told me how much you love to do ballet, and then I even read that article about you in the Statesman, I thought it would be cool if you could show us all what you do. I thought you’d be happy. I’m really sorry.”
“I almost believed you were starting to be nice to me after all this time. I thought we were friends or something,” James Jenkins said.
I felt sick in my stomach when I saw a tear squeeze out from the corner of James Jenkins’s unmoving right eye. I looked down so I wouldn’t have to see him.
Why was James Jenkins apparently needing me to be nice to him? There was something—and it must have been pretty big—that I was missing.
I felt terrible.
I never intended to do something bad to James Jenkins, but I guess it happened.
James softened and I looked at him. It almost felt like he’d given up or something. He took his hands away from my shoulders, even though I fully expected (and believed I deserved) to be punched by James Jenkins.
Guys began coming out from the locker room, dressed for PE.
The bug kid—Michael Dolgoff—stopped, looked at us, and shook his head.
(Excuse me.) “You guys are so freakin’ stupid,” Michael Dolgoff said.
Another boy, named Brody Bjork, said (excuse me), “If Blovard makes us run, I’m kicking your ass, Abernathy.”
Brody Bjork was a Mathlete, so I didn’t take his threat too seriously, which was probably one of many mistakes I’d made since coming back from my rain-soaked worm-eating vacation with Dad.
Talk about putting on a show for Blue Creek!
A third kid, named Malaki Jackson, who had a very high-pitched, piercing voice, said (excuse me), “Holy jeez! Abernathy made JJ cry!”
And that was it. I deserved to be murdered. Worse than murdered, if there was such a thing.
James (JJ, as Malaki and some of the other boys at Dick Dowling Middle School called him) swiped a palm across his face and without saying anything else ducked (very slowly) into the locker room, leaving me standing there alone in front of an audience of the entire eighth-grade boys’ PE class. I calculated (and not being a Mathlete like Brody Bjork, I was probably wrong) that I had less than a minute to change into my (excuse me) idiotic PE uniform, so I dashed through the doorway after James Jenkins.
I was already half undressed by the time I made it to my locker. But James Jenkins had not finished dressing, and although it was certain that we were not about to say anything to each other, the bell rang for us to be in our numbered spots for Coach Bovard to do his head count.
James Jenkins and I were late to class, and Coach Bovard was standing at the end of our bench, his arms folded across his chest, just watching us. Or, at least, it looked like he was watching us. It was hard to tell.
Coach Bovard had a clipboard tucked under one arm and was wearing sunglasses that were so dark, you couldn’t tell what he was looking at or if his eyes were even open. “I don’t know what it is with you two,” he said, shaking his head. Then Coach Bovard added, “I think the whole class is going to be so happy to run the Mustang Mile today.”
My heart sank to my belly button.
Nobody was ever happy about doing the Mustang Mile, which was actually much longer (and more difficult) than a regular mile.
The Mustang Mile was four laps on the track, like a regular mile, but at each of the long straightaways we had to go up and down every stairway on both th
e home-side and visitor-side bleachers—all the way to the top and then back down to the bottom. There were eight staircases on the home side and six on the other, plus a mile on the track, on top of everything.
And of all the boys in our class, not one of them seemed to connect our punishment with anything James Jenkins did—it was all on me. They all wanted to kill me, but I probably deserved it, anyway.
As was the usual case on our class runs, I was next to last, and James Jenkins was just a few steps behind me. It was especially frightening because of the noise of all those feet thundering up and down the aluminum bleachers in front of me, and then the pursuing clank! clank! clank! of James Jenkins’s size twelves slowly and steadily trailing along just behind me, that sounded like some kind of tireless, mechanized metallic murderer.
On the fifth staircase up the home side on our final lap, James Jenkins got closer. And then closer.
My legs were burning. I was too little to take such big steps, and as much as I desperately did not want James Jenkins to catch up to me, I couldn’t speed up to get away from him.
I started humming “I Will Walk with Him in the Garden of Blood.”
Pretty soon, James Jenkins was right beside me, matching my stride, step for step. He kept his chin and eyes forward.
James Jenkins said, “My instructor at Acceleration called me before lunch today and asked me if I’d dance for her. That’s how I knew it had to be you. I can’t say no to my instructor.”
There was nothing I could say to him. I kept my eyes down so I wouldn’t see how many steps were still ahead of me.
Clank! Clank! Clank! Clank!
James Jenkins kept his eyes forward. But that was just because he’s James Jenkins. He said, “Why did you do that? My dad’s never going to let me go back to my mom’s place now.”
Clank! Clank! Clank! Clank!
My eyes stung from sweat, and my lungs strained for oxygen, but I managed to choke out, “Are you going to kill me, James?”
James Jenkins didn’t answer for a really long time, which is totally something a murderer who was running the Mustang Mile and who also didn’t really want his dad to see him dance would do in response to a question like that. We had gotten to the top, then turned and headed back down the opposite side of the stairs. Only three more staircases to go—and then we’d have to do the visitors’ side.
(Excuse me.)
And James Jenkins said, “I’m not going to kill you, Sam. But maybe Brody Bjork or Malaki Jackson will.”
I looked across to the opposite bleachers. Brody Bjork and Malaki Jackson were already at the bottom of the last staircase on the visitors’ side—the finish line for Coach Bovard’s (excuse me) Moronic Mustang Mile. They had their shirts off and were doubled over, their hands on their knees, breathing hard, sweating, exhausted.
They’d certainly be rested and fresh, and ready to kill me, by the time I got to the bottom of that final staircase.
James and I finished the home-side bleachers and went back out onto the track to round the bend to the visitors’ side. There were only a few guys still running ahead of us, and James was right beside me, so close I could feel the heat radiating from his body like a cloud of volcanic vapors. He continued to match my pace without saying another word.
We got to the top of the first staircase on the last set of bleachers, and as we turned to head back down I said, “Do you want me to tell them to cancel it? My dad, I mean. I mean pretend to be my dad and then tell them not to come? And to not make you do ballet? At Blue Creek Days? So you don’t have to do it? Because I will, if you want. Do you want me to do that? Tell them no?”
I knew what I said made absolutely no sense, but I hoped James understood what I was offering to do.
I counted the clangs of our footsteps while James Jenkins was not answering me. On the way up the second set, James finally said, “No.”
I was so happy James Jenkins answered me, and that I was still alive—at least until I got in with the rest of the boys.
“Do you mean tell them no? Or you don’t want me to tell them no?” I asked.
“Will you just shut up?” James Jenkins said.
Now I was confused, but I was also too scared of James Jenkins to say anything else.
At the bottom again, James finally cleared things up. He said, “I want to do it, but just shut up.”
I took a deep breath. “Okay,” I said. “I’m shutting up.”
James did not move his head. He never did. He just kept his focus forward as though he were intensely concentrating on the finest details of every single one of those (excuse me) stupid aluminum stairs.
And as we turned to climb up the last set, and every sweaty, angry, out-of-breath boy in our class was at the bottom, waiting, watching us, James Jenkins said, “Just stay by me so those guys don’t start messing with you.”
So I said, “I think it’s time to reexamine the narrative which suggests that the construct of manliness encourages boys to punch other boys they get mad at for making them run Mustang Miles.”
And James Jenkins, without moving his eyes or his chin, said, “Shut up, Sam.”
A DAY FOR GROSS MISCALCULATIONS
The worst things start with the end-of-the-school-day bell.
I realized that I came very near to ruining James Jenkins’s life, and it was all because I had assumed I was so smart about things that I could easily solve all his problems. But that was incredibly (excuse me) stupid of me, and it made me feel awful.
So I did what James Jenkins suggested, and I just shut up for the rest of the day.
I also stayed on an imaginary James Jenkins leash that was about eighteen inches long when we all went back into the locker room and the extremely (excuse me) disgusting showers. Nobody would get near me as long as I hung around James Jenkins, and that only worsened my feelings of guilt, on account of the fact that I was taking advantage of James being so frightening to the other boys (and to me).
But if anyone had the right to be mad enough to punch me in the face, it was James Jenkins who should be in the front of that line.
Still, as creepy as it was, it seemed like all the guys in our PE class, including Brody Bjork, Malaki Jackson, and (excuse me) dumb Michael Dolgoff, just stared at me the whole time I was in the shower, like a pack of murderers would do, or like hungry lions who were just waiting for the extremely adorable and tiny baby antelope to lag behind the protection of the herd, which in this case consisted of an intimidating fourteen-year-old ballet boy wonder named James Jenkins.
I really did break the universe.
And once Coach Bovard released us boys from class and we all scattered, limping and sore from our Mustang Mile, in different Dick Dowling directions for the last classes of the day, I assumed that, like most grievances in middle school, everything about what I’d done to get the class punished had been forgotten.
Unfortunately, I was completely wrong about this.
It was a day for gross miscalculations on my part.
Blue Creek Days were nearly upon us, but I hadn’t yet decided on a recipe for my entry. Every day after school, I’d been experimenting at Karim’s house, and he and Bahar both loyally swore to me that they were not getting tired of daily variations of macaroni and cheese. But that’s what friends do, I suppose, as opposed to tricking you into performing ballet in front of a bunch of red-meat-craving Texas football fans, or throwing a ball in such a way that it causes you to wind up trapped for three days in an abandoned well.
Hayley Garcia and the rest of the Science Club were nearly finished assembling our rogue-radio-station alien-monitoring device, and they were counting on me to climb up the fiberglass T. rex at Lily Putt’s Indoor-Outdoor Miniature Golf Course (the highest point in Blue Creek) that weekend to perform the installation. I just hoped Dad wasn’t planning on proclaiming “kilt day” at the golf course. But I wouldn’t know anyway, because Dad wasn’t saying much to me these days.
The final bell of the day rang and the m
ain hallway of Dick Dowling Middle School transformed into a swirling sea of bodies, all unaware of the individual missions each of us was on—to get outside the building and breathe freedom once again. It was the way things always went: Nobody paid attention to anyone, because we were all so focused on making the most economical departure possible.
That’s the best way I can explain why I did not notice Malaki Jackson, Brody Bjork, and Michael Dolgoff the bug warrior waiting for me in the hall as I went to dump my books into my locker. And while I was caught up in the moment of not paying attention to the epicenter of activity in the hallway, the boys came up from behind me as I had my face pointed into my locker.
I felt just a momentary sensation of fingers gripping my shoulders, then a solid shove from behind, and in less than one second the worst imaginable thing that I could ever think of happened: the boys pushed me inside my locker and slammed the metal door completely shut, trapping me inside.
I was dimly aware of Malaki Jackson (because he had that high-pitched voice) laughing and saying, “See you in a Mustang Mile or two, Abernathy!”
Then everything went completely black.
HEART-SHAPED CONFIDENCE
This all starts with a memory.
Ever since that Thanksgiving Day when I was four years old, there had been a giant blank spot in the stories my memory constructed about the Little Boy in the Well.
I mean, I had heard so much about those three days and their aftermath that the stories people told me painted their own pictures—filled in the blanks—as though they were really what I experienced.
I could not tell the difference.
Even so, I could never recall what even one second of being trapped at the bottom of that well actually felt like. I couldn’t remember the first thing about my days in the well, or much at all about the year or so after when I simply stopped talking.