A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip (14 page)

He’s not sure what he means, or if he even means anything at all, but the tone of sad-sack defeat in his voice gets him a laugh.

The result is incontestable. That’s who he is: funny.

The rest of the day passes somehow, and then he is lying on his bedroom floor staring at the blades of the ceiling fan, edged with ruffs of gray dust, and there is only Friday to finish before Christmas break.

He spends most of the evening working on the lyrics of a Christmas song—“Deck the School,” he calls it—the kind of parody he has written by the dozens ever since he started buying
Mad
s and
Cracked
s from the magazine rack at Kroger. The verses ascend through the school grades, each one landing squarely on a big-name student, a Beau Dawkins or a Bryan Plumlee, a Matthew Connerly or a Doug Odom. The next morning Kevin deposits the page anonymously on Mr. Garland’s desk and waits for him to read it. You never know with Mr. Garland. You just never do. He is half jester and half grouch. Telling a joke in his class is as likely to earn you a demerit as a laugh. But after the bell rings and the quiz begins, when he finally lays his fingers on the page, he chuckles silently with his mouth closed, exercising one side of his face as if he is working the sugar off a jawbreaker.

In chapel, sitting with the rest of the seventh-graders at the far end of the bleachers, Kevin watches him take the microphone and announce, “The kid who wrote this actually included all the fa-la-las, but I’m just going to give you the good stuff.” Mr. Garland delivers the lines like wisecracks, pausing to let the laughter burn down to ashes. The loudest reaction comes from the eighth-graders, for “When we get
back, there’ll be no lickin’s / Assuming that there’s no Chris Pickens,” and then from the seniors, for “Can you hear the women screamin’? / There’s mistletoe and (gasp!) Scott Freeman.”

Afterward, in the thick of the applause, a voice shouts out, “Who wrote it?” and Mr. Garland tacks the paper to the stand with his finger. “Sorry, folks. ‘By anonymous.’ ”

Someone once told Kevin that if a hummingbird’s wings stop, its heart will explode.

That afternoon, following seventh period, Ethan Carpenter invites him to a Friday-night movie with his youth group. Kevin calls his mom from the pay phone in the foyer to ask permission.

“To spend the night, you mean?”

“
Can
I?”

“Yes. I suppose. If it’s all right with Ethan’s parents. Have them call me.”

There is no better place to sleep than away from home. He and Ethan wait at the loop for Ethan’s dad, watching the cars vibrate slowly down the carpool lane, Kevin tolling the big metal school bell gently with one of his knuckles. They go shuddering through town in the old Chevy van Ethan’s dad uses to deliver cigarette cartons. The carpets are saturated with the mushroom-and-cinnamon smell of tobacco, and Craig O’Neill is DJing on KKYK, and Ethan can’t get used to Spider-Man’s new black costume. “I don’t know. Call me a sucker for tradition. Spider-Man isn’t supposed to be the Punisher.” His dad leaves them at the foot of Ethan’s driveway, pulling away with a cheep of his horn. Other people’s houses are always too bright or too dark. Ethan’s is somehow both, with its small square cave of a living room and its bedroom
glazed white with sunshine. “I’m hungry,” he says. “You hungry? Let’s see what we got here.” They eat pudding pops out of the freezer, and corn dogs out of the microwave, and then Ethan’s mom drops them off at the big brown moon-dome of the Cinema 150, with its giant screen curving across the auditorium like a tipped-over rainbow. Sarah Bell sits one row behind them, between Jess and another girl. Every so often Sarah’s clothing will rustle as she recrosses her legs, Sarah’s knee will jog the back of his chair, Sarah’s stomach will produce a bearlike rumble, and Jess will say, “Hungry much?” The movie is about Sherlock Holmes as a high school student, and Kevin and Ethan both agree: take away the gargoyles and the stained-glass knight, and what’s left? It’s no
Raiders
, no
Jedi
. It can go away. Goodbye.

“So we’ve got this party at the youth minister’s house,” Ethan says. “We can catch a ride out there with someone, or I can call my folks to pick us up. What do you think?”

“Who all’s gonna be there?”

“Pretty much everyone you see.”

Which means Jess and Margaret and Tara and Kristen and Julia, all the Pleasant Valley Church of Christers.

“Everyone?”

Ethan has the face of someone wresting his tongue around for a sesame seed. A “yes” filters out of him like a sigh. “Yes. Sarah’s going to be there.”

They take a bench in one of the church vans. Their breath is whitening the air, and their hands are jammed in their pockets, and the heater begins to blow, and the tires whisper over the asphalt, and a half-moon hangs low in the sky, and the traffic exhaust makes the stoplights look like open paint
cans, round glosses of color with little coils of light inside, and it is not so hard to believe that anything can happen on a cold night, at the beginning of Christmas, with girls. They roll up University, past House of Hobbies and Discount Records and TCBY, and “I’ve gotta tell you,” Kevin says, “I’m kind of surprised the church would take you guys to a PG-13 movie.”

“Wait, that was PG, wasn’t it?” Ethan says.

“PG-13,” one of the older kids says, “for violence.”

“And pipe-smoking,” someone adds.

“And lameness.”

“Anyway,” says Ethan, “there aren’t any rules against that sort of thing. We’re all thirteen.”

“
You’re
not.”

“In two weeks! Give me a break!”

Kevin’s family used to be Catholic, but now they are Methodist. He has never attended any church other than St. James—not since he was a little kid—but going to chapel at CAC has taught him that the Church of Christ is against all the same things his is, plus a few random extras: organ music, dancing, co-ed swimming. Back in October, during a sermon, Superintendent Diles outraged some of the kids when he divided the school’s Church of Christers and its non–Church of Christgoers into two separate categories, “the Christians here and all the rest of you.”

“I’m as Christian as anyone else,” Kevin remembers hearing afterward, and “It’s like he’s saying we’re not going to Heaven,” and maybe some people were angry only because they believed they
should
be angry, they had a responsibility, but others seemed truly indignant.

That same afternoon, waiting in the bleachers for PE to
start, Kevin said to Ethan, “You don’t really think that, do you? That all Methodists are going to Hell?”

Saying the word—
all
those Bible words:
hell, damn, Jesus
—felt like cussing.

“Nah. The way I look at it is that how God wants you to live is like a point at the center of a circle. You should try to figure out where that point is and live as close to it as possible, but God wants us all in Heaven with Him, and salvation’s a pretty big circle.”

“
You’re
a pretty big circle.”

It was the obvious joke, and Ethan knuckle-punched him on the shoulder.

“Ow. See, it’s funny ’cause it makes no sense.”

The punch didn’t leave a bruise, just a tiny constellation of scarlet dots that were there when he went to bed but gone by the time he woke up. For the next few days Kevin couldn’t stop thinking about Ethan’s invisible moving circle of sin and forgiveness. He felt as if God was tracing him everywhere he went, sliding His eyes this way and that as he walked to the Superstop or kicked the soccer ball against his fence, ran laps around the school gym or collected his lunch from his locker. And still, occasionally, Kevin imagines he is drifting around inside the big glass ring of God’s grace. With every lie, every favor, every compliment, every dirty joke, every act of meanness or goodness, selfishness or decency, he goes bobbing around before God’s eyes like an animal plunging through the crosshairs of a gun. Someday God will fire, and Kevin will die. If God hits him, he will go to Heaven. If God misses, he will go to Hell.

The van carries them past Grady’s Pizza and the Mole Hole, then past the barbecue joint where the grill smoke flows
from an old black cannon in the parking lot, and then under a bridge where a deserted basketball court lies spread out in the lamplight like a scene at the bottom of a pool, a dozen layers of algae straining the sun to a thin green gloss. Little Rock keeps taking him by surprise. Shopping malls and roller rinks erupt from the ground overnight, thrusting up through meadows and plots of trees. Everywhere he looks there is another bookstore, another burger place, an arcade, a playground, a golf course, a hospital, a school, a supermarket, a bank, a church, a bowling alley, a nightclub, a car wash—but the truth is they have all been there for years, and Kevin has simply never noticed them.

Where has he been living all this time?

There are so many blocks, so many neighborhoods.

The van makes a quick series of turns before it stops at a house he has never seen. The street is quiet enough for him to hear the trees clicking, the grass rustling. A stop sign with a missing bolt clanks against its steel post. Only the cars parked along the curb suggest that the party has already started.

Kevin follows Ethan inside. From the TV Huey Lewis sings, “Don’t need money, don’t take fame, don’t need no credit card to ride this train.” A couple of seniors lie arm wrestling on the living room carpet, their torsos propped up on their massive elbows. Kevin’s heart begins to race when he sees Kenneth in the corner, pouring a Pepsi from one of the two-liters on the card table, but it is some other guy, a lanky D&D type with his own striped button-up, his own brown hair, and oh thank God not Kenneth at all.

Ethan knows everyone, and Kevin knows Ethan, so no one asks him why he’s there. And no one will, he figures, as long as the two of them remain where they are, standing against
the wall swigging lukewarm Sprite from plastic cups. He feels the way he used to feel at the water fountain after recess, as if he could drink and drink without ever stopping, an open well with a body around it.

Sarah is sitting on the couch watching music videos, absentmindedly toying with a scrunchie, her fingers lazily separating and then coming back together. Man. She is (1) unearthly, (2) unconceited, (3) unequaled, and (4) unattainable.

(5) Unfortunately.

He has liked her since he was six years old—half his life. He lets his eyes skip through the room. Some crazy screwdriver tightens his ribs around his heart. All the girls with their makeup and their hair spray. All the boyfriends with their girlfriends. It’s not that no one loves him. That’s not it at all. He is loved in a hundred little ways by a hundred different people. That should be enough, shouldn’t it? But he can’t stop wishing he was loved in one big way, by one person in particular.

It is terribly late to be in some strange grown-up’s house. Ordinarily Kevin would have brushed his teeth and changed out of his school clothes by now. Gradually the party has developed the pleasant buzzing softness of an episode he is just lying in bed imagining.

At ten, the youth minister situates a folding chair in the middle of the living room and calls everyone together for a game. The rules: a volunteer sits blindfolded with his hands covering his ears while the game master devises three options—for instance a bear hug, a neck massage, and an Indian burn; one, two, and three. Then the volunteer removes his blindfold, picks a number, and selects someone to perform the mystery
routine. “Are you ready? Let’s play.” A blond girl with black eyebrows listens to a guy serenade her with Phil Collins. A girl in stonewashed jeans gets her back scratched through her sweater. A tall guy in a letter jacket, with the little white bull’s-eyes of recently removed braces on his teeth, accidentally chooses a noogie, and everyone whistles and claps and talks in a ripple of voices.

Kevin is not expecting the youth minister to say his name, or “Why don’t you come up here and take yourself a turn, buddy?” but he does, so Kevin walks to the chair, slips the blindfold over his eyes, and listens to the stampede sound his palms make when he covers his ears. Then someone taps him on the shoulder, and he can hear again. He removes the blindfold. Through the window he sees the yellow glow of the porch light, reaching barely as far as the hedges.

“All right, Kevin. One, two, or three?”

He always says two.

“Great. And who’s going to help you out with that?”

In his head he urges himself to reply, “I’m no fool. Sarah,” but though he is ninety percent certain it would be a cool thing to say, he just points, says a crackling, “Her,” and tries to prevent himself from smiling because if he smiles she will know everything. The
oooh
that stretches through the room makes his armpits go clammy. Sarah cuts slowly through the crowd. Then she is inches away, her face diving in to kiss him, and Thad and Kenneth can go to hell, because he is better, he is better, he is better.

The locker room door opens in an aerosol of sweat and shampoo—
fwoosh
, all at once, a steamy summer day’s worth—and Kevin makes a dash for his duffel bag.