A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip (17 page)

Jell-O Pudding Pops that preserve the wavelike peaked shape of your lips. Little Debbie Fudge Brownies that break in half along a groove in the frosting. Summer sausages like #2 pencils, cling-wrapped together on a Styrofoam platter. Strawberry Fruit Wrinkles that scent your fingers if you don’t pour them directly into your mouth. Squares of American cheese sealed so tightly their wrappers show little pale lagoons of trapped air. Chocolate Pop-Tarts sprinkled with shards of something that tastes like sugar but looks like rock salt. Doo Dads floured with cheddar, great masses of leftover peanuts hiding at the bottom of the bag. Little Debbie Nutty Bars, two per wrapper, their sides pasted so lightly together that they separate with the sound bath bubbles make when you whisk through them with your finger. Monster Pops popsicles in three different styles—Satan holding a pitchfork, Frankenstein clutching a skull, and Dracula grasping his chest with eight riblike fingers—made with the kind of ice that splits apart in chunks rather than sunbursting loose from the stick in layers. Blueberry Toaster Strudels with snake trails of sticky icing. Crystal Light powder in frosted plastic tubs. Bon Bons ice cream nuggets in bells of melting chocolate. Capri Sun pouches you can reinflate once they’re empty, squeezing the bottom to launch the stiff little arrow of
the straw across the room. Bugles corn treats that you eat in fives—that
everyone
eats in fives—using them to make lion’s claws or witch’s fingers before you suction them loose with your lips:
hwoot
,
hwoot
,
hwoot
,
hwoot
,
hwoot
. Little Debbie Pecan Spinwheels and Little Debbie Swiss Rolls and Little Debbie Star Crunches and Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pies.

Usually Kevin marauds through the snacks as soon as he gets home from school, stuffing himself in his room, but today is different. Today he is on a reconnaissance mission. He taps his way slowly through the cabinets and the refrigerator, studying the possibilities box by box. The granola bars. The Fruit Roll-Ups. Someone at school has been stealing people’s lunches from their lockers—including, for the fifth time now, his. He needs a new plan, since obviously the potato chips didn’t work. That was his tactic on Monday, shaking a bunch of Ruffles into a clear plastic sandwich bag and then rigging the packet with a mousetrap, the snap kind, with a hook and a bar and a coil. In the morning, before first period, he tucked the chips into a brown paper sack and used them to booby-trap his locker. By noon, when the bell rang, the sack had fallen over, and there were shards of Ruffles everywhere. Which meant that the thief must have popped the door open, taking Kevin’s lunch by the edges, and “Sweet,” the guy had thought, “Score,” but before he could make his getaway, the trap had sprung, showering him with potato chips—a
chips-plosion
. And out loud he had said, “Holy shit!” And the bar had caught the tip of his finger, and he had panicked and wrenched his hand loose, dropping the sack into Kevin’s locker before he slammed the door shut, gave a quick glance
left and right, and went spurting off down the hallway. And for the rest of the day his friends had asked him, “Why do you keep sucking on your finger, man? You look retarded.” And when he showed them the crack in his nail, and the sealed plane of beet-colored blood, they cringed and said, “Ah sweet
Holy
Christ, what’d a car door get you or something?”

Except that it must not have happened that way. If it had, Kevin’s lunch wouldn’t have been stolen again.

He wrings the last few drops from the fantasy.

That looks gruesome, man
.

Dude, you should go to the office with that thing
.

Now what did you do to yourself again?

The open refrigerator hums, shudders, and gives off a cut-grass smell. The grapes and the apples, the ketchup and mustard, sit there sharp and bright, throwing their colors out at him, as if it is always noon inside the refrigerator, on April the third, and everything is drenched in sunlight. It is hard to tell sometimes whether he is hungry or just plain bored.

A snack equals one Pop-Tart, one popsicle, or one Dixie cup full of Doo Dads or Bugles, though occasionally, when no one else is home, he will cheat and have two.

That evening, after TV, he does his geography, then lies on his back clutching Percy to his stomach. After which comes the part where Percy decides whether or not to muscle free of him. He lowers his ears, rearranges his weight, and stiffens his spine, then jumps a little invisible hurdle and trots from the room purring.

The dishwasher is bathing the dishes. The VCR is playing
All My Children
. The sound of a car decelerating around the curve reminds Kevin of Thad for some odd reason—how,
when he used to spend the night, Kevin’s mom would drop them off at Breckenridge and they would pocket the money she gave them for the movies, striding off into the yellow-lit darkness to hang out with girls. The shopping center’s walkways were framed with X-shaped wooden beams, and Kevin would lounge in the fork of one looking cool, keeping his left leg rigid and letting his right dangle like a cat’s tail, and beneath him, on the ground, Thad would take whichever girl he had picked to be his girlfriend and wrap her in kisses, and the trees would rustle in the wind, and the beetles would pankle against the lightbulbs, and it seems to Kevin that he was more grown-up on those chilly Friday nights than he has ever been since. He had a different best friend then, a different school, and though he didn’t know it, he was at the peak of something.

Who can say what possesses him, but hardly a minute passes before he is calling Thad to ask if he wants to sleep over on Friday. Why shouldn’t his life turn the other way for once? Why can’t things go backward?

Thad seems guarded, suspicious, as if he is anticipating a prank. “Yeah? What do you want?”

“I was calling to see if maybe you can spend the night this weekend. Maybe Friday? After school?”

A T-shirty, smothered sound, a little hum of noise, and then, “Mom says I have to ask Dad, and Dad’s not home. I’ll let you know tomorrow, good?”

“That’s cool. It’s casual.”

“Yeah. Right. ‘Casual.’ ”

“I thought we could hang out at Breckenridge if you want. You know. ‘See a movie.’ ”

“Uh-huh.”

“Or go to the mall.”

“Yeah, look, I’ve gotta go, so—bye.”

Kevin is already singing Chicago’s “Stay the Night” by the time he hangs up. He fixes his upper lip flat against his teeth like Peter Cetera, trying for that pulled-taffy voice of his. The words slide right out of him: “No need to hit me with an attitude, because I haven’t got the time.” He has the kind of brain that unearths songs all day long, one after another, harvesting them from books, movies, sermons, lessons, conversations, and announcements. The slightest scrap or echo of a lyric and
boom!
—there he’ll be, reconstructing some twice-heard melody, verse, chorus, and verse. He does it with so little thought that sometimes he’ll find himself hours deep in a song with no idea where it began. This time, though, the source is unmistakable.
Spend the night
, so
stay the night
.

Back in his room he runs his fingers down the rows of his tape box. Chicago is sandwiched between Van Halen and John Cougar Mellencamp. Funny how their titles sound like a quarterback calling hike:
19! 84! 17! Uh! Huh!

More than half of Kevin’s tapes are music club releases, six for the price of one from RCA or eleven for a penny from Columbia House. Every time he resurrects his membership, another big rattling cardboard brick of them will appear in his mailbox. Music club tapes are a bleached white plastic like candle wax, with a smell totally unlike the fruit-sugar scent of the tapes he buys from Target or Camelot, the see-through kind with the frosted lettering. He plugs
Chicago 17
into his stereo and rewinds it to the beginning. He has just enough time to listen to side one before he has to change for bed.

He goes to sleep with no plans, no ideas, yet locked in his mind the next morning is a strategy for revenge. No one’s going to steal
his
lunch. He wakes like an athlete diving into cold water, with the same breath of excitement he remembers experiencing as a kid on Saturdays. There is a deadness to the house, a tingling moon-quiet. He feels as if he is somewhere he has never been, separated from the curving streets and grassy slopes of his neighborhood by light-years and miles—whole mountains away, whole galaxies away.

At first he is sorry to disturb the stillness, but then he hears the tick of the water heater as his mom turns on the shower, hears Percy scratching at the litter box, and instantly he is back home again. He pads to the kitchen to begin his work. Step one he makes a bologna-and-cheese sandwich. Step two he takes the top slice of bread, the undressed slice, into the bathroom, and pinches hold of the corner to douse it in urine. Step three: he bakes the bread dry with a hair dryer—it stiffens weirdly in the heat without ever quite toasting. And finally, step four: he writes “I peed on this sandwich” on a scrap of paper and plants it between the cheese and the lettuce.

He bags the sandwich up and takes it to school. The problem is that none of the lockers at CAC have real locks, just latches that slide open with a hard steel
chock
. What they are is
un
lockers. Take-what-you-wanters. Welcome-on-iners. The idea seems to be that since stealing is unchristian, Christians won’t steal. Some theory. Kevin loads the morning’s books into his camera bag, then puts his lunch on the backpack shelf—
so long, you, and good luck
—and cuts through the gym. Stretched out behind the basketball court is the
stage the school uses for concerts and plays. It’s a strange thing, that stage, able to fire pins and needles into him just by existing. Its curtains bulge and deflate in the air-conditioning. The lights turn to fuzz on its polished boards. If his life were a TV show, he thinks, it would be an episode of
Amazing Stories
, and the twist would be that the stage was actually alive. The stage has plans, he imagines. The stage knows what it wants. It wants to maneuver him up one of its skinny sunken mini-staircases, giving him intangible little bumps and plucks with its intangible little fingers. It wants him to put on a show. Butterflies: that’s the nervous feeling you get in your stomach before a performance. But what do you call it when the performance is entirely in your imagination? Caterpillars maybe. Moths.

The first bell rings while he is still at half-court. By the time he reaches Bible, Thad has already claimed his seat. Kevin tries to attract his attention, but something else keeps catching his eye, something just to the right or the left, flea-hopping away whenever Kevin moves in for an interception.

Thad is asking Brandon—Drale, not Ostermueller—about a movie they both saw on TV. “Did you watch the Showtime version or the USA version?”

“USA. Why? What’s the difference?”

“R versus PG. You know that massage scene where chick thinks dude’s a girl?”

“Ooohhh yeah.”

“You gotta see the Showtime version. That’s all I’m gonna say.”

Thad fiddles with his gold chain, triggering the clasp
click click click
. Not until Mr. Garland has taken roll does Kevin finally manage to signal him. He mouths “Friday?” and Thad
creases his brow and mouths back “What.” Then he makes a revolving-door motion with his finger—
turn the other way
—and just like that Kevin remembers that they are no longer friends.

Of course. He is such a kid. It kills him that their days of kicking the soccer ball around are over, kills him that he never knew how little it would take to smash them. Nothing. Nothing. A split second. A white lie. In his memory he hears
Cut it out, guys
, and
Detective La
, and suddenly he feels the blur of heat in his eyes. He hopes no one sees him, though he would bet a hundred dollars they do. Sometimes his feelings run so hard in him he’s sure they must pour from his skin. And sometimes he’s surprised that other people notice him at all.

An hour later, for instance, in English, Miss Vincent reads the class a story and “The End,” she says. “Show of hands. Who’s an ant
annnnd
—who’s a grasshopper? Kevin! A grasshopper! Why’s that?”

Clearly the ant should have shared his food—that’s what Kevin thinks, and he says so. He has a way of taking an answer and, without hammering or tugging at it, making it sound like an election speech. After he has finished talking, he notices Lisa Minton staring at him from across the circle of desks, slouching so low in her chair that the shoulders of her jacket engulf her neck. She is puzzled enough to ignore the silence of the room and ask, “What’s it about that you’re crying all the time?”

He realizes that he is still sniffing and blinking. “I’m not sure.” The truth is that he always thought he would outgrow it.

“Do you have like allergies?”

“Bee stings.”

“No, I mean like pets or dust or pollen.”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“Are you sick then?”

“Let’s talk about something else.”

“Yes,” Miss Vincent agrees. “Let’s,” and because she laughs, everyone else does, too.

Someone’s footsteps go beating down the hallway like an Indian drum. How it works who knows, but all of a sudden Kevin imagines his locker door springing open with a pop and a shiver. His palms begin to sweat. There are two things happening today—Thad and the sandwich—and if one of them doesn’t go right, he thinks, surely the other will. He spends the next few hours concentrating just hard enough to do his work. After science and before geography, the brown paper bag is right where he left it, but forty-five minutes go by, and when he joins the lunch crowds, it is gone—snatched! He gives his locker a triumphant smack. His throat makes a crowlike cackle. It is unlike any sound he has ever heard himself produce. Walking past the classrooms and the bulletin boards, he feels a wonderful lifting sensation, as if space has flip-flopped around him and a whole world of things are rising that should be falling. Someday this is how he will die, he imagines, so full of happiness he will burst from his life a rocket.