A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip (19 page)

“Okay. Fine. Are we almost done?”

“Actually, that’s it. The last question. So, let’s see, you got twenty-eight—plus one, two—thirty correct, which means your IQ is … ninety-six. And that makes you … average.”

Kevin is barely friends with Sean Hammons, and to be here at his house, in the weird incense of his family’s cooking, on the couch that preserves the curves and valleys of their bodies, is bizarre. Not half as bizarre, though, as quizzing his mom with the IQ test he bought at B. Dalton last
week. In her eyes Kevin catches a waspy look, a quick slant of anger. And you know what? She’s right. The test is hard. He could swear that some of the questions have multiple correct answers. Take the one with the five pictures—no words, just illustrations—(a) a saw, (b) a knife, (c) a spoon, (d) a shovel, and (e) a screwdriver. And “Which one of the five is least like the other four?” At first Kevin guessed (e) the screwdriver, because it joins things together, while saws, knives, spoons, and shovels all take things apart, but the proper answer was (b) the knife, since
knife
starts with a
k
and the other four start with an
s
. But what if the knife was a steak knife
—s
? Or the saw was a handsaw
—h
? What if the issue was whether the object in the picture sloped this way or that way? Or whether it could be used as a murder weapon? It’s tricky, a question like that.

From the driveway comes a crackle of broken concrete. At a distance it sounds the way potato chips sound when you’re chewing. Mrs. Hammons glances outside and says, “Well hey, I think that’s gotta be your mom’s Subaru. And your bag’s right there in the corner. And don’t forget your poster boards.”

“I won’t.”

Sean lives in an area of Little Rock that Kevin has never visited before, a tiny hidden drawer of a place, so far from the hills and curves of Northwick Court that even the spacing between the trees seems strange. The grown-ups say their hellos on the front porch, pretending to laugh about the things that grown-ups pretend to laugh about. Then the car closes its doors, and the house closes its, and Sean and his mom vanish back into the bricks and the carpet, and Kevin and his mom drive away together, mazing through the side streets that never quite intersect with the highway.

Barely three weeks of school remain: the last week of April and the first two weeks of May, plus Friday—tomorrow—a clean little pocket of woodsy air waiting to rush like a deep breath into everyone’s lungs. The walkathon will start after lunch, the lock-in as soon as the final bell rings. But the centerpiece of the night will be the lip-synching contest. Kevin is practically sure of it. To win, he and Sean will need a gimmick, like that guy from
Puttin’ on the Hits
who split himself into Diana Ross and Lionel Richie, painting his face two different shades of black.

“Hot for Teacher”: that will be their song. They’re going to serenade the Magic Marker drawing they made of Miss Vincent, all tall and hourglassy, with a red swimsuit, bunny ears, and crisscross stockings. The two of them used up the first part of the afternoon kneeling over a couple of poster boards, darkening her lines and then filling in the colors. They couldn’t remember whether her eyes were blue or green or some watercolory in-between shade, so they flipped a quarter to decide. The second part they spent in Sean’s backyard, listening to the song, then rewinding it and listening again. At first their moves were sloppy, embarrassing. Sean kept sawing around like Eddie Van Halen with his tennis-racket guitar, doing his impression of a virtuoso making the notes blur—
DOW​nannanaDOW​nannana​NOW
. Maddening. But Kevin insisted that they rehearse their choreography until they got it down pat: “Okay, I’ll go over here and sing, ‘I brought my pencil,’ and then you can go over there and sing, ‘Give me something to write on, man.’ Ready? Let’s try it.”

“Wait, so do I go right or left?”

Still, as late as seventh grade, Kevin can’t remember which is which. They should be immovable, he has always thought,
like the Golden Gate Bridge and the Statue of Liberty. What was it Coach Dale taught them about how to read a map?
West is weft
. Kevin envisioned the United States in midair. “Left,” he said.

“Gotcha.” Sean pierced the strings of his guitar with his index finger and gave it a wobbly spin. “Left.”

“So are you ready? We need this thing to be perfect if we’re going to win. You’re not going to pull another Case-of-the-Missing-Miss-Vincent on me, are you?”

“No. Jeez. I’ll
be
there. How many times do I have to apologize?”

The power lines at the corner of Sean’s roof opened out over the grass, printing a bisected V onto the air. A miserable little collection of lifeless-looking birds had gathered there to watch the clouds blow through the sky. Occasionally their trance was interrupted by some high-pitched squeal or another—a burst of feedback from the boom box, or a car applying its brakes—and they would lift their feet as if to shake the stiffness from their knees, trading noises like CB chatter. Sometimes that’s how birds sound: electronic. Sometimes they sound like a swing set creaking against its chains. Sometimes they sound like water plinking into water. Kevin has always hated camping, hated the dirt and the smoke and the rooty ground, but once a month he sets off into the woods anyway with his Scout troop, and the birds wake him first thing in the morning, early enough that he has nothing to do but lie in his sleeping bag making comparisons while the tent gathers its soft orange light.

That one: rock salt grinding against a tire.

That one: an infant cooing for its mom.

That one: a pair of scissors
shick
ing open.

It takes forever to drive home. The evening feels less like spring than summer—dry and insecty, neverendingly sunlit. Kevin spends it in his room with his stereo, his lips shaping their way through “Hot for Teacher.” Should he drop to his knees during the guitar solo? And when he says, “I brought my pencil,” should he flash a yellow #2 at the crowd, like that kid with the sunglasses does in the video? Nah. Kevin owns six or seven pencils, maybe as many as a dozen, but in second grade he had scores of them, hundreds, a giant collection he accumulated by thievery. Back then he believed that as soon as an object fell to the floor, it was lost, officially. Coins, pencils, beads, barrettes—all finders-keepers. One day several kids complained that they didn’t have a pencil to write with, and Jim Babb said, “That’s because Kevin stole them all,” and Miss Jordan made him open the pocket of his book bag, where they lay emitting their graphite smell. If only someone with a movie camera had been there to capture what her face did. For a long time it stayed poised at the edge of something, like dominoes just before they topple. Then Kevin explained that he would never have started collecting pencils in the first place if everyone else hadn’t kept losing them, and her eyes, her cheeks, her jaw, her mouth—down all at once they cascaded.

It is one of those nights like a locked room, when it is impossible to imagine that time will ever pass, but time always does, and before Kevin knows it, he is circling the track that rings the football field, watching grasshoppers fling themselves out of the brush.

He has already done the fund-raising rounds, convincing
his parents to make their friends, bosses, and coworkers pledge a quarter or a dollar per lap. The problem is that he doesn’t care about laps—not remotely. He cares about grades and merit badges and about the thought-beams he sends out the window to Sarah Bell at night:
I love you. Pay attention to me
. He cares about Marvel and a little about DC. He cares about girls and making them laugh. That might be why he is having so much trouble monitoring his progress around the track: girls. He keeps bolting ahead to join one group, then dropping back to join another, sliding his way into the mix of a conversation for precisely as long as it takes him to pop off a joke. There are a thousand ways to be wanted, and this is his: to be amusing. Melissa Reznick says that her cat helps her stay warm at night, and Kevin tells her she’s hot for creature.
Was that three laps or four? Better say four. But four isn’t a round number, so five
. A few minutes later, on the highway side of the football field, with a different set of girls, he repeats the Raggedy-Ann-and-Pinocchio riddle from
Truly Tasteless Jokes
, and Margaret Casciano says, “Oh quit it you,” brushing his wrist with the tips of her fingers. How can so glancing a touch feel like a bite? It’s a mystery to him. He half-expects to find toothmarks on his skin.
Surely he must be up to ten by now. Ten or twelve at least
. He stops to tie his shoes, and Margaret glides away with Cathy, Kristen, Jennifer, and Tara, shrinking to half her size on the track’s conveyor belt of white dirt and gravel. Kevin falls into step with Ann Harold. Ann is easy: all he has to do is power up his Coach Dale routine, and in an instant she’ll be struggling not to laugh. This time she keeps herself from cracking a smile, but just barely, coming so close that her lips go all sour-lemony with the effort. Maybe
at the lock-in the tornado sirens will howl, and every inch of wall space will be commandeered by other people, and the two of them will be forced to curl away together in the storage cabinet beneath the stage, wrapping themselves up in each other’s arms and legs, a tight little bow-knot of body parts.
Okay. The last time he counted, he was at twelve or fifteen, and that was a few laps ago, so by now he must have reached eighteen, and eighteen might as well be twenty. Twenty-one. Let’s say twenty-five
.

By the time another hour has passed, Kevin has counted seventy-five laps. Most of his friends are already hiking up the trail to school. The class schedule is broken for once, irrelevant, and since nobody is hectoring them to go inside, they stop wherever they want, on the patio or at the unpaved end of the parking lot, like anyone would anywhere. This is how a school looks when no one has anything to do: a Fourth of July party on a sun-drenched afternoon, clusters of kids layered across the landscape like figures in a View-Master reel.

A few of the guys are hanging out where the asphalt meets the dirt, some in blue jeans and some in gym shorts. Kevin edges into the circle. Right away the tailgate of a pickup begins toasting his legs. Each diamond of chrome spreads its own little thistle of light. Not until just now did it cross his mind that he should have worn his street clothes. With his shirt untucked and his shorts bagging around his thighs, he looks like he’s dressed for a nap.

“What about you, Kev?” Alex asks. “How many laps did you finish?”

Kevin hopes he doesn’t sound like he’s bragging when he answers.

“Pffft,” Shane Wesson scoffs at him. “No way. There’s no fucking way on God’s green fucking earth you’ve done eighty-one laps. Four laps equals a mile. So what you’re basically saying is that you’ve run from here to Conway.”

“I don’t know what to tell you. That’s how high I got.”

“Man, you weren’t even running all that time. I saw you. You were walking.”

Kevin weasels a rock out of the dirt with his toe. He can feel the back of his neck reddening. How many laps
did
he finish? Everyone is waiting for him to answer. He ticks through his getaway options. An insult. A story. A joke. A change of subject. Nothing he can imagine would end this moment and begin another. It seems possible he will stand here prickling with self-consciousness until he dies.

“Well, how many laps did
you
do?” he asks Shane.

“Twenty-seven.”

Then Bateman says, “Twenty.”

And Asa. And Chuck. And Alex.

“Twenty.”

“Twenty.”

“Yeah, twenty.”

Sometimes Kevin wishes he could take time like an egg and crack it. A year ago, the six of them went to different CACs—Bateman, Shane, and Kevin to Pleasant Valley and Asa, Alex, and Chuck to Sylvan Hills. Twenty miles of trees and pavement lay between them, full of Krogers and Burger Kings and the bending rope of the Arkansas River, green in the summer and brown in the fall, with four concrete bridges he had no earthly reason to cross. Kevin’s brain has always been a kind of banker, slotting the nickel into the nickel tray
and the quarter into the quarter: Bateman and Shane are old to him, Asa, Alex, and Chuck are new. Or: Bateman, Shane, and Asa have pale lips, Kevin, Alex, and Chuck have red. Or: Asa, Alex, and Chuck have sisters, Kevin and Shane have brothers. (Bateman is an only child.) Or: Shane is the tallest of them, Chuck the second tallest, Alex, Bateman, Asa, and Kevin the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth. His mind won’t stop shuffling through the possibilities. But the only division that really matters is the first. Not so long ago he had never spoken to the Sylvan Hills kids, and neither had Shane or Bateman. He’s thinking that there must be a version of the world where the discussion they’re having now happened back then, in sixth grade, before they actually met, a version where half of them stood around talking to the ghosts of half the others, and no one knew what was going on, and it was so confusing that it didn’t matter how many laps Kevin said he had run.

Suddenly 3:30 rings out over the parking lot. Though the bell is powerless this afternoon, it breaks the moment anyway. Thank God. Kevin slips out of the circle to change. The showers have been running nonstop. Their clamminess covers the locker room in a slick transparent film. The concrete floor glistens beneath the lights, gray like a bad tooth. Kevin has a hole in the knee of his blue jeans large enough to accept half his toes. The first time he tries to punch his leg through, his foot gets caught halfway down in the net of unraveling cotton. Even wearing socks, he can feel the threads flossing his toes. It’s a good thing he isn’t racing anyone.

“Dang it!” he complains, and someone repeats it from the other room, “Dang it!,” using an angry little squeak-voice that sounds the way he sounds to himself on tape.

Some weeks go by as one long battle with anything he touches—every last cereal bowl, phone cord, and ballpoint pen. The entire world, it seems, is waiting to fall or break or tangle. Then one morning he wakes up and with no explanation he’s Mary Lou Retton.