A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip (21 page)

The secret neatness of the world.

The plans, the blueprints.

What happened today?
someone might ask him.

This
, he would say.

A wall of radiation is sweeping across Little Rock. Kevin pedals as hard as he can to outrace the fallout. His bike slices like a knife down the streets. On one side the plants are a bright May-green, their leaves twitching and swaying with every undulation of the air. On the other they hang limp and brown, as slick as tobacco slime. Slowly, ever since Chernobyl, a barricade of atomic dust has been advancing across the planet. This morning he learned from the radio that it had leapt the Mississippi into Arkansas. He wants to reach Melissa Reznick’s house before the world is extinguished and the Rapture begins. He knows exactly where she lives. He lays his bike in her yard and runs to the porch, the afros of the dandelions exploding against his sneakers. “Let me in!” he shouts. “Hurry! Melissa! It’s coming!” And all around him, so loud that he cannot hear his fist on the door, the sound of fire and trumpets.

He closes his eyes, then opens them. Above him he sees his bedroom’s vinyl shade, carved into squares by the windowpanes and the sunlight. On his stomach the cat lies heavy as a bag of flour. It is morning, and the birds did not die in the night. Sometimes, right after he wakes up, he can feel his bed rotating brokenly beneath him, hitching back into place again and again, as if his room is tracing a thousand identical
beds in the air. For a while he was somewhere else, and now he is— now he is— now he is here again, where being alive is all it takes to make him dizzy.

Usually he waits for the sensation to pass before he puts his feet to the floor, but today is the last day of school, and not only that but Ethan Carpenter is carpooling home with him to spend the night.

Ethan Carpenter. In thirteen years of best friends, he is Kevin’s best yet. Easygoing and dependable. Unsecretive. Brotherly, Kevin would say, except that Kevin has a real brother, Jeff, and all they do is argue. No one other than their relatives cinches the two of them together anymore, saying their names one-two, like that, Kevin and Jeff, side by side. Every time some aunt or uncle refers to them that way, it sounds all wrong to him. These days, at school and everywhere else, it is always “Save a couple of seats for Kevin and Ethan,” “Kevin and Ethan, you two fellas need to quiet down back there,” “Hey, Mom, can Kevin and Ethan ride to Mazzio’s with us?” They are the kind of friends who can talk for hours without tiring, contributing so quickly to each other’s rolling little comic scenarios that after a while, when they build up speed, neither of them can quite remember whose jokes are whose, who shot the ball and who sank it. It seems amazing that they have known each other for so long—since first grade: Miss Emily’s class—and yet they didn’t
know
-know each other until this year.

Kevin steers Percy off the bed and folds back the covers. At the beginning of seventh grade, he always took a bath before bedtime. Now, nine months later, he always takes a shower before breakfast. Bit by bit, in fact, and without much effort,
he has changed his whole morning routine. He parts his hair down the center now, like the older kids do, rather than at the side. He uses a facial astringent and a roll-on deodorant, so that instead of smelling like whatever he ate most recently, as he did in elementary school, he spends the day catching whiffs of fragrance from those few quick seconds of swabbing and doctoring, that chalk-and-chemical scent of Sure and Sea Breeze. Barely a month ago his penis was a small pink helmet of a thing lying against his floury skin, but last week he found himself pimpled down there with hundreds of hard white dots. At first he thought he must have a rash or an infection, a disease. Why he wasn’t alarmed he couldn’t say, but
Okay
, he thought,
I’m diseased now
, and decided not to tell anyone. The next day, when he discovered that the dots were growing hairs, it wasn’t intelligence he felt, or even relief, just a baffled formality, as if he had woken up wearing a tie.

This morning begins like every other. He is rinsing the shampoo from his hair, though, when a flash of light pierces his eyelids and he hears the
whumpf
of a distant concussion.

Here it is: the bomb. He had convinced himself, foolishly, that it would never actually fall. Any second now and the wind will arrive, the ground will rumble, the house will shake loose from its timbers. He reaches out to wipe the water from his face and realizes that his towel has slipped off the curtain rod. All at once the thud and the brilliance make a different sort of sense.
Flash, whumpf
, of course.

His dream comes heaving back into his mind. He can visualize it in every detail. Why Melissa Reznick? he wonders.

The school day hardly seems real. Kevin sees the same group of kids as always, follows the same chain of teachers
from the morning into the afternoon: Mr. Garland–Miss Vincent–Mr. Garland–Coach Dale–Mrs. Dial–Mrs. Bissard–Coach Dale. Back in August and September he kept repeating their names like that, in chronological order, for weeks, at first so that he wouldn’t forget his schedule and then because the rhythm had become a kind of song in his head:

This is the last time he will ever have to sing it.

Between periods everyone bumps through the halls like football fans at a stadium, their voices so loud that Kevin can barely disentangle them. They have no notes to jot down, no tests or quizzes to take, and neither does he, except in Bible, where Mr. Garland has given them one last memory verse. Kevin is good at quizzes, good at school. He has the instinct for learning exactly what he needs to know, then casting it aside to learn something else. He can feel himself forgetting the words of the memory verse almost as soon as they leave his pencil. Everything sinks like a rain shower into the soil.

There’s always a wonderful static to his classes when he knows that he’ll have a friend spending the night. Even the most boring moments of math or SRA seem to crackle around the edges. And today the feeling is twice as powerful since scarcely anything else is happening. The periods have all been shortened by ten minutes to leave time for the yearbook assembly, and at 2:30, when the bell rings, everyone pours into the gym, jamming onto the wooden bleachers. As usual the seventh graders sit all the way to the left,
facing the edge of the basketball hoop, the seniors all the way to the right, facing the edge of the other basketball hoop. Kevin lets his gaze skip through the crowd. William Carpenter with his back as straight as a yardstick. Leigh Cushman with those curls of hair at his neck. Sarah Bell with her fruit-red lips. Once upon a time, when they were kids, her picture was directly next to his in the yearbook. Their names made sure of it—Sarah Bell and then Kevin Brockmeier. He liked to pretend they were boyfriend and girlfriend, holding hands beneath their photos. He imagined her thumb stroking his palm, her pretty knee meeting his handsome one. The two of them were in love, madly and deeply and lastingly in love, down there where no one could see them. Buzzing with their eagerness to touch. To burrow in and add their temperatures together.

Kiss her picture and she’d feel your lips on her cheek.

Close the pages and you’d turn out the lights.

The game didn’t end until fifth grade, when a new kid, Michael Berridge, joined the class’s alphabet. These days there must be a half dozen faces wedged between them: at one end there is Sarah, and then, like drawings of the presidents on a ruler, there are Sharon Benton and Jim Boothby and Alex Braswell and God knows who else, and finally, a row or more away, there is Kevin. It’s hopeless.

Everyone waits for the teachers to finish unboxing the yearbooks. They work from receipts taped to the covers, haphazardly calling out names. When they reach Kevin’s, he cuts across the sideline to the card table. The books are bound in purple and gold, the school colors, and decorated with overlapping horseshoes—mustang shoes—the school mascot. He flips to his photo, and thank God he’s smiling.

For the rest of the hour, he roams the building targeting signatures:

All the girls end their notes the same way: “Love ya.” But they don’t love him—not really. The giveaway is the missing
I
. “
I
love ya” would mean that they actually loved him. “Love ya” just means that they’re out there loving.

He thinks it is funny to sign his own yearbook, so he scrawls, “You’re cool!” and prints his name underneath. Then he makes his way upstairs to Miss Vincent’s room. She is angled over a stack of papers, writing B+, B+, A–, holding her ballpoint pen lightly between two fingers, so that the blunt end twitches and sways as she works, carving exuberant shapes in the air. He wonders if it’s drawing the same grades at the top that it is at the bottom.

“Miss Vincent?” he says.

She pronounces his name, “Kevin Brockmeier,” with the hushed tone of an announcer at a tennis match.

“Will you sign my yearbook?”

“Can there be any doubt?”

Half the time he has no idea whether he understands what she’s saying. Little breezes seem to blow through her voice, jogging it this way and that like something with wings, and no matter how nimbly he reaches, he can never quite grasp it. But he has learned a trick with questions, one that works almost every time, which is that you can shuffle their words around to concoct a safe answer.
Can there be any doubt?
“There can be no doubt,” he says.

Miss Vincent grimaces and makes a not-so-sure gesture. “Well, maybe there can be
some
doubt.”

“Yeah, maybe …”

“Here,” she tells him. “I’m teasing. Give me your yearbook.” After she returns it, she adds, “You take care of yourself this summer. And next year, too, okay? I’ve gotten to know you. You treat people sympathetically. You deserve good things.”

“You’re welcome. You too.”

Man! He has never been able to converse with grown-ups
the way he does with ordinary people. Sooner or later, he is always convinced, he will break some hidden rule and they will laugh or give a wordless frown—or, worse, embarrass him with a correction.
No, Kevin. Nuh-uh. It’s like this
. He can hardly utter a sentence without bracing himself for his next mistake. His shoulders hunch and his stomach tightens—not much, but noticeably. It is impossible for him to relax. There are days when it takes all his willpower just to keep his eyes from stinging. He lives in a giant world of men and women. Sometimes there’s no ignoring it. What if he disappoints them somehow? What if they decide they don’t like him anymore? It would be no more mysterious than the fact that they ever did.