A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip (6 page)

When his friends climb back out, Shane Wesson is with them. It is as if the Zipper has somehow given birth to him. Watching him stride over the asphalt, his cheeks red from the wind, Kevin has the impression that the ride has shaken something loose from him, and from Kenneth and Bateman and Thad and all the others, the thirty or forty people following the rail to the exit, so that whatever it is that usually keeps their minds hidden from view is gone, and every thought they have seems to pop right out of their faces.
Holy hell, that was fast. I should have worn the sweater instead of the windbreaker. Never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever again
. He wants to turn to the person next to him and say, “Look, do you see that?” but he doesn’t. The sensation vanishes as quickly as it arises.

He supposes he should still be angry with Shane, but the foxtail trick feels like a lifetime ago, and the truth is he has flat stopped caring.

All at once, Kenneth laughs and says, “I think some kid started
crying
on there,” and Shane says, “Hey, Kev man, where’d you come from?” and Kevin says, “I don’t know about you all, but I’m saving my emm for the gee.”

“Say huh?”

“The Gravitron. My money for the Gravitron.”

“Uh-huh.” Shane drops a look. “So are you like
high
now, or are you like
black
?”

There is a mechanism inside Kevin that fixes an answer to every question, even the rhetorical ones. It moves forward a notch. “Whatever’s awesomest,” he says.

Now there are five of them, and they set off through the prize booths and the concession stands, past the barns that
smell of sweat and hair and grass and corn and leather and milk and manure, past the thrill rides with their waves of colored lightbulbs. Music thumps up through their legs, a new song every thirty yards or so, booming out of the Himalaya and the Fireball, the Twister and the Screamin’ Swing. Some of the rides turn in simple circles. Some rise straight into the air and plummet straight back to the ground, like a hammer centering on a nail. And others are less like rides than science experiments, Spirographing people through a complicated trajectory of loops and curves and rings-in-rings that Kevin could never reproduce on paper, not with a million tries. There is a game that involves dropping five metal disks into the outline of a circle that none of them can figure out how to win. There is a vendor wearing faded blue overalls who is selling fresh fruit and fried pickles. Kevin spends a good chunk of his allowance on a foam lizard attached to a long leash of coat-hanger wire, which scurries around like a live pet even if it does cost him four dollars. Four dollars, he thinks. That equals five comic books with three cents left over. Four dollars, which equals something like eleven candy bars. So much money. And he is so sure he will mislay the lizard in the tide of the crowd that eventually he does.

“How you doing with Mr. Lizard over there?” Bateman asks him, and Thad tries out a half-formed joke, “Mr. Lizard’s World,” and that’s when Kevin realizes it is gone.

“I lost it.” His eyes are as hot as coals. “Damn it, I lost it. Stupid fucking unbelievable shit. I cannot fucking believe this.”

Kenneth corrects him: “It’s right there in your hand, Kevin. Jesus.”

And he’s right—it is.

And the UFO whirs past overhead.

And the riders scream their midair screams.

And later he is inside the Gravitron, pinned to the cushion by centrifugal force, his scalp tingling under his hair, his feet floating up from the footrests, as the wall spins faster and faster. He can see himself in the mirrored column at the center of the platform, his jacket batwinged open beneath his arms. Beside him, a woman in a Panama Jack shirt tied in a high knot to display her stomach hollers along with the music. He looks on, first in the mirror and then in real life, as the tassel from her pants slides past her navel like a raindrop rolling up a windshield. She has the fallen-into-bed posture of a model in a perfume ad. It seems barely possible—a magnificent contest between gravity and centrifugal force—that the tassel will stretch far enough to slip beneath her shirt and touch her breast. Somewhere in back of the mirror, Sarah Bell is watching him tilt his head so that he won’t get caught staring. She can tell what he is thinking. Anyone could.

After the ride, Thad distorts his face, making Pringles lips, and in his Goon voice, all strange and pipey, says, “I want to eat a fried pickle.” The Goon voice is a total mystery. Kevin has always assumed that it is somehow connected to the Goon from Popeye, that great bald brute with the banana-squash nose, though how or why is hard to fathom. One thing: using the voice allows Thad to turn any remark, no matter how ordinary or sincere, into a joke. “I’m pretty sure that disk game is rigged, y’all.” “My dad said he was gonna kick me in the crack of the ass.” “I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna ask Annalise out.
No, Thad. But we can still be friends, Thad. Go away,
Thad. Go away and leave me alone
.” The voice is his superpower. It reminds Kevin of Shadowcat, his favorite X-Man after Wolverine, whose intangibility lets her phase through walls and force fields.

Shane says, “Who would want to fry a pickle in the first place?”

“Whoever, I want to shake that man’s hand.”

“I want to shake his pickle.”

“I want to pickle his shake.”

“I want to fry his hand.”

“Oh my God, did you just go, ‘I want to
fry
his
hand
’?” Kenneth says, and it is two points to Kevin for the winning line.

Everyone else is sidetracked by the funnel cakes and corn dogs, but Kevin and Thad continue on to the fried pickle stand. Sometimes Kevin has no idea why he says the things he does. Why, for instance, as the two of them eat pickles from a paper plate behind the trailer, where a giant fan thickens the air with the smell of cooking oil, does he nudge Thad with his elbow as if he were passing him a note in class and go, “Hey, if the others start telling lies about us, like you were putting me down or I was putting you, we won’t believe them, will we?”

In his Goon voice Thad answers, “What did that kid want with you anyway?”

“Kid?”

“When the rest of us were on that bus-looking thing that flipped over in midair, and you said if you rode it again you’d throw up—you know, that
kid
.”

“Him.”

The ride was called the Kamikaze. Kevin had been lying
next to it in the gravel when a boy’s face had appeared above him like a pale moon.

“He just wanted to know if I was all right. I told him my head was spinning but yeah. He called me mister.”

Thad strips the batter off a pickle with his teeth. “Wouldn’t it be badass if we could float alongside the rides and pretend nothing special was happening? Like if we were just sitting there all la-di-da with our legs crossed, swooping around and around. People would fucking
freak
.” His Adam’s apple bobs in his throat. “These pickles, by the way? Totally disgusting.”

It is an interesting expression,
la-di-da
. Kevin repeats it a few times.
La-di-da. La-di-da
. The wind gusts between the trailers, and a cotton candy cone goes somersaulting over the black extension cords, and from the far back of nowhere a memory comes to him, a few seconds of radiant filmstrip in which he is standing over a busy street, his eyes locked on a sunlit concrete ledge where an orange peel rocks back and forth like a baby’s cradle. How old was he? he wonders. Where did it happen, and when? Was he alone? No, no, wait, he was holding the tail of someone’s shirt, wasn’t he? That shirt, he thinks—it is like a gap in a puzzle. If only he could remember whose it was, his life would fit together without a single missing piece. Would snap flat and turn into a picture. Would look the way it does on the box. For the rest of the day, he feels as if he is on the verge of understanding something momentous, something he knew long ago, knew to his bones and then forgot, a hundred years before he was alive.

The morning after the fair, he wakes on a pallet of blankets on Bateman’s floor. The birds are calling to each other in twos and threes, and he lies there listening to them, testing himself
for the sense of enlightenment he felt, or nearly felt, behind the food stand. It is somewhere nearby, burning its slow way toward him. And the next day, and the next, whenever he stops watching TV or reading comics for a while, letting his mind go clear and quiet, he can feel it fluttering inside him, thinning away little by little.

It is another two weeks before it vanishes completely. And what has he lost? Maybe nothing. He no longer knows. By then it is Halloween, and he is walking through CAC in a blond wig and a gingham dress, wearing a bra stuffed with balled-up hand towels.

He is one of eighty or ninety kids in costume. He catches a junior named Wesley Walls saying, “The few, the proud, the umpteen,” and stores the line away to use with his friends, none of whom are there to hear it. Instead, crowded into the foyer and the gymnasium, are airline pilots and Draculas and three older girls dressed identically as flappers. There is a big gray battering ram of an eighth-grader in a lab coat and corpse makeup. There is a Cyndi Lauper and a Madonna and a Judd Nelson or a Judd Hirsch (Kevin can never remember which is which: the one from
The Breakfast Club
). And there are the usual cheerleaders and football players and drill team girls, costumed lazily as themselves. But no one else is gathering the same looks he is. He notices people turning as he passes—teachers, seniors even—their attention breathing lightly all over him. The tickling sensation he feels could be pleasure or it could be embarrassment. It’s hard to tell.

Craig Bell corners him outside Bible and asks, “Exactly who are you supposed to be?”

He adjusts his cowboy hat. “Dolly Parton.”

“Kevin …” Chris completes the thought by motioning up from the ground. “No. Just—
no
. You’re not hairy enough to pretend you’re a girl.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Put it like this: you look too much like a girl when you pretend you’re a girl. It’s disturbing. It weirds people out.”

Kevin thinks of several comebacks, but he isn’t happy with any of them. In the end he resorts to, “No, I don’t. No, it isn’t.”

Though probably he is wrong. Probably he does, and it is, and good, and so what?

In the bathroom, before second period, when he takes his stance at one of the urinals and lifts the hem of his dress, the three older guys lined up beside him vanish into the hall like bottle rockets flying through a PVC pipe. As Kevin tucks himself into his underwear, someone else opens the door and does an instinctive about-face.
Whoosh
. It is like a game. At the mirror he adjusts his bra strap, dropping his shoulder and tugging at the elastic. Margaret Casciano watches him pick a flake of lipstick from his lips. She is one of those girls he has known since he was six, like Julia Harris and Tara Watson, so long that the thought of her should stir a thousand competing memories, but for some reason his mind always fetches up the same one: how in the fourth grade she sat behind him during a slideshow and in the dark, without speaking, scratched his back through his shirt.

Miss Vincent has already covered half the board with a pronoun chart. On the other half she is copying out a dozen numbered sentences. A cirrus cloud of chalk decorates her sleeve, raining traces of powder onto the floor. Kevin picks
the smell up in his sinuses, that bitter scent of aspirin crushed with the back of a spoon. He takes his seat by the wall of comics she has clipped from the Sunday papers. So far, he has given her two strips to add to the collection, a
Marvin
with Bitsy the dog and a
B.C
. with Grog and the clams. She took both of them with an odd stretched smile he couldn’t quite figure out. There was some strange brain work behind it—a reluctance, an embarrassment,
something
—she was trying hard to disguise as kindness. And there was also the actual kindness, the kindness that lay in the effort to wear a disguise in the first place.
I’m uncomfortable right now, but I’ll try to keep it hidden. You’re monumentally weird, but I’ll stay quiet about it if you will
.

Pronouns are easy: he, she, me, you, nobody. Kevin listens with only half an ear as she conducts the lesson. He has a trick he likes to do with his pencil, angling the cylinder just so on the edge of his textbook, then watching as its tilt carries it up the desk. When he gets it exactly right, it will roll to the top of the book, fall off, and slide away toward the arm of his chair, tick-tacking over the polished wood like a log tumbling down a slope. It’s the kind of thing he can do again and again, like playing catch with himself against his bedroom wall. He doesn’t stop until Miss Vincent passes out the day’s worksheet, which, as usual, he finishes before anyone else. “You know,” she says to Kevin when he hands it in, “you’re all the talk in the front office.”

“
I
am?”

“You. They had a meeting to decide what to do about your costume.”

“It’s for Halloween.”

“I know. That’s what they decided.”

“Decided what?”

“That you can cross-dress on Halloween.”

“Yeah, and ultimately it was pretty easy. Mom had the dress left over from some square-dancing thing she did with her sorority.”

In chapel, before the opening hymn, the air rings with footsteps and conversations, with six big sets of wooden bleachers cracking their joints. The sounds echo against the roof of the gym, coming back fuller and crisper. Kevin looks up, tracing the V-shaped struts and parallel lines of the metal girders. He has seen kids smack them with their palms after shimmying up the ropes in PE. From down here it seems nearly impossible. His own arms are like ribbons, and inevitably, when it’s his turn, he just clings to the rope shaking until one of the coaches gives him permission to let go and leap to the mat. But what if he could crawl directly into the beams—there, from the side wall, where they almost touch the bleachers? And what if he was on the basketball team, and it was the final round of the playoffs against Oak Grove or PA, and CAC was behind by a single point, and at the last second he caught a wild throw from Steve Mollette, took aim at the basket from directly overhead, and
swish
: two points!—or would it be three?