Authors: Rakesh Satyal
No, wait—as soon as I have this thought, I snap out of my daze and return to the flute more determined than before. It may do to shun friends, to shun the school, to find refuge in myself, but I must never lose sight of my artistic goals. My plan, my happiness, depends on this performance.
When I hear Mrs. Moehlman calling all the kids back into the school at the end of recess, I start to walk back from The Clearing like Dickon in
The Secret Garden
, although hugging the perimeter. But maybe it’s the image of Dickon, pan pipe in hand, that propels me forward; maybe it’s the revelation I’ve had about keeping to myself; but whatever it is, when I hit the blacktop, I keep on going. I go back into the school and walk down the hallway, lost in the throng of children. And, so easily that I am shocked when I reflect on it later, I pass out of the front of the building and keep on walking, leaving school and its people behind.
It is noon on a Wednesday and the sun is out.
Martin Van Buren Elementary School is situated in a residential neighborhood full of ranch-style homes in varying shades of brick. It is fall, and the leaves are beautiful on the trees and gathered in crispy piles on the ground. Dressed in my navy blue sweatpants and a brown flannel pullover, I feel equipped for the weather. I stroll down the sidewalk, not wanting to stare directly into people’s front windows but turning my head slowly as I walk past, getting as big an eyeful of the lives contained inside without drawing too much attention to myself. About half of the houses are empty, but the other half usually displays a turned-on TV and the darkened figure of an adult moving inside. It strikes me as some great secret—while we’re cooped up trying to learn fractions and endure the social jungle that is school, these adults are watching TV and eating popcorn and cookies and watching soap operas. The day I stayed home from school sick (only once in all these years, last winter, and that was because I had a 103-degree temperature), I got to watch
Days of Our Lives
and thought it was the most transcendent show I’d ever seen, although there wasn’t nearly enough romance in it as I imagined, just a lot of people talking to themselves and this slick Mafioso-looking slab of a villain named Stefano. That the women in the houses I pass get to sit home and watch these shows during the day makes me fume with jealousy, although after the third lawn strewn with a variety of toys, I remember that there are real nightmares to deal with, after all.
When I get to one of the main roads of the town, Yates Avenue, I panic for the first time since my departure. It hits me that right now, Mrs. Nevins is urging everyone to open their teal vocab books, which is usually when I get to read by myself at the back of the classroom, since I study with Mrs. Goldberg, and now is the most noticeable moment for me to be absent, since everyone in the class is always acutely aware of my special treatment. As cars pass me on Yates, it seems that the passengers in them are looking at me and criticizing me for my midday escape. I make a particularly strange sight, I’m sure, a lone child standing on a street corner caught between the residential and commercial areas of town and holding a recorder. If I put out my thumb to hitchhike, the probability of someone actually stopping to help me would be even lower than usual. Even a kidnapper would drive past the sight of me and accelerate.
When the crosswalk lights up for me to pass, I cross the street swiftly. I have passed by this intersection so many times with my family (it is, in fact, one of the intersections we pass in silence on our way home from temple), but it looks so vastly different when experienced this way. Whereas the pavement usually appears as just a blur of gray, I can see from up close the individual pebbles flattened in its surface. Black holes of expectorated gum dot the surface, along with one particularly pronounced scuff of car wheels. When I get to the other side of the road, I look back just to make sure that no one is following me. I can see the top floor of the school through the trees and the top stripes of the American flag outside it billowing in the wind.
I now enter a residential neighborhood adjacent to my own. Even though I am relatively close to my house, this area feels strange and new. The only time I ever come here is to visit our town’s biggest public park, and the moment I think of the park, I know that it is my destination. Despite the relative lack of natural charm in my hometown, this patch of land, Gerber Park, is quite impressive, two square miles of hilly lawns, tiny, open-air wooden lodges for holding barbecues and birthday parties, swing sets, and hiking trails. It is situated at the end of the road that I’m now traversing, and the closer its entrance becomes, the faster I walk. Two cream-colored butterflies flutter across my line of sight, and I liken them to the way my stomach feels. There is something springlike about them, which puzzles me on this autumn day, but I imagine that they stayed in the cold for the sole purpose of making this beautiful sight for me.
The Parks and Recreation Department has not done a particularly good job of tending to the grounds, and a thick carpet of crinkled brown leaves covers the grass. This is paradise for me, and I stomp through the leaves, sending puffs of leaf and earth dust into the air. The wind blows, pricking my skin through my sweatpants, and the carpet shifts in turn. I scan the panorama of the park and don’t see a soul. This is, then, my new playground. Let the other kids infest the school blacktop, let them banish me to the edge of The Clearing; I now have a playground that puts theirs to shame, and for the next fifteen minutes, I roll around in the leaves, play “America the Beautiful” on my recorder and sing to myself. I come to a small birch tree, one branch of which has grown out parallel to the ground. I grab the penitent branch and treat it like a barre, practicing
ronds de jambe
that rake through leaves. At one point, a robin bobs in front of me, inquisitive as the drivers on the road, and another shudder passes through me as I imagine Mrs. Nevins walking to Principal Taylor’s office to tell her I’m missing; Mrs. Goldberg hearing the news in passing and looking up and down the hallways for me; Mrs. Buchanan cackling and pouring herself a large brandy from a snifter she hides in her kiln. And then, zap, I am back here in the park, and it’s so quiet, except for the wind and the leaves and the chirp the robin gives before flying off and leaving me to my own devices.
Speaking of devices, I hear the faint grumble of a car, and then the grumble gets louder. I hide behind the tree, which, being a birch, is too thin to fully conceal me, and I curse the fact that I didn’t find a maple tree to hang around. The car emerges, and it’s a blue pickup truck, its grille slightly askew and its tires wobbly. Despite its delicate frame, it charges ahead with purpose. It drives down the main park road, which weaves around trees and lodges, and because the park is a pretty open space, I can see it drive to the summit of the park, a roundabout where another huge American flag towers over a small stone wall. From there, you can see the entire city of Crestview, and most kids’ favorite thing to do is to pick out their own house from this lookout point. Mine always looks sorely out of place, bigger and newer than the other houses around it.
My parents.
What on Earth will they do when they find out I’ve done this?
I begin to walk back to the entrance of the park, terrified. I can’t believe how foolish I’ve been. My dad will lose his mind when he finds out that this has happened, and my mother will end up giving me a huge speech in which she likens my absence from school to the first cigarette that someone smokes:
“Just as one puff leads to cancer, so one missed assignment leads to not becoming a doctor,
beta.” Even though I am petrified to endure these reactions, I know that the longer I stay out here, the more intense the anger will be, so now I start running back.
And it’s Wednesday! I have ballet class on Wednesdays! Now I am sprinting back as fast as I can.
Then something stops me. Maybe it’s the wind heaving extra hard for one second, but something turns my head in the direction of the pickup truck. Instantly, I must know who is in that truck. It’s the middle of the day on a Wednesday, now around one o’clock. Mothers are watching soap operas in the dim daytime comfort of their homes, but what is happening in the park?
Just as I have walked the perimeter of The Clearing, I now walk the perimeter of the park, along a wall of interwoven maples and pines and birches. Whereas the leaves on the ground were a thing of enjoyment before, they are now a hindrance, the crinkling under my feet a way for the occupant of that truck to find me out. Of course, only if that person had sonic hearing would they hear me, but I am extra paranoid because I am extra intrigued.
I get to a good vantage point at one of the lodges, where I can crouch behind a large green trash can and see straight to the truck. It is about thirty yards away. From here, I can make out the silhouettes of three people piled into the two seats of the truck. There is a flurry of movement, as if they are laughing hard, and then the front doors open and three high school–age people file out. There are two guys and a girl. One guy has his hair cropped short and dyed platinum blond. He is wearing a Michael Jordan Chicago Bulls jersey over a white T-shirt and long jeans, and despite his baggy clothing, I can make out the strong heft of his body. Even from where I am, I can see the shiny rings of gold piercing his ears. The other guy is skinnier, shorter, with spiked brown hair and gold rings in his ears, too. He is wearing a bright blue hooded sweatshirt and equally baggy, but black, jeans.
The girl looks out of place with these guys. Whereas the guys are joking wholeheartedly and look very sure of themselves, the girl laughs almost like an afterthought. She is wearing a puffy, black Pittsburgh Steelers Starter jacket. Her hair is dyed platinum blond, as well, and is long and curly. Her eyes are very pronounced, encased in mascara (it is most surely not
kajol
; I don’t think mascara can be called
kajol
when there is a Starter jacket involved), and her mouth is a bright red oval of lipstick. Her skin, like theirs, is very pale, and when she laughs her teeth look yellowed in comparison.
They are all smoking in different rhythms and resemble, at one point, as they file away from the truck, a human calliope. They kick through the leaves as if they have done this many times before, and I recognize that they are “those kids” that my parents warn me about—the ones who “play hooky.” It’s not just some joke that my parents make; there really are people who blow off their studies and do nothing all day. Another twinge of fear pierces me (Mrs. Moehlman is being berated now by Principal Taylor for not keeping better charge of the students; Mrs. Goldberg is walking around the playground wondering if I’m at the swings; Mrs. Buchanan is drunk off her ass), but I follow behind these kids all the same, too obsessed with them to pay much heed to my fear.
They head toward one of the hiking trails, a snakelike stripe of dirt that disappears into a canopy of tall, colorful trees. The boy in the jersey leads, with the other boy following behind and the girl last. Once they disappear, I contemplate how to go about following them without their knowing I’m there. I decide that I’m just going to have to make my way through the trees and bushes without taking the trail. I start, then, through the bushes, which are not as tangled as I might have feared. I slip through them quite easily, in fact, and although the occasional twig scratches me through my sweatpants, I am able to use my recorder as a machete to whack through the underbrush. “When the Saints Go Marching In” pops into my head with a pang of irony.
After about five minutes, I come to a big tree whose thick trunk hides me completely from view. The trio has stopped at a tiny brook littered with small white stones. It is at the bottom of a dusty halfpipe of earth, tree roots, and weeds. My tree overlooks this and thankfully puts me out of the line of sight of these people. The spiky-haired boy and the girl flick their cigarettes away, but the blond boy keeps puffing on his.
“Give me a hit of that shit,” says the spiky-haired boy, who sweeps his hand in a mock move of stealing the blond boy’s cigarette. The blond boy ejects a quick chuckle and says, “Fuck you, dude.” He sucks on the cigarette very deeply, then exhales a blue, almost purple cloud of smoke. The spiky-haired boy leans forward and pretends to chomp at the smoke. The girl laughs a deep laugh, and says, “You’re fucking crazy, dude.” Hearing her curse instantly transforms her for me into a femme fatale, albeit an ungraceful one. She is, I think, even more masculine than these boys, her clothes more male than androgynous, her bearing and laugh more adult. I can’t tell, however, if she is more or less wizened than the boys.
“Shut up,” the spiky-haired boy says, this time successfully taking the cigarette from his friend and puffing deeply on it.
“Whyn’t you make me?” the girl says. It is not so much a threat as a weak rejoinder.
“I’ll make you,” the blond boy says. He moves toward the girl, who stuffs her hands deeply into her back jean pockets, juts her chin into the air, and grins. Then the blond boy leans in and kisses her. As they kiss, the girl keeps her hands in her back pockets, simply receiving more than giving back. It’s not the way I’ve ever seen people kiss in the movies. I always envision kissing to be a passionate embrace in which two people clutch each other tightly and work together to create a balance of tongues and lips. But this type of kissing seems perfunctory. All the same, I begin to rise in my sweatpants, and my heart beats so hard that I can barely hear the wind anymore.