Authors: Rakesh Satyal
Once I have my arms over my head and am swinging my hips in a circle—“dress you up in my looooooove”—I throw my head back and happen to look at the clock. I gasp. It’s already ten till 7:00, ten minutes until I’m supposed to meet my mom. Ten till 7:00 on a Friday afternoon. Not a time for anyone to be at this school, except the janitors. I perk my ears up and try to see if I can hear them moving around. Sure enough, I hear the faint sound of small wheels rolling along the hallway.
I’m used to seeing the janitors at work when I stay later with Mrs. Goldberg. It seems like a lonely job, moving slowly down paper-littered corridors with nothing but a yellow bucket of suds and a large mop that looks like the impaled head of a sheepdog. I think about that display case in the hallway and how the janitors must look forward to its contents changing; at least then they have something new to look at. Other than that, they have the same stretch of sneaker-burned, sticky floor to wipe clean every day. And no matter how clean they make the floors, no matter how many times they drag their mops across that surface, the same gaggle of kids—or their younger siblings, another generation of floor-scuffers and litterbugs—will be back to dirty it up again.
The janitors have a reason to be here, though. I, on the other hand, don’t know what I am going to tell my mom if I’m late. I still have all the supplies to put back and clean up, but that will take me at least fifteen minutes. How could I be so foolish? None of this plan was thought through. I simply had the idea and ran with it. My new skin has made me assume invincibility. I’ve been moving around for the past few days as if I have no one to answer to.
Isn’t that the way things should be? Clearly, if I’ve been deemed worthy enough to succeed Krishnaji, I can find a way to magically clean this room like Mary Poppins. Maybe if I just sit on the ground and meditate about it hard enough, or play the recorder that is smushed in with my fabric, I might just find myself back home. But even I know that won’t happen. I am the divine made mortal, not the divine made divine, and there are certain limits to being reincarnated as Kiran Sharma. I chuckle for a second thinking what Krishna would have made of Mrs. Buchanan if she had been in his forest. One minute spent with that clog-hooved nightmare and he would have run out of the trees screaming about yogis and fogeys.
Once I think my costume is dried, I fold the various pieces carefully and put them back in my bookbag. Giving a last glance around to make sure that everything looks the way it did when I snuck in here, I head toward the door and peer cautiously out of the small square window that is in its top right corner. I have to do a
relevé
on the balls of my feet to see out of it, but no one seems to be in the hallway. I don’t even see the long cord of a janitor’s vacuum snaking across the tile. I open the door, still moving cautiously, and am just about to shut it behind me when I hear laughing. It’s not innocent laughter. It’s laughter with a purpose—mischievous laughter. It’s not coming from the hallway, however. It takes me a second to realize that it’s coming from outside.
I turn around and look out one of the long windows running alongside Mrs. Buchanan’s room. Outside in the dark, I can make out a few kids horsing around on the lawn that borders this side of the school. When I see the murky outline of a kid throwing back his head and laughing with some difficulty, his curved shoulders jutting out grotesquely, I realize that I am watching Cody. He is with Donny and the girls.
I go back into the room and shut the door, transfixed by the sight before me. It’s too dark in this room for them to see me—indeed, I finished my project under relative dark given the early autumn night—but I can make them out more clearly the closer I get to the window. The buttery lights that are perched on the rim of the school’s roof have come on, and between my squinting and their glow, I can make out quite clearly the jolly looks on the kids’ faces.
HOW IN THE HELL DID THEY BECOME FRIENDS? I yell to myself in my head, yet again. I just don’t get it. And not only are they hanging out together, but now they’re sticking around
after school
to hang out? It just doesn’t make any sense. Where in the hell do Sarah and Melissa’s parents think they are right now? The football game? Of course—they probably go to the football games in that large patch of light next to the high school every Friday, apprenticing themselves to the older girls who discuss loftier things than Lip Smackers chapstick. But still, that begs the question: why would these girls forgo that cesspool of popularity for Donny and…Cody?
Soon enough, pinpoints of cigarette light give me my answer.
The four of them are smoking up a storm out there. And they remind me of those kids in the park. Part of me wants to break through the window and yell at them, warn them that they are headed for a wayward, destructive existence, but at the same time, I know that my fascination with what those kids were doing has not diminished in the least. If I placed one of those burning sticks to my lips, would I be cool like these four? Would I be headed toward a life of waywardness or achievement?
That devilish feeling I felt this morning returns, except it’s multiplied by a hundred, transforming my blood into fire. Every humiliating, intense experience I’ve had recently has instilled anger in me, but the anger is compounding, and now I feel like it’s reached the height of its powers. Without thinking, I turn around, walk to the table bearing the pop bottle turkeys, and start pulverizing them. I grab one and rip its feathers off. I take another and chuck it across the room. It hits the pencil sharpener attached to the wall. I take three at a time, throw them on the floor, and start smashing them under my feet. I see one of those plastic jars of Crayola paint—red—unscrew its cap, and scatter paint all over the rest of them. I hit them with my hands—my arms, really—and send them flying through the air. Real turkeys don’t fly, but boy, do these turkeys lift off. I keep pounding them with my fists, and the red paint has gotten all over my hands. I am hitting the faux poultry so hard that I could be bleeding but wouldn’t know it for the paint.
I don’t stop at the turkeys. In the spare seconds I have between throws and poundings and punches, I can still hear the four of those kids laughing, can still hear the garbles of their speech through the glass. I proceed to ruin the marker wall, unleash the rest of the Crayola paint, lob fistfuls of beads across Mrs. Buchanan’s desk, then push everything off her desk onto the floor with both hands. The mug that holds pencils and pens breaks against the floor, and pieces I can’t even see scatter across the room and under tables. The last thing I do is to jump up and swat at the papier mâché heads on the wall. A pig, a California Raisin, a Paula Abdul in a tilted checkered hat—I make them all fall to the floor and wreak my footstorm havoc on them.
The only thing that stops me is realizing that in my frenzy I may have jostled the bag on my back and ruined my costume. I slink off the bag and open it. The costume is fine, but Mrs. Buchanan’s room…her room is streaked with ruined art. Donny and Cody, Sarah and Melissa, however, are still living it up outside.
If they can smoke, so can I. I pick up two of the disemboweled turkeys and some of the papier mâché mess from the floor and walk over to the kiln. I open it up, stuff the bunch of crumpled paper into it, slam the lid closed, and flick the switch on. I wipe my hands together as if I’ve loaded a dishwasher, then turn on my heel and leave quietly.
“How was rehearsal?” my mother asks as I get into her car.
“Good. Sorry we went late,” I say, so coolly that I shudder.
I am so steeled by the revenge that I’ve exacted on Mrs. Buchanan and SCAMMED (a sort of acronym I fashion from the names of that quartet of traitors on the ride home) that I don’t think of the real ramifications of what I’ve done. It’s not until I lie down for bed—not even until my parents have retired for the evening and their snore overture begins—that I sit bolt upright and think of the janitors in that building. I think of the building itself—flames licking at bulletin boards all over, Mrs. Goldberg’s mug charred black with smoke—but I also think of actual people being injured or killed. I wish I were not just a god but Superman, capable of flying to the school and breathing a frigid wind that would frost the people in it to safety. I wrap my arms around myself, caressing my skin as if I can unlock its godly power. But nothing happens, nothing
keeps
happening, and I start scratching my skin, cursing it, crouching down on the floor as if in physical pain. I always thought that revenge was supposed to feel victorious. Krishna Himself danced a happy jig every time He bested demons, but I find no such joy in what I’ve done.
Cody, Donny, Sarah, and Melissa must have run away from the inferno in complete wonderment, laughing at how they would probably miss a ton of school for what had happened. Maybe they went to the football game anyway, a part of the acceptance and chicness of that event after all.
The night proceeds in spurts of crying and total exhaustion. A few times I wake up on a pillow damp with tears. I cannot decide if the fact that it’s now Saturday and there is no school is comforting. This way, I will have no knowledge of the extent of the damage I’ve caused. I will have only this agony.
God bless those janitors.
As my parents and I see on a noon broadcast of the local news—the local newscasters look downtrodden on Saturday, clearly wanting to be at home lounging like everyone else—one of the janitors, Bob Randolph, a wan thirtysomething with the eyes of an eighty-year-old, smelled smoke in the building and got to Mrs. Buchanan’s room just as the flames were burning through her door. He ran to the nearest red belt buckle of an alarm and pulled it. Unfortunately, the sprinkler system had already had twenty years to invite dust and decay, so it didn’t exactly quell the fire. It did, however, stall it in time for the firefighters to arrive and put it out.
What’s left after their efforts is not as awful as it may have been, but it’s not exactly a pretty sight, either. As we see on the TV, a hole like a cigarette smoker’s dirty mouth has been burned into the side of the building. Mrs. Buchanan’s room is obliterated, the roof caved in. The steel frames of the windows from which I watched SCAMMED have twisted and look like tartar-coated teeth. A couple of streaks of black climb out of the hole like mutant tongues. The full shot of the school makes the damage look relatively minimal, a black splotch on a picture, but the close-up shot is ghastly, fierce, gnarly.
An equally repugnant sight comes on the screen soon enough. It’s Melinda Maines, all corporate Joan Collins in a garish hot pink suit and earrings so big they look like gold meteors that fell onto her face. She stands in front of the wreck as boisterously as any other event she would be attending, like this is an exciting thing to behold instead of a mysterious fiasco. Indeed, if her microphone were a corndog, she’d practically be at the Ohio State Fair.
“The blaze was discovered at approximately seven fifteen p.m. by Mr. Randolph, who says he saw four young students near the blaze around the time of his discovery. Those children, whose names cannot be released at this time, are being questioned thoroughly. Mr. Randolph believes that the mishap may have been the result of improperly disposed-of cigarettes.”
It’s too perfect. It’s just too perfect. Sarah and Melissa wanted to be friends with Cody and Donny? Cody and Donny wanted to be friends with Sarah and Melissa? Well, they got what they wanted, and now the police are grilling them. Maybe they’ll be executed—burned at the stake! No, no, that won’t happen, but it’s just…too perfect.
I guess I should learn a moral from this: that it shouldn’t matter what actually happened to the school or what part I actually played in the disaster, but that I did such a terrible thing so recklessly and that I have caused four otherwise uninvolved children to be blamed for it. And I do, faintly. But more than anything, I thank my lucky stars. For once, I feel like I’ve actually come out on top. For this, I am truly thankful.
The gymnacafetorium looks like a chiffon dragon vomited all over it.
It’s Wednesday, the day before the talent show. Every year, Mrs. Nevins runs a dress rehearsal, which is supposed to be an assuring run-through of the acts but more often than not turns into a battle of egos. Put a few dozen girls in bright pink, red, blue, gold, and silver sequined costumes, then put them in the same room and see what happens. Many of the girls are wearing tap shoes, the sounds of which, when compounded like this, sound like a storm against the floor. Some of the more down-home girls are wearing clogging shoes, and their sound is heavier, like throwing a rock into a well. The girls who are not wrapped in sequined bodices or decorated with faux feathers are wearing sleek leotards and leg warmers. One group has decided that it is going to perform a routine dressed as the Smurfs, and a couple of them have done themselves up in full costume to give Mrs. Nevins a full picture of what they will look like. They are wearing white thermal underwear, have stuffed their long hair into collapsed-pillowcase hats, and have smeared their faces with blue face paint. Whereas my attempts at making myself blue have heightened my mystique appearance-wise, these girls look totally freakish. The blue is way too fake, and in addition to their worker-elf air, they are holding batons, as if the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of the Smurfs is their incredible acrobatic flair. With their batons clutched in their hands like tridents as they march about and laugh, they are demonic—hypothermic Oompa Loompas who have escaped from Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory to murder us all.
I have not worn my real costume today. I can’t let people know my true performance intentions due to the religious character I am portraying. True, Mrs. Buchanan hasn’t been to school at all this week due to the utter destruction of her classroom—and, it would seem, her entire purpose of existing—but I am too wise to risk Mrs. Nevins scrapping my act. Instead, I have dressed myself in my white sweatsuit, which I wear very rarely, and red sneakers. I am wearing a Cincinnati Reds hat, as well, to at least feign normality.
The people who are not practicing on stage have to line up along the right wall of the gymnacafetorium. The front of the line is next to a door that leads to stage left. Most people sit down, their backs against the painted brick, but they don’t seem to notice that all the dust—from outside, from this musty school, from the food lint of Cheetos and Chips Ahoy—is tainting their costumes. I stand, knowing that my sweatsuit in particular would be ruined by that muck.
Sarah and Melissa are obviously absent from the proceedings, which makes this rehearsal all the sweeter. The two of them were supposed to be part of that five-girl routine to “Rhythm Nation,” but the act has been reduced to three in light of their out-of-school suspension. The trio of remaining dancers, dressed in their black baseball caps, black T-shirts with the sleeves rolled up, white jean shorts, black socks, and Keds, are visibly addled in trying to redo their act. The purpose of having a larger group of girls was to engage in a series of canon sequences that would make them look like a hip drill team. Instead, their attempts end prematurely, making it look like they are simply out of step with each other. At one point, Tessa Fuller, the girl on the far left, starts crying and halts the practice. Everyone in the room looks on as she starts trash-talking Sarah and Melissa. While most others sympathize with them, I have to try my hardest not to burst out laughing. Part of me wants to suggest that they do a routine to “Like a Prayer” instead; the image of burning crosses from that music video would be relevant to Sarah and Melissa’s recent problem.
When it’s my turn to go onstage, I get a reproachful look from Mrs. Nevins, who is still distrustful of my taste in art since the accident at the mall. She sits near the stage at a folded-out cafeteria table that has a messy collection of sound equipment on it. The main sound panel, with all its buttons, looks like a large Lite-Brite, as if Mrs. Nevins herself hasn’t progressed past an elementary school mind-set. Thank God she seems to have left behind the headphones she wore last year. It was way too self-important, let alone unnecessary, for having a job that involves operating a tape deck, and I had the sneaking suspicion the whole time that she was imagining herself in another music video—“We Are the World,” in which Quincy Jones and a hundred other celebrity cohorts donned puffy black headsets and belted their hearts out for starving African children. Mrs. Nevins, as you might imagine, is about the farthest thing from a musical celebrity, let alone a starving child from Kenya.
The other kids are already snickering by the time I position myself in front of the microphone. They are still thinking of my past performances, but I smile inside knowing that they have no idea who I am now. I see the duo of wannabe Smurfs and wonder if they can see any of the blue on my face. No one has noticed it yet, which still surprises me—although I still swear that it comes and goes. I’ll look at myself in the mirror and see nothing, and then all of a sudden I will see that blue sheen and run my hands incredulously over my cheeks. Last night, I started to have another migraine just from seeing my skin change color.
I open my mouth once the music begins and start singing Whitney’s words. Regardless of what the kids in this gymnacafetorium think of my personality, they know that I have a good singing voice, and they all have impressed expressions on their faces when I begin. Soon enough, though, they remember that they are supposed to be finding fault with me and start commenting on how only a sissy would sing this song. Once my singing finally ends, they are talking out loud about how weird I am, and although Mrs. Nevins tries to shush them several times, I can hear the complete lack of earnestness in her voice and know that she would just as soon smash my cassette tape with a hammer than support my presence on this stage.
I shrug all this off and finish the dress rehearsal as coolly as I can. As a group, all of the cast members are supposed to sing a unison version of “That’s What Friends Are For,” and we oblige as best as we can from the lyrics that Mrs. Nevins hands out to us. Most of the people on stage giggle madly while we sing it, not taking the dress rehearsal seriously and yelling throughout. This show is supposed to be fun—it’s supposed to be fun to do it together—and a lot of people are taking the time to enjoy the preparation and kick back. I, meanwhile, cannot fall into so easy a trap. This year, the show is not about joking around and simply enjoying myself. It’s about joining my talent and my spirituality.
But then another member of the Rhythm Nation starts crying and practically tears her costume off in frustration. It’s then that I remind myself to have
some
fun.
At night, which I have come to see as my witching hour, I hold a tiny séance to prepare myself for the show.
Part of me is extremely sad that my parents don’t know I’m performing tomorrow night, especially since they’ve come every past year, but in the midst of all their frustration with me, they seem to have forgotten that it is now almost Thanksgiving, when the show usually occurs, and that Dad should be packing up the camcorder while Mom takes the still camera. Instead, they retired early tonight after watching
Primetime Live
, my mother, then my father, paying me hardly any attention as I pretended to do math homework at the kitchen table. I listened to my father’s feet thud up the staircase in the foyer, reminded as I often am of the difference between the way he ascends heavily and the way my tiny feet whisper up the stairs. I waited a reasonable amount of time before I ascended, too—just after taking a couple of sticks of butter out of the refrigerator, of course.
I turn on my beside lamp, sit on the floor of my room, and lay the instruments of my séance before me: the sticks of butter, already softened in their wax paper; the recorder, which I have wrapped in Reynolds Wrap to make it look silver; my costume, folded into a glistening pile of magenta and gold, along with a peacock feather I’ve plucked from our living room decorations; a page from
Penthouse
that shows a man from the waist up, his bare torso and strong shoulders and chiseled face; and a picture of Krishna that I tore out of a library book. It shows Krishna broad-shouldered and blue, holding a flute in one hand and a bow and arrow in the other. It shows Him as strong and handsome as I want Him and me to be, and I place it in the middle of all of the objects to stress its importance.
I light a little Strawberry Shortcake candle that I won at a school fair a few years ago. I never planned on lighting it and wanted to keep it in pristine condition forever, but I figure that this séance is an important enough occasion to open its candy-striped box and pull the mini replica of SS’s head out, a cowlick wick sprouting from its top. Once it is lit, I turn the lamp off, relishing the way the candle bumps warm light all over my room.
While looking at that flame, I remember the time that Mrs. Nolan had us make hot chocolate during our fourth grade holiday party. She brought in a little burner that fit between the blackboard and a filing cabinet at the front of the room. She put a pan on top of the burner and mixed a delicious brew of Swiss Miss, milk, water, and miniature marshmallows. While we sat at our desks and ate the red-and green-sprinkled sugar cookies that Hannah Skinner’s mom made for us, Mrs. Nolan stirred the hot chocolate and tried to turn it into a science lesson.
“Class,” she said, pointing toward the flame under the pan, “see the flame underneath this pan?”
We nodded dismissively, focusing most of our attention on the chewy delectability of the cookies.
“Most people think that the hottest part of a fire is the orange part of it,” she continued. “But that’s not true, class. The hottest part of a flame is actually this blue part right here.” She pointed lower, the tip of her finger almost touching the fire. In her demure black sweater and red skirt, she seemed like an unlikely pyromaniac. “The hottest part of the fire happens here. See—you learn something new every day.”
I didn’t think much of her observation then, but as I look at the SS candle in my room, I focus on the blue of its flame and make a connection to my own life: I am like that flame. I may not be as normal or confident as the other kids I know, but I feel things much more intensely than they do. I
burn
more intensely than they do. Haven’t John Griffin and his goons called me a “flamer” before? I know what they mean by that—a boy who is so sissy that he is “flaming gay.” Perhaps I am, just not in the way that they think. They have no idea what sort of emotional flood rages in me every day, how alternately high and subtle my sexuality can be. Like a fire that works and rages to provide a glow but whose efforts are invisible to us, I struggle secretly but powerfully.
For the first time in my life, I wonder if there might be people just like me in my school, other “flamers” who have the same sexual desires I do, just not overtly. I am the figurehead of a secret, sacred brotherhood of blue flame souls—the first blue boy. Accompanied by the instruments of my return to this blue Earth, I close my eyes and hum “Om” to myself while feeling genuinely happy for the first time in a very long time. All of my worries about the show and my parents and my (lack of) friends melt away like this mock-SS’s wax head. It is only when a thick stream of pink wax curls up on the carpet, oozes against my foot, and stings me back into reality that I pack up my gypsy sideshow and go to bed. The sky will soon lighten as it always does, and there is no more hopeful moment than that: when time is tomorrow but still carries a strain of today, when we’re wiser and reborn all at once.