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:
Mr. Miss. Mr. Coach. Mrs. Mrs. Coach.
Mr. Miss. Mr. Coach. Mrs. Mrs. Coach.
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:
How’s it going Kev!? It’s been nice knowing you this year you’ve been a good friend. You are very smart.
Kevin, You are the sweetest boy in this school. Love ya, Ann
Glad we were good friends. Wish you didn’t have that trouble at the first of the year. Hope you don’t next year. Keep up the good grades. Chuck
P.S. You’re an awesome poet.
You are a polse, Kevin! Leigh C.
I mean that.
Hey Kevin I know I’ll see you this summer, but then again you might be at your dad’s so stay cool and see you next year. Your friend, Michael Berridge
Kevin, a smart and funny guy you are. If get stupid and dress out slower you would be me. Dan
Kevin, I don’t know you all that well, but I do know you are very sweet and SMART! Love ya, Meredith
Kevin, Stay stupid. J/J. Looking forward to next year. Love ya, Lisa
Kevin, You have been too nice to me! I don’t know where to begin! You’re also the kindest person. I can never repay you. If I can’t go here, keep in touch. Love ya, Carina
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.
He leaves down the empty back stairs. At the bottom he nudges the door open with his hip. The sound of conversation microphones open around him. Something must be wrong with the air-conditioning, because the lunchroom is freezing cold. Clusters of kids prop themselves against the tables and the vending machines, their bodies doing an aching little up-down motion. An older girl—Chuck’s sister—cups her palms to her mouth and breathes into them at 98.6 degrees. One of the football players, a stocky guy whose name Kevin doesn’t know, stands with his hands tucked into his sleeves like an Indian squaw. Along the side wall, leaning against the windows, are Thad and Kenneth, Craig Bell and Clint Fulkerson, Shane Wesson, Shane Roper, Joseph Rimmer, Levon Dollard, the whole bunch of them too absorbed in whatever joke they are telling to have noticed Kevin standing just a few feet away. In his Goon voice, with that strange kazoo-hum, Thad says, “Will you sign my queerbook?” and then in his regular voice, “No! No! Rearbook! Will you sign my rear-book?” and it must be the ideal line, because everyone booms with laughter.
Thad is (1) slick, (2) happy, and (3) confident. He is (4) handsome, in an Adam’s-appley sort of way. And he is (5) mean, or at least (5) inaccessible, or how about (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) Kevin doesn’t know him at all anymore.
At the beginning of seventh grade, they were best friends, but the months kept changing, no one could stop them. Their friendship blew up and—flash, whumpf—filled the atmosphere. The dust of it has been chasing him ever since.
He was hoping he could avoid seeing Thad and Kenneth and the others before the final bell rang. He considers backing out and returning upstairs, following the convolutions of the building to the foyer. It is amazing how long a second can last. But the sun is laying a stripe of yellow light across the room, one that climbs the benches and scales the tables, then plunges to the floor like the skyline of a city. He walks right through it, and no one seems to notice.
Kevin — I guess it is needless for me to say that you are an excellent student. It has been so much fun having you in class and being able to share in your creative efforts. I have also been pleased that you are coming out more and are more outgoing. You are such a fun student and a pleasure to know. Keep trying and succeeding. Love, Miss Vincent
Half an hour later he and Ethan are home on Northwick Court, drinking Capri Suns from the refrigerator as they recline on the back porch. The end of school must have worked its spell, because everything feels different. Quieter. More yielding. Some switch has flipped inside the day: a few hours ago it was warm and shining like spring, and now it is warm and shining like summer. They listen to the fan whir inside the air conditioner, then spin to a stop as the thermostat clicks off. They watch Percy track a pair of dragonflies across the lawn, leaping at them with his paws outstretched. Thousands of glowing white specks dance over the grass, and tangles of honeysuckle rustle against the fence, and the shadows of the clouds are like the shadows water makes as it ripples over gravel.
As soon as they finish their drinks, Kevin coaxes Ethan into playing a kick-game in the carport. Ricochet, he calls it, and all it takes is a soccer ball and a good hard wall. The ball rebounds off the bricks with a weirdly tinny smack, the sound of an echo with nowhere to go. It launches itself at their legs, careering into the door and the mailbox, the pillar and the bushes. Every few kicks it clips past them and sails out of bounds down the driveway.
After they become tired of chasing it, they decide to hike to Osco and spend their money, following a shortcut Kevin knows through the woods. He has been walking to the same drugstore since he was in kindergarten—no matter which house or apartment he has lived in, and no matter with which of his parents—buying comic books and stickers, Choose Your Own Adventure novels, cinnamon oil for toothpicks. A bag boy is collecting shopping carts from the metal corrals and wheeling them across the parking lot, a long square millipede of a creature that keeps hitching and shuddering over the asphalt. Kevin and Ethan are busy kicking rocks, and even though they veer back and forth to chase after the strays, wincing at the ones that ping against the undersides of cars, it doesn’t matter—they still beat the bag boy to the sidewalk by a mile. The candy aisle is midway through the store: rack after rack of chocolate bars and chewing gum. Ethan chooses a box of Nerds, Kevin one of Everlasting Gobstoppers—fifty-nine cents plus tax, and that’s it for his allowance—and then they riffle through the books and the magazines. Mad and Cracked. Hit Parader and Song Hits. Stephen R. Donaldson. Stephen King. Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions.
The two of them have already set out for home when Ethan says, “You do know you have a zit on your face.”
“No, there isn’t. Where?” Kevin finds it near the tip of his nose: a hard round pill of skin. “Jesus! It’s like a candy button.”
Ethan tries to tie off his smile. “I think it adds character.”
“Shut up. Go to hell.”
Kevin doesn’t need his fingers to feel the tightness of the thing, the weight, but he can’t quite catch sight of it. Attempting to do so only makes him aware of the way his nose hovers between his eyes, bulging there like an orange wedge. How does anyone ever manage to see anything else?
“At least your yearbook picture came out all right,” Ethan says. “Look at what they did to me.”
It’s true: a printing flaw on the page has marked Ethan’s cheek with a horrible black ink flag.
“I think it adds character,” Kevin says.
“Shut up.”
Soon it is dinnertime, and then snack time and TV time, and then Kevin’s brother has gone to bed, and then his mom, and he and Ethan use the rails of the wooden fence to climb onto the roof of the house. Once, not so long ago, there were no buildings at this end of town, no houses, only acres of empty fields and a loose net of oak trees, and every time Kevin hoists himself onto the shingles, his mind offers up the same idea: how if he had been here back then—right here, exactly where he is now—he would have been pacing through a canopy of branches, arranging his body in midair. Maybe that’s where ghost stories come from, he thinks. Maybe ghosts are just people walking around in the
past. People at the wrong time.
He and Ethan lie back on the slanting tiles and stretch out over the kitchen. Beneath them must be the cabinet where his mom keeps the oils and the spices, and beneath that the counter with the tall wooden stools, and beneath that the tortoise-green arabesque of the linoleum. They prop their heads on their arms, switching every so often from the right to the left, using their shirts to brush the roof-grit off their skin. A car guns its engine on Reservoir, and a stereo plays across the street at the Stegalls’, but otherwise the night has a beautiful grassy stillness to it. All they can hear is the chiming of the insects, a sound so full and layered it’s easy to imagine it cascading down from outer space. The moon is hole-punching the sky, the stars salting it in little collections of four and five. Even the very closest ones, Kevin has read, are light-years upon light-years away. How many of them have shed their surfaces already, he wonders, and how many have collapsed? How many stars must go out before a constellation dies?
“What’s the best nightmare you’ve ever had?” he asks Ethan.
“The best?”
“The worst.”
“Hmm. I’ll have to get back to you on that.”
Kevin tells him about the Chernobyl dream—the fallout and the blaze of light, his three-speed and Melissa Reznick. He shakes a Gobstopper from the box. “Okay, let’s say this: there’s a nuclear war, and you’ve got an island in the middle of the ocean. You can save five people. Who do you take with you?”
“Five people including me?”
“Five people in addition to you,” Kevin clarifies, and names his own five: Ethan, Sarah, Melissa, Bateman, “and Carina,” he finishes. “No—Ann. No!—Carina.”