“Oh, tha-at’s right. You broke up.”
“They broke up.”
“Unfortunately,” Kevin says, “yes. We broke up.”
“So did you two ever make out?”
“Is she a tonguer? I bet she’s a tonguer.”
“Did she give you a hickey?”
“Did she rub you off?”
“Did you suck her protrusions?”
He doesn’t understand it. He watched them so intently during chapel, roosting just a few feet away, and that’s the most bewildering thing of all—how they could sit there praying and singing as if everything was normal and the middle of the day wasn’t looming ahead of them like a giant stone wall. Even now they don’t let any obvious cruelty show, only camaraderie, agreeability, the most genuine curiosity. What’s wrong, Kevin? What? They’re just flicking questions at him. They’re barely touching him. This? It’s just a chuck on the shoulder, pal. Don’t mistake it for a punch.
The next day, Thad greets him in the hallway before science with, “Buenos días, Detective Kevin,” and by lunch he and Kenneth have added the name to their volley of questions. Sometimes it is difficult to tell what is a taunt and what isn’t. Detective Kevin counts but not buenos días, the gas station but not the mall, guy but not man, Steak-umms but not comic books—why?
“Buying some Fritos, Detective Kevin?”
“Fritos fan?”
“Hey, maybe we can eat some Fritos together the next time we spend the night with you.”
“And you can show us your TV Guide collection.”
“Yeah, TV Guides kick major ass.”
“So when can we spend the night with you again? Friday?”
“Or how about Saturday?”
“Hey, Detective Kevin,” Kenneth says, “whatever happened to those chips you used to bring in the plain silver bags. You know the ones—”
“Mystery Chips,” Thad answers.
“That’s right! Mystery Chips! Perfect! A mystery! Detective Kevin is on the case.”
The day after that, they move on to the girls in the class: “Man, Kevin, you won’t believe this, but I heard that Annalise Blair really likes you.”
“Yeah, I heard that Rachel Brierley likes you, too.”
“Honor Shelton said that you were hot.”
“Noelle Batch wants to have your babies. Twins, didn’t she say, Kenneth?”
“Yep. Twins.”
“Twins. Sonya and Priscilla.”
Every room is like a math problem. Thad in one desk plus Kenneth in another equals Thad and Kenneth. Thad tapping the lid of a soda can plus Kenneth raking his hand through his hair equals Thad and Kenneth. Occasionally, if Kevin moves silently, unassumingly, and stays out of their line of vision—if he sits with Ethan, say, or Bateman—they will fail to notice him, or choose to ignore him if they do, but usually some muscular reflex seems to seize them as soon as he passes by, and with barely a pause, like ghosts in a video game, they are up and after him.
“Why, hey there, Kevin.”
“Where you off to, Detective?”
“Feeling kind of la la la today?”
“What’s up, Detective La?” and the name is so entertaining, so surprisingly fitting, that it takes over the conversation. “Oh, Detective La, that’s great. That’s the best one yet. So is it going to be M&M’s or Fritos today, Detective La?”
“Sarah or Melissa, Detective La?”
“Hey, dude, give Detective La some room. He’s got to weigh his options.”
One afternoon Kevin blocks Thad’s path through the lunchroom and asks, “What’s this all about? Thad, tell me. You have to tell me. Why are you guys doing this?” but Thad keeps listing back and forth at the waist like someone struggling to stay upright, glancing at the wall or the mainstays, anywhere but at Kevin, and “No,” he says. “I can’t. Man, leave me alone,” as if Kevin is cheating, and all his appeals, his sad grasps at the past—what is he thinking? He should know better. That shit isn’t part of the game.
After school, Clay’s mom collects the carpoolers in her station wagon. Kevin climbs over the rear seat onto the cargo shelf. As they pull away, he flashes his finger at Thad through the back window. “Whoa,” Kenneth says, impressed. “He honestly looked shocked by that.”
But by the next morning, the gesture is just another part of their routine, the two of them contorting their hands in outlandish palsies, holding their middle fingers as straight and as slender as candles on a cupcake. Apparently, when you flip someone off, you are supposed to use your index and ring fingers as a sort of pedestal, bending them both at the first knuckle. Kevin does it wrong. It makes him look queer.
At lunch, Thad and Kenneth find him drinking from the water fountain in the foyer and come lunging over with their fingers extended. “What does this mean? Hey, Kevin, what is this supposed to mean?”
Before he can stop himself, he has said it again, “Cut it out,” and they have struck up the chant: “Cut it out. Cut it out. Cut it out. Cut it out, guys.” This time Shane Wesson is with them.
They trail Kevin into one of the stairwells, calling him Kevin-guy and Detective La and asking, “What time is it? Do you know what time it is? Pardon me, but by any chance do you think you can tell me the time?” The stairs smell of Pine-Sol and shoe leather. Shane lifts him up off the floor and pins him against the wall, giving a bullish grunt of exertion. He means no harm, not really, or if he does, it’s only because he always means a little harm, thinks it’s funny to mean a little harm. He is taller and stronger than Kevin—considerably—but there is a guilelessness to the way he overpowers him, clashing up against him for the sake of the joke. He sees heaving Kevin into the wall as his role in the performance, just as Kenneth’s and Thad’s roles are to make crying faces, and Kevin’s is to pretend he’s being bullied. The situation demands it of them.
And the crazy part is that Kevin is often barely a hair away from imagining that Shane is right, as if, out of boredom or whimsy or some sharp new teenage impatience, Thad and Kenneth have made up their minds to put on a cloak of hostility, and he is playing along with them because they are his friends and it seems to make them happy. He could put a stop to it with a single word. He is ninety percent sure. But then the two of them will select some incident from a few weeks or months or even years ago, one he never would have guessed they remembered, much less found foolish or contemptible, and present it to him with all the edges sharpened. The hurt of it will hit him sudden and hard. His life will become real again. It always happens the same way. There are days when he is lucky enough to evade them, but not many.
One lunchtime midway through December, when the sky is spitting just enough rain to keep everyone inside, he spots them craning their necks for him in the hallway, and he retreats upstairs to the quiet row of classrooms where the senior high kids are working. It is Miss Vincent’s free period, and she is eating a sandwich at her desk. He knocks on her open door and asks, “Do you mind if I hang out here until the bell rings?” She has just taken a bite, and she beckons him inside with a feint of her chin.
Kevin heads for his regular seat beneath the wall of comic strips, a paling rainbow of Marvins and Mommas and Hi and Loises, their corners creased over rectangles of Scotch tape.
Miss Vincent gives him a probing look and asks, “Kevin, is everything all right?”
The sound of his name. That’s all it takes. From someone who doesn’t mean it as an insult.
“Oh dear,” Miss Vincent says, and “Take your time,” and “Would you like me to close the door? Here, let me close the door.”
Haltingly, because it is not a story, he tells her what has happened. The rain taps like grains of rice against the glass. A laugh filters through the wall. When he has finished, Miss Vincent gets up and walks to her desk, tugs out a handful of Kleenex, and hands them to him in a lily. In elementary school, on the first day of class, everyone was required to contribute a box of Kleenex to the supply cabinet. They never lasted until Christmas.
>
“How long has all of this been going on?” Miss Vincent asks.
“Two weeks. More like three.”
And that’s when the intercom goes off, and the building fills with noise, and her tenth-graders begin to arrive. She escorts Kevin to the landing at the top of the back staircase. “I need you to wait here a few minutes. Can you do that? I’m going to page Mr. McCallum. He’ll want to talk to you.”
“But I’ve got math.”
“Don’t worry about math. I’ll write you a pass.”
“But—”
The fire door sighs closed on its metal cylinder. He sinks down the wall to the floor. There is no silence like a school’s after the halls have drained and the bell has rung and the doors have clapped shut like a string of firecrackers. Kevin rubs his eyes. For a moment, his body seems to swim with light. He hears Miss Vincent call his name from the corridor, but he is sitting directly beneath the grated window, and she can’t see him. “Kevin?” she repeats, and a wild guilt goes sprawling through him. He wishes that he understood where it came from. Often he has a dream—he could be inside it now—that he is carrying something fragile, something precious, and he has dropped it. Sometimes he relives the accident a hundred times before he wakes up. He can never prevent it. That’s how he feels listening to Miss Vincent say, “I don’t know what to tell you. He was right here. I don’t know where he went”—as if something irreplaceable has bobbled from his fingers. It is falling, it is broken, and maybe it will always be broken. A week might pass, a year, and who can say?
There is no silence like a school’s after the halls have drained and the bell has rung and the doors have clapped shut like a string of firecrackers. Kevin rubs his eyes. For a moment, his body seems to swim with light. By the time his vision has cleared, a man is standing over him on the landing, a skinny guy with the look of a guidance counselor on his day off, untucked but still buttoned up. The man holds himself with the same slight hunch Kevin wears when he wants to remain invisible—except stiffer, old-mannier. Here, Kevin thinks, is someone who has been trying to go unnoticed for so long that the posture has become irremovable. He is welded into it.
Breathlessly, like a runner finishing a race, he says Kevin’s name, giving a sympathetic dip of his chin. “Hello again. You’re supposed to follow me.”
Without thinking, Kevin gets up and accompanies him downstairs. They both skip the last step with an instinctive little elastic stride, as if they’re avoiding a puddle.
If you had asked him, Kevin would have said he was sure the stairwell door opened at the back corner of the lunchroom, but the wall must have spun ten feet to the left, because they end up in the kitchen instead, behind the Formica counter where the science club and the spirit squad conduct their pizza sales. The man leads him through a darkened side room, then past the vending machines and microwaves to the table where Asa Stephens and Danny Morgan usually sit.
He makes a jellyfish gesture with his fingers: Have a seat.
Kevin takes the bench across from him. He has never seen the lunchroom so deserted. He can hear the Coke machines humming like spaceships.
“So,” the man says—a finished statement. “It’s been pretty awful, hasn’t it?”
“Thad and Kenneth and everything. Yeah. Am I supposed to go over it all again with you?”
“You can if you want.”
“Well, I just finished telling Miss Vincent, and she said—” On the table Kevin notices a pattern of sunlight guttering through leaves. He turns to face the row of windows. “Hey, it stopped raining.”
“For now it has, absolutely.”
“Weird. Where’s Mr. McCallum, anyway? Shouldn’t he be here for this? Miss Vincent said she was going to call the principal.”
“Mr. McCallum is waiting upstairs for you. I promise he’ll stay there as long as it takes.”
Kevin scrutinizes the man: his lean neck, his dark beard, the pigment spots on his forehead. His mannerisms are oddly familiar, like those of some halfway relative in the background of a hundred family photos, all mild words and big stage gestures. He has one prominent canine tooth. His eyeglasses are shaped like elongated stop signs. And the way his hair thins to silk on top and flares back in a great puff at the sides reminds Kevin of—oh—what was his name?—that small skullish guy who commanded the Death Star. “You’re not a guidance counselor, are you,” Kevin says.
“A guidance counselor, that’s good!” The man has a generous laugh, much bigger than it appears he would. Each ha is like a perfect circle, soaring out of him one after the other, a tunnel of glowing blue rings. “A guidance counselor! No, think of me as a sort of chaperone. A courier.”
“So you don’t want to talk about Thad and Kenneth?”
“Well, again, we can if you’d like, but no. Truth is, I know the Thad and Kenneth story already. By heart. What I want is to offer you a way out.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Here, look. This is—will turn out to have been—the worst few weeks of—well, your childhood, at least. Your school years. That I can promise you, Kevin. Right now you think the harm is irreparable, and you know what? You’re right. It is irreparable. It is. You’ve changed. From now on, for good or ill, however fractionally, you’re going to be a different person.”
The transparent hairs on Kevin’s arms prickle.
“I know, I know, you don’t want to be a different person. Believe me, I understand. And that’s why I’m here. Life is difficult and confusing, but—and here’s the thing—it comes with an escape switch. Everyone gets their chance to press it if they want. This is yours.”
He situates his glasses on his forehead. Some people’s eyes seem to soften without their glasses. His, though, sharpen to a knife-edge. “Do you understand what I mean?”
“Not the remotest clue.”
“No? Look around.”
Kevin can’t stop sniffling. He wipes his nose with one of the Kleenex Miss Vincent gave him. When he was a kid, in first and second grade, he would cry so furiously sometimes that his jaw ached and sweat pasted his hair to his scalp, yet ten minutes later he would feel fine, magnificent, as fresh as grass. But now that kind of crying leaves him utterly exhausted. For the rest of the day his eyes will have an ugly red-rimmed look, with colorless flats of tightened skin underneath. Between classes he will hog the water fountain, drinking until his stomach strains at his jeans, but his throat will keep itching anyway. He won’t begin to feel better until he gets home and turns on the TV.
“The lunchroom,” he says to the man. “Big whoop.”
“Look closer.”
At first there is just a vague weaving of colors that keeps flickering behind itself, returning and disappearing, but then some warp seems to move through the room, and it all settles into place. Everywhere Kevin turns, pairs of figures are joined in what must be conversation. Some of them look like people, a few like animals, a few more like animals if animals were people: two gangling birds with long snaky necks, two mice sitting back on their haunches, two coppery-red toad-things, rows of polished feelers along their backs that look like paper clips bent partway open. Many of the shapes are hardly like bodies at all, but gadgets, magic tricks, science experiments. Kevin isn’t quite sure how he recognizes them as living creatures at all, only that he does.
Two spikes of beating light.
Two plumes of yellow-brown smoke that slip through some pinprick in the air.
Two curved sheets of paper marked with letters he can’t read.
A pattern of frost slicing its way through a similar but sparser pattern.
Some strange roughening in space next to a slightly more porous roughening.
Two plantlike sprays of greenery twitching with raindrops from an approaching storm.
Two mirrors reflecting everything except each other.
Why, Kevin wonders, didn’t he notice any of them earlier?
“Who are all these people?” he asks.
“They’re like you. Alive. This is
their chance to say no.”
“But where did they come from?”
“Everywhere.”
“But I mean what are they doing here?”
“Here at CAC? That’s just a convenience, an illusion. Right now they’re probably wondering what you’re doing under the ocean or in the forest or between the solar rifts. Anyway, none of that matters. What matters is how you answer the question.”
Kevin cocks his head to one side. The question?
“The question is, Would you like to press the escape switch?”
A hissing gradually takes the shape of the room, squaring out against the walls and the ceiling. It sounds as if a blank tape is playing directly into his ears. Usually Kevin feels smarter than this.
“I don’t understand.”
The man pivots his head until a vertebra in his neck pops. “Mmm. What I’m saying is that you’re alive, but you don’t have to be. You don’t have to have been, ever. It’s up to you. That’s part of the bargain. This is your chance—your one chance—to make up your mind.”
Two old women hobble through a door Kevin can’t locate once it closes. The man points to the bench where they were sitting and says, “See, that was her chance, just now,” then to a pair of threads winding around an invisible spool. “And this is his.”
Something inside Kevin lands suddenly. He takes a sharp breath and tells the man he understands, but not out loud. What should he do? The man repositions his glasses. “I know nearly as much about you as you do, but I’m here only to ask the question. You’ll have to answer it yourself.”