by Andrew Smith
The banner, after many years on the wall, had become so desiccated that it was cracking apart and shedding small flaky scales.
It was a lot to take in: The Last Dance of the Year was going to be held on This Friday! which was May 9. It was to take place inside the gymnasium, beginning at six p.m., and would be free to all sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade students.
Also, the sign said this: Be sure to turn in parent permission slips to Mr. Dougherty by Thursday!
In fact, every phrase on the sign had been punctuated with at least one exclamation point. It made me feel like I was being screamed at by a twelve-year-old.
Paradise on the Shore!!!
Last Dance of the Year!
Wear Hawaiian Style Clothes!
Hot Dogs $1!!!
Although I wondered why they did not want the boys and girls of Henry A. Wallace Middle School to wear Iowa-style clothing, which I rather liked, it was the last exclamation that I found most puzzling.
I could not remember ever hearing or reading about “hot dogs.” There were no hot dogs in the model of the world assembled by my father.
So I said, “Hot dogs were specially trained miniature wolves that taught kids how to dance at these events. You know, like how Robby taught you and me how to dance in the hole. And although it may seem impractical to have a miniature wolf teaching kids how to dance, the advantage was, in having four feet, that one hot dog could instruct both dance partners at the same time.”
“But why were they hot?” Mel asked.
“It was symbolic,” I said. “The miniature dance-instructor wolves had rings of fire—actual flames—circling their midsections, to discourage boys and girls—or boys and boys, or girls and girls, for that matter—from getting too close to each other on the dance floor. The world before the hole was a vast conspiracy of rule making and inhibitions about sex and the closeness of peoples’ bodies.”
Mel laughed.
I built this world.
And all stories are true at the moment they are told.
• • •
We found the school’s gym across from the staircase at the end of the hallway. It was still decorated for the Last Dance of the Year.
Unfortunately, the Last Dance of the Year at Henry A. Wallace Middle School most likely turned out to be the Last Dance for all Eternity, as far as the before-the-hole world was concerned.
It was all very surreal.
The gymnasium was massive, and it echoed with a sad emptiness when our boot soles squeaked on the varnished wood floor, which was painted with narrow lines that made meaningless geometric shapes. They were probably some strange type of regimented dance boundaries, I thought.
The walls of the gym were adorned with construction-paper palm trees, dolphins, women wearing skirts made from leaves, and bare-chested men with wreaths on their heads who appeared to be wrapped in colorful, floral-patterned towels.
“Could you imagine this place, filled with dancing people?” Mel said.
“And the occasional couple engulfed in flames for touching,” I added.
Then Mel said, “We should dance, Arek.”
Like nearly everything else I’d encountered these past few days outside the hole, Mel’s suggestion filled me with wonder and fear. I felt myself choking up, consumed with thoughts of putting my arms around her, twisting my fingers in her hair, collapsing together onto the floor in a ball of fire.
“But.” It took a good ten seconds for me to get the rest of the words out. “There isn’t any music.”
Mel just smiled and gave me a look like she thought I was crazy, which I was. And it was also crazy to be dancing with her to no music here in an empty Iowan middle school gymnasium decorated like a bad imitation Gauguin. But that’s exactly what we did.
“We must look really stupid,” I said.
“Nobody’s watching,” Mel answered.
Thinking about nobody watching us—and all that could possibly mean—caused me to start sweating.
“I could sure use a hot dog right now,” I said.
“You’re sweating.”
“These long underwear are definitely not meant for dancing in.”
“Dancing in the tropics,” Mel added.
“There should be a rule about that,” I said.
When we stopped dancing, Mel and I walked around the perimeter of the gym, looking at all the clumsy decorations.
“It must have been nice. I mean, to have been here with maybe two hundred other kids, with music, dancing,” I said.
At the back of the gym, on opposite sides of the floor, we found doors that led to what were called locker rooms. One was marked BOYS, and the other said GIRLS.
All those rules, over and over, without end, I thought.
It turned out locker rooms were not prisons for unruly middle schoolers, as Mel and I had theorized. They were, in fact, very much like the big shower room in Eden, the hole, but not nearly as nice. And they were belowground too—beneath the gym at the bottom of a damp and moldy flight of stairs. The showers were rusty spigots poking out like drooping chrysanthemums in evenly spaced rows along two walls of stained tiles. Mel and I went into the locker room for boys, which, even after all these years, smelled like sweat and urine. It was dark, illuminated only by the gray light that squeezed inside through high, narrow windows glazed with swirled glass that you couldn’t really see through. There were discarded socks and underwear scattered randomly on the floor, and a bank of urinals and toilets separated by five low sinks and a wall mirror that no longer reflected anything.
Everything in the locker room seemed to be enclosed behind mesh walls, too, so it actually did have a prisonlike atmosphere. And there were lines of metal cubbies with doors in front of long wooden benches. Some of the open cubbies had articles of clothing drooping from them, like the tongues of tired dogs.
I found one of the orange balls, just like in the picture of the boys’ basketball team, but it was wrinkled and deflated. And there was a row of metal cabinets that had the white sleeveless shirts we’d seen in the photograph of the basketball team boys with medals too.
“Look!” Mel said. “It’s number forty-two.”
It was the same shirt I had seen—the one worn by the boy I suspected was the top rule breaker at Henry A. Wallace Middle School, the boy named Julian Powell.
I held it up in front of me, pinned to my shoulders. Julian Powell must have been very tall as a middle school boy; the shirt’s tail hung down to the middle of my thighs.
Mel said, “That would look good on you.”
“I. Um.” I cleared my throat. Why was I being so stupid? “Do you think I should keep it?”
“Have you broken forty-two rules?” Mel asked.
“Maybe I should look for a bigger number.”
Mel smiled. “I think you should have it, Arek.”
“Well. Just as long as we keep our eyes out for irate wolverines,” I said.
I Don’t Care About Houses
Henry A. Wallace Middle School gave wordless testimony to the wild nature of the world before the hole.
And Mel and I were the jurors who would ultimately make the final decision as to the details of what had happened. This is how truth works.
We found the library upstairs.
We kept hundreds of books in the library of the hole—but the one here at Henry A. Wallace Middle School must have had thousands. It smelled like everything. There was always something that struck me when reading a book, holding my index finger tucked behind the page I was on while breathing in the smell of all those read and unread words.
It was a magnificent place. I wanted to open every single book there, but I knew it would take days and days, without end. The funny thing was that I’d found a number of books in Henry A. Wallace Middle School’s library that we also had in the hole. Up until that precise moment, I had lived my entire life simply assuming that books only existed as single copies. It had never been explained to me, nor was it included within the mode
l my father had assembled, that there were, in fact, many copies of the same book in the world before the hole, and that people all over the planet could be reading exactly the same words at exactly the same time.
I was so excited about this discovery I waved a worn copy of Slaughterhouse-Five in front of Mel and told her about it.
“Think of all the people, everywhere, who read this same book that I did.”
She was as surprised as I was, but then again, when your entire world has only eight people in it, you just have to stumble onto these truths in your own way, I suppose.
I couldn’t even begin to imagine what all those people would have been like, or what this library would look, sound, and smell like with so many books being opened and read by dozens and dozens of other boys and girls, without end. It was almost too much to consider.
In the end, I took a book with photographs in it that was about how to play basketball. As Mel had suspected, basketball had not been a form of punishment, and I decided I would try to learn how to play and then teach Mel, so that we could have a basketball team that didn’t just have boys on it.
I also decided that, before we left the school, I’d go back down inside the boys’ locker room and get a shirt with the lowest possible number on it for Mel, as well as some of those big shorts, too, just so we would look like we knew what we were doing, even if we had to make up the entire world and all those rules from the beginning, all over again.
Mel was very smart, and I was sure she would no doubt be able to outplay me in basketball. I also thumbed through my book very quickly just to be certain the game had nothing to do with sacks filled with small rocks or throwing anything at my balls.
Mel found a dictionary, resting open like some sort of religious object on a thick wooden pedestal at the front of the library. We had a dictionary in the hole, but this dictionary was massive. I marveled at how the smallest pieces of every idea that had ever been considered, every story ever told, and every line of poetry, without end, were trapped inside the dictionary’s pages.
Mel looked up “hot dog.”
“It says this: ‘A hot dog is a frankfurter sandwich on a split roll, usually topped with mustard, ketchup, pickles, or sauerkraut.”
Then she had to look up “frankfurter,” and those last four nouns as well.
“It makes me hungry, thinking about all the different things people had to eat before the hole,” I said. “Let’s go back to the van and eat. And tomorrow we should probably look for food somewhere.”
So I took an armful of clothes and shoes from the boys’ locker room, and I used one of the toilets, which did not flush, and then hid behind a bank of metal boxes so Mel could go too and not be embarrassed—if that was possible for her—about me watching.
I did not think Mel would ever be embarrassed about anything around me. Mel was strictly an after-the-hole human being.
We stayed that night outside Henry A. Wallace Middle School. We ate venison meat and small potatoes and carrots from jars I’d stolen from the kitchen in the hole, and afterward Mel showed me how we had hot water, so we could take showers, and she told me I needed to take off my gasoline-smelling clothes.
It all made me so nervous—the thought of us taking showers, and how Mel had told me to take off my clothes.
“I. Um,” I said.
“Stop being so weird, Arek.”
Mel opened the door on the little bathroom inside the van. I heard the water splash down from the showerhead.
She said, “There. I turned it on for you. It’s warm. Now go.”
I didn’t know what to do. Mel could see it. I’d never been afraid to undress in front of anyone, but being here in such a confined and private place, alone with Mel, made all things from the world we’d left behind in the hole irrelevant and foreign.
“Go on. You’re so dumb. Is this what happens to boys when they start getting boy periods?” she said.
“I don’t know.”
How could I know? As far as I knew, I was the only boy in the entire world, and Mel the only girl. How could we know about these things, or about ourselves, without making it all up—assembling a model and drawing flawed conclusions from Breakfast Papers and books and paintings?
My face turned red. My hands shook.
I’d never felt like this—not once in my entire life. I thought I could possibly be dying.
I took off my hat and, fumbling, started to unbutton my gas-reeking shirt.
Then Mel left me alone and went up to the front of the van. She sat down in the driver’s seat and watched all the quiet nothingness and everythingness of the outside world as the shower water splashed down like rain.
Under the water, warm and alive, I combed my fingers through my hair and scrubbed my skin with thick-lathering soap.
There is a line from a book I’d read in the library of the hole.
When I was confused, when I was trying to construct the truth about so many things, I asked my fathers.
This was just a few days before they’d woken me up in the dark to change me into out-of-the-hole boy clothes and take me fishing—our secret mission.
We were in the library, and I’d asked my dads if it made me a degenerate that my body had been doing things that I couldn’t really understand. I told them I’d had dreams—twice in the past week—after which I’d woken up with sticky stuff in my underwear and on my bedsheets. It scared me. I thought something was wrong with me, or broken inside me.
My dad—Austin—smiled and patted my knee. He explained what it was and said, “There’s nothing wrong with you, Lucky. It’s a totally normal thing that happens to every boy when he gets to be a certain age.”
I didn’t think being certain had anything at all to do with it.
“I was afraid I’d have to tell Wendy about it, and she’d get mad at me for making a mess.”
I figured since Wendy was our nurse, she would know if I was a degenerate, or if I needed some kind of medical treatment to make me stop leaking.
And Dad explained that this was something that boys before the hole were too inhibited to talk about with their fathers, or grandmothers for that matter, so he was proud of me for being a new human.
I didn’t get it. If you couldn’t talk to your dads about the things your body does, how were you supposed to figure out anything at all about being a boy?
Robby puffed a cigarette and said, “It happened to me almost every night, from about the time when I was twelve, all the way until after we moved down here—particularly whenever I dreamed about your dad, which was pretty much all the time.”
I looked at Dad. His cheeks reddened, and his eyes turned before-the-hole.
I did not tell them it happened to me because I dreamed about Mel—specifically about touching her. I felt like a liar for not saying that, but I believed they knew without my admitting it. Dads know these things, I think.
“Will it ever stop?” I asked.
Robby sighed. “Sadly, yes.”
I shook my head. “It’s just—I mean, sometimes I can’t stop thinking about certain things, and the only way I can get those things out of my head . . . well . . . I mean . . . I go find a place to be alone. Is it bad for you—I mean, will masturbating do harm to a boy’s body?”
Dad looked at Robby. They both smiled at my question.
And Dad said, “It is the exact opposite of harmful, son. Don’t worry about it. Just make sure you clean up after yourself, because, you know—”
“Yeah. Wendy.”
My dad lit a cigarette. He looked strangely happy and proud, and I couldn’t begin to understand why, but then again, Dad could straddle time.
He said, “I am happy you asked us about this, Lucky. I am happy to know that you’ll never be afraid of talking to us about anything.”
And Robby said, “We both love you very much.”
“That’s the other thing I need to know about,” I said. “How will I know when I fall in love? And I don’t mean like the love I feel for my d
ads or my mom. I mean the different kind of love they make up poems and paintings and stories about. How will I ever know?”
Robby told me about this book called John Thomas and Lady Jane. He told me the book was about everything you could feel about another person, and that when he read the book, it made him feel whole.
The book was written by a man named D. H. Lawrence.
D. H. Lawrence had gone through a hole, much as Max Beckmann had. And like Max Beckmann, many people considered D. H. Lawrence to be a degenerate.
The line I remembered said this:
You are home to me. I don’t care about houses.
At the time when I read that passage, at just-turned-thirteen, I don’t think I really understood what Lawrence meant. I never knew what home was supposed to be, to feel like, because I never knew what not-home was.
This was home.
The water was good.
The shower made me feel like a new person, but that’s exactly what we’d become after coming up from the hole, wasn’t it? I came out from the bathroom dressed in my new basketball shirt and shorts, my hair dripping and hanging down into my eyes.
“See? That does look good on you,” Mel said.
“Oh. Uh. Thank you.”
I went up front, distracted, trying not to look back, because I knew Mel was going to get in the shower next. I tried everything I could think of to make myself not imagine being in there under the warm water with her, or becoming the water itself, but it was useless. I wondered if she felt like this was home, and if she didn’t care about any other places. And while the water ran and Mel was inside our bathroom, I climbed under the sleeping-bag covers on my bed and opened one of the movie discs I’d taken from Walmart.
The movie was titled Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. I’d chosen it because I liked the cover: It showed a blue sky with veils of thin white clouds and the pitch-black silhouettes of three birds. And there was a pretty gold-haired woman who carried a blue purse and wore a blue dress cinched at the waist by a wide blue belt. She had a blue jacket on too. It was all blue, blue, blue, except for the birds, and that’s why I liked it. It reminded me of Max Beckmann’s The Sinking of the Titanic painting for some reason.
