A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip: A Memoir of Seventh Grade

by Kevin Brockmeier

  Jess’s putdown meant that he had kissed something repulsive. He is an ass-kisser—that’s what she was saying.

  He feels the satisfaction of cracking the code, a fine warm body-lightness that causes his fingers and toes to tingle. Simultaneously, though, he can’t help but wonder: Is Jess right? Is he an ass-kisser, a suck-up? And how would he know if he was? The truth is he spends thirty minutes of every hour suspecting he has missed some essential clue about himself. And not only himself—he has a recurring fantasy that one night, while he was asleep, the entire world was transformed into an alien planet, but no one bothered to tell him, and he didn’t have the instinct to figure it out, and here he is now on a wild new Earth, walking around like an imbecile, as if everything he knows hasn’t fallen away behind him like a river plummeting over a precipice.

  At 3:30, the final bell rings. He returns to his homeroom to collect the overnight bag containing his clothes and his toiletries. Then he follows the crowd to the buses centipeding across the parking lot, a half dozen idling old athletic vehicles, their yolky orange color faded by the sunlight.

  It is a golden Friday afternoon, the very last minute of the school week, and for a moment he simply stands there at the edge of the weekend. The days and nights make a quiet sound of possibility, rustling and ticking like a dark forest. The campground at Lake Bennett, forty miles up the highway, is hosting a sleepaway for everyone at CAC, seventh-graders through seniors, permission slips required. Who knows what could happen between now and Monday morning?

  The teachers are busy directing people to their assigned buses: Eighth grade, I’m looking for the eighth grade! Yo, SOPH-mores! Juniors right here—come on, folks, let’s get a move on! Thad, Kenneth, and Bateman have already packed themselves into the long bench at the back of the seventh-grade bus, along with a couple of new kids, Shane Roper and Joseph Rimmer, who seem to Kevin like the same shaggy, drowsy cutup ladled into two separate bodies, one brown-haired and the other blond, both of them laughing all the time at some private joke they’ve exchanged with a twitch of their eyebrows. Thad says to Kevin, “Sorry, neeg-bo, no room in the rear for you,” and in his dirtiest voice Shane repeats, “In the rear,” and Joseph says, “Up the butt,” and Kenneth says, “Holmes, did you just call dude neeg-bo?” and the word echoes against the walls as Kevin walks away: neeg-bo, neeg-bo, neeg-bo.

  He finds a seat next to Ethan, one of the three Carpenters in their class, just as Sarah is one of the three Bells, Thad one of the three Brookses, Jennifer one of the two Grahams. Kevin is the only Brockmeier.

  He and Ethan Carpenter are Billy Joel friends, comic book friends. Together they have made countless Saturday afternoon expeditions to Gadzooks, a small fluorescent box of a store that smells of Windex and carpet glue, as if the desks and filing cabinets of some one-room insurance office had been replaced with glass cabinets full of vintage toys and racks of the latest Marvels and DCs. The two of them spend the ride talking superheroes, arguing which-is-better-and-why. The Avengers or the Justice League? Batman or Wolverine? They both agree: the Punisher.

  Soon the lakeshine pierces the trees, and the road hooks down through the grass, and the bus comes crunching to a stop in the wet sand. The door folds open, and everyone stands up to leave, pressing and bunching down the aisle. Mr. McCallum, the principal, waits in the courtyard in his tie and short-sleeved shirt, his thin hair whipped up from his scalp by the breeze. He looks like a baseball player dressed uncomfortably for church, addressing them as “guys and gals,” and saying, “Grab your gear and choose a bunk. Boys to the left and girls to the right. Hot dogs are at six o’clock, lights out at eleven. Otherwise have fun and don’t drown in the lake.”

  Kevin’s is the last bag unloaded from the cargo bin. He wants to sleep next to Thad, and if not Thad then Kenneth or Bateman, but by the time he reaches the building, all the beds have been taken. The only empty bunk he can find is in a private suite on the far side of the barracks. It is a prize room, easily the best in the lodge, with a window, a table, a couch, and a dresser, and though it is already being shared by three ninth-graders he recognizes from his elementary school days—that world without end of chapels and lunches, kickball matches and recesses, amen, amen—no one stops him from claiming the remaining bed. Before long the ninth-graders head out for the docks to borrow a canoe, and a short while later, four grown seniors come charging in to gorilla-toss their bags into the hallway. Kevin lies on his stomach reading a Two-Minute Mystery while they tramp around the room claiming mattresses, kicking the sand off their shoes, and stuffing their clothes in the dresser—all but the big one, who stands watching the mayhem from the shoulder of the couch. Then Kevin is alone again.

  “Say hey, man, let me chat with you a second.” An older kid is leaning in the doorway, all black jeans and catlike posing. “I’m Rory. You?”

  My name is Kevin Brockmeier; I collect What Ifs and X-Men; my favorite band is New Edition.

  “Kevin.”

  “Awesome. So listen. The big guy who was just in here? That’s David Henson. He’s out there feeling like you’ve robbed him of his bed. He was All-Conference last year, as a junior. I’m talking the Razorbacks have their eyes on him. Now I know you got here first, but there’s another room just down the hall. Three beds instead of four—that’s the only difference. You can get a couple of buds and take that one instead. Sound good?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Cool. Give me two names, and I’ll tell them where to meet you.”

  One: Thad; and two: Bateman—Kevin doesn’t hesitate. He is like a gymnast of favorites, keeping his muscles limber and his reflexes honed by asking himself again and again, at every opportunity, which songs he prefers, which girls he likes, who his best friends are. Kenneth is number three today. Kevin hopes his feelings won’t be hurt. He half-suspects the other room is a scam, anyway, an invention, and he’ll end up sleeping on the bus or sharing a mattress with Jim Boothby, one of the few kids at CAC, boy or girl, who is smaller than he is. But the room is real, with one cabin bed and one bunk bed and a fan that spins so hard it makes the ceiling light totter. Kevin is thumping the seat of a chair stretched with army canvas when the Rory guy raps on the doorframe. “Well, Kev, looks like you lucked out. Those friends of yours have already dug in for the weekend.”

  “Kenneth wasn’t ticked off, was he? You said only two people. That was the precondition. If he’s ticked off, then maybe he can trade with Bateman tomorrow night?”

  “No, man, look, you didn’t hear me. Nobody’s coming. You’ve got this place all to yourself.”

  That night, at lights out, after a cookout that shoots coal sparks into the sandy grass and a hayride where Carina DeCiccio lets the round part of her hip rest against him, Kevin lies quietly in the gray darkness, listening to the fan whir the way a cricket chirps.

  Saturday he wakes later than usual. The men’s room has already emptied out. Beneath the open row of shower nozzles are only a bottle of Prell and a few slick patches of concrete, and he is able to wash himself without embarrassment. The noises outside the lodge are sliced off by the rush of the water. As soon as he closes the tap, though, they resume. The hull of a motorboat smacking the surface of the lake. A softball wha-racking against a bat. A group of footballers goofing around like cheerleaders, Weird Al–ing their way through the Mustang Spirit chant: ah-lean, lean, ah-lean-lean-lean-lean.

  Kevin towels himself off and dresses. He is using the toilet when the bathroom door creaks open, and all at once it’s, “Whoof,” and, “Jesus Christ, do you smell that?” and, “Do I smell that? Of course I smell that. Dude’s been eating roadkill, and you ask me if I smell that.” Then someone must peer beneath the stall because Kevin hears a voice whisper, “Check it out—shoes,” and he understands that they are talking about him.

  After a while, he has no choice but to rise and zip, buckle and flush. He opens the stall door. Three upperclassmen, sturdy Roman pillar types, are standing quietly by the hot-air blower, wai
ting with their arms crossed. The moment they see Kevin and his little straw body they lose it. Laughter blooms from their mouths like a chain of musical notes, dozens of tiny stems and noteheads popping open and ringing off the walls. The three of them cling, gasping, to one another’s shoulders, and stumble against the sink counter. Kevin watches their fingers shape miniature invisible boxes in the air, a gesture some of the older girls have carried into the school from their summers, meaning how small, how cute, look at the teensy-weensy adorable little baby.

  He can’t help it—he starts grinning along with them. He is not just some jerk in a story. He is in on the joke.

  It takes him forty minutes of roaming through the park to locate his friends. Along the curve of the lake is a thick place of oaks where the light that strains through the leaves meets the light that dances off the water, playing over his skin in hundreds of greenish gold threads. Beyond the docks is a chain of boathouses where gray squirrels sprint tik-tik-tik over the tin roofs. They bound across the gaps without a second’s pause, sailing in a frozen stretch, like runners leaping hurdles, before they land and unlock and keep running.

  Kevin’s mind won’t stop replaying the incident in the bathroom. If you ask him, the whole thing wasn’t half as funny as those other guys thought it was. What was the punch line supposed to be? Big things come in small packages? Hilarity.

  He wishes he had been quick enough to produce a comeback, some sterling silver one-liner he could have dropped at their feet like a coin.

  Blank—that’s what he should have said.

  This.

  Whatever it was, it would have been perfect.

  The more he thinks about it, the more embarrassed he becomes. All the same, when he passes the picnic table where the older kids are sitting with their buddies and hears, “There he is. That’s him. The Source,” he experiences a queer proud sensation of minor fame. They have given him a name. The hair on the back of his neck prickles. He hopes they haven’t told that Rory guy.

  Eventually he catches the rhythm of Bateman repeating his favorite baby story, the one about the time he scraped his knee playing in front of his house. Kevin can recognize it by the beats alone:

  “I fall down.”

  Where did you fall down?

  “In the street.”

  WHAT were you doing in the street?

  “Falling down.”

  He cuts around the wall of a pavilion and finds the usual gang standing in a patch of grass-stitched dirt. He hiked past the spot not five minutes ago, and it was completely deserted. “Jeez, bros,” he says. “I’ve been to Conway and back practically. Where did you all migrate in from?”

  “We’ve been around.”

  “Here and there.”

  “Mass murdering.”

  This from Shane Wesson, who never says something true if he can say something ridiculous. But Shane begins stamping the ground, planting his foot flat and firm like elephants do, and Kevin realizes that he is referring to what Mr. Garland told them one day in science class—how with every step you take, thousands of minuscule creatures are crushed beneath your weight. “To the grave! Die, foul microorganisms!”

  Kenneth says, “All right already, Shane. It’s getting lame. Ell-ay-ame.” Then Bateman says, “It’s way past lame, it’s mame,” and Clint Fulkerson, a tall kid with white jeans and straight bangs and a weirdly handsome science fiction face, like a Tiger Beat Spock, says, “Yeah, dude, enough with the microorganisms,” and Bateman dives back in with, “By now it’s nearly name,” and Kevin seals his palms over his ears and says, “La la la.”

  Something happens in Thad’s expression, like a knife sharpening against a stone. “La la la? What the fuck is la la la?”

  “It’s like, cut it out. You know, like, I don’t want to hear it.”

  Thad parrots him syllable for syllable, replacing all the words he used with la’s. “La la, la la la. La la, la, la la la la la la.”

  Kenneth and Bateman, Joseph and Clint, Shane Roper and Shane Wesson—for a while it is a concert of la’s, all of them talking at once. There is a problem with Kevin’s eyes again. He reddens and blinks, looking away so that no one will notice. By his shoe lies a bottle cap—the prying kind, not the twisting kind—with a flat clot of dirt inside it. It could be a pie tin for Smurfs or Littles. He kicks it and watches it slide off toward the trees. He wishes some distraction would come along and conceal him from everyone. A bomb. A tornado. And soon enough a cute eighth-grader, Dana Treadway, strolls by with her friends. Thad and Kenneth shout out “Dana Banana” until she reaches the door of the snack bar, where she wheels around and gives them a big bracey escape-smile. Then it’s, “Dang, did you see that?” and, “She wants you, holmes. She totally wants you,” and Kevin feels like Moses or Daniel, Houdini or David Copperfield, allowed by some miracle to slip out of his chains.

  Seemingly overnight, his friends have discovered a new method of spitting, and he looks on as they show off their technique. Here’s how it works: you stroke your throat for a while, then gasp as if you are fumbling a stack of plates—Aw-ah! Oh God! Here it comes!—varying it up sometimes by adding a girl’s name, until you are ready to throw your head back and fire off a pearl of spit. It looks easy enough, but try as he might, Kevin can’t quite get it right, and after three or four attempts, he quietly gives up. He has never been any good at these games. It seems smarter just to stand back and watch, to let his friends take turns priming their throats and spotting the ground with saliva, to laugh when he senses he is supposed to laugh, swear when he senses he is supposed to swear.

  He slept through breakfast and missed his usual snack time, so by 1:15, when the lunch bell calls everyone to the courtyard—a lunch horn, actually, three quick taps from one of the buses—he is literally starving. No, Kevin, the Miss Vincent in his head corrects him: Not literally. You’re figuratively starving. You’re practically starving. “This is literally the most creative story anyone has ever handed in to me. Your penmanship is practically beastly.”

  He walks with the others back to the lodge, where the teachers have laid out pizzas on folding tables. He can taste the brine of the pepperoni, the ash of the crust, from a good fifty feet away. Cavalcades of gnats and flies follow the smell. Nearby a rope chimes against a flagpole. The girl who steps in line behind him says, “Hey!” and then, “Kevin!” and then, “This is my sister, Lynn. Lynn, this is Kevin. Kevin’s the one who’s always using the big words in class.”

  He is? Kevin picks through his memory for the biggest word he knows. The searching expression on his face must look like mystification to the girl, because she says, “You don’t remember my name, do you?”

  “I was trying to think of a big word to impress you. Incorrigible.”

  “That’s okay. You don’t have to be embarrassed. I’m Melissa.”

  “I’m Kevin. Absquatulate.”

  She makes a no-kidding gesture. “I just introduced you. By name, remember?”

  “Sorry. A reflex.”

  “So are you like constantly reading books or what?”

  He is talking to a girl, and there are a hundred possible answers to her question, but at last he selects the true one: “Pretty much.”

  “I like that,” she says. And then they arrive at the front of the line, where the table splits their conversation down the middle. She and her sister load up their plates with slices of pepperoni, and Kevin takes his usual, two plain slices of cheese. They meet again by the ranks of Cokes, where he says, “Well, bye, then,” and Melissa says, “See ya in class,” and as the flies make crumb-passes over their plates, they leave to join their separate friends.

  Maybe this counts, he thinks.

  Maybe something has happened.

  Late that afternoon, Kevin and Clay, one of the other Carpenters, borrow a paddleboat and steer it out onto the lake. Kevin finds himself listening to the soft parting noise the wheel makes as it dips and surfaces, again and again—a kissing sound: pwah pwah pwah pwah. He has never
operated such a contraption before. There is a dinky toy-car feeling to it. It’s fun, he has to admit, but also kind of ridiculous. He can’t believe that grown-ups do it, too—grown-ups!—with their big legs and their beer coolers and their sunglasses, pumping and splishing across the water while Jet Skis and motorboats slice past them like knives moving through a cake. He and Clay aim for a clearing on the far side of the nature trail. Every so often they observe a fish rolling up from the depths. To Kevin they look like loose pieces of something larger, the gray or brown forearm of some strange underwater man stretching slowly up out of the muck, but Clay is able to identify every one with a single word. “Flathead. Largemouth. Spotted. Drum.” The names are so unlikely that Kevin has a hard time believing he isn’t making them up.

  They are pedaling past a knot of trees when they become aware of two girls quarreling with each other on the shore. One says, “That’s not what you promised me,” and the other, “I already told you. It wasn’t my decision, it was Jennifer’s,” and the first again, “Jennifer, my ass. This is totally humiliating for me, don’t you get that?” and he knows that it is Sarah because he knows.

  The argument grows louder as the cove angles into sight. As soon as their boat putters past the trees, Clay spots the girls and points them out—Sarah and Jess, standing chest to shoulder by the struts of a wooden dock.

  “Jess,” Sarah begs. Then she says it again as if it were a command: “Jess. Look. I already told everyone. You-know-who is going to be there. For once in your life, can’t you have a little compassion?”

  “It’s out of my hands, I’m sorry.”

  “What, do you want me to say please? Okay—please.”

  “Sugar, you’re not getting the picture.”

  The boat is sliding past so quietly that neither of the girls has noticed it. “You know what? Fuck you,” Sarah says, and Jess tosses back the newest answer, which is, “Fuck yourself, save a quarter, this machine is out of order.” Then she pivots around and marches away.