A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip: A Memoir of Seventh Grade
Page 17
“So no one in your family?”
“Oh!”
“No room for your family on the island. Tough luck, family! You can go ahead and burn to cinders.”
Well, no, but his family would overturn the whole question. “Let’s say our families are already taken care of.”
“All right. Then you and Bateman, and I guess Chuck, and Jennifer, and Shane Wesson.”
“Shane Wesson?”
Ethan is the kind of person whose entire personality flashes through in his laugh, quiet, calm, and unpretentious, as if somewhere deep inside his body he is always cushioned in an old recliner with a comic book propped open on his chest.
“Be serious.”
“Okay, okay. Clay Carpenter.”
“Good answer. So are you saying you like Jennifer?”
“I don’t like anybody right now.”
“Huh. I don’t think there’s ever been a single time in my life when I didn’t like anybody.”
Ethan laughs again. “Yeah, I know that about you. So when did you say you leave for your dad’s?”
“Shit. Wednesday. Man, I don’t want to go to Mississippi. Everything always changes when I’m in Mississippi.”
“Well, we’ve still got a few days left. I have all this stuff to do tomorrow, and Sunday is Sunday, but what are your plans Monday?”
“Yeah! Do you think your mom would drop you off? That would be excellent. I get paid tomorrow. We could go see a movie.”
“I’ll ask her.”
Last summer Kevin was leaving for Mississippi, and Gotcha! had just opened, and “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” was the number-one song on the radio. Now he is leaving for Mississippi, and Top Gun has just opened, and “West End Girls” is the number-one song on the radio.
The Gobstopper clacks against his teeth, and he takes it out to inspect the colors. Though the streetlamps have dimmed on their timers, the light is still bright enough for him to see the miniature swirling planet the layers have formed, some Jupiter floating far up in the night. He tucks the candy back in his cheek, then crosses his hands behind his head.
“Thad called it a queerbook,” he says.
“Did what?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
Someone’s tires whisper past on the road, and suddenly Kevin’s mind carries him back to Monday morning, when the sixth-graders paid their year-end visit to the school’s main campus. How nervous they must have been as their bus coasted to a stop in the parking lot, yet how carefully, he thinks, they hid it, slouching in their seats and trading jokes with their friends. On one side of the river stood the brown-brick building where they had grown up playing war and inventing fan clubs at recess, on the other the redbrick building where half the students drove their own cars. Between them lay five minutes of curving highway and sandstone bluffs and hillsides green with a million trees. The kids descended the bus platform onto the patio and jostled through the school’s front doors. The halls absorbed their footsteps. The crowd rolled around them like a wave. And in chapel, when Principal McCallum said, “Now will you all please join me in the Mustang Anthem,” they sang so much louder than everyone else—
We clasp our hands in unity.
Our hearts are joined in love.
We make our pledge of loyalty
To Him who dwells above.
And as we meet life’s fortunes here,
Our thoughts shall always be
Of love for each and every year
We share at CAC.
Kevin listened to their voices reflecting off the rafters, a great unanimous chorus of pre-altos and pre-tenors. Even the coolest of them had not yet learned that it was better not to demand too much attention. A year ago he was one of them and had no idea where his life was going. As the next song began, he sat in the bleachers remembering what it was like. Thinking, Before you know it, nothing will be the same. Saying, You’re not me yet, but I’m still you.
Acknowledgments
I owe thanks to the William F. Laman Public Library for a fellowship that allowed me to complete this book, as well as to my editor, Edward Kastenmeier, and his colleagues Tim O’Connell, Jocelyn Miller, and Emily Giglierano; to my agent, Jennifer Carlson, and her associates at Dunow, Carlson & Lerner; to my publicist, Josie Kals; my production editor, Victoria Pearson; and everyone else at Pantheon and Vintage; to the editors of the various magazines in which portions of this book were originally published, most especially Carol Ann Fitzgerald and Marc Smirnoff at The Oxford American, Meghan McCarron at Interfictions, Stephen Corey and Jenny Gropp Hess at The Georgia Review, Rachael Allen and Yuka Iqarashi at Granta, and Aja Gabel and Karyna McGlynn at Gulf Coast; to Jessica Easto and Chris Bertram for helping me in my hunt for a title; to Jessica Brogdon for refreshing my memory; and to Karen Russell for responding to this odd little memoir-thing with enthusiasm, sympathy, and acuity.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
In addition to A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip, Kevin Brockmeier is the author of the novels The Illumination, The Brief History of the Dead, and The Truth About Celia; the story collections Things That Fall from the Sky and The View from the Seventh Layer; and the children’s novels City of Names and Grooves: A Kind of Mystery. His work has been translated into seventeen languages. He has published his stories in such venues as The New Yorker, The Georgia Review, McSweeney’s, Zoetrope, Tin House, The Oxford American, The Best American Short Stories, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and New Stories from the South. He has recieved the Borders Original Voices Award, three O. Henry Awards (one, a first prize), the PEN USA Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an NEA Grant. In 2007, he was named one of Granta magazine’s Best Young American Novelists He teaches frequently at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and he lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he was raised.