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

  Also by Kevin Brockmeier

  FICTION

  The Illumination

  The View from the Seventh Layer

  The Brief History of the Dead

  The Truth About Celia

  Things That Fall from the Sky

  FOR CHILDREN

  City of Names

  Grooves: A Kind of Mystery

  This is a work of nonfiction. Nonetheless, some of the names of the individuals involved have been changed in order to disguise their identities. Any resulting resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and unintentional.

  Copyright © 2014 by Kevin Brockmeier

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Portions of this book have previously appeared, in slightly different form, in The Oxford American (Summer 2011) as “Seventh Grade,” in Gulf Coast (Summer/Fall 2013) as “Two Days in Seventh Grade,” in The Oxford American (Summer 2012) as “More Seventh Grade,” in Granta Online (January 2014) as “The Case of the Missing Miss Vincent,” in The Georgia Review (Winter 2013) as “Dead Last Is a Kind of Second Place,” and in Interfictions (Fall 2013) as “The Plans, The Blueprints.”

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Brockmeier, Kevin.

  A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip : a Memoir of Seventh Grade / Kevin Brockmeier.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-307-90898-8 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-307-90899-5 (eBook)

  1. Brockmeier, Kevin—Childhood and youth. 2. Authors, American—Biography. 3. Boys—United States—Biography. 4. Preteens—United States—Social life and customs. I. Title.

  PS3602.R63Z46 2014 813′.6—dc23 [B] 2013031895

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Cover design and illustration by Paul Sahre

  v3.1

  This book is dedicated to Jason Akins, Tim Allison, Nikki Bailey, Chris Bastin, Mark Beason, Chris Bell, Randy Bell, Stacey Bell, Sheri Benthall, Matthew Berry, Alisha Black, Jon Bozeman, Andrew Brady, Rebecca Bredlow, Chris Brown, Tasha Brown, Todd Brown, Martha Campbell, Chad Carger, Chuck Carter, Eric Carter, Walter Carter, Michael Compton, Lynn Cypert, Camarie D’Angelo, Learon Dalby, John Daniel, Erica Dany, Brian Drewry, Kristen Dugger, Cari DuVall, Kelly Felton, Christian Funderburg, Russell Gardner, Jessica Gentry, Katie Gentry, Jeff Glymp, Jennifer Harper, Amy Harris, Shane Herald, Kim Hill, Mark Hopkins, Melissa Horn, Carey Kilpatrick, Sophia Lewis, Shane Lind, Jason Looney, Michael Loyd, Stacy McDonald, Scott Meislohn, Leslie Miller, Janet Moore, David Morton, Jennifer Newkirk, Brian Orsborn, Tammy Parsons, Aaron Perry, Keith Price, Jason Raney, Michele Regauld, Bobby Roberts, Steve Robinson, Michael Smithson, Allan Snyder, Shawn Starr, Ami Stecks, Shauna Stephan, Angie Stevens, Hope Sutton, Karla Templeton, Phillip VanWinkle, Stephen Webb, Jill Wood, and Tina Woodward

  and, with gratitude, to Miss V.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young.

  —Italo Calvino

  He feels like a different person. There he is, scaling the bluff behind Mazzio’s Pizza, bracing his sneakers against chunks of stone and the whip handles of baby trees, twenty-five feet above the parking lot. He could be a stuntman, a daredevil, almost anything. He clasps a rock, the kind made from hundreds of chalky plates, and reaches for another. His hand finds a tuft of grass instead. Then he snatches at a pine sapling and it separates from the ground in a froth of dirt and roots. His knee gives a sudden slide to the left. He nearly goes sailing off the hillside. He has to flatten himself against the rocks to regain his balance. The wall above him is smooth, faceless. He’s too short to grip the top edge and, even if he could, not strong enough to hoist himself that high. He tries to climb back down, but the way his leg lashes at the air, slipping short of its foothold, makes his muscles feel like they are floating free of his bones. The others, Kenneth and Thad and Bateman, are already somewhere overhead, flicking long curves of spit onto the grass—gleeking, it’s called, and no one has ever been able to teach him how to do it. He can hear the snap of their tongues against their teeth, and then Thad bragging, “Coke bottle!” and Kenneth saying, “Negro, you did not hit that,” and Bateman beginning his Eddie Murphy routine, powering up his slow, shameless fox’s laugh. He stays fastened to the bluff, glancing this way and that, as if the trees or the clouds or the roof of the Shell station could undo the last thirty seconds and give him another chance. It would be just like him, a classic Kevin move, to die here while his friends tell dick jokes.

  His throat is so dry that talking seems impossible, but “Guys,” he manages to say. “Hey, Thad! Bateman! I need some help.”

  Thad’s head appears, Whack-a-Moling out over the grass. “Having some trouble?”

  “How did you guys make it up there?”

  “See that big rock? You want to go around the other side.”

  “I can’t. I’m stuck.”

  “You weigh like seventy-five pounds, man. Here.” Thad lets down an arm, and gravity instantly ropes his skin with veins.

  Kevin counts to three and releases his fingers from the root fibers of the pine tree. He is ready to fall, ready to break a leg or worse. He is always amazed by the difference between how he feels and how he appears, the way his single-minded determination can look like the panicky darting motion of a little kid.

  “Ow,” Thad says. “Not my hand, gaybait. Take my wrist,” and then there is the same sensation Kevin remembers feeling when he played rocketship in the swimming pool. His body is lofted into the air, and before he knows it, he is lying safe on the ground, bugs the size of celery seeds springing in multitudes out of the clover.

  It was last winter when Kevin’s dad and stepmom moved to Brandon, Mississippi, a town roughly half the size of its own reservoir. That was where he spent the summer, watching R-rated videos and buying candy from a bait-and-tackle store, playing with his little brother instead of his friends, his head brimming with fantasies of everything he might be missing. Barely a week has passed since he returned to Little Rock. Home to his records and his comics and his room with the big wooden K on the door. Home to his friends and their ten thousand changes. Suddenly everyone is saying badass rather than awesome, lame rather than stupid, gaybait rather than faggot, and mostly the gaybait is him. They have taken up a medley of black slang—holmes, boy-ee, negro—pronouncing the words with a strange slingshot rubberiness. Their one-liners are borrowed from Fletch now, not Beverly Hills Cop, and in their tape players Mötley Crüe has been replaced by Iron Maiden, Dio, and W.A.S.P. And then there are their social lives, that elaborate nervous arrangement of who owns what, who called when, who kissed who and where. In May, Kenneth was going with Sarah, but they split up in July, and now she likes Thad, or at least that’s what Jess said. (She certainly doesn’t like Kevin.) M.B.’s parents bought a new house in Colony West, and it looks like Carina’s are d
ivorcing. Bateman’s moped was stolen from his back porch—by Ethan and Kenneth, it turns out—but they returned it that same afternoon. Stephanie is leaving Central Arkansas Christian to attend a secular school, Nathan has moved with his family to Texas, and Greg, who made a V of his arms and called out, “Boom time!” whenever he scored a goal during soccer; Greg, who liked to tackle Kevin, clamp his legs around him, and say, “Don’t you want to get up? Why don’t you get up? Come on, Brockmeier, get up off the ground”—Greg has recruited his older brother to pen Kevin in a locker on the first day of seventh grade, one of the tall athletic models the senior high kids use, and there’s not a damn thing he can do about it.

  In Arkansas, in August, the sun is so indomitable that the light melts on the pavement, collecting in silver puddles that reflect the sky and split like water around the tires of the cars. Bateman, whose shirt is ribboned with sweat, the cotton clinging transparently to his gut and nipples, says, “This heat is a bitch, mans. Let’s get something to drink.”

  They take the easy route back down the bluff. The sidewalk outside the pizza parlor is so muggy, the foyer so frigid, that goose pimples contour their arms as soon as they step inside. All at once it feels like winter: September, October, November—whoosh. An old Pac-Man machine fills the room with its electronic swallowing noise. Absentmindedly, Thad attempts to reproduce the sound: “Huey-huey-huey-huey.”

  There is a moment of perilous quiet before Kenneth pounces. “Huey-huey? What the fuck is huey-huey?” Then Kevin says, “It’s not huey-huey. He goes waka-waka, doesn’t he?” and Bateman says, “I thought it was wookiee-wookiee,” and Kevin tries, “Nookie-nookie,” and Thad says, “Pussy-pussy,” and Kenneth says, “Licky-licky.”

  They keep running through their variations as they head for the soda fountain. Kevin unzips his backpack and distributes the stack of plastic yellow Mazzio’s cups he has been saving. One by one they fill them from the soda spouts. Someone has to cap off the line, and today it is Bateman, which means that he is the one waiting for the foam to settle when the stocky little manager comes tugboating over from the ovens, trailing a pair of skinny waiters behind him. He smacks a hand on the ice bin. “Just what are you boys doing?”

  Bateman gives the Coke lever another tap. “These are endlessly refillable.”

  “Look, kid, the free refills are for when you order something off the menu. You can’t just wander in off the street and start drinking whenever you feel like it.”

  “It doesn’t say that in the commercials.”

  “It’s strongly implied.”

  “What do you want us to do, dump it out?”

  The manager wipes the oil from his brow with a shirtsleeve. “No—go, go. Drink your Cokes. But don’t try this stunt in here again.”

  November, October, September, and they are back outside, in the heat and the daylight and the damp air with blurred spots of gnats sliding through it. There is a rumor everyone has heard that when the cook scorches a pizza, Mazzio’s tosses it in the trash barrel out back, coated with red pepper flakes to keep the homeless from stealing it, but when the four of them investigate, they find only a mound of raw dough the sickish color of something trapped in a swimming pool filter, slowly bloating through the holes in the rusty metal. It is easy for Kevin to imagine it coming to life and terrorizing them. He says, “Beware the Blob,” hoping for a laugh, but the alley behind the restaurant is so sticky and unpleasant that the joke frays away before he has quite finished speaking.

  The others seem not to hear him. They sit on the wooden ties that divide the hillside from the parking lot and sink the rest of their sodas. Heaped behind them is a clinkery of discarded beer bottles. Thad has the idea to line them up for points and aim rocks at them from the top of the bluff. They set to work arranging the bottles in a row, posting them along the tarry wall. Kevin places a green one at the very edge, then smacks the wastewater from a clear one and balances it on top of two browns—a three-pointer.

  “Hey, Kevin,” Kenneth says. He points to an empty bolt hole in one of the ties. “Here’s a question. I’m not making fun of you, I’m just curious: Could you fit your penis in there?”

  Kevin inspects Kenneth’s face for signs of ridicule, but all he sees is the question, floating there with its beak out like a hummingbird. He decides it is safe to answer. “Not when it’s hard, no, but otherwise—I don’t know.” He slips his finger into the hole. “Maybe it’s long enough, but I don’t think it’s quite wide enough.”

  In his stomach he feels a wringing sensation, but it comes and it goes and there is no trap waiting for him, no ambush, just his best friends wearing the even-eyed expressions of teachers making checkmarks on a worksheet.

  Soon Bateman sets the last bottle in place, and they step back to inspect the display: thirty-some jewels of green, brown, and yellow glass flinging kinks of sunlight out at the afternoon. Kevin decides to give the soul voice a try: “Ahh-ight, boy-ees. I think we got us a contest here.” It is a decent effort but not truly convincing. The others say, “I get the first throw,” and, “Go to hell, you get the first throw. It was my idea,” and, “All right, first one to the top then,” and begin scaling the bluff. He watches from below as they go Spider-Manning from rock to rock. Then he follows behind them, starting with the trench that reaches along the bottom of the wall and ending with the crumbly dirt ledge an arm’s length from the summit. This time he manages to finish the climb without any help, boosting himself onto level ground. Yes. The grass is so tall that the wind seems to scurry through it like a troop of small animals. Kenneth, Thad, and Bateman have already set to work. Kevin rises to his feet and joins them. The soil holds its rocks so tightly that when they pry them loose it makes a sound like burlap tearing. All but the largest fit neatly in the palms of their hands. They offer a perfect quarter-pound of throwing weight, as if they were planted there for just that reason: to send beer bottles tumbling through the air like gymnasts. The bottles pop and they shatter, one after the other, leaving a few jagged cups of glass sitting on the wood. Bateman and Thad are barraging the wall with rocks, trying to demolish the lone survivor, when the manager of Mazzio’s comes crunching through the wreckage. “Hey, you little shits, knock it off!”

  “Knock what off?”

  “You’re filling my lot here with glass, that’s what.”

  It is true, the asphalt shines like a mirror beneath him, but what can you do with a day so bright that nearly everything shines like a mirror—the green of the leaves, the brown of the dirt, the gray of the roofs and the pavement?

  Thad lets a rock fall thud from his hand. “Sir, we are so, so sorry,” he says. “We must be total idiots. We didn’t realize.”

  “Yeah, well, stupendous. Magnificent. Me and my people are gonna have to clean this mess up, though, you know? Or else someone’ll flatten a tire. Just use your heads from now on.”

  “We will, sir. And again, we’re really sorry. Oh, and one more thing: fuck you, harpy-fucker.”

  It is one of Thad’s favorite cutdowns, borrowed from Kevin’s Monster Manual—an insult so dirty and inventive that it ticks off nearly everyone who hears it. But the manager just sighs and scuffs back inside, a monkey look of disappointment on his face. It is the expression of someone just like Kevin, with a tendency to believe the best of people until the very last second.

  A long moment of insects and car horns passes. A blackbird lands in the crown of an oak tree, caws three times, and flaps away again. Only then do they decide the manager is not returning.

  And maybe that counts as a win for them, but if so it is a frustrating one. The dude has taken the possibility of a great story, one they could have shared between them forever, and ruined it by failing to lose his temper. “It’s like a bad Fourth of July,” Kevin says, thinking of those bottle rockets that go sailing off with a phrrt of black powder and vanish into the silence of the sky.

  The four of them decide to set off for Kevin’s house in case the manager surprises them by calli
ng the police. It is the last weekend of summer, the last weekend before seventh grade, when CAC’s three elementary schools braid their twelve-year-olds together with the junior high and high schoolers at the big redbrick building on the hilltop overlooking the river brush. Thad is spending the night with Kevin, and Kenneth is spending the night with Bateman, and tomorrow they will return home to their families and wait for the day to empty out. Then, on Monday, they will all wake up and everything will be different.

  On the far side of the field, where the valley rises up to meet the hilltop, is the apartment complex where Miss Moon, their sixth grade teacher, lives. She is tall and slight, with brown hair and blue eyes that seem drained of their color by her freckleless white piano-key skin. Something about the sound of her tongue stumbling over their names when she scolds them fills the boys in Kevin’s class with shivers of sexual longing. He has never understood it. She is pretty the way a statue is pretty. Who would turn his eye toward a grown-up when there are girls their own age, impossibly gorgeous girls, who might actually let you touch them someday, and who would let you touch them now if you were touching material? Who would desire anyone else when there is Sarah Bell, Sarah Bell, Sarah Bell—say it loud and listen to it ring—whose fingers grazed Kevin’s leg last spring during chapel and made him feel as if his skin had suddenly grown too tight for him?

  Kevin is good with stories and always has been. At school, whenever he has finished his work and doesn’t feel like borrowing a book from the library or mapping a dungeon out on a sheet of graph paper, he likes to write mystery stories with himself as the detective and his classmates as the kidnap victims—The Case of the Missing Tania Pickett; The Case of the Missing Ethan Carpenter—or superhero stories that mingle the Marvel Universe together with the DC Universe, or science fiction stories about a motorcyclist named Ace who leads two separate lives, waking into one the instant he falls asleep in the other, or ghost stories with paragraphs that conceal the names of all the shows on prime-time TV. In their group Bateman is the clown, Thad the heartbreaker, Kenneth the cool guy. What is Kevin but the inventor, the storyteller, the negro with the big imagination? It might be the single thing his friends like best about him. And so, as they walk through the apartment complex, he spins a pornographic little what-if for them, pulling this string and that, a fantasy in which one of them—take your pick—disconnects his penis and ships it to Miss Moon in the mail, and “What on earth could this be?” she wonders, flicking its head, tapping it against her palm, holding it distractedly between her teeth, where she chews on it softly like a pencil, pleased and astonished when it begins to change its shape, so that she exclaims, “Oh my goodness, what a fun little toy!” and, “Let’s see what else it can do,” testing it with her lips and her tongue and her fingers as it transmits its psychic antenna signals across the city, until Kenneth seems to scarecrow-dance out of his limbs and says, “God, God, God, Kevin. Jesus. You have to stop right now.”