Brockmeier - A few seconds of radiant filmstrip: a memoir of seventh grade

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, KevinChildhood and youth. 2. Authors, AmericanBiography. 3. BoysUnited StatesBiography. 4. PreteensUnited StatesSocial life and customs. I. Title.
P S3602.R63Z46 2014 813.6dc23 [ 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 DAngelo, 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.

Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young.

Italo Calvino

He feels like a different person. There he is, scaling the bluff behind Mazzios 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. Hes 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 grassgleeking, its 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 foxs 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.

Thads 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 cant. Im 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 Kevins 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 slangholmes, boy-ee, negropronouncing the words with a strange slingshot rubberiness. Their one-liners are borrowed from Fletch now, not Beverly Hills Cop, and in their tape players Mtley Cre 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 thats what Jess said. (She certainly doesnt like Kevin.) M.B.s parents bought a new house in Colony West, and it looks like Carinas are divorcing. Batemans moped was stolen from his back porchby Ethan and Kenneth, it turns outbut 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