A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip Read Online Free PDF Page A

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-rack
ing 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-airblower, waiting 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