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

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 goodfifty 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.