Mike Meginnis - Fat Man and Little Boy

Claire turns away.

Claire means to leave school alone. She feels a little woozy, slightly off. Peter and Matthew follow her out. They walk on either side of her, elbow-lengths away. Either could, speaking purely in terms of distance and practicality, touch her skin, take her hand, hold her elbow, stroke the nape of her neck. Some days she might want them to, or at least one of them. Today she would like neither. It might have been their fight that made her feel so ill. Something left their warring bodies and entered hers. She might throw up.

“Your skin got really hot while we were arm-wrestling,” says Peter.

“What?” says Matthew, in English.

“Your skin,” says Peter. “It was incredibly hot. Are you okay?” He shows his palm. It’s still a little red—irritated by the heat, apparently, or even burnt. It might be the beginnings of a rash.

Maybe what Claire has is catching. She rubs her tummy.

“Are you feeling okay?” says Peter.

“What?” says Matthew.

“Not you.”

He gets that. Matthew hangs his head, kicks a rock hard enough to send it flying.

Claire says, “I’m fine. You two looked ridiculous, though. You’re going to hurt each other someday.”

“I doubt it,” says Peter.

Matthew says, “Do you want to ride bikes? Claire can ride on my handlebars. We can take her home and that way she’ll be safe.”

It’s been days since Claire has heard him say this much to anyone. She imagines Matthew working through a French phrasebook for an evening, underlining useful conjugations, building the invitation in a separate notebook. Has he explored the possible avenues of this conversation thoroughly? What else might he be prepared to say on the subjects of bicycles, security, and Claire? Does he know the word for wheel yet?

“I don’t want to do that,” says Claire. She waits for the what.

“We should go somewhere else then,” says Peter.

“I question the handlebars as a conveyance,” she says, wanting to go home but not with them. She waits for the what.

“You can ride my bike,” says Peter. “I’ll run beside you.”

“I want to take her home so she’ll be safe,” says Matthew, getting in front of the other two and turning to face them.

“Safe from what?” says Claire.

Peter nods. This is the way the boys agree. She needs to be safe.

“Fuck that. I don’t want to be safe. Put me on your handlebars, Matthew, but don’t take me home.”

Matthew says, “What?”

They go to Half Hill. Half Hill is a tall one, rising from the earth like a wave, flattening to a reasonable plateau, and then cresting harshly, falling inward, revealing its soil: the dirt, the rocks inside, and sometimes the worms. This open side is also partly mossed and grassed in horizontal gradations. Explanations for Half Hill vary considerably, being almost purely the subject of schoolyard speculation. No one their age can remember. Some kids say it was the Germans with one of their big guns—a rail gun, even. Others say it was a bomber—German or American. Some kids say there was going to be a building there, one in a weird style, integrated with the hill, and so the builders dynamited half the hill. It was going to be a haberdashery or something. No one agrees, and none of the stories are especially plausible. But there stands the hill nonetheless.

“The game is simple,” says Peter, pacing before Claire and Matthew like a commanding officer, the flat side of Half Hill his backdrop. “You ride your bike up the hill as fast as you can. Then you ride as fast as you can over the flat part. That’s where you get most of the speed. Then you launch off the edge. You dismount the bike as you fall, and take the fall as well as you can.”

“What’s the point?” asks Claire.

“You wanted something unsafe. This is it. Totally unsafe. We could all die.”

“You’ll wreck your bikes,” says Claire.

Matthew says, “I will do it.”

“Matthew, your bike is the only way you can get to school,” says Claire. “We live close enough to walk. Peter, you love your bike. You don’t want to hurt it, and Matthew can’t afford to destroy his.”

“What?” says Matthew, fuming. “I’ll do it!”

“It’s a calculated risk,” says Peter. “Look, I’ll go first and show you how.” He walks his bike to the foot of the hill and mounts it. “People do this all the time,” he insists. “It’s no big deal.”

He pedals hard. Climbing the hill is obviously not the part where you pick up speed. It’s the part where you prove that you can bike uphill. The speed comes at the plateau—he hits an impressive pace, and, at the verge of the precipice, stands upright on the pedals. Claire’s stomach twists up inside itself like a towel being wrung. From their perspective, the bike rolls off into empty air, aligning with the clouds. Peter tilts sideways until he and the bike are parallel with the ground, at which point he retracts his legs, tucking them up in his gut. He lands with a thud and coughs for a minute. The coughs become laughter. His bike lies three feet away, angled by its pedal, front wheel swiveled and spinning, back wheel still.

“I did it!” he shouts. He stumbles to his feet and checks the bike. “It’s fine. Now Matthew can try.”

“I’ll do it,” says Matthew. Someone must have told him girls like boys who plan to do things. He doesn’t move from his spot at the foot of the hill, and it doesn’t look like he’s going to.

“I’ll go with you,” Claire says. “I’ll ride on your handlebars.”

Matthew stares at her blankly. It must be everything he wanted. They’ll be flying off a little cliff, though. Did Matthew want that? It may be he doesn’t know what she said. She boosts herself up onto the handlebars. He nearly falls, but Peter runs over, catches them, and holds them upright.

He asks Claire if she really wants to do this and she nods without thinking. “I thought you would go separately. I thought you could both use his bike, because it’s more sturdy than mine.”

She hates to see Peter crow when he’s won. She hates to see Matthew sit and shake and crimson. This is also, in her life as their captive, a precious opportunity to be less than safe. That’s enough in its own right.

So she shouts, “Go Matthew!” and Peter, in a too-rare moment of kindness, pushes the bike, helping Matthew climb the hill, running alongside across the plateau, and barking a reminder for the both of them to jump. Matthew stands on the pedals. He breathes on her neck. She pushes off the handlebars.

A long, sharp breath at the apex.

They land entangled—Matthew with one leg beneath the bike, Claire with her arm trapped under Matthew’s torso, everyone crying. Peter comes down from the hill the long way. He tries to help them up. They hurt too much. Claire wrenches out her arm from beneath Matthew and rolls onto her side. Her mouth is bleeding. Her nose is bleeding. Her body hurts all over. Matthew is bleeding from his nose as well, and his leg has been scraped badly. The bike’s right handlebar is bent to a weird angle. Peter is saying he’s sorry. He’s saying she shouldn’t have done it.

She says, “It’s okay.”

Matthew curses in English.

She says, “I’ve got to pee. I’m going to go behind Half Hill. Peter, please don’t let Matthew look.”

Matthew rolls onto his back and lets his mouth hang open as if he’s waiting for the sky to pour itself down his throat. He kicks once at the clouds. He says, “That was stupid.”

Claire makes her way out of sight. She tastes her own copper, feels it running weirdly cold from her nose and down her cheeks, her neck. She draws up her skirts around her waist and pushes down her underwear. The grass tickles. She relieves herself. It soothes her stomach.