John Darnielle - Wolf in White Van

It was JJ; Teague; Tara, who was JJ’s girlfriend; Kimmy, who was Tara’s friend; and then me. It was the middle of the week. We were bored, sitting around on the aluminum bleachers up by the practice baseball diamond on the other side of the high school parking lot, waiting for something to happen. Tara had her boom box and we were listening to Relayer. I was looking hard at the tape shell and thinking the thoughts I get looking at tape shells. Am I the only person who gets the hard creeps from this guy’s face? was what I was thinking specifically. I was looking at the singer from Yes. His mouth looked like it was from somebody else’s head. I couldn’t make all the pieces fit.

Teague was teaching himself to dungeon master; he’d gotten The Dungeon Master’s Guide from his parents for Christmas. It was May now. You could see from the book he’d already read it a million times. The front was like a wrinkled old map, and half the pages were bent in at the corners. He was hunched over it with his index finger pointing at the middle of a page and his eyebrows scrunched down. When Teague is irritated it’s really obvious.

“Can we listen to some Rush?” he said without looking up.

The Yes tape was Kimmy’s but she had all kinds of different music so she started digging through her gigantic purse to try to find something else to play. In her purse, tape shells clacked against one another while she dug; you could hear them scraping against each other, against keys, against pens and compacts, the sounds muffled in the purse’s puffy vinyl folds. To me it sounded like somebody shaking up dry bones. I closed my eyes and thought about those old bones in some girl’s purse and then I let my mind go: if you wanted to fit bones into your purse they’d have to be broken into pieces; you couldn’t fit a whole arm bone or a leg bone or a skull in there, just teeth, toes, and fingers; maybe kneecaps; but my imagination told me teeth would make a high sound, like pieces of glass, and toes would sound dull, like old crushed cans. That left fingers. I remembered biology class when we did anatomy. Distal phalanges, proximal phalanges, metacarpals. To walk around with a bag full of bones in the normal world would require a stone constitution. You could be a thief. You could be an actor, probably. Actors die young in ancient Rome, though. If it’s the present day and you’re Kimmy, and you’re carrying someone’s bones around in your purse, then I have a lot of questions for you, and I’ll probably never ask them, and you’ll have a secret that only I have guessed.

When I snapped out of it Kimmy’d popped out Yes and put in 2112. She has everything. JJ and Tara were halfway making out. She had her hand on his pants, moving up the thigh. He was two years older than her, already out of high school. Nobody really knew what he was doing with his life, because we only ever saw him at the park when he wanted to hang out with Tara. He had a mustache.

I was ditching P.E. to come up and hang out with everybody. I started to worry that if I missed two classes the school might call my house, and I’d get in trouble, and when I start to worry I can’t stop, so I told everybody “Later.” I felt sad to leave even though there was nothing going on. The sun was out and it was really bright; I wished I had some sunglasses. I walked across the parking lot toward the school, and then somebody honked at me. I never look up when people honk at me because I don’t want any trouble. People gave me trouble back then because of the way I dressed and because they didn’t like my friends. Inside I hated anybody who honked at me and wished I could cause their car to crash using only the powers of my mind. I could see what the crashes would look like from the outside and what they would feel like inside the car. It was awesome.

I once heard in a science class that you don’t start remembering things until you’re three, or maybe five. When I remember this day and most things before it, it’s like trying to remember being four years old, or two. I can see it, and I know it happened, and I have enough information about it to reconstruct the whole scene to my own satisfaction, but the person to whom it happened is somewhere so far off that I only know it’s me because I can see his face, and because I’m the one remembering.

Later that day I walked home in the bright sun. I remember seeing the bottlebrush bushes that lined the street for the last four blocks, how they looked ancient, or maybe Martian. Alien. Home from school was a straight shot through four different neighborhoods, and by the time I got home, I always felt like a traveler returning from a great journey, relearning what home was like, acclimating to newly unfamiliar waters. Two packages were waiting for me on the front porch; I was glad to get to them first, because sometimes my parents teased me about how much time I spent with my books and tapes and magazines. Or they tried to start conversations about what I was into. I hated that. It wasn’t like with some of my other friends, whose parents were Christians; my parents weren’t Christian like that. But they did say they “wondered about where I was headed.” That was how they put it. It got on my nerves. So if I sent off for something cool, I avoided opening it in front of them. I didn’t want to have to answer any questions.

I went back to my room and spread the mail out on my bed. One of the packages was from Brazil: it was a sword catalog. I’d seen an ad for it in one of the little magazines I got at the game store. It cost three dollars, but mail from far away was worth a little extra, so I hid three ones inside a folded piece of newspaper and sent it off to São Paulo. Catalog of Rare and Unknown Swords from Around the World, Send Three Dollars and Two International Reply Coupons. It was like a treasure to me, weird alphabet letters in the return address and a strange slick sheen to the envelope. Sometimes when you send off for something without knowing what it is, what you get back looks like a third-generation copy somebody found somewhere, but this was nice: glossy paper, clean staples. Some of the swords had hilts with designs, like dragons or horses, and some had what looked like jewels. Smooth semi-precious stones inlaid afford textured grip. The prices were listed in a currency I’d never heard of; it had a little symbol that set my mind racing to the good places.

The other package was from up north in Oregon, some town I’d never heard of before, Grants Pass. It was a membership patch from Inter-Hyborea, a Conan fan club; it came with a tape of songs based on Conan stories. The patch was high quality and was going to look very cool on my backpack if I could just get it on there without getting caught. This was going to involve a needle and thread and working on the patch in secret, or asking a girl to do it for me. If I asked Tara, JJ would be mad, but Kimmy was a possibility so I called her. I had my own phone in the room ever since Christmas, because if they didn’t give me my own phone I’d always be in the living room talking and no one would be able to hear the TV. It was a good deal.

Kimmy either didn’t believe I couldn’t sew the patch on myself or she just wanted to tease me; she pretended she didn’t understand what I was asking, and then either she pretended she thought the patch was an excuse for me to come over to her place or she actually believed that. It made me mad, and I felt embarrassed, and the conversation gradually evaporated until neither one of us was saying anything. Then her voice got softer and friendlier, and she said everybody knew how to sew. But actually I didn’t know any guys who took sewing. It was the least popular elective class for guys, below even accounting. So I made a joke out of it, and said during registration I tried to sign up for sewing but all the jocks beat me to it. That was a joke for us to share, because I hated all sports, and she hated guys on the football team specifically; I didn’t know why specifically the football team. I didn’t care. I hated them, too.