Rebecca Coleman - The Kingdom of Childhood

“Mother fucking fucker,” he said, loudly but in a level voice.

I ventured toward the house. “Is everything all right?”

“No. I just spent an hour putting this shit on backwards.” He slid out of the house and ripped off his headphones. They hung around his neck as he sat up, his knees against his chest, and rubbed his eyes. “And I got sawdust in my contacts.”

“You didn’t have your safety glasses on?”

“No,” he snapped. “I was too occupied with messing shit up to remember them.”

I sat cross-legged on the floor beside him. “What’s the matter with you?”

“I’m just tired of this. I didn’t get enough sleep, and then I overslept, and my mom came in like the Wrath of Khan to get me up. I didn’t have breakfast.” He wrapped his arms around his knees and rested his forehead against them. I rubbed his back in a firm, comforting way, and he leaned his whole huddled form against me. His skin was drum-tight over those lanky bones of his, with not an ounce of fat for padding. “I’m starving, ” he repeated. “I’m never going to make it ’til one. My mom’ll be picking up my corpse.”

As if on cue, his stomach rumbled audibly. “Okay,” I said. I patted his shoulder. “Come on. I’ll get you fed.”

He lifted his head and looked inordinately happy. “Seriously?”

“Yeah, we’ll run out to 7-Eleven. But then I’m off the hook for Starbucks. Come on.”

At the store he trailed me silently inside, branching off to the Slurpee machine, where he took the largest cup they sold and filled it with layer upon layer of frozen slush in lurid colors. His snack selections were more conservative: two sticks of cheddar cheese, an apple, and a tube of chocolate-covered sunflower seeds. Like most of my students, he probably considered those a decadent junk food. He had likely been trained from birth to consider the other items on offer, like gummy candies and Nestlé-brand chocolate bars, tantamount to ingesting drain cleaner.

“That looks vile,” I informed him once we were back in the car, nodding to his Slurpee. “What would your mother say?”

“Whatever. I’ve seen what’s in your fridge.”

I strapped my seat belt and shot him a wry look. “I beg your pardon.”

“Beg all you want. Anyway, it’s good.” He tipped the cup toward me. “Try it.”

I gave a short laugh. “That’s okay.”

“Go on. I don’t have cooties.”

The purple straw practically touched my nose. I met his eyes, then took a drink. It felt like a quick slip through a rabbit hole of time, sharing a straw with a friend of sorts, as though I were a high-schooler myself. “It’s not bad,” I conceded.

The cup retreated, and he offered a mild, satisfied grin. The straw went back into his own mouth, his knee wedged against the dash as if he owned the place. As I backed out of the parking space I asked, “What’s wrong with my fridge?”

“You’ve got all sorts of crap food in there. Hot dogs and pepperoni and that cheese dip that comes in jars. You never run out of Coke.”

“ You drink it.”

“Yeah, but not at home. My mom won’t buy that stuff, and the main reason is because you teachers tell her not to.”

“ Steiner said not to,” I corrected. “Nourishing foods and nourishing fluids. It’s our job to implement that within the school. We don’t have to practice all of it at home.”

He shook his head and grinned around the straw. “Lie.”

I glanced at him with some offense. “No, it isn’t.”

“Yes, it is. You’re supposed to do it all and you know it.” Tipping his head to face me, he added, “Can I ask you something?”

“Not if it’ll get me fired.”

“Is it true that you kindergarten teachers really believe in gnomes?”

I snickered. “That’s a trade secret. Officially, we do.”

“My grade-school teacher always swore up and down that she did. And I know Steiner said they really existed. But I always wondered if the teachers actually buy it.”

I twisted my mouth to one side and considered how to answer. “I don’t believe in very much,” I explained, “and I certainly don’t believe in little fat men in pointed hats running around with rakes and spades. But I do believe in spirits in general, mischievous ones included. What Steiner said was that if you don’t make spiritual progress during your physical incarnations, you come back as a gnome. So maybe we all have a little bit of that gnome in us, that aspect that carries grudges or won’t forgive.” I shrugged. “It’s not an original idea, that the lesser spirits get banished to the wild. The ancient Irish believed spirits lived in bogs, you know. In Denmark they seem to find mummies in the peat all the time, sometimes with ropes around their necks. It usually seems to be connected with water, for some reason. Don’t ask me why.”

“Ms. Valera talked about that type of thing. This Roman guy, Tacitus, he wrote that in Germany they used to put the prostitutes in the bogs. Then they wedged them in there with stakes. It was supposed to be so their souls couldn’t get up and wander around.”

I chuckled. “Sounds very German, indeed.”

“Yeah, we have to write a group report based on it. Except ours has to be on Maryland, and I’m in charge of the crime and punishment section, and it’s nowhere near as interesting.”

“Maybe you should talk about our laws against interracial marriage,” I suggested, edging my tone with humor. I slowed for a red light and added, “It was still illegal here when I was a girl. I hear it obscures the ancient wisdom, or something like that.”

“That’s me,” he joked. “I like to complicate things for you white people. If it wasn’t for me, you would believe in gnomes. But I sit down in your car, and wham .” He spread his arms wide, whacking me in the arm with his Slurpee cup. “You’re off the path. No longer drinking the Kool-Aid.”

“My coworkers will find out, and I’ll lose my job.”

“Oh, I won’t tell on you. I’ll just use the information for blackmail.”

“Is that the worst you can find on me?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know, is it?”

I smiled privately.

“Ooh,” he said. “Maybe it’s not. I’ll have to find out all the dirt on you.”

“Dig away, kiddo.”

He jabbed me in the arm again, then in the waist, again and again until I laughed out loud. And for a moment, for the first time in perhaps my entire life, the things I guarded made me feel mysterious instead of dreadful.

With Zach’s belly full of apple, cheese and various food dyes, he seemed to be in much better spirits. Hours of work stretched ahead. With a glance toward the parking lot that was empty except for my car, I told Zach I would be back later that afternoon, then crossed my fingers and hoped no injuries or fires would occur in the meantime.

“I can handle it,” he said, his voice edged with glee.

I ran my errands, stopping by Russ’s college to pick up stacks of brochures for Sylvania School’s College Fair the following week, then took myself to the dining hall and picked up a sandwich that came with a handful of brittle, inedible potato chips. On my way around the circuit I paused at the bakery counter and ordered two cookies: one chocolate chunk, one black-and-white.

The weather was lovely, crisp but not yet cold, and so I carried my foam container up the hill to the benches that surrounded the reflecting pool. As I ate I watched the skate-boarders coast up and down the concrete terracing, grinding on the giant sundial, all bold energy and stumbling grace. A few looked old enough to be college students, but most did not. They all wore close-fitting T-shirts and baggy jeans hitched even lower on their hips than Zach’s. Their bodies looked solid as stones. Nothing moved but muscle and sinew; and they seemed so careless about it, as if it were nothing to move through life in a package so neat and dense and perfect. I ate my cookie and smiled forgivingly when a skateboard ran up against my ankle, and one of them, a young man with a headful of wavy golden hair, jogged over and said, “Sorry, ma’am.”