Rebecca Coleman - The Kingdom of Childhood

He hustled up the stairs with his stash, and I rocked my chair gently. A year ago this conversation would have gone very differently—screaming, begging, tears. But my eyes felt utterly dry. Something inside me felt ready for war.

Eight months, I thought. Only that long until Scott graduated from Sylvania. A year from now I could be anywhere in the world. I would be free.

I feared I wouldn’t even know where to begin.

Monday wasn’t going well for Zach. At the top of his chemistry test was a red-penned note: See me. Fairen was ignoring him, flirting with a guy from the swim team. He couldn’t even go straight home that afternoon, obligated as he was to stop by Judy’s classroom to pick up some bazaar-related advertising sign he was supposed to repaint. And although he had grown to like Parzival, the previous English unit, Dante’s Inferno was doing nothing for him. He didn’t get it.

The concept of Hell bored him. He didn’t care if Dante’s view was progressive for its time or deeply personal or raised questions about society. He just didn’t give a shit. Also, he didn’t like having to examine Francesca’s adultery and how her lust for Paolo showed a “weakness of will.” He preferred to think about lust on the following terms: you wanted someone, and they said yes or no. Francesca’s miserable sham of a marriage made it even less explicable why she and her lover ended up in anyone’s version of Hell. Zach believed to his core that the world was ultimately fair. With the obvious exception of his father, he believed if some other guy was balling your wife, odds were on some level you deserved it.

He endured the afternoon. He endured Dante. As soon as class was dismissed he chucked his backpack onto his shoulder and brushed past his classmates. He pushed through the door of the Lower School and made his way to Judy’s classroom, where she was bidding farewell to a little kid whose nanny had to be at least twenty minutes late.

He leaned against the wall and waited for the nanny to quit arguing with Judy and leave. Russian accent, long unfashionable braid, chunky ass in shorts with legs cut too wide to look normal on a woman in her twenties: she didn’t pay the tuition bill, and Judy’s curt reminders about the schedule betrayed that she was aware of this. He controlled a smile and bounced his heel against the floor impatiently. Finally the woman left.

“And you,” Judy sighed, turning to face him. “Zachary Xiang. What can I do for you?”

“I’m supposed to pick up a sign.”

She blinked and shook her head in irritated confusion. “Sign. What sign?”

“Some wooden sign that goes by the side of the road to tell people when the bazaar is. That lady in charge told me I have to repaint it.”

“Am I supposed to have this item in my possession?”

He shrugged loosely. “She said you had it in a closet or something.”

“Oh, God.” She turned and walked toward the back of the classroom, where a closet door stood ajar. Her hair, dark brown and trailing all the way to her waist, looked ratty at the ends and in need of brushing. She stepped into the shallow closet, moved a couple of baskets, pushed aside the faded spare dress-up robes that hung on hooks on the wall, and said, “I have no idea where it is. Check back tomorrow and maybe I’ll have found it. Maybe. If I get around to it.”

“What’s the matter with you? ”

“The matter with me? I’ve had the weekend from hell. Would you like to hear about it?”

“Not really. I’m reading Dante’s fucking Inferno . I doubt you can top that.”

“Dante’s Fucking Inferno,” she repeated. “Sounds like they’ve updated it since I was a girl.”

In spite of himself, he broke into a grin. “Bad teacher. Some example you’re setting. First the gnomes and now this.”

She raised her eyebrows high and, with a comical wide-eyed glare, latched the closet door. “Fuck the gnomes,” she replied.

“Listen to you,” he marveled. “Your chi is messed up. ”

“So,” she said crisply. “Tell me where this happy hunting ground is that you’ve found for acorns. Because I need to get this craft project underway, and I’d like to drive out there this afternoon while I have time.”

“These woods behind a town house development. It’s not far.”

“Where is it?”

“Off Pine Road. By the abandoned hospital.”

“What abandoned hospital?”

He sighed and glanced out the window at the sun still relatively high in the sky. “I can’t explain it exactly. I guess I can ride along and show you if you want. If you count it toward my hours.”

She hoisted her purse onto her shoulder and hooked a sweater over her arm. “I count everything toward your hours. You know that.”

He snorted a laugh. “You told me to stop making jokes about that.”

“Well, I’m in a mood.” Her thin slippers slapped the floor as she made her brisk walk out the door. “Follow me. I’m parked around the side.”

The air was still summer-warm, at least what would qualify as summer-warm in New Hampshire. As she drove, she hummed along with Joan Baez on the radio; he popped a piece of gum in his mouth and endured the music. When the roads grew smaller he offered directions, guiding her through the subdivision. They parked at the edge of the lot, not far from the metal gate that stood between the end of the road and the woodland path. He slid the books out of his backpack and shouldered it so they would have a means to collect whatever they found.

“Up this way,” he told her. He hiked up a steep embankment into the woods and heard her footsteps behind him. As they wound their way between the trees, he added, “They say there’s a guy in a rabbit suit who haunts all around here. They call him the Bunny Man.”

“The things people come up with,” she said. “It sounds like a German children’s book character. When I was a girl they would have put him in a story to warn us about the perils of sleeping with stuffed animals for too long, or eating too much Easter candy, or something.”

Zach laughed. “It’s definitely not for kids. He’s supposed to carry around an axe.”

“All the better. The one we had in the book I read as a child was a boy with claws and ghoul eyes. ‘ Der Struwwelpeter, here he stands, with his dirty hair and hands.’” She wrinkled her nose at him in a jesting sneer and raised her tensed hands. “Don’t forget to cut your fingernails, boys and girls. If you don’t, you’ll turn into a monster.”

“That’s messed up.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” she said, but her voice was light. “I think it scarred me for life.”

Zach replied with a broad grin. They had crested the hill and had to brace themselves for a descent toward a creek in the distance. The trees became farther apart, the brush thinning to almost nothing. When the land leveled off, Zach slowed and indicated the ground with a wave of his hand. “Here you go. All over the place.”

She made a sound of delight and set to work scooping acorns into her palms. He set his backpack against a tree and crouched to help her. Before long the pack was half-filled, and Judy, now on her knees, still avidly swept acorns into her hands. He asked, “How many do we need, anyway?”

She peered at what she had collected. “Oh, that should be plenty. I’m so used to finding none that I didn’t realize we’d gathered so many. And you still have leftovers from the playhouse roof, don’t you?”

“Some, yeah.”

“Well, this should certainly do it.” She set her hands on her hips and surveyed the ground with a look of satisfaction. He took the last few acorns in his hand and, rapid-fire, chucked them at her back.