Rebecca Schiff - The Bed Moved - Stories

—

“LINDSAY,” I ask Lindsay, with Newspaper’s tape recorder, “how are you deciding team costumes this year in the absence of clear characters like enchanted fish and turtles?”

“We have characters,” she says. “From that decade.”

“You mean famous people? Like Valerie Solanas?”

“We’re not doing her,” says Lindsay. “Mrs. Spumondi says it has to be inclusive for everyone. The whole town comes.”

“Yes, the whole town came last year. Male attendance was especially high. How did you feel about your friends’ fathers and the guy from the post office seeing you in those sexy lobster costumes?” This is my hardball.

“We’re proud of our bodies,” she says.

I hadn’t thought of that, but Lindsay is well versed in defending Sports Night from a short-lived club that formed in opposition to Sports Night. Nobody remembers them now. Abstinence came and stole their thunder by being opposed to sex overall.

“Okay, Lindsay. Thank you for your time.”

“Thanks for watching us practice.” She smiles at me like I’m one of the male teachers who also watches them practice.

“I need to watch for the article.”

The truth is that I’m not sure I would have passed Driver’s Ed last year if Mr. Hinkle and I hadn’t spent so much time together watching Sports Night practice in the lobby.

“No DUI fatalities this weekend,” I’d say, disappointed. You needed to hand in thirty DUI fatalities from local newspapers in order to pass the class.

“How do they kick so high?” he’d wonder.

“Maybe I’m not looking in the right papers.”

“Someone will drink and drive soon,” promised Hinkle. “Birds gotta swim. Are you thinking of trying out for this?”

I kicked to show him that my heel hardly cleared the floor, forcing the reluctant, throat-driven laugh of a man who must occasionally use an emergency brake. Mrs. Spumondi told us we were free to leave if we didn’t respect the practice. Mrs. Spumondi’s not a teacher or anybody’s mother. She’s old. She just runs Sports Night. She may have invented Sports Night.

She at least kept it going, long after we had girls dribbling balls, swinging bats, and kicking something other than the air. Now Mrs. Spumondi delegates. She selects the teacher-judges, assigns formerly hot moms to a committee that decides if the basketball hoop is a decent place to hang balloons.

Newspaper wants me to find out what else the mom committee does, but I tell the editors I’m busy with suicide now. I’m quitting Newspaper. They don’t know yet, but my article on Suicide Awareness will be my last — in effect, my suicide note. I’ve realized I don’t like reporting on the school.

The school shouldn’t blame itself. It’s just a school, the kind that bans glue sticks and hats. I’m tired of having opinions about the bans. I never sniffed a glue stick. I never wore a hat. I tried to sniff a glue stick once and nothing happened. Maybe you need to eat them.

Also, the acceptance letters from colleges should be here any day now, the decal for my mother’s car. So she doesn’t get mistaken for the other moms of her race.

—

THIS YEAR Hinkle acts like he doesn’t know me anymore. Kids come out of detention, hug him, go back in detention. He’s kind of their mascot. It has to do with that the kids who get detention are also the best drivers. I’ve ridden in the backs of the Ed cars when they’re at the helm, and the ride is smooth. Hinkle never uses the brake with them, never says, “Pull over immediately, or I will have no choice but to use the emergency brake.” They hand in fifteen fatalities, and he’s fine with it. He lets them smoke in the cars.

Sports Night girls take smoke breaks. They crouch in their leggings on the concrete steps, stretch their hamstrings, gossip, cry.

I go out there and find Lindsay in tears.

“What’s the problem?”

“People are abusing their power.” She lights a cigarette with one of her old bat mitzvah matches.

“I thought you were a captain,” I say.

“Who are you again?”

“I interviewed you for The Argus. ”

“That Josh guy interviewed me, too,” she says, coughs.

“When?”

“He said he needed to ask me some stuff you’d forgotten.”

“He always does this. He undermines my relationships with my sources. I’m quitting.”

“I’m quitting, too.”

I don’t know what she’s quitting, smoking or her dance team, but it doesn’t matter. We sit on the steps and quit for a while. Lindsay’s matches say “I shopped till I dropped at Lindsay’s Bat!” Her bat mitzvah theme was shopping. Guests were assigned to sit at tables labeled Bloomingdale’s, the mall, the Gap. Everyone got a little credit card with their name on it. I wasn’t invited, but I remember teachers confiscating the Lindsay cards at school, as though they paid for things in a junior high black market.

“I hate Sports Night,” she says. “At this point, I actually hate it.”

“We could switch places,” I say. I picture myself ablaze with blush in the gym on Sports Night, cat-crawling across the volleyball court, telling a reporter I’m just proud of my body.

“So I would have to be on the school newspaper? Nobody reads that.”

“That’s not why we do it. We do it for college.”

“That’s not why you do it,” she says. Before I can find out why I do it, detention comes out of the building and turns the steps into a skateboard ramp, a dangerous, bumpy thing.

—

MY MOM won’t let me quit. She says we’re not a family of quitters. She shows me her yearbook to prove she was on committees. A committee to plant flowers, a committee to end the war.

“Didn’t you basically want the U.S. to quit the war?” I say. “Quitting is powerful.”

“ The Argus is not a war,” she says.

“They both exploit the young,” I say.

“You sound like Alan,” she says. I’m not sure if my father is antiwar or anti- Argus. He works late and my mom likes to turn me into him when he’s not home. When he is home, my parents talk about things I’m not interested in, like homeowners’ insurance, or how much it will cost to fix the scratch I put on the car. They have no extracurriculars anymore. It’s hard for them to see what they could give to this town.

—

WHEN SPORTS NIGHT arrives, it’s Lindsay I follow. I follow her through several songs gay men used to dance to before the virus, and a skit about the yo-yo. I take notes for Newspaper. They’re not just doing dances from that time. They’re doing dances from now: pops and locks, the Dougie, the Butterfly. They lip-synch their songs. They lip-synch their skits. Spumondi takes notes on a clipboard. It’s unclear what decade we’re in.

Balloons hang all around. Boys pop them with pencils, get threatened with detention.

“But it’s Saturday,” a popper argues. “You can’t get detention on Saturday.”

He’s right. We’re in the school, but we’re not in school. The bans don’t apply Saturday. Kids wear hats. Teachers wear jeans. Kids run around saying, “Mr. Hinkle’s wearing jeans.” JAG doesn’t have his backpack on and looks like a dismembered turtle. He looks good.

“Make sure to write down the order of the dances,” he says.

“You’re micromanaging me, Josh.”

JAG’s notebooks all say Joshua Aaron Geller in block letters on the front.

“In your suicide article,” he says, “you left out the name of the girl who committed suicide.”

“I thought we had to protect her privacy. You know, she did Sports Night last year? But they made her be a swordfish.”

“Fact-check that,” says Josh.

A group of boys starts throwing pencils at us, or maybe we’re just in the way of what they’re aiming at. Josh picks up a pencil gently, like it’s a gift.