Kate Berson
Sometimes Kids
The kids sometimes lay heads on laps, palms on necks, fingers on thighs in a game room. Once on a stormy Sunday. They shared mouth-purpling wine in Styrofoam cups rimmed with bite-marks and spit. Hot in the dense room, but they liked it. They dared each other to close their eyes, use their mouths.
One of the girls—the excitable one—sat up in front of the sleet- thrashed window. Her T-shirt’s sleeve hung down her arm to show shoulder and centered bra strap. She drummed her temples to call back a thought.
“I tell you no lie, I tell you no lie, there’s a story,” she said, “that a whole entire family died in their house in a fire, right down to their two yipping dogs. Not far from here, in fact. Someone I know knew them. Their bodies were flopped on the floor, all covered in soot, when the firemen arrived.”
“Woah,” the group said, and “Ick.” They shivered together, they wanted more.
“Whose story is that?” the kids asked.
The girl shrugged. “Can’t remember the name.” But it was hers, the story, in a way, hers to tell.
She winced her face and said, “The upside is, well, if there is an upside, it’s that there was no one left to miss each other.”
In the news of their own lives, there was a story, too. But it was not theirs to tell. It belonged to just one, the serious boy, who said to his friends in the game room, “I just want to say one thing. My brother is not missing. He is the missed, we are the missing.”
The boy’s brother had recently vanished from home with no explanation.
The kids all nodded reverently.
“And saying his name won’t keep him gone,” said the boy, “so: Ozzie Ozzie Ozzie,” because this name used to come so easy to his mouth but now sounded like vocabulary. Ozzie, sixteen years old, gone 31 winter days. Ozzie, the quiet, the poet.
His English teacher was the last to see him when the bell rang for the kids to herd out of school. This teacher urged his students into rhyming lines, instructing: adjective first, here a noun, verb here, and the last noun slotted in place to finish. Ozzie attended, obeyed. He handed his scrawly papers in on time. But this assignment killed him, he told the serious boy, glaring at his printed poem on the living room table.
At home, Ozzie had become, of late, a sigher, a retirer to his room before dinner was done, and a talker only to his brother. Always, he had whispered wisdoms to the boy—how to woo and kiss, to quiet his voice when making a point, to choose and manage every word that glided through his lips, how to get what you want once you know what you want.
Teams of adults had searched for Ozzie, long and hard. And then they stopped. Because finally they knew, as the serious boy had always known, that Ozzie in fact was on the escape. But did Ozzie consider that the boy was one of the left, as well? That the boy, also, was sorrily escaped from?
The serious boy and the excitable girl sometimes huddled into each other alone on a beach. Once on a windy day, spring not yet come. Cold, but they didn’t mind. They’d brought no beach ball or frisbee to lash back and forth, to catch or miss.
They plucked frosted glass off the sand. The sand was more like dirt than sand, with a heavier, darker grain. They hurled the colorful, unbaked shards back into the sea.
He said to her, “Look.”
Hermit crabs were lined up neatly dead along the shoreline, impossible to miss, but still he said again seriously, “Look.”
The crabs’ stilled gills and lungs were nestled inside their dried-out shells.
“Wow,” the girl said excitedly, but unkissed.
The boy and girl with their boot tips nudged the dead creatures into the water, but waves washed the crabs right back onto the beach. The boy knew that soon enough the girl would tell the others of this day, tell it as a special story with the boy playing his part. He knew, too, that all of them talked about Ozzie when the serious boy wasn’t there.
It was all the boy could do now not to step on a crab to hear the crunch and see how flat he could make it. But no, no. He looked up instead at the girl, who fingered her earlobes, which dangled thin strips of silver.
“Ouch,” she said. “I hardly ever wear these things. I have to re- pierce my ears when I do.”
What did she expect from the boy? He touched her ears.
“Ouch.”
He rubbed off the crumbs of blood that caked the backs of her lobes until they were clean. He wet-willied her ears’ ticklish insides.
“Hey, quit it,” she said. The boy watched her longing at him. “I mean it,” she said.
The boy was strong and fast. On the beach, he sprinted away from the girl, then ran back to her waiting face – a little show for her, a joke. He didn’t often joke around.
Panting, he said, “I dare you to strip and go in.”
Her body was tight in the cold, and flimsy in the wind, as she strode into the waves. He quivered at her from the shore. Her jacket, jeans, shirt, and under things lay empty at his feet. He picked them up and lay them over his stiff, bent arm. Dirty sand fell off the clothes into the wind and blew out. When the girl emerged from the water, the boy wished for her to be his brother coming back.
*
So far, the kids liked themselves for the most part. The girls’ skins were tan and even and fit nicely on their bodies. The boys’ voices were sinking appealingly. They had a few things to call their own, things their parents gave them. They were hungry sometimes, or chilly, but they were never hungry-hungry or freezing. It was possible Ozzie was, who could say? Ozzie went hatless and gloveless in winter. But maybe the coat of hair growing on his chin and along his jutting jaw—the only real beard in his grade so far—was keeping him warm. The boys would need to shave soon, but when the time came, the serious boy would not do it.
The kids sometimes biked to a nearby pond. They jostled into canoes, pushed off the edge of withered grass into the water. Once on a Saturday. Over them, the clouds’ borders reached weakly out to each other. Nature around them was doing what it does.
“I tell you no lie, I tell you no lie,” the kids chimed, their voices blending together. They sang the dramas of their families, tragedies of their town, all their little gossips. Calm pond creatures under them, they swooped their oars to reach the farthest, shadiest nooks, where they found things to say they discovered.
Well into summer, the water was warm. The kids dared each other, and some of them flung themselves in. They splashed, went under, came up with much bravado and laugh. The boys went in in their boxers. The girls’ white, stringy suits turned clear with soak, and their nipples poked out for the boys to see. The water with sky on its surface was theirs.
The serious boy dog-paddled his way over to the excitable girl but forgot what he wanted to say. The narrow space between their faces seemed to rattle. Neither could distinguish between creepy seaweed strands and each other’s slippery feet. What or who was stroking whom so silkily? “What do you want?” the girl whispered at the boy.
In the quiet game room, in his own room, and in Ozzie’s, the boy had turned everything off—things that buzzed or ticked or emitted noisy air. He kept his window open and slept with a hand wedged under his head to lift his ear off the pillow. But he never heard his brother coming, his brother didn’t come. Only his brother’s name the boy heard everywhere. “Ozzie,” the TV blared. Ozzie, in the ring of his phone. Elevator doors whooshed open, Ozzie, Ozzie, they clapped shut.
The kids wanted Ozzie back, of course they did, but they would miss the missing, too. There was nothing as dark and adult in their lives as Ozzie to whisper about. Such scare. Where were they themselves headed, if an older brother could, in a finger-snap, vanish like that?
“What do you want,” the girl asked in the pond, “I’ll give it to you.”
The girl was ready and waiting for him. He thought to spray pond water through his teeth at her. Or dunk her under, count how many seconds she could hold her breath, see if she’d pinch or push when she came up. But instead he merely splashed her.
After school sometimes, the serious boy and excitable girl swigged a flask the boy had swiped from his brother’s room. They slipped off into the woods to a secretly famous place, just a woman’s house. The woman was their parents’ age but nothing like their parents, which was strange to them and fascinating. For five dollars they could sit in her pillow-filled den, where a stereo sounded two notes, only two. The notes were not harmonic. They jagged against each other, each wanting to break out on its own.
Once on an autumn afternoon. The boy and girl began their search for that imagined, sneaking melody they knew from past visits would come above and below the two notes. The serious boy finally found the illusory song. He closed his eyes since that would help him not to lose it. The excitable girl tapped his shoulder. She kept nothing from him. She seemed to want his secrets, too, to keep or not, he couldn’t be sure. The boy kept his eyes shut and moved her hand away to a nearby pillow. He put his hand heavy on top of hers to stop its fluttering. The song bugged its way into him and stayed there until he fell asleep hours later, tucked in his own home.
After more than a year gone, Ozzie returned on an April morning, along with all of nature’s fanfaring brightness. Gardens growing back. Perennials popping up on their own. Orioles, warblers, thrushes, kinglets, and killdeer back. Strollering mothers came outside to show their newborns the world they would eventually have to learn and relearn and relearn.
Ozzie gathered the listening kids around him in the game room–the serious boy and his friends, who were now fourteen years old.
“I’ll tell you the truth,” Ozzie said to them. “I had to leave. I had gone around with all the other kids for so long. If you had been a bird or God, looking down,” said Ozzie, the poet still, “you wouldn’t know who was who. You couldn’t pick me out. We’d be like just these tops of heads all mixed together. And if you lay on the ground, you’d see all these sneakers and sandals, and you wouldn’t know which were mine until I broke out from the rest of them.
“I set out thinking the whole world, all the roads down to wherever they ended–everything was for me. Mine. And it was. People let me stay on their couches. They fed me. They gave me rides. I’ve got a ton of stories for you, you wouldn’t believe, I’ll have to tell you.”
The serious boy grimaced, and his face felt little, scrunched up. Ozzie didn’t notice. But the excitable girl, always staring, grimaced to match him. What did the boy want, now that what he’d wanted most–his brother back–he’d gotten?
“I pretended I was going somewhere,” Ozzie said. “Or I thought I was. If you think of somewhere as something.” He was guessing. “Trust me, you’ll want that same something, whatever it is,” Ozzie said. “In a few years, when you’re tired of the same old trap of your family’s house.”
The kids looked up at the ceiling and down at the floor.
“And the same old bore of this town.”
The kids looked out the window and into the tentative fog that grayed the air.
Outside of Ozzie’s story and the kids’ imaginations, outside of the brothers’ house, dirging winds swept across the beach. On the pond, melancholic lily-pads waited. Stray dogs mistrusted each other. Children stripped birch trees’ peelable bark, which came off in brittle spirals. Flocks of geese did not forgive the stragglers who stalled behind them–on they went.
“And even the same old talk of your same old friends.”
The kids couldn’t look at each other.
“You’ll need to get out, like I did,” Ozzie finished.
The serious boy looked up, looked for the two eyes he wanted to see. The eyes were his brother’s, which looked much like his own. Their pupils leaked tiny legs of black into their light blue irises.
“So why’d you come back?” the boy said. But he wanted to want right then whatever his brother had wanted.
Later. Upstairs, outside, the serious boy grabbed his bike and pedaled strongly away. To the edge of town, out of it, onto the next. His vision blurred wet from the windy rush, and all that he saw looked wavy. The bike whined from years of use. The knuckles of the boy’s handle-gripping hands reddened from the dry air.
But the few towns he passed through looked just like the town he shared with his friends. They’d be hungry for an account of this run away. And he’d tell them. A lie. Because when he finally stopped, got off his bike, guided it slowly along the even sidewalk, no passing people spoke to him. He discovered no new feeling, deciphered no pattern in the clouds, no distinct shape in the shadow stretching out from him. No story unfolded around him. So he sighed his way back to his waiting home.
That night, the boy took off his shirt and slid on his old, button- less boxers. He touched himself briefly, but nothing. His body fit into its own impression it had made over time in his childhood bed. On the other side of the wall lay his brother, probably scrawling down adventures in his journal.
Better before. The boy switched off his lamp, and his room went black. He reached for his pillow, folded it in half, and crammed it under his neck. He felt for the end of his sheet and yanked it up over him. He pictured his friends doing the same, his parents every night, and his brother, now that he was home. Ozzie, Ozzie, Ozzie. The saga of Ozzie over, nothing belonged to the boy anymore.
The serious boy and excitable girl shared a shift at a video store sometimes. Once on an unbusy Sunday.
“I tell you no lie, I tell you no lie, there’s a story,” the girl said.
“Stop,” said the boy. “I don’t want to hear it right now.”
“Once there was a lake that iced over in winter. A whole entire neighborhood of kids went out on it with their skates and hockey sticks, etcetera.”
“Hey, stop,” the boy said.
“I can’t stop there. Is there anything worse,” she said, “than stopping a story right in the middle?”
She swiveled her loose skirt to center it. She twisted her earrings, swiped back her bangs and looked hard at the boy.
“As you might have guessed, the ice began to crack. First, a bunch of wrinkles around the edges. Then, the cracks shot toward the center of the pond. They got wider and wider.” The pitch of her voice climbed. “The cracks looked like lightning. The ice couldn’t bear the weight of all those kids–”
“Fucking shut up,” the boy said. “Fine,” said the girl. “Sorry.”
An hour passed. The spring night began to storm. The boy and girl looked at each other between customers, uncertainly, worriedly. But neither of them left the other. After they closed and dimmed the store, they lingered. The girl smiled softly. She approached the boy, and he nodded. He would play.
She shrink-wrapped his hands with a blow dryer. She took his plasticked-over fingers and rubbed them along her neck. The boy tagged her cheek with a price gun.
“Come on,” he said. “I dare you.”
They creaked through swinging doors into the dark backroom. There were movies and packs of candy stacked to knee height, to waist height. There were full, heavy boxes on the backroom counter and empty ones on the floor. From the ceiling hung a string to pull to turn the light on, but they didn’t.
The boy could hear the girl’s excited breath. He felt his own skin wanting something, so he kissed her. They kissed for a while, and the boy’s mind did not wander. He lifted her skirt bottom and pinned the fabric between his hip and hers. He edged his thumb under the bottom of her shirt, glided the underside of her belly.
The girl closed her eyes, a pondering face he could barely make out through the dark.
“What should we do?” he asked. “What do you want?” she asked back.
“I don’t know.” He grabbed the skin above her hips and squeezed.
“Ouch,” she said.
He pulled her shirt up until it was off, and he clumsily unhooked her bra. He climbed his palm over her skin, under which breathed her lungs and beat her heart. He reached under her skirt to remove what was in his way, slipping them down her legs slowly.
“Not yet,” she said.
He kissed his way down her chest and stomach until he was kneeling before the standing girl. He ducked under the soft shelter of her skirt.
“No,” she said and took a small step back.
The boy gripped her ankles, felt the tendons tighten. He looked up, but there wasn’t light enough to see anything at all. So the boy blindly lifted his face, parted his lips, and he hunted himself in her.