By Mattea Heller
Here are thirty middle schoolers huddled together in the finished basement of Paulie Rydell’s raised ranch. The glow of the TV the size of a minivan dances like starlight on acne-pocked skin. We are a thirteen-year-old universe filled with galaxies of cliques—the nerds, the preps, the artsy kids, all together today. The cute sporty girls have traded their ponytails for curling iron tendrils, but they still talk of soccer. The kids who usually wear Grateful Dead tie-dye now wear black and, in another year, will reek of marijuana.
On the big screen TV, girls wearing baby-doll tees talk of blowjobs and the perils of getting sperm stuck in their teeth. Skater boys do kickflips and laugh about only fucking virgins. A twelve-year-old girl has sex with an older boy unaware he’s HIV positive. A kid in baggy jeans rapes a girl as she lays unconscious.
I sit cross-legged, my flowered skirt tucked between my legs as a dampness blooms under my arms.
Paulie’s mom has provided us the movie, just as she will provide us a regular supply of cigarettes and booze senior year. Nothing strange about showing two dozen junior high kids an NC-17 movie without their parents’ consent. Mrs. Rydell shrugs while taking a drag of her Newport Light, It’s about teenagers, for Christ sake.
When the movie ends, we shoot off into new constellations. I join the circle of classmates playing Truth-or-Dare. I’m hoping to get kissed by Brendan Miller, and when I take the dare, my best friend poses the challenge in a nonchalant voice that isn’t fooling anyone. Brendan’s breath smells like Cool Ranch Doritos. As our lips press together, he keeps his eyes open, so I do, too. His are still puffy and red from this morning. When we pull away, my heart is orbiting outside my chest, but he just sits back and stares off into space. My best friend takes the next dare and let’s Paulie feel her boobs over her shirt.
We are weeks away from the school trip to Washington, D.C. where we will accidently crack the wall art while jumping on the bed. Two months from when I will suck my first cigarette until my throat broils and then hide the pack in the hollow belly of a stuffed animal. Six months from the utter loneliness of learning I’m the only freshman in my gym class on the first day of high school.
Today, watching a movie in Paulie Rydell’s basement, we may look just like eighth graders. But we are full of surprises.
The teens in the film seem louder, wilder, more vivid than we would ever be. They rave, steal liquor, suck nitrous, beat up strangers in Washington Square Park. But in some ways, they feel tame. We have it seething under our skin—the will to do violence to each other. The will to do violence to ourselves. One of us will carve his sadness into his arm in the form of a girlfriend’s name. One will have her stomach pumped of the contents of grandma’s liquor cabinet. One will consume nothing until she is.
One had done worse.
Jason Durante, the class clown, had gotten in trouble with the principal for a homemade rubber band gun. Instead of returning to class, he walked the mile-and-a-half home. And in his kitchen, with his father’s hunting rifle, he shot himself in the head.
Four days ago. Leap day. A time bending anniversary that will not arrive for another four years. By then we will be seniors, waiting for college admissions, buying prom tickets, driving aimlessly around town, getting high in Paulie’s basement. All things Jason will not do with us.
In the fall, I will visit his mother, sit in that kitchen which will be freshly painted, sparkling silver with so much remodeling, and wonder if she still has the dry erase board on which I’d heard he’d left a suicide note.
Of course, we hadn’t seen it coming.
We are constantly on the brink, yet always surprised when we fall over the edge. We have a great solar system of possibility before us without even knowing what is actually possible.
Or what we are possible of executing.
Today, we wear black in Paulie’s basement, and a few hours ago, attended our first burial service—not for the people of chalk-colored hair and time-worn skin, our grandmothers, our great uncles, our elderly neighbors—but for one of our own. We waited to pay our respects as if we were lined up for concert tickets. We peered in the casket, somehow an open casket, and saw the bone white cheeks, the slicked backed hair, a reconstruction of someone we knew. The oak and red satin lined with his goofy snow hat, his wood carvings, and that rubber band gun—the things that will decompose by his side as the years go on.
We keep our heads low but still sneak glances at our classmates. Now we know things about each other we aren’t supposed to know—which boys cry, which girls don’t, who makes the sign of the cross, who dares to touch the lapel of Jason’s suit. Our middle school wonder and grief is dressed up in our mother’s cardigan, our father’s ill-fitting tie.
And then we’ll go back to Paulie’s house and watch a movie called Kids, as we are, on the afternoon of our best friend’s funeral.