Free A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore Page A

test and got sent to the principal’s.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I said Gandhi was a deer.”
    “A deer?”
    “I got Gandhi mixed up with Bambi.”
    “What?” He was bright, so he came to things quickly without patience. He tended to blurt. If he hit a blank spot he just said something fast. And it was sometimes absurd. He had once said asteroids instead of hemorrhoids , which made me bury my face in my arms.
    “I don’t know—words remind me of other words. Like the word hostage makes me think of sausage . I don’t know why. I just hate all that shit, I’m telling you. But don’t worry, I’m not going to go postal or anything.” We were scooting along inefficiently, hardly lifting our feet so as not to slip. “My grades aren’t good enough, and college applications have to be in first of the month. I may just join the military.”
    “Why?” Alarm struck a note in my throat.
    “It’s peacetime. I’m not going to get killed or nothing—”
    “Anything.”
    “Anything. Two years and the government’ll pay for some of college, and Mom and Dad’ll be off my back.”
    “The government will only pay for some of it?”
    “Well, apparently there are different packages, depending on how long you sign up for. A recruiter came to our high school.”
    “A recruiter came to your high school? Is that legal?”
    Robert snorted. “It is at Dellacrosse Central.”
    “Sheesh,” I said.
    “Yeah, when I bring the whole thing up Mom gets upset. She’s threatening to phone the recruiter at his house in Beaver Dam and give him a piece of her mind.”
    “It’s amazing she has a piece left. But it’s true—I believe she does.”
    “What does she want me to do? Go to DDD?”
    “I hope not.”
    The Dellacrosse Diesel Driving School was the hellish Plan B—Plan D, it was jokingly referred to—for all the kids who’d bombed out in their courses. “I’ve been taking yoga for PE credit,” he said.
    “Really?” Things changed so fast, it whipped your head around. Yoga had entered the corridors of Dellacrosse Central High, but so had the army recruiters.
    “Yeah. Deep breathing: a triumph of me over me.”
    “Oh-ho. You have your own personal and hygienic mat?”
    “I do.”
    Here he looked up at me with great earnestness, his eyes asking me to hear him in the deepest way I knew how. “And I sit there in the dark gym,” he said, “and just think. Signing up for the army seems the only thing. It’s either that or diesel driving school.”
    “But it’s not really peacetime. There’s Afghanistan,” I said. These faraway countries that had intruded on our consciousness seemed odd to me. It seemed one thing sixty years ago to go over and fight for France, a country we had heard of, but what did it mean now to fight in or at—there was no preposition … for?—a place like Afghanistan? To their credit, students in Troy were eager to find out, and the Intro to Islam course had filled up for spring semester, which was why I was stuck with the more narrow, and reputedly fluffier, Intro to Sufism. We would read Rumi and Doris Lessing.
    “Afghanistan’s over.”
    “It is?” I’d been studying for finals.
    “I dunno.” He skittered a stone again. “Yeah, I think so.”
    “What happened? Did we win?”
    “I dunno.” He laughed. “I guess so.”
    “Yeah, well, soldiers without a war get bored and sometimes they get stationed in hot, edgy places and start to want one. They don’t know why they’re there otherwise. And if one doesn’t come they just start shooting the sky and then each other.”
    “How do you know so much?”
    “Movies.”
    “Ha!” Then he added solemnly, too solemnly, “If I don’t come back, you know, alive, don’t let them bury me in some big-ass coffin. I don’t want to take up space.”
    “Well,” I said, “I guess that’s why you’re taking yoga: so we’ll be able to squeeze you into a pretzel box! We’ll all declare, ‘Oh, he would have wanted it this