Free A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip by Kevin Brockmeier

gone by since then. Now Tara is just another girl towering over him in the hallways. He can barely remember what it felt like to believe he was in love with her.
    It doesn’t matter.
    The Case of the Missing Miss Vincent: A Play in Five Acts
. It takes Kevin the rest of the day, but he is able to completethe script just before bed, rounding it off with a full list of the characters. He brushes his teeth, and he does his math homework, and he slides the
Myth
book onto his bookcase, where it fills the gap it left as neatly as a rock prised from the clay. Then he turns out the lights and waits to forget himself, and after a while he must because it is morning.
    Everything else seems to happen very quickly. By lunch Miss Vincent has read the play. He is cutting past the break room toward the Coke machines when she pulls him aside to suggest that he try mounting a production with some of the other seventh-graders, and that afternoon he gets an appointment with Coach McAteer, who agrees to assign him a date on the chapel schedule, “Let’s see, why don’t we say—oh—Thursday two weeks,” and then Kevin rewrites the script in his most legible handwriting and asks his mom to Xerox the pages and holds auditions to select the actors, and Julia Harris is Miss Vincent, and Asa Stephens is Mr. McCallum, and Sean Hammons is Kevin Brockmeier, and Kevin himself is the narrator, and they meet in the library every day to rehearse their lines, along with the rest of the cast, the bit players, and no one wants to memorize the dialogue, it’s way too much work, so fine, he says, whatever, they can carry their stupid scripts, and one day between classes he spies Annalise Blair saying, “Who me?,” giving a palms-up gesture of amiable confusion, which is exactly how Anna Succhi, who depicts Annalise in the play, reacts when she learns she’s a suspect in Miss Vincent’s disappearance, and he wonders if there is a word for the kind of fame that makes it difficult to tell whether people are making fun of you, and two weeks have passed in a moment, and the show is premiering tomorrow,and he is carpooling home with Kenneth and Clay and Bateman, and the river is dotted with a thousand white circles, like confetti from a three-hole puncher, and Kevin prays for some force to whisk him a few miles further through his life and deposit him a day or two away, in that patch of sunlight blazing just up ahead, when the hard part will be over and he will not need to worry. But it doesn’t work. It never does.
    The next morning, at school, it can’t be two minutes before Sean Hammons grabs him by the arm and pins him with a look of apology. “Kevin,” he rasps, and
Bullshit
, Kevin thinks.
You’re faking
. “I can’t talk, man. I’m sorry. I’ve got laryngitis.”
    “Look—” Kevin begins. “C’mon—” But he can tell that Sean has settled on his decision. It’s right there in his gaze, fixed in bold embarrassment.
    All around them is the ratcheting noise of locker handles, the lapping and boiling of conversations, and Kevin’s mind keeps offering up the same thought, over and over again, in the brightest of colors. “You’re the star of the play. What am I supposed to do?”
    Sean is all shoulders. “I’m sorry. I can’t talk. I’m serious.”
    “So who’s going to be me then?”
    “You can.”
    “But I’m the narrator.”
    “Be both.”
    But the narrator is supposed to stand at one end of the stage, and Sean is supposed to follow the action: Kevin Brockmeier, the shrewd and fearless detective, dashing here and there after each new piece of evidence. That’s how they’ve rehearsed it. Kevin can’t be everywhere at once.
    The first bell rings.
    He has five minutes, he realizes, no more than that, tohunt for a new lead actor. But his best friends are total chickens. Thad says he has stage fright, and so does Ethan, and Kenneth is in the other Bible class, and Bateman guffaws—
guffaw-
guffaws—and says, “No way.