Free A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip by Kevin Brockmeier Page A

Nuh-uh. Find someone else to humiliate.”
    Finally Kevin manages to coax a yes out of Shane Wesson. Shane! He won’t do any acting, he says, but he is willing to read the part of the narrator. “Take it or leave it, Kev.”
    “Thanks. You saved my life. So you’ll meet us onstage?”
    “Roger Wilco.”
    “Good. Over and out.”
    All right then: Shane Wesson will be the narrator, and Kevin Brockmeier will be Kevin Brockmeier, and Sean Hammons will have laryngitis.
    After the second bell, Mr. Garland lowers the lights to use the overhead projector. In the humming gray dusk of the classroom, with the windows framing the cars and bushes, Kevin scans his script for what must be the thousandth time. He tries to concentrate on his new lines, but by now he knows the words so well that it’s like reciting the Lord’s Prayer or the Pledge of Allegiance. The meaning is buried far beneath the rhythm.
Our Father, who art the flag, hallowed by thy name
. How strange everything seems—Mike Beaumont doodling in the margins of his notebook, Saul Strong cleaning his fingernails, Matthew Connerly levering the back legs of Jim Boothby’s desk up off the floor and then letting them crash back down.
    “Boothby! Is there some problem you’d like to share with us?”
    “No, sir. Sorry,” and a second later, in a pissed-off whisper, “Quit it, Matt.”
    There they are, a roomful of people spending an ordinary hour at school while Kevin sits in the first seat of the third row, quietly burning to cinders. Go.
Go
. The clouds draw their shadows across the parking lot. The intercom scratches out an accidental rustle. He pays just enough attention to Mr. Garland to answer a question or two, but at the first clap of the chapel bell he launches himself into the hallway. He beats the crowd to the side door of the gym, drags the prop desks, microphone, and filing cabinet out from the wings of the stage, then waits in back for the rest of the cast to arrive, plucking at the odd machinery of ropes on the wall, arranged like the strings of a piano. One, two, Brandon Ostermueller. Four, five, Jennifer Graham. Ten plus himself, and that makes eleven. His cast. Beyond the curtain he spies a fragment of the basketball court, a thin band of yellow wall where faces appear and vanish atop long shimmers of clothing, but except for Ann Harold, who veers into the girls’ locker room, he doesn’t see anyone he knows.
    The gym becomes saturated with voices. Then Coach McAteer silences everyone for the prayer and the opening hymn, the Mustang motto and the announcements. “Today,” he says, “we have something special for you, a play presented by CAC’s seventh-grade class, titled
The Case of the Missing Miss Vincent
.”
    Kevin gives the signal to Joseph Luigs, Policeman #2, who is on curtain duty. He had imagined that taking the stage would be like diving into the ocean, but it is exactly the opposite, as if the dazzling lights have lifted him from the water and set him down on dry land. Life is so much easier without the salt spray and the buffeting of the waves. How come he never realized?
    His nerves fall away from him in an instant as he projects his lines into the stillness. Acting isn’t like he thought it would be. He is not a detective solving a crime, just himself, but a different version of himself, a better one, with an audience. From every side he hears the dialogue he wrote, all those jokes and hunches, screams and snores,
who-me
’s and sighs of relief, each of them coming at precisely the right moment. Shane has trouble deciphering Kevin’s penmanship and keeps supplementing his lines with the stage directions: “It was two days ago and Miss Vincent was in her fifth-period class. Miss V. hits Clint over head three times with paddle—lightly but make it look hard.” But otherwise the play ticks along without a blunder. All the bleacher sounds register in the darkness, every beeping watch and every popping joint. There are more laugh