Can’t breathe. Get away. Phone call from your mom. Your body. Found. Near where your jacket was. Run out my screen door, the slam behind me. Sky gray. Run around the cove where the boathouse is. Run across the lawn between the dorms and the lake, far enough away that no one sees me. No one hears me. Stop. Double over. My hands on my thighs. Can’t breathe. Can’t stop. Off again. Pumping arms, legs high, lungs burn, no air. Fifty meters, one hundred, into the middle of the cornfield.
Geese take off. Honk. The field explodes. Birds shoot up. The sky isn’t gray now. It’s tangles, birds going ballistic. My mind runs faster than my legs, and they give out, and I’m down, collapsed like those buildings blown from the inside, collapsing on themselves. That’s how I go down. Cornstalks hit my face, and scrape my ear, and my palms try to stop me, but cornstalks poke.
“Miss Alta,” somebody yells. Somebody sees me. In the middle of a cornfield with geese crazy, I’m face-planted in cornstalks, and no kidding, somebody sees me.
No way.
I ball up, wrap my arms around my knees and tuck my head in. Maybe I’ll blend in, and they’ll go away. Maybe they won’t see my Tim’s windshirt. My arms pull in tight, and I can’t keep the cry in any more. It comes out like air leaking, and I rock. The sound is high and little. The sound is like dying.
Somebody reaches me, and knees go on either side of me, and arms go around the ball of me, and I let somebody pull me in. “Ms. Alta,” somebody says, and it’s Carla, and the high sound in me keeps coming out. I let her rock me, and she’s warm. I’m in her arms, and her legs squeeze, and pretty soon the high sound goes low, and my whole body bucks, and she holds on. Carla’s wool sweater smells like wet cardboard, it’s been out in the cold, and she’s kissing my hair, kissing my ear, and I bury my head in her shoulder, and we’re warm, and I say, “Sarah.”
She says, “Shh, it’s okay,” and she kisses my shoulder, my back. My head slides down her shoulder, and I brush my face on her chest, and my arms come around her, and we’re holding on. My eyes close, and I see Sarah’s body all bloated on the shore, under the water, snagged under the surface, and there’s wool and Carla’s hair in my mouth and the two of us. Warm.
A sound like gagging comes behind us. Over my shoulder I see Kyle. Kyle is here too, and he’s gagging behind us, and I turn. Kyle with Carla in the cornfield? Kyle seeing us. Kyle repulsed and gagging at the sight of us.
Kyle is two hands around his neck, his thumbs digging in the front of his neck, his tongue way out. His gagging is a dry cough, hacking, and his eyes roll back, and then he keels over on the corn. His hands are locked on his neck, his elbows high in the air, and his legs kick out. He’s totally choking himself.
I’m on my feet and over to him. “Kyle,” I say, “Kyle,” and I kneel in the mud next to him, grab his arms, and Kyle twists on the ground. I pull back, try to get his hands off his neck, but he twists and his face is getting red, and he makes different sounds, like flat tire sounds, like flap flap, and I’m trying so hard to get his hands off his neck that I pull him toward me in the mud, and I rock back on my knees and stand up, and Kyle comes off the ground. I’m lifting him off the ground, and he won’t let go of his neck.
“Kyle,” I say, “let go,” and he does.
His eyes bug out, and his arms stay in my hands, but the rest of him crashes to the ground. He lands on his knees. And then he’s panting like a dog, his tongue out and his head down. His arms are up in my hands, and I’m standing, and it looks like he’s almost praying, begging me for something. He looks up at me from far away on the ground. His eyes, looking up into my eyes, hold no disgust for two girls hugging in the mud. His eyes have the geese and carry the sky.
I say, “What’s wrong?”
“Everything,” Kyle says. “Too much.”
“What is, Kyle?” My hands let go of his forearms and take his hands. His shoulders go lower.
“Pain.”
“You’ve got too much pain?”
“Everybody,” he says.
And it’s the three of us, Carla sitting on the mud, me standing, and Kyle kneeling. The gray sky almost touches us. The geese are settled into the next field. It’s the three of us in all the sky gray.
And way too much pain for one little boy.
And Carla starts talking. “Shit, Kyle. You totally scared me.”
“Sorry.” Kyle slumps back on his feet.
Carla starts talking really fast, like she’s a little girl and trying to tell a big person that there’s a fire. She tells me how she got to the edge of the cornfield and took a runner’s stance, hands on mud, how she said the start commands for a race, ‘Êtes-vous prêt? Partez!’ and sprinted into the field, blew right by Kyle, how he blended in like a moth. But then he stood up and scared the shit out of her, how he asked her why she scared the geese, and she said she didn’t know why, just wanted to. And he called that “gratuitous stimulation” and went all machine-talk on her.
“‘Gra-tu-i-tous-stim-u-la-tion’ and moved all choppy like he does,” she says. I can really see his head jerking with each syllable. He kneels while she tells the story.
And she keeps talking, says that she told him to cut it out, and he did. She asked him what he meant by the gratuitous thing. And he said that kids in the dorm jump him just for fun, just for the satisfaction. Gratuitous.
Carla is breathless telling this part, and the sky is clear of the geese, gray with clouds so low they keep the sound close.
She says he raised his shirt and there were bruises all over that the boys gave him. They wait till he’s asleep, and then they come in his cubicle and jump on his bed. He’s sleeping on his stomach, and they pinch him all over. And he says that he doesn’t let the kids see it hurts. Mr. Song can’t know, or the kids will do him worse. They said so to him. He said he can take it.
And maybe he can take it, this little boy in the brown field. But he shouldn’t.
“Show her, Kyle,” Carla says. “Show Ms. Alta your legs.”
“Will not.” His hands press his sweats to his ankles.
“Show her.”
“No.” With one hand he grabs a handful of cornstalks, tosses it.
“Why not?” Carla’s voice goes louder. She leans toward him.
“You’re making stuff up,” Kyle says. The way he’s kneeling makes his head about the same height as Carla’s, the way she’s sitting in the mud. He’s looking at her, and his face is blank the way the sky is blank.
Carla’s face is a painting. It’s a Warhol, a stencil, a white face against red, then a red face against yellow, then a yellow face against blue. There’s a red thing coming from her taking over. It’s like the field and the sky and the geese have a film over them. Brown field goes red field. Gray sky goes red sky.
“Fuck you,” she says. “I saw them.”
Her words land on him, like she pushed him, and he rolls back, his feet coming up, and then he curls up on his side, on the mud in the cornfield.
“Cut it out,” I say. I step in front of Carla, my legs blocking her, and I face Kyle, curled up like a potato bug in the field.
His arms go over his head. “You can’t be like them,” he says. “Go away.” He tucks his legs up.
My knee lands in the mud. On one side of me, a little boy lies, holding everything in. On the other side of me, a girl sits with her fists on her knees. Her face flashes red, white, yellow. She is a canvas, flattened. The red hot thing comes out her eyes.
“I’m not like them, Kyle,” she says. “I’m not like them.” And she’s crying. I don’t think she ever cries. And inside me two forces pull apart. I know what it means to be torn down, the coaches yelling, picking at every catch, calling us names, demeaning. They toughened us to care less about the body and more about the win. The boys in the dorm, they care nothing about Kyle. They tear him down to feel more about their bodies. If I tell Mr. White and the boys are punished, Kyle will be pummeled. If I don’t tell, Kyle will be pummeled. What I know now, I’ll keep. I can keep him safe.
“It’s turbulence,” Kyle says. “They do what they want. You can’t stop them.”
And it’s the three of us, one girl, one boy, and me, the one who is supposed to tend. And geese in the next field. The cold of November is the mud where my knee rests, where Kyle’s shoulder curls, where Carla sits. There is no other world than this, me with a body rising after ten weeks in a river, Carla with all the want red in her eyes, and one little boy with pain marking him inside and out.