Everyday Psychokillers Read Free

pretty full by the time we returned in the afternoon. I don’t know what they did in that building or what it was for. All kinds of extravagant plants grew from cracks in the cement and hung from the limbs of trees. I didn’t know the names of any of them. A lot of things no one bothers to know the name of unless they want to buy one. When you’re a kid, walking around in a world that’s nameless does not always seem like a problem. You’re used to things being mysterious. A lot of things just don’t matter. It’s sort of like being what they call carefree . But not really.
    So I stood outside that building every day for the whole time I went to that school. It was a building to stand in front of. It had a bit of an overhang at the front doors for when it rained. The boys hid broken-down cardboard boxes around the side and when I arrived in the mornings they were already taking turns spinning on their backs with their ankles crossed, showing each other what they could do. Break-dancing. Even when it rained and the boxes were ruined, we’d gather by the entrance to the building and they’d lay their raincoats down and try spinning on them.
    They looked like pill bugs. I imagined myself a giant over them, turning them on their backs and flicking their feet so they’d spin, sometimes trying to ease into more elaborate acrobatics. The boys had enormous respect for each other’s efforts. They all looked idiotic, but they marveled at one another. Even perpetually small and clumsy boys enjoyed a kind of hands-off policy, a respect in the face of what they all longed to do and none did well. They spat tobacco into triangular cups folded from notebook paper, and once you were on the bus you had nowhere to go if one of them wanted to throw his cup at you. No other girls used my bus stop.
    So it was a relief when, for a week, I didn’t have to ride the bus home, because for one week a year, the students who’d tested into special classes were invited to stay after school for a series of advanced lectures to be delivered by Mr. Freedman, our science teacher. His wife, Mrs. Freedman, our history teacher, ran the slide projector, and after the lecture each evening, she sat in the parking lot with the students until their parents arrived, while Mr. Freedman packed the slides into boxes and hid them in the lab somewhere.
    In the parking lot, Mrs. Freedman sat on the edge of a cement planter that held a palm tree, and the kids sat on the sidewalk in front of her. They talked about the lectures, which explained a lot of the mysteries about the Egyptians, proving how they must have had batteries and helicopters, and how there existed actual remains of such technologies, and photographs of those remains in gilded entombed boxes, slides of which Mr. Freedman presented to them. The kids felt what it must be like to be real scholars, discussing with Mrs. Freedman, whose great bubblelike eyeglasses seemed to float around her face, what it had been like to be listening to Mr. Freedman, whose gray beard brushed against his collar as he spoke, and whose kind eyes lit brightly as he lectured about the ancient people and their science and their culture—brighter even than they’d seemed earlier that day in fifth period when he taught them to produce brilliant colors by sprinkling chemicals over Bunsen burners. You could tell by the music in his voice through the shadows of the lab, and the shadow of his hand with its pointer that pointed like the pointer of an orchestral conductor at here and then here on each slide. They felt what it must feel like to be professionals, listening to and admiring another professional, thinking “That one knows something I’d like to know,” and “Now we are thinking about what we all know is important.”
    He said the batteries we saw there in their ancient gilded boxes, their own little tombs, were indeed containers themselves, that they