“Teenage Kicks”

This is a story of loss and longing, of forgotten sorrows and the sting of unrealized dreams. It’s the story of the three of us when we found ourselves in the throes of a teenage obsession with all of its kicks and confusion. Once upon a time there was a secret in our city of dreams. The three of us got matching haircuts to commemorate the occasion and to pledge our undying love and devotion to its mystery. I was full of illusions and discontent. Nothing could have prepared us for how absolutely underprepared we were to live lives of anonymous disappointment.

It was right about now, six weeks into our spring semester and countless lunches ago, that we started receiving the notes. It was a Tuesday morning when I slipped a hand into my locker and snagged my pre-calculus textbook. I watched it slip out of my hands and fall to the ground neatly splitting facedown in two. A note fell out.

“Read me,” it said, and we scratched our heads and read:

“Dear Sir (To Whom It May Concern): please leave one apple and one candy bar under the gym room bleachers in exchange for a secret. Best wishes, Anonymous.”

We had no choice but to comply. Who wouldn’t feed even the multi-headed Cerberus in exchange for dirt?

My brother had the bright idea to hide out in the unlocked equipment shed when we left our offering underneath the bleachers after school. It was possible to see through the foggy window halfway up the shed’s door, and as the three of us pressed our faces up against the glass I thought about who might show up. Would it be Little Laney? An unknown freshman? The boogeyman? We waited and waited and whistled and whispered and cracked jokes for twenty-five minutes before giving up; it must be some extravagant hoax, we decided, before tumbling out of the shed. But days pased by, and we got another note.

This time it was in my brother’s locker. It read:

“Dear Sir (To Whom It May Concern): Your offerings were much appreciated. As promised, you will receive one secret enveloped and placed beneath the bleachers after school in six days. Best wishes, Anonymous.”

Of course we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into but the fantastic allure of our growing obsession eradicated the irrationality of this inconvenient exchange.

It was Little Laney, our intermediary agent and sophomore star, who, stuffed with cynicism and gall, saved our curious souls.

We bribed Little Laney with candy and cafeteria cornbread in the lunch line in exchange for her compliance, mostly because she seemed to know everything about anyone. We let her in on the notes. Several days later, Little Laney reported that she had seen Arnold Rizer lurking around the bleachers after her last-period gym class. Arnie was six-foot-something, skinny, and a big eater. Every day he ate an entire steak-and-cheese sub and washed it down with a large strawberry milkshake at lunch. Little Laney referred to him as a “self-proclaimed rolling stone,” who revealed dreams of hitchhiking to the city after graduation. We didn’t have the intimacy or immediacy to tell him that his dreams were hinged on a dying art. We dressed in all black and scuffed our sneakers. High school was full of the unrecognized potential of poets and thinkers and athletes alike. And if Arnold Rizer wanted to hitchhike, who were we to squash his dreams?

Days later, we decided Arnie was our man. He was just in enough to know the juicy secrets of hungry teenagers, and just spontaneous enough to reveal them to complete strangers. In one day’s time, we would receive our secret from Arnie, as promised. Little Laney insisted on her rights to read the promised note, and out of fairness, we agreed to share the confounding and motivating secret Arnie wished to keep anonymous. Why he would want to confide in us was beyond me, but as minutes clocked out the hours of the promised six days later, our obsession elongated and encompassed all.

The blistering sky played mirror to our bruised and scaly insecurities every day after school. We had had separate asphalt gym classes full of sunburns, basketballs, and skinned knees. When we reunited the three of us watched the molasses traffic slide by underneath my open bedroom window. Mostly, we communicated by not actually communicating at all. But we did talk about Arnie and the notes. When the dream world subsumes reality you find yourself either in trouble or in heaven. This crux is exactly where we landed, in an obsession that lies in the in between spaces.

On the sixth day, Arnie wore a patterned sweater that was topped with the floppy black hat he kept in his black backpack. He played no sports after school but was the fastest runner in Little Laney’s gym class. He did no homework but competed with his classmates for the highest scores on tests. With his tumbling mass of contradictions, Arnie embodied an escape from the reality of our teenaged normalcy. We pinky swore to keep his secret between the four of us, and as minutes became seconds, locked in the equipment shed, we watched Arnie slink into the gym, unzip his backpack, and leave a large white envelope underneath the bleachers. He left the gym and Little Laney bolted out of the shed.

“I’m afraid, my boys, that you have been pranked,” Little Laney said. An awesome and hushing silence came over us as my brother bent over and opened the envelope containing nothing but air.

We had been pranked—fully, unconscientiously, and irrationally pranked. I suppose in exchange for a candy bar and an apple, we wanted Arnie’s secrets. But more than our obsession with the unknown confessions of an utter stranger, we wanted integrity. We wanted to know that there was something right, something just in our world that could lead to the mutual satisfaction of schoolmates. And when reality didn’t match the impeccable and clean quality of our jeans? We gave it all up in favor of our dreams. And now, our teenage kicks last through the night.

 

–Camille Dourmashkin-Cagol