The Kingdom of Childhood

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ZXP

18

When he finally got home, he clomped straight up the stairs and took a shower. As the water heated up he stared hard at himself in the mirror, his image growing ever-fuzzier in the steam, and took inventory of his flaws. His skin looked like crap. He needed a haircut. Without judo or yoga his muscles were going soft, and on top of all of that, he was still short.

He wasn’t likely to grow much more at this point. Clearly he was, for all intents and purposes, a man. He didn’t feel at all like an adult, and normally took pleasure in that fact. He had the rest of his life, after all, to muse darkly over the tedious matters of the world. As long as he had the freedom to dwell on the entertaining and the trivial, he would do just that. And so he hated it when adult concerns crept in.

He was pissed at himself for ejaculating.

He had felt sure he wouldn’t. For that matter, he had been determined not to. He felt tired and crappy, and annoyed at her—no, angry—for driving him out to the geographic center of nowhere and leaning on him to have sex with her. She hadn’t asked, hadn’t felt him out—she simply took for granted that he was available for that purpose, as if, because he was sixteen and in her car, he was a captive audience with a permanent erection. It made him feel less like the irresistibly charming Zach Patterson and more like the sum of his parts.

Of course, he could have flat-out turned her down, but it felt like more trouble than it was worth. She would have come away with a bruised ego that could, in the long run, make his life extremely miserable. It was easier just to give her what she wanted and go home.

Still, he had thought there was no way he would finish. He wasn’t in the mood, wasn’t happy with her personally, and was terrified—despite her careless assurances—of getting her pregnant. It should have been a supernova of a buzzkill, but in the end, he couldn’t help it. His body, which he loved, had betrayed him.

He scowled at himself in the mirror and got into the shower, leaning his forehead against the cool tiled wall. The hot water felt good on his back, but he seemed to be growing more tired by the moment, rather than more refreshed. When he got out he toweled off and pulled on a clean pair of boxers, combed his hair, and started down the stairs. He made it halfway, then stopped and sat, cradling his head in his hands.

“Zach, is that you?”

His mother came around the corridor and, one hand on her hip and the other on her belly, stopped to look at him in surprise. “Are you all right?”

“I don’t feel so great.”

She waved him down and he followed obediently, moving with what seemed like an enormous effort. She reached up—for he was taller than her, at least—and laid her palm, deliciously cool, against his forehead.

“Oh my goodness my,” she said. “How hot was that water?”

“Normal. I feel chilly, though.”

He walked past her and lay down on the sofa. She covered him with two afghans and returned from the kitchen with the basketful of lozenges and supplements and homeopathic tablets. And for the second time that day, he resigned himself to the fact that his body was, by an act of nature, about to let him down.

The next day, when I picked up Scott from Madrigals practice, I noticed Zach was missing from the group. Wednesday morning, I contrived an excuse to visit the Upper School and, peeking into the eleventh-grade class, saw his seat empty. That afternoon I worked up the nerve to call his mother.

“Does he need a ride to the choir concert Saturday evening?” I asked. Even to my own ears, the innocence in my voice felt forced.

“Thank you, but he won’t be needing it,” said Vivienne. “We’ll drive him if he goes.”

“Is he all right?”

“He’s just got some sort of bug. Fever, cough, sore throat. I suppose he’s all right.”

I remembered massaging my way down his spine, taking note of the heat of his skin. The radiant warmth of him had felt sensual to me. It had never crossed my mind that it was abnormal, that he might be sick. How could I not have noticed? Had he been my own child, I would have. And he was somebody’s own child. Vivienne’s.

The groveling shame I had felt when he glared at me in the car returned, but a deeper part of my mind rushed to suppress it. I said, “Well, we’ll miss him at the concert. I hope he feels better soon.”

“That’s kind of you. I’ll pass the word on to him.”

It was not until after I hung up the phone that the thought occurred to me: measles. I felt a rush of fear. Had I overlooked an illness that serious? But, no—it was most likely just a cold. Of the fifteen children who had contracted the virus, none were Upper School students. There was little mingling between the two sides of the school, and most of the unvaccinated students were in the Lower School.

Then I thought of Zach in my kindergarten classroom. Not once. Many times.

I thought of everything he had told me about his family. Everything I knew about his body. I thought, these people are true believers.

And then I thought, it can’t be.

Before school began I slipped into the main office in pursuit of Zach’s student file. My surreptitious search turned it up quickly, the only P in the bunch, marked with a yellow tape flag that indicated it was one of the files missing either a vaccination record or a signed exemption. The only health-related paperwork it contained was the birth history survey filled out by his mother, describing in lyrical prose his home birth in rural New Hampshire. If I wanted to know whether Zach was our latest case of measles, I would have to ask him myself.

As soon as my last morning student left with his mother I tore out of the parking lot at a speed unbecoming of a kindergarten teacher. Once on Zach’s street I slowed to a crawl, scanning his driveway and the curb in front of his house for cars. Both his mother’s sporty little Volvo convertible and his father’s green pickup truck were gone. I parked one house down to be on the safe side and crunched through the dry leaves that covered his lawn. When I knocked on the door I felt a moment of wild fear that his mother was home after all, but just as I backed away from the door it opened, and there he stood in the living room’s muted light, wearing a gray T-shirt and baggy pajama