Bubblegum
The tenth swingset I murdered belonged to the Strumms, a family of bikers who lived in some trailers on an acre of pavement off County Line Road. The second-youngest Strumm, Stevie, had invited me the previous Monday in lab. She’d be stuck at home sitting her sister, she’d said, while her parents and aunts and uncles and cousins all rode out to Alpine to see G N’ R; they’d be gone half the day and at least half the night, the swingset was “fucked,” and the neighboring properties were totally vacant.
In the couple-three weeks since the school year had begun, I’d turned down any number of similar invitations. Despite all the social capital I’d earned from my performance at Feather’s, I wasn’t so sure I was ready for an encore. I was, first of all, spooked by the possibility that Feather’s swingset hadn’t initially wanted my help; even if it had said, ||Finish,|| to me—if that hadn’t been the bat, or my imagination—it hadn’t done so til I’d pummeled it for nearly an hour. And then, secondly, I had this uncomfortably self-contradictory feeling about having helped it in front of others (a mix of satisfaction and shame at witnessing my own satisfaction, which persisted despite the persistence of the shame). This was a new, almost vertiginous feeling, a feeling I’ve only ever felt twice since: while dressing at the foot of Grete the grad student’s bed, and after reading No Please Don’t’s first review.
And yet Stevie Strumm had once dubbed me a mixtape just because I’d told her that I liked her Cramps shirt. When our Science teacher’d partnered us for lab that quarter, Stevie’d high-fived me and said, “Thank God.” Each Valentine’s Day since second grade, we’d traded chalky candy hearts and plastic-sleeved roses the school sold at recess (never the “romance”-signifying red ones, true, though never either the “warm feelings/friendship” yellows, but rather those ambiguous pinks and whites). In short, I really liked Stevie Strumm. Sometimes I even thought I was in love with her, and that made me think she might have liked me back a little. Plus she told me she’d missed the previous murder—she’d had to sit her sister that night, too—and she felt left out, kept from something important, and was holding my hands, both of my hands, squeezing a little, saying, “Belt, please.”
The turnout was even bigger than at Feather’s. Kids from St. Mary’s and Crown Jewish Day came. Kids from Aptakisic. Kids from Twin Groves. Someone’s older brother brought him in a Firebird—metallic blue, T top—which got him some attention from a few of the girls til Jonboat rolled up in his flan-colored Bentley. He’d bloodied Blackie’s nose on the tetherball court just three days before, and a rumor that they’d fight that evening had spread, but Blackie wasn’t there, and the whole throng of kids, led by Rory Riley, surrounded the limo to demonstrate allegiance.
The swingset sat farther back on the property, between a crescentic array of trailers and a portable fireplace Stevie’d set blazing. I went over to inspect it while Jonboat got mobbed. It was, to my relief, as “fucked” as Stevie’d said. No two
