Excerpt: After the Wild

He’d known her all his life, or all that mattered, at least. She had been practically family since his earliest memory, and most of the time she was as familiar to him as his own sisters. More, even, because while his sisters often spoke a strange, private language of pop culture and girly things and inside jokes, Michele talked about important things like books and religion and philosophy and art. Real things. She always listened and rarely made him feel embarrassed or awkward or – worst of all – young. Even though he was, at fifteen, the youngest in the junior class and younger than many of the sophomores. He’d skipped third grade, but only after his mother had stormed into the Superintendent’s office and requested – demanded – that her son be challenged in school, which was not happening in the Days-of-the-Week-and-Months-of-the-Year curriculum of second grade. At seven, Colin was working his way through the books JD gave him: Siddhartha and Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Animal Farm. Charlotte’s Web was lovely reading for the other second graders, but Colin was asking the teacher questions she couldn’t answer, like “Is it possible to find a pure utopia, or do they all turn into dystopias?” and “What’s the difference between a fable and an allegory?” and “How can some animals be more equal than others?”

So Colin had jumped directly from second grade into fourth, into the bowdlerized version of United States history and the fifty nifty states, but also into the stranger world of nine and ten year olds, a year long gap that stretched across generations of playground understanding. It was the typical story: kid skips grade, is slightly more challenged academically and severely challenged socially.

And JD had taken it upon himself to fill in the gaps for Colin, joking about developing a Seymour Glass complex and promising to explain it when Colin was older. They were ten years apart, JD a senior in high school when Mrs. O’Riley bullied the Superintendent into skipping Colin. The next year, Colin had to navigate the treacherous waters of fourth grade on his own, but JD was back from college most weekends to philosophize and share books and give tips about playground survival. Those weekends were the best. Colin would get to go along with JD as he revisited all his Prairie Junction haunts: his favorite running trails from the days when he was the captain of the Cross Country team, the few high school teachers he actually liked, the secret spot on the shore of the immense lake at the state park not too far north of town. JD had camped there when he was in high school, and in college he sometimes still slept out on the lake when he was home, especially if Michele had come home with him.

At night they usually ended up at the North Star Bar & Grill, one of the few restaurants in town, and the only one where you could get a decent cup of coffee and french fries after midnight. JD and Michele together on one side of the booth and Colin there across from them with a chocolate malt instead of coffee, munching on fries and mostly holding his own in the conversation. He made them laugh with his seemingly endless memory for random facts about the American presidents; he’d memorized at least one piece of trivia per president as a way to amuse himself while the rest of his classmates struggled to memorize at least – at the very least! – the ten previous presidents. For extra credit, at least 20 presidents. For double extra credit and a candy bar, all 43. To the general drone of “Bush, Clinton, Bush… Reagan… um, Reagan… Carter…” Colin whispered to himself, “Chester Arthur, owned more than 80 pairs of pants, changed them several times a day. Grover Cleveland, only president married in the White House. Ben Harrison, first president to go to a baseball game….”

In fifth grade, while everyone else was reading Maniac Magee, Colin was reading Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara. He was into abstract expressionism that year and devoured everything he could find about Jackson Pollack, Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler, and Robert Motherwell. JD didn’t come home from school as frequently as he had the year before, and when he did he was quieter than he had been, less likely to expound on his own interests or quiz Colin on the books he’d informally assigned.

The next summer, he disappeared.