They Way It Used To Be Done
Last Friday, one of the boys from my four-forty brought explosives to school. Not the good kind of explosives. You couldn't have wrecked any Gundams with this shit. They came in silver packets. Basically, you'd set one of these things down and stomp on it. After the initial impact, some chemical reaction kicked in and the little silver packed would expand and then explode. I suspect the same kind of reaction goes down when you mix up about six-ounces of drain cleaner and a few good twists of tin foil and shake it in a plastic bottle.
This kid was so jazzed about this. . . I hate calling it a firework, but explosive is entirely misleading. . . this firework, alright? He's trying to make good, trying to better himself in my class, if only to appear like less of a fuck up in front of the girl he's now sitting next to. . . he's making an effort to appear "smart" and as a result he's more manageable. But, he's still young. Only eleven. So he was probably flashing this thing around up to the bell. And when I managed to show up five minutes later, he still had the damn thing out. The thought of him stomping on it in class didn't sit too well with me, so I confiscated it, telling him that I'd return it to him at the end of the hour and a half and then we could go outside and listen to ours ears ring in the bitter cold.
And why not? When I was a kid, watching my old man get fucked up with his buddies and then setting off bottle rockets or firecrackers was pretty high up there on the list of things to do, right next to building an addition to the house and automotive repair. When Cindy and I went down to Puli for New Year's, we hanged out with her little cousins. We wound up sending bottle rockets over the family's walls and into the balconies of their neighbors. Flashes of light and loud noises, human beings love them.
So we ducked outside, just the guys, at the end of class on Friday. He went out into the courtyard and huddled up next to one of the windows over by the patch of concrete. I gave the packed to the boy and he set it down. We just stood there, for a minute. And then the more spastic of the four boys tried stomping on it. The packed didn't even bubble. I had to explain to the kid that a stomp was something you did with the heel of your foot, not the toes.
The more morose of the lot stepped up and brought hist tennis shoe down on it, hard. He took a step back and when we saw the firework balloon, we did the same.
And it exploded and then explosion echoed through the courtyard and the apartments surrounding it, followed by five males giggling like barely-legal schoolgirls, drowning out the sounds of the starts and interrogatives from the classroom.
And then we ran inside. The girls were still in the classroom comparing phones and bragging over whose mother had stolen the most of her husband's soul. The five of us waited quietly by the door, looking at our feet and hoping that we hadn't attracted the interest of the schoolmistress.
It went off without a hitch.
Just us guys had never really done anything before.
Today we attempted to do the same thing again. This time with the girls along. It went pretty much the same as before, the difference being that the students in the classroom of which we were outside were prepared.
The cool fat kid was the one who gave it the boot. He didn't seem to think it was expanding fast enough, so he stomped on it repeatedly. He looked up at us, with his face slack, after a few seconds. The silver packed hadn't exploded and he felt like he'd fucked it up somehow.
When it did go off, he wasn't expecting it. He bounced, of course, but his face was the mask of surprise and relief at the same time. He was smiling when he landed, and then laughing. Everyone was laughing.
And the bell rang and the kids shuffled along to the front of the school, and I went home to a dog and a pot of coffee, probably feeling like more of a responsible adult than I should have.