In 2004, I slipped out of the pocket of Ian Thomas’ denim JNCO jorts and fell into the darkness
deep beneath the gym bleachers at Cumberland Hills Middle School. Ian’s jorts had a bulldog
patch on the back pocket. They were sick.
For Ian, the consequences of my neglectful dissapearance were fleeting; he had to wash his
dad’s car and couldn’t play Halo for a weekend. He had a new phone a week later.
Me? I faced a solitary prison. My battery stayed alive for a month, and everytime someone
called Ian, “Come Out and Play” by the Offspring rang out in the cavernous purgatory. My
neighbors? A crumpled up Gogurt wrapper. Dust. A desiccated Cheeto. A clove cigarette that
fell out of Ryan Ashbin’s pocket in 2006; crumpled up detention slips; later, an influx of Silly
Bandz and Livestrong Bracelets.
For nineteen years, I could smell only buttsweat and Axe; in 2007, a gym sock fell a few inches
from me and I prayed for the vicious odor to be fumigated. The massive quaking and
reverberations from pep rallys; the secret conversations. Usher on loop during school dances.
I have been a silent witness.
A witness to conversations soaked in the melodrama of existing, for a moment, as a thirteen year
old. You remember, right? How you simultaneously knew everything and nothing; sweaty, trying
desperately to latch onto something, anything that made sense. Everything single conversation
felt like forever, like it was the totality of everything. But I saw them pulled away by time, out of
the school, away and into the world. A collection of tiny moments, faded into the ether, that at
one time, to some kid, mattered more than anything else.
Vince Garcia scrambling up the bleachers, tears in his eyes, huddled at the top corner,
hyperventilating. Prinicipal Bennet following shortly behind him, his massive body creaking up
the bleachers, gently coaxing Vince to come back to class.
“It’s my dad,” Vince croaked. “He’s dying.”
Rosie Blair admitting to her best friend that she cut herself. Tom Gatlin coming out to his best
friend. Macie Howard breaking up with Danny Evans and dating Howie Grant and then getting
back together with Danny and Danny’s ex-Tracey Young jumping Macie and pulling her hair. A
debate that almost devolved into a fistfight over whether Bigfoot existed in San Andreas.
I have seen the years pass by through the cracks in the bleachers. On a cold December afternoon, light permeated the darkness. A hand grasped me, and pulled me out of the catacombs.
Jonny Bolduc is a poet from Lewiston, Maine. He teaches writing to seventh graders at a rural Maine middle school and is a devoted guardian to three cats. His work has been previously published in JAKE magazine, he was a recipient of Frost Meadow Review’s Editor’s Choice Award, and Roi Fainéant Press.
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