The Wild Things

CHAPTER VII

“You ready?” his mom asked.

Max didn’t want to be driven to school, but he had no choice. His school had done away with bus service. There were only a handful of kids whose parents had allowed them to ride it in the first place, and so the previous year they’d gotten rid of it entirely. No one complained, no one missed it.

Riding his bike to school was no longer an option. After he’d been biking to school for a month, one of the parents, Mr. Neimenov, had complained. First to Max’s mom, then Max’s dad, and finally to the principal. He thought that Max’s unchaperoned riding was attracting potential child-abductors and child-assaulters. “Just as a liquor store attracts drunks,” he’d written in a note to Max’s mom, “so does an 8-year-old riding alone attract all kinds of unsavory types …”

When Max’s parents hadn’t responded, Mr. Neimenov brought the matter up with the school, and they quickly gave in. It wasn’t even a battle. There wasn’t a bike rack on the grounds in the first place. Max had been the only one who’d been riding to school.

The good thing about Thursdays was that on Thursdays there was gym. Thursdays were the only day, in fact, when gym occurred. And given budget cutbacks and new priorities and bi-weekly all-school testing sessions, there were only twelve gym days a year. So Max knew to savor each one. He ran out to the blacktop — the school had paved over the grass to save money to buy more Scantron forms — and lined up.

“Okay folks,” Mr. Ichythis said to the class, “as you know, we have only one day for each sport, so today’s our day to cover soccer. We use this ball for soccer,” he said, holding up a volleyball, “and the object is to kick it into that net.” He pointed to one of the goals, then seemed suddenly to notice something. “Or that one,” he said, nodding toward the opposite goal. “Either one, I guess.”

With that, he blew his whistle and threw the ball in the air. The kids immediately scattered. Half ran toward the ball, the other half for the sidelines.

There were only a handful of kids emotionally prepared, Max had learned, for team sports. And even some of the seemingly athletic kids were prone to bursts of crying. Wherever there was a ball and a net — soccer, basketball, tennis — crying followed. Even in his weekend soccer league, in every practice and every game, there were kids weeping. They cried when they were touched, they cried when they missed the ball, they cried when the other team scored. They cried when faced with any possible doubt or disappointment. They cried as a default, they cried when they didn’t know what else to do.

But Max knew what to do. He was on the soccer field to kick, chase, survey, run, slide-tackle, and score at will. When he was playing, he felt a sense of self-possession and order that was unparalleled anywhere else in his life. He knew where the ball was going; he knew where the other players were and where they were likely to go; at any given moment he knew exactly what had to be done.

He also had a sense of what needed to be stopped, and when. At that very moment, Dan Cooper was heading down the sidelines, dribbling the ball toward the goal. It would be up to Max to stop this business, so he made himself a torpedo and plugged in Dan’s coordinates. Max was quickly upon him, and when he was within striking distance, and Dan was about to score on the open net — the goalie was hiding behind the goalpost — Max unleashed unto Dan Cooper a slide-tackle of great ferocity and terrible accuracy.

Max was heading the opposite direction, careening upfield with the ball and praying that Dan wouldn’t cry, when the whistle stopped him.

“Foul,” Mr. Ichythis said.

The slide-tackle had been legal but the kids on the sidelines were giving Max disapproving looks. “Savage,” one girl hissed. Dan was indeed crying, silently, deeply, as if lamenting all the sadness and injustice in the world.

“What kind of foul?” Max asked.

“The penalty kind,” Mr. Ichythis said.

“For what?” Max asked.

“For making Dan fall,” Mr. Ichythis said. “Just go to the penalty box and give me a break, okay?”

There was no such thing as a penalty box in this sport, but Max didn’t feel like explaining it all to him. To a chorus of judgmental frowns from the non-participating girls and boys, Max walked off the field and into the school. It was almost lunch anyway.

In science class, Mr. Wisner had just discussed the sad plight of Pluto, the smallest and most remote planet, which had long languished on the periphery of the universe, and now was a planet no more. It was now just some rock in space.

Max was staring up at the model universe dangling from the ceiling when something Mr. Wisner was saying caught his attention.

“Of course,” he was saying, “the sun is the center of our solar system. It’s why all of the planets are here. It creates day and night and the warmth of its sunlight is what makes our planet inhabitable. Of course, the sun won’t always be here to warm us. Like all things, the sun will die. When it does, it’ll first expand, and will envelop all the planets around it, including the Earth, which it will consume rapidly …”

Max didn’t like the sound of any of this. He looked around. None of the other students seemed to be listening closely.

Mr. Wisner continued: “The sun, after all, is just fuel, burning ferociously, and when our particular star — a painfully average one, I should say — runs out of fuel, our solar system will go dark, permanently …”

Max had a sick feeling in his stomach. There was something about the words go dark permanently that didn’t sit well with him. This was the very worst lesson Max had ever heard in school, and there were fifteen minutes left on the clock. Mr. Wisner turned and pulled down a map of the world.

“But before that, the human race will likely fall to one of any number of calamities — self-inflicted or not: war, radical climate change, meteors, spectacular floods and earthquakes, superviruses …”

Now he turned back to the students, with a look on his face that was almost cheerful.

“Wow, I sound like a downer, don’t I! Look on the bright side — you and everyone you know will be long gone by then! When the sun is extinguished and the world is swallowed like a grape by the collapsing fabric of space, we’ll be long forgotten in the endless continuum of time. The human race is, after all, just a sigh in the long sonorous sleep of this world and all worlds to come. Okay, that’s the end for today. Have a great weekend.”