November 21, 2001

• Hover

  Hover

  He’s 7 or 8, that kid. He has a game he likes to play, called hovering. It’s a game you can almost play alone.

  What you do is- you go somewhere where you’re alone, but you can watch people. Then you sit and be baffled by your situation, and how you won’t ever fit in. You hover there. He’s still too young to understand it, so he hovers.

  He’s hovering. He skipped school, but instead of doing what other kids would do if they skipped school, he hovers on the banks of the creek that runs behind the school’s property line. He’s peeking in the windows of his class. He’s trying not to be seen, not because he’s scared of the consequences, but because it’s a fun game. It makes him feel like a hero in a spy movie.

  Why would he skip school only to watch school happen from the outside?

  It’s raining. He’s wearing his yellow rain slicker, and he’s got a red backpack that has all his homework, the homework he’d be turning in right now if he were in class, a few books, a packed lunch which was eaten shortly after the decision was made to skip. Why is a kid, skipping school, hunkering behind a grassy knoll trying not to be seen, peering in at his classmates, in the rain?

  He’s hovering. He knows he can become invisible; it’s happened before. No one can see him, such is his loneliness. He doesn’t want to be seen, either, because that would ruin the fun.

  His mom thinks he’s relatively happy. She says he’s having some rough times, what with the two hospitalizations this year and the sexual predator in that very same school playground where he now lurks, trying to remain unseen. But she wants him to be happy, because if he weren’t, she’d be a bad mom.

  Across the creek, there’s a shopping center. As they say, a ‘strip mall.’ He likes to go there. He can go into the drug store and be fascinated by all the products, the array of products, the maze of displayed products. He has a disorder that makes it so he can’t learn how to ‘do’ culture, so he latches on to the easily-digestible culture of advertising and merchandise. Status objects are easier markers than real social navigation. The people on packages always look so content and happy, having purchased their way through the social heirarchy.

  He doesn’t understand any of that. He just likes to see the products in their packaging. That’s how he sees it. He’s 7 or 8; he doesn’t understand the irony of it. Yet.

  He’s gone from the schoolyard to the drugstore. He likes the orderedness of the store layout. Even rows, recessed flourescent lighting, magazines always in one place, toys always in another. Candy bars. Weird hygiene products. ‘As Seen On TV.’

  He’s caught. A clerk at the drugstore was bright enough to realize that a 7 or 8 year old kid shouldn’t be there alone. The school is alerted. The boy is carted off to school where he spends fifteen minutes in class before the school day is over.

  • 7:32 am
  • 4 Comments