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brothers who broke into a funeral home. Ken was telling about this steel ball that flew around with a blade sticking out that would drill into your head and spray blood like a damn garden hose.
    “When yall go?” he asked Ken, who said his older brother would sometimes take him and David with him and his girlfriend, let them sit in the front seat while his brother and his brother’s girlfriend necked in the back. Ken and David discussed other movies they’d seen, Dawn of the Dead, which Larry had also read about and was eager to see, where zombies tore people apart and ate them as they screamed, and one called Animal House, how John Belushi from Saturday Night Live scaled a ladder to spy on girls in a dorm room pillow fighting and taking their clothes off— “You seen their titties?” Larry asked.
    “Shit,” Ken said, “pussies, too.”
    “We go all the time,” David said, swooshing past. “Me and Ken going Friday night, too, ain’t we.”
    “Hell yeah.”
    Larry clenched the chains. “Yall think I could go sometime?” he asked, moving his neck to see David behind him, beside him, above.
    David and Ken, swinging opposite trajectories, like a pair of legs running, had to struggle to make eye contact.
    “My brother ain’t gone take you,” Ken said and David laughed, like what a stupid question.
    “It’s one way you might could go,” David said, and even though Larry saw him cast an evil look at Ken, he couldn’t help biting.
    “How?”
    “You got to join our club.”
    “Yeah,” said Ken.
    “How do I join?”
    A moment passed, the boys swinging.
    “You got to call Jackie ‘Monkey Lips,’ “ David said. “To her face.”
    A bell rang up at the school and the teachers began to grind out their cigarettes.
    “Watch this,” David said, kicking his legs harder, so hard, going so high, the chains in his fists slackened on his upswing and he bounced hard in the rubber seat and swung back and the chains snapped again and as he flew forward he leapt from the swing, seat flapping in his wake, and sailed a long time over the ground—his shirt flying up and his arms out, feet dangling—and landed dangerously close to where the black girls, headed back to school, were giggling about something.
    They jumped and screamed as David skidded and dusted them with playground sand.
    “Boy, you crazy,” one said, brushing sand from her backside, almost laughing.
    “He go break his neck,” another said.
    Up at the school, the teachers had paused before going in, watching.
    Before Larry knew it Ken had sailed out, snapping his chains, flapping the swing, airborne, the girls backing up as he landed fancy, doing a somersault and rolling to his feet with his hands out like, “Ta-da.”
    “Them white boys crazy,” another girl shrieked, the group moving farther away, but everybody, David, Ken, the girls, the teachers, looking at Larry, as he kicked his legs harder and harder, getting ready. He thought that if he did a good one, better than anybody else, they might let him go to the drive-in, he imagined telling his daddy about it, Where you going boy? To the drive-in movie with my friends, in a car.
    He went back, kicked, up, kick, back, the girls waiting, Ken and David watching. He thought if he could land in the center of them, scatter them, what a story it would make, he thought of going inside with Ken and David who’d tell everybody how far Larry Ott flew and how he sailed like a missile into the nigger girls.
    He’d jump the next time, as a couple of teachers went into the upstairs door, Larry swinging back, needing more altitude, now the black girls turning, Larry forward, kicking, thinking, Wait, but then the second bell rang and a teacher waved her arm, come on in, as the playground began to empty.
    When he jumped only Ken saw, David having given up, too, and Larry sailed out, his legs running, arms behind him.
    He yelled, “Monkey Lips!” and landed on the wrong foot and half-ran, half fell to a hard