MOONLIGHT, STARLIGHT, BOOGIE WON’T BE OUT TONIGHT by Jenny Shank
They played the game in the darkened gym. The teacher chose the first Boogie: Davonya Williams, slim and solemn and watchful, wearing pink teardrop eyeglasses, decades out of style. She lay on her stomach at the far end of the gym, head propped on cupped hands. She stared ahead as the other children drew near, skipping and chanting: “Moonlight, starlight, Boogie won’t be out tonight,” approaching her with each refrain. Chanting like that, skipping with such insouciance, they were asking for it, really, asking for anything that would come.
The rule was they had to skip forward until she rose, then run like hell to get away. If she touched them, they had to join her, become Boogie on the dark end of the gym. If they reached the wall that they started from, breathless, fingertips straining toward the cool, painted cinder blocks, they were safe. The lights flickered on, abolishing fear for the moment, but as they caught their breath, the children knew there would be more Boogies next time, and more the next.
The gym teacher always chose Davonya because she was the quickest, the most streamlined, hair corn-rowed tight to her head, each braid ending in three blue plastic beads held in place with a bit of tinfoil. The teacher knew she could rise from her stomach without an anticipatory twitch of a muscle and catch people as they fled, head start and all. She wore a discount store’s knock-off version of Keds, held together by nothing but cheap glue, but they propelled her like the winged shoes of Mercury. The teacher dimmed the lights to give her a chance to surprise them with her opening sally, but she didn’t need a chance, not really. She had speed, which was all the help she needed, and more than most were blessed with.
Davonya aimed for Katie Mills first, the second fastest girl. Katie was a pale, freckled child, with white blonde hair and the eyelashes of a fairy. Katie looked flour-dipped, so white she could have left a ghostly print on everything she touched. Katie was always staring at Davonya with widened eyes, on edge, waiting for her to do something that would make her cry or scream, expecting it, though it never once happened. The only time Davonya ever touched her was during the game, and the Boogie-making gesture was more symbolic than harmful, just a sweep of thin fingers across Katie’s back.
Katie’s speed bothered Davonya most of all. Katie was skittish enough to sense a split second before everyone else when she should bolt. She had fretted all the meat off her bones and was down to muscle and spectral blond hair. Katie’s mother dressed her in diaphanous pastel clothes that wouldn’t weigh down her insubstantial limbs. Still, she was the best adversary available to Davonya. The other girls didn’t care about running. They wore inappropriate shoes and let themselves be caught.
One day they played the game and Katie evaded Davonya’s touch. She was so swift that she reached the wall every time, forcing Davonya to tag other children until her herd of Boogie underlings overwhelmed Katie, moving her to one side, slowing her advance so Davonya could catch her. Davonya didn’t like to work that way, with so much help. It felt untidy.
For the first time that day Davonya felt the burden of the Boogie. When her dominance faltered, the fright she induced in the others went with it. The children joked with their friends, shoving each other into Davonya’s path. Davonya didn’t want to lose this, the only moments in her second-grade life when she felt powerful and intimidating, and so she ran faster.
The next time they played the game, when the gym teacher sized up the kids to select the Boogie, his glance fell not on Davonya, but on Katie, and he pointed. The children let out a collective gasp. Katie took the position, belly down against the cold floor on the dark side of the gym. Davonya stood in the middle of the pack on the opposite side, her arms across her chest. Pissed as she’d ever been. The other kids maintained a distance from her, as if her anger produced an electrical perimeter. When the children began to chant and skip toward Katie, taunting the Boogie, Katie rose and aimed for Davonya, chasing after her and tagging other children only incidentally, pursuing and unafraid.
Davonya felt a tinge of fear for once, the terror of the chased, but she wouldn’t let herself be caught. She’d show the gym teacher his mistake. She and Katie played the game over and over, the other children all turned Boogie, running for a while with Katie and Davonya, then falling down one by one on the gritty lacquered floor in the dark of the gym, their breathing ragged as they waited for the game to end. But it went on, Katie pursuing, Davonya fleeing, always reaching the wall before Katie touched her.
The gym teacher ignored the complaints of the children and cracked open the door to the playground for some air, letting in the scent of fallen leaves rotting outside. He leaned against the wall, his whistle dangling from a chain around his neck, and watched the game continue. Davonya skipped aggressively; you couldn’t really call it skipping, it bore such threat. He wanted to see how the game would end.
The next time racing back across the gym floor, Davonya saw the open door and ran through it. Katie ran after her. The game had become too big for the gym. The gym teacher called for them to come back as they disappeared across the playground, puffs of schoolyard dust rising where their feet fell, but they didn’t stop. He jogged out after them and his knee buckled from an old high school football injury. He returned to the gym, pressed the office call button, and explained the situation before heading back outside to find the girls. The vice principal entered the gym where the kids coughed from their exertions, too dramatically, she thought. “That’s enough,” she said, turning on the lights.
The gym teacher walked around the perimeter of the school, looking for the girls. On a juniper bush by the flagpole, he noticed a bit of pink fluff, perhaps from Katie’s sweater. In the gutter near by, he picked up a single blue plastic bead. He looked down the street across the way, saw a row of houses needing paint, slouching porches, untended yards. He took a tentative step across the deserted street. He never spent any time in this neighborhood outside of school hours, parking his car each morning in the locked lot, and he thought of the meth house busts he’d read happened around here, the unprovoked shootings, the strange case of a man two blocks away who’d taken in a boarder, then dismembered him and set the house on fire to hide what he’d done. It was time to call the parents, then the cops.
But when he went to the office to make the calls, the principal told him that the girls had turned up in their next class, scratches on their faces, bits of dead leaves in their hair, Katie’s sweater stretched out, Davonya’s shirt ripped, their nostrils flaring as they took their seats, still out of breath. They wouldn’t discuss what happened, wouldn’t tell anyone where they went. Who won? was all the kids wanted to know. But neither girl would speak.
In college, Davonya eases into the starting blocks. Her muscles twitch once before they must be silent and wait to explode. Davonya wears contact lenses – the donated Lions Club eyeglasses far behind her – and shoes bearing symbols that denote speed, a swoosh or three slashes ranked on either side like the gills of a shark. She can hear the others breathing, adjusting their positions on either side of her. But her eyes face straight ahead. Her chin hovers near her left knee as she waits, crouched, for the starter to call set. Sometimes her thoughts wander to the game she played as a girl, the game that set her on this course. What was the gym teacher thinking when he came up with it? Had he forgotten how scary it was to chant an invitation to a monster, how children magnified every threat in the funhouse mirror of their minds? Or did he feel assured that these were city kids, clad in a tough rind of half-neglect, and their parents would never ask what games they’d played in gym that day, let alone be moved to complain? Maybe he chose that game of tag because the person designated It became a luminary instead of a pariah.
The starter calls set and Davonya rises, arching her back, suspending her body in the awkward pose that says: let me run. The gun, and she bursts forward, trying not to uncoil too soon but to use it, to exploit the momentum as she draws herself to full height, arms pumping. The lone trace of discernible fat on her body – in her cheeks – quivers as her feet pound. Her track spikes dig into the spongy, brick-colored surface, giving her a little push with each step. She is in a center lane and sees no one in front of her, and that is the way she likes it. She now knows what the gym teacher was trying to teach her: that there were still times, in the modern world, when self-preservation depended on how quickly you could run.
Jenny Shank’s short fiction has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Michigan Quarterly Review, Calyx, CutBank, and Eureka Literary Magazine. Her first novel, The Ringer, will be published by The Permanent Press in 2011.