Rant

district’s legal counsel, the administration organized a presentation exclusively for male students in the affected peer groups.
    Dr. David Schmidt ( Middleton Physician): My slide show consisted of color photographs documenting penises suffering extended priapism and the resulting gangrenous injury. For the purpose of this lecture, I selected the most extreme examples, members on which the foreskin, glans penis, and engorged corpus carvenosa had discolored to a purple-black or iridescent dark green, typical of advanced necrosis in oxygen-deprived tissues.
    Silas Hendersen: Some kids would take a shoelace and tie it off. Other kids brung a cucumber. Tying off something full of blood could hurt, but keeping track of a cucumber took all your concentration. God forbid, but you’d see guys limping halfway to the bathroom for readjustment, and a cucumber or zucchini squash slips out the cuff of their jeans.
    Kids called it “Sportin’, Spottin’, or Stuffin’.”
    Spotting was, you’d take a fingertip of cooking oil or shampoo, something too greasy to dry out, and you put a dark spot on your front. Fake peter tracks.
    Lowell Richards: The district’s strategy remained only marginally successful.
    Cammy Elliot: Rant Casey wore those same two shirts to school because he couldn’t bear to have kids make fun of his mom. Even he figured the embroidered rainbows and the ivy she’d stitched up the legs of his blue jeans, they looked pretty sad. So he brung home two secondhand shirts and a pair of plain jeans, and kept them hid in the barn, where he could change clothes on his way to or from school.
    He was double-trapped. If he wore the clothes his mom monkeyed with, he’d hear jokes about her until they broke his heart. But if Rant told her to lay off decorating his stuff, then he’d be breaking her heart.
    Danny Perry: History is, a week into spring term, and Rant sat down to negotiate our demands with the school board. Behind closed doors, in the teachers’ lounge, they talked while the rest of us waited in the hallway.
    Bodie Carlyle: The teachers’ lounge being off-limits to us, nobody knowed it had an outside door. After our long butt-sit in the hallway, the school administrators come out. But no Rant Casey.
    Danny Perry: History is, Rant skedaddled out that secret door leads to the outside, sidestepped us, took with him a check for ten thousand dollars and a certificate saying he’s graduated early.
    Logan Elliot: No lie. Rant left us standing there with our boners, taking a political stand with our dicks on the line, and he goes kiting off, paycheck in hand from the school district. Folks is still branded him the Boner Benedict Arnold.
    Silas Hendersen: Without him, the Erection Revolution kind of lost steam. Gone limp. Left us just dumb kids with vegetables stuffed down our shorts and rubber bands wrapped around our wieners.
    Trusting Rant Casey was our mistake.
    Rubber bands was a bigger mistake. Nothing hurts more than snipping a rubber band, snarled and tangled, all mangled up in your short hairs.
    Lowell Richards: The trade-off gave Rant a new school record, awarding him a 4.0 grade-point average and top honors, plus a letter in every sport. Rant Casey, who never kicked a ball or ran a step in his life.
    But if he ever showed up at a class reunion, there’s men in Middleton who’d wait in line to kill him.
    Bodie Carlyle: A paycheck at school graduation—instead ofjust a diploma. Both them, just paper folks agreed mean more. Being in agreement the big step from a lie to reality.
    Rant sawed how reality was something you could build. Same as the Tooth Fairy money. If enough folks believe a lie, how it ain’t a lie no more.
    Mary Cane Harvey: Even all these years later, I’ll discover “Rant Casey Got Out of Here” carved in a desk in my classroom.
    Leif Jordan: Sure, some folks never forgave Rant for his betraying us. But most guys, we just shrugged. We shook the carrots out of our pants and got on with life.
    Irene Casey ( Rant’s Mother): We could only afford the plainest things, but I dressed them up with embroidery or rivets. Boys love lots of shiny chrome. Sometimes, I’d sew on special trims or rickrack. I know Buddy loved those clothes. He wore them to school and kept them so nice.
    The night he left home, Buddy packed up the lot of them to wear in the city. He was so proud.
    12–The Food
    Echo Lawrence ( Party Crasher): To make time stand still—what sand mandalas are to Buddhist