Crock

We knew Mat hadn’t won. First, no second T. This made it fit to spell Fat Mat in our heads and elbow him at recess. Second, our crap town: abandoned paper mill, rocking chair in the powerlines to mark 1954’s flood. Sure, waitresses and go-kart attendants called us growing boys, but no way had any of us won FOX’s Lunch With the White Power Ranger Contest. Especially not Mat.

“He said his long hair helps him in fights,” Mat said.

“Did he show you karate?”

“Already know it.”

“Crap!” we yelled. “That’s a crock of bullcrap!”

“I’m telling,” Mat said, and he threw grass at us, so we all tackled him and someone got a soccer ball to hit him with, but the yard lady told us stop.

Mat would point to wildflowers and say his uncle had planted all the purple ones. Mat would say he’d programmed a computer game. Mat would say he’d taken a glass elevator in San Francisco where you could press a button and turn the glass to waterfalls. We’d let him lie until it got dumb. Usually it was like who cares. But the Power Rangers? Too far. Fat Mat had to pay.

Then his mom helped chaperone the field trip to Salvation Army. It was boring and weird. They showed us old baby scooters and boxes of gym shorts. A man with a cross embroidered on his cowboy hat talked about the Army’s history. How they have bands. He passed around a toy trumpet. We tried it, but we sounded like nervous trains. Mat stuck by his mom, hair combed for once. She wore culottes and sunglasses. The whole time she ate from a giant bag of Bravo Ranch chips, which are just Doritos for phony diets.

During lunch break on the lawn, we surrounded them. “Mrs. Mat’s mom,” we said. “Did Mat win a TV contest?”

She ate a Bravo. “Is this about those Magic Rangers?”

“The White Ranger,” we said.

She nodded. Her legs sprawled out in the grass. You could see blue veins in her thighs. Mat sat behind her, their backs touching, almost like they were in a trench, which would’ve fit the whole Salvation Army thing except we were pretty sure it wasn’t that kind of Army.

“Mat,” she said. “You know we talked.”

He didn’t say anything. Then he smooshed his face into her back and started to cry. She reached around and patted his hair without looking. She whispered something. Mat jumped up, hiccuping, and ran away. Mat’s mom looked at us like how they tell you not to look at the sun. We were scared, but we’d come this far and we had to know.

“Tell us why you named him with one T,” we said. “Don’t lie.”

She rolled up her chip bag. Unrolled, rolled. “When Mat was little,” she said finally, “he’d get ear infections. We tried everything. Then we found a doctor who showed us the problem. All this time we’d been calling him Matt, but his ears were too sensitive. All the extra T’s jammed in. So we cleaned them out, and ever since it’s been just Mat.”

Let me ask you something. Why do adults say to trust them, then make it so hard? Extra Ts? Really? Armies with trumpets and used gym shorts instead of guns? We knew what to call all that, and who cares if we got in trouble.

“Bullcrap!” we yelled. “You’re just a crock of bull!”

And then we began to chant it—crock of bull!—at Mat’s mother and her stupid chips, but that just wasn’t enough. So we ran. Shrieking crock of bull to the Salvation Army, the goth kids and snowplow drivers who browsed the bins. Crock of bull at the floods and mills! Crock of bull! San Francisco was a crock of bull and the White Ranger was a crock of bull, and nobody told us we were wrong, no sir, though some people tried to tell us we were bored. But that wasn’t it, okay? That wasn’t it. Trust me.