LJ Idol 7, Week 16: Open Topic
A few things you have to understand about Toby and me before we begin:
We lived on the same block since the day we were born, although we didn’t notice each other until we got put in the same classroom in first grade. Well, I noticed him, anyway. Everyone noticed Toby the first day, for two reasons: one, because the kid’s eyes were so bad that he was already wearing grandpa-glasses. It’s pretty much a given, if you’re wearing glasses in the first grade, that you’re going to be blind by the time you’re forty, but in the first grade, you can barely get your head around the concept of twenty. Anyway. Little kid, huge glasses.
The second thing was that he always had his hand up. Always. Either to ask something or answer something--it was a roughly 50/50 thing, answering and questioning, although it slanted toward 60/40 later in the year. By the end of the year it was around 75/25, headed rapidly toward nil, because our first grade teacher hated questions. You’d think a first grade teacher especially would be enthralled with the prospect of all these shining little faces in front of her, so eager for knowledge, but no. Mrs Guareschi had whittled it down to bare bones: if the question started with ‘why’ or ‘how come,’ you didn’t get any further with it. She’d cut you off. If you asked her “Where is the bathroom?” that was fine.
Since it was impossible to tell from the outset whether or not Toby’s upraised hand signaled an answer or a question, Mrs. Guareschi ignored it every time it went up. She told Toby that he was not to raise his hand, ever, unless it was an emergency. You could sort of see Toby fuming in place, little stink-waves of hate rising off his head like a cartoon. But soon he’d forget and raise it again anyway.
Don’t think he was doing it just to be a brat, though. The thing is . . . Toby really did know all the answers.
I knew most of the answers, but after seeing how Toby got treated, I knew better than to raise my hand too much. I didn’t raise it at all. I would wait to be called on, singled out; it was the only way to wrench anything from my mouth.
“Who hasn’t had a turn in a while?” she would ask in an ominous voice, and her eyes would slowly scan the back rows while a vulpine smile spread across her chops. I believe to this day that she enjoyed singling out kids who didn’t know the answers, just so she could pounce on them: “You didn’t read the assignment, did you? You didn’t finish the worksheet, did you?” And then she wrote a note to your parents and made you deliver it. With my parents, that was like being messenger to your own execution papers.
The trouble with that was that while I displayed all the standard didn’t-read-the-assignment, don’t-know-the-answer symptoms--tightly clenched teeth, terrified expression, trying desperately to somehow hide behind my own desk--that was never the issue. I just didn’t want to be picked. I would whisper out the answer and then sigh, relieved, as she moved on to another victim.
Second grade was a little better. In second grade, you learned to read, even if you already knew how to read, and they divvied you into groups. The majority of the class, the ones who read at a level deemed appropriate for second-graders, were the Moonbeams. The slower reading kids were the Sunshine group; there were about six of them.
Toby and I were Starlight, the third-grade group. I still don’t know how our teacher figured out that I was ready for Starlight, since all through first grade, I carefully stammered and whispered my way through the paragraphs. Toby, of course, read loud and well and fast--too fast, since occasionally our teacher had to tell him to slow down and let the rest of the class catch up.
Early on, I had realized one simple point to the reading classes: the slow kids might eventually catch up and become Moonbeams, but we Starlights would always be one step ahead. Next year in third grade, we’d still have different books from everyone else; while everyone else was getting quizzed in Starlight, we’d be taken aside separately and given questions from the fourth-grade book. What I had seen, in other words, was forever: a lifetime of education in which I would never, ever be able to hide in the crowd.
“Starlight readers,” said Mrs. McCarthy, “read pages fifty-six through sixty-one for tonight’s assignment.”
Toby’s hand shot up. “Mrs. McCarthy, if we finish Starlight, can we start Comets?” Comets was the fourth-grade reader. Suicide. I gaped at his stupidity. I should have been listening more closely; I was dumb enough to believe that when Toby said we, he referred to some collaboration between himself and Mrs. McCarthy.
She looked him over, with what I realize now was the grown-up version of my own you-want-to-do-what? look. “Have you finished already?”
He nodded. “Uh-huh. So can I start Comets?”
“We’ll have to see how well you do on Starlight first,” she said, then addressed the celestial emanations that comprised the rest of our class.
I wriggled beside him in terror. If he got to Comets, I was stuck in my own reading-group. So was he, but that was exactly what he wanted. I hissed at him, “Why do you always have to be such a show-off?”
He blinked at me in surprise, with his big brown eyes all huge and ripply behind the glasses, as if he was looking at me from underwater. “Starlight is stupid,” he said disparagingly. “Galaxies has science-fiction.”
“Galaxies is sixth-grade,” I whispered back. (All of the readers had vaguely stupid astronomy-themed titles--Starlight, Comets, Planets, Galaxies. I suppose that if you worked your way to the end of the series, they’d be “Quantum Irregularities” or something.) What I didn’t know was how he knew Galaxies had sci-fi. Maybe you might hear rumors of Comets from your Starlight group, but Galaxies were in a whole different, um, galaxy, as far as your sad little second-grade self was concerned.
“Maybe if we get all the way to Galaxies now we won’t have group reading until seventh grade,” he said. “Maybe we’ll get like an extra recess or something.”
“Ha,” I replied. This has always been the critical difference between us--I am much more cynical than Toby. Plus I was the only seven-year-old in the history of modern education who hated recess.
I think you get it by now: I was a loner kid. I didn’t understand, and still don’t understand, the world’s insistence upon groups. Unless it’s something like a barn-raising, there’s nothing in the world that can’t be done just as well by yourself, as far as I can tell. I wanted to be left alone. Toby, I realized, also wanted to be alone, but with an odd and incomprehensible quirk: he wanted to stand out. I wanted to fade away.
It was somewhere around that time that I realized that Toby followed me all the way to my corner on the way home. He lived, like I said, on the same block I did; I just hadn’t noticed it before. It was as good a time as any to confront him about the Comets thing.
“You’d better not get me stuck in your stupid Comets group,” I told him.
“I don’t even want you in my Comets group.” His Comets group! He actually talked like this! Like he owned it! “Maybe I just don’t want to be in your stupid Starlight group.”
My lip sulked up past my teeth. “Maybe I’ll ask Mrs. McCarthy to take me out of your stupid Starlight group anyway.”
“Maybe you should,” he said. “You don’t even want to be there. You’re not a Starlight. You’re a stupid Moonbeam. Maybe you should be in Sunshine,” he sneered. “Maybe they need to bust you all the way back to Blue Skies.” The kindergarten reader.
My vision wavered. I socked him right in his enormous glasses. They made one hell of a target. I hit him so hard that I cut my fingers on the frame and the glasses split exactly in half and fell on the sidewalk.
So yeah. My best friend in life, forever, and the first thing I ever did was break his nose.
He dropped down and sat on the concrete, the two halves of his glasses on either side of his butt, and started howling. There was blood in places I couldn’t even imagine blood could get to when you only punched someone in the nose: in his mouth, on his teeth, his neck, down the front of his shirt; somehow it had made it to my bare knees and into the creases of my knuckles and rimmed red moons under the fingernails of the fist I’d hit him with. I started screaming too. I thought I’d killed him.
A cop ran over, and I thought, oh my God, they can’t take me to jail, no one’s ever sent a seven-year-old girl to jail. I would be the first. They wouldn’t send me to the electric chair; they’d lock me up and study me. All the grown-up murderers would beat me up. Before that cop made it from the corner to where we were standing, I saw my whole future flash before my eyes: incarcerated at seven, giving interviews to Dr. Phil via satellite.
The cop was pretty okay about it. He calmed us both down--well, he calmed me down; Toby was so fascinated by the fact that he might get to watch me being arrested, he said later, that he shut up and watched (“I like police procedurals,” he explained). The cop told Toby to go sit on the stoop with his head between his knees, then got my address out of me while I was slobbering all over myself. I am a total mess when I cry. If someone ever figures out a way to harness human mucus as an alternative fuel source, that person and I will both be millionaires. But the cop talked me down, then walked us both to Toby’s house.
Toby’s mother looked just like him, short black curls and thick glasses, but not as thick as Toby’s. “Oh my God, did you fall down the steps?” she asked. “Did you for god’s sake get mugged?”
Either the cop realized I couldn’t talk or else I made enough noise to tell him ‘no, you,’ because he explained to Toby’s mother that he didn’t know what the start of the trouble was, only that I’d hauled back and socked the kid one. He handed her both halves of Toby’s glasses.
“Who is your mother?” Toby’s mom shouted at me. “What’s your phone number?” The cop told her both, from where he’d written it down before. I still couldn’t talk.
Toby, by the way still pouring blood from the nose, piped up. “This is Jessie from my reader group, Mama.” His mother may have heard casual confirmation of my identity; all I heard was myself being pointed out from some future witness stand.
Toby’s mom looked surprised. “That’s you?” she asked me, so disappointed. “But Toby talks about you all the time.” The disappointment stuck out at me, like even without knowing me she had had such hopes for me. I felt I had somehow destroyed all future prospects in life, just by disappointing Toby’s mom.
She went and called my mother from inside, and Toby followed her, probably to wash his face, since by the time my mom showed up his nose was swollen but bloodless, even though he wore the same ruined shirt. The cop hung outside the door with me.
“Have you learned your lesson from this?” he said. In my memory, it seems he might have asked this several times, over and over, while we waited for my mother to come. “You don’t ever hit people. Even when they call you names. It’s not worth it to hit people.”
I sobered up enough to realize I was in it deep and agreed whole-heartedly that I most certainly had learned my lesson and that there was absolutely no reason for further punishment because nothing could be worse than knowing I’d hit my very best friend Toby in the face and now he would probably never speak to me again.
My mother came power-jogging around the corner in her work uniform. I’d forgotten: I was supposed to come straight home from school on days when my mother worked evenings, since I usually got in around three-thirty and she had to clock on by four. She was going to be late for work. If she lost her job, I was responsible for our future poverty.
The cop asked Toby’s mom if she would like to press charges. Toby’s mom said no, but she would contact my mother later to work something out about the glasses. My mother said that I was a good, quiet kid, that I never hit anyone, and that Toby must have provoked me and that it was all a matter of self-defense. Toby’s mother told my mother to calm down. My mother told Toby’s mother that she was calm, by God, and if Toby had laid a hand on her daughter then they could take it to court, if that’s the way Toby’s mother wanted to play it. Even Toby, peeking around the doorway with the bridge of his nose turning into a vast purple lump, looked embarrassed for me. The cop rolled his eyes and told everyone to calm down, but he directed it toward my mother and everyone--even me, even Toby’s mom--understood that.
Eventually Toby’s parents ended up suing my parents for the cost of Toby’s prescription specs. My mother threatened to counter-sue for assault, but it was pretty half-hearted. Toby came to school with new glasses, thicker than ever, but nice trim wire-rims, rather than the motley plastic ones he had before. The story got out and people started avoiding me on the playground, which was fine by me: like I said, I was always kind of a lone wolf, even as a little kid. What no one could understand is why Toby still talked to me. I didn’t understand it either. It was like that splat of blood had cemented us.
Toby talked the teacher into letting him start Comets. I think she did it to shut him up. After a week, he talked her into letting me start too. If he’d kept talking, we might have actually made it to Galaxies before the end of second grade, but Toby usually knew when he was pushing it.
We lived on the same block since the day we were born, although we didn’t notice each other until we got put in the same classroom in first grade. Well, I noticed him, anyway. Everyone noticed Toby the first day, for two reasons: one, because the kid’s eyes were so bad that he was already wearing grandpa-glasses. It’s pretty much a given, if you’re wearing glasses in the first grade, that you’re going to be blind by the time you’re forty, but in the first grade, you can barely get your head around the concept of twenty. Anyway. Little kid, huge glasses.
The second thing was that he always had his hand up. Always. Either to ask something or answer something--it was a roughly 50/50 thing, answering and questioning, although it slanted toward 60/40 later in the year. By the end of the year it was around 75/25, headed rapidly toward nil, because our first grade teacher hated questions. You’d think a first grade teacher especially would be enthralled with the prospect of all these shining little faces in front of her, so eager for knowledge, but no. Mrs Guareschi had whittled it down to bare bones: if the question started with ‘why’ or ‘how come,’ you didn’t get any further with it. She’d cut you off. If you asked her “Where is the bathroom?” that was fine.
Since it was impossible to tell from the outset whether or not Toby’s upraised hand signaled an answer or a question, Mrs. Guareschi ignored it every time it went up. She told Toby that he was not to raise his hand, ever, unless it was an emergency. You could sort of see Toby fuming in place, little stink-waves of hate rising off his head like a cartoon. But soon he’d forget and raise it again anyway.
Don’t think he was doing it just to be a brat, though. The thing is . . . Toby really did know all the answers.
I knew most of the answers, but after seeing how Toby got treated, I knew better than to raise my hand too much. I didn’t raise it at all. I would wait to be called on, singled out; it was the only way to wrench anything from my mouth.
“Who hasn’t had a turn in a while?” she would ask in an ominous voice, and her eyes would slowly scan the back rows while a vulpine smile spread across her chops. I believe to this day that she enjoyed singling out kids who didn’t know the answers, just so she could pounce on them: “You didn’t read the assignment, did you? You didn’t finish the worksheet, did you?” And then she wrote a note to your parents and made you deliver it. With my parents, that was like being messenger to your own execution papers.
The trouble with that was that while I displayed all the standard didn’t-read-the-assignment, don’t-know-the-answer symptoms--tightly clenched teeth, terrified expression, trying desperately to somehow hide behind my own desk--that was never the issue. I just didn’t want to be picked. I would whisper out the answer and then sigh, relieved, as she moved on to another victim.
Second grade was a little better. In second grade, you learned to read, even if you already knew how to read, and they divvied you into groups. The majority of the class, the ones who read at a level deemed appropriate for second-graders, were the Moonbeams. The slower reading kids were the Sunshine group; there were about six of them.
Toby and I were Starlight, the third-grade group. I still don’t know how our teacher figured out that I was ready for Starlight, since all through first grade, I carefully stammered and whispered my way through the paragraphs. Toby, of course, read loud and well and fast--too fast, since occasionally our teacher had to tell him to slow down and let the rest of the class catch up.
Early on, I had realized one simple point to the reading classes: the slow kids might eventually catch up and become Moonbeams, but we Starlights would always be one step ahead. Next year in third grade, we’d still have different books from everyone else; while everyone else was getting quizzed in Starlight, we’d be taken aside separately and given questions from the fourth-grade book. What I had seen, in other words, was forever: a lifetime of education in which I would never, ever be able to hide in the crowd.
“Starlight readers,” said Mrs. McCarthy, “read pages fifty-six through sixty-one for tonight’s assignment.”
Toby’s hand shot up. “Mrs. McCarthy, if we finish Starlight, can we start Comets?” Comets was the fourth-grade reader. Suicide. I gaped at his stupidity. I should have been listening more closely; I was dumb enough to believe that when Toby said we, he referred to some collaboration between himself and Mrs. McCarthy.
She looked him over, with what I realize now was the grown-up version of my own you-want-to-do-what? look. “Have you finished already?”
He nodded. “Uh-huh. So can I start Comets?”
“We’ll have to see how well you do on Starlight first,” she said, then addressed the celestial emanations that comprised the rest of our class.
I wriggled beside him in terror. If he got to Comets, I was stuck in my own reading-group. So was he, but that was exactly what he wanted. I hissed at him, “Why do you always have to be such a show-off?”
He blinked at me in surprise, with his big brown eyes all huge and ripply behind the glasses, as if he was looking at me from underwater. “Starlight is stupid,” he said disparagingly. “Galaxies has science-fiction.”
“Galaxies is sixth-grade,” I whispered back. (All of the readers had vaguely stupid astronomy-themed titles--Starlight, Comets, Planets, Galaxies. I suppose that if you worked your way to the end of the series, they’d be “Quantum Irregularities” or something.) What I didn’t know was how he knew Galaxies had sci-fi. Maybe you might hear rumors of Comets from your Starlight group, but Galaxies were in a whole different, um, galaxy, as far as your sad little second-grade self was concerned.
“Maybe if we get all the way to Galaxies now we won’t have group reading until seventh grade,” he said. “Maybe we’ll get like an extra recess or something.”
“Ha,” I replied. This has always been the critical difference between us--I am much more cynical than Toby. Plus I was the only seven-year-old in the history of modern education who hated recess.
I think you get it by now: I was a loner kid. I didn’t understand, and still don’t understand, the world’s insistence upon groups. Unless it’s something like a barn-raising, there’s nothing in the world that can’t be done just as well by yourself, as far as I can tell. I wanted to be left alone. Toby, I realized, also wanted to be alone, but with an odd and incomprehensible quirk: he wanted to stand out. I wanted to fade away.
It was somewhere around that time that I realized that Toby followed me all the way to my corner on the way home. He lived, like I said, on the same block I did; I just hadn’t noticed it before. It was as good a time as any to confront him about the Comets thing.
“You’d better not get me stuck in your stupid Comets group,” I told him.
“I don’t even want you in my Comets group.” His Comets group! He actually talked like this! Like he owned it! “Maybe I just don’t want to be in your stupid Starlight group.”
My lip sulked up past my teeth. “Maybe I’ll ask Mrs. McCarthy to take me out of your stupid Starlight group anyway.”
“Maybe you should,” he said. “You don’t even want to be there. You’re not a Starlight. You’re a stupid Moonbeam. Maybe you should be in Sunshine,” he sneered. “Maybe they need to bust you all the way back to Blue Skies.” The kindergarten reader.
My vision wavered. I socked him right in his enormous glasses. They made one hell of a target. I hit him so hard that I cut my fingers on the frame and the glasses split exactly in half and fell on the sidewalk.
So yeah. My best friend in life, forever, and the first thing I ever did was break his nose.
He dropped down and sat on the concrete, the two halves of his glasses on either side of his butt, and started howling. There was blood in places I couldn’t even imagine blood could get to when you only punched someone in the nose: in his mouth, on his teeth, his neck, down the front of his shirt; somehow it had made it to my bare knees and into the creases of my knuckles and rimmed red moons under the fingernails of the fist I’d hit him with. I started screaming too. I thought I’d killed him.
A cop ran over, and I thought, oh my God, they can’t take me to jail, no one’s ever sent a seven-year-old girl to jail. I would be the first. They wouldn’t send me to the electric chair; they’d lock me up and study me. All the grown-up murderers would beat me up. Before that cop made it from the corner to where we were standing, I saw my whole future flash before my eyes: incarcerated at seven, giving interviews to Dr. Phil via satellite.
The cop was pretty okay about it. He calmed us both down--well, he calmed me down; Toby was so fascinated by the fact that he might get to watch me being arrested, he said later, that he shut up and watched (“I like police procedurals,” he explained). The cop told Toby to go sit on the stoop with his head between his knees, then got my address out of me while I was slobbering all over myself. I am a total mess when I cry. If someone ever figures out a way to harness human mucus as an alternative fuel source, that person and I will both be millionaires. But the cop talked me down, then walked us both to Toby’s house.
Toby’s mother looked just like him, short black curls and thick glasses, but not as thick as Toby’s. “Oh my God, did you fall down the steps?” she asked. “Did you for god’s sake get mugged?”
Either the cop realized I couldn’t talk or else I made enough noise to tell him ‘no, you,’ because he explained to Toby’s mother that he didn’t know what the start of the trouble was, only that I’d hauled back and socked the kid one. He handed her both halves of Toby’s glasses.
“Who is your mother?” Toby’s mom shouted at me. “What’s your phone number?” The cop told her both, from where he’d written it down before. I still couldn’t talk.
Toby, by the way still pouring blood from the nose, piped up. “This is Jessie from my reader group, Mama.” His mother may have heard casual confirmation of my identity; all I heard was myself being pointed out from some future witness stand.
Toby’s mom looked surprised. “That’s you?” she asked me, so disappointed. “But Toby talks about you all the time.” The disappointment stuck out at me, like even without knowing me she had had such hopes for me. I felt I had somehow destroyed all future prospects in life, just by disappointing Toby’s mom.
She went and called my mother from inside, and Toby followed her, probably to wash his face, since by the time my mom showed up his nose was swollen but bloodless, even though he wore the same ruined shirt. The cop hung outside the door with me.
“Have you learned your lesson from this?” he said. In my memory, it seems he might have asked this several times, over and over, while we waited for my mother to come. “You don’t ever hit people. Even when they call you names. It’s not worth it to hit people.”
I sobered up enough to realize I was in it deep and agreed whole-heartedly that I most certainly had learned my lesson and that there was absolutely no reason for further punishment because nothing could be worse than knowing I’d hit my very best friend Toby in the face and now he would probably never speak to me again.
My mother came power-jogging around the corner in her work uniform. I’d forgotten: I was supposed to come straight home from school on days when my mother worked evenings, since I usually got in around three-thirty and she had to clock on by four. She was going to be late for work. If she lost her job, I was responsible for our future poverty.
The cop asked Toby’s mom if she would like to press charges. Toby’s mom said no, but she would contact my mother later to work something out about the glasses. My mother said that I was a good, quiet kid, that I never hit anyone, and that Toby must have provoked me and that it was all a matter of self-defense. Toby’s mother told my mother to calm down. My mother told Toby’s mother that she was calm, by God, and if Toby had laid a hand on her daughter then they could take it to court, if that’s the way Toby’s mother wanted to play it. Even Toby, peeking around the doorway with the bridge of his nose turning into a vast purple lump, looked embarrassed for me. The cop rolled his eyes and told everyone to calm down, but he directed it toward my mother and everyone--even me, even Toby’s mom--understood that.
Eventually Toby’s parents ended up suing my parents for the cost of Toby’s prescription specs. My mother threatened to counter-sue for assault, but it was pretty half-hearted. Toby came to school with new glasses, thicker than ever, but nice trim wire-rims, rather than the motley plastic ones he had before. The story got out and people started avoiding me on the playground, which was fine by me: like I said, I was always kind of a lone wolf, even as a little kid. What no one could understand is why Toby still talked to me. I didn’t understand it either. It was like that splat of blood had cemented us.
Toby talked the teacher into letting him start Comets. I think she did it to shut him up. After a week, he talked her into letting me start too. If he’d kept talking, we might have actually made it to Galaxies before the end of second grade, but Toby usually knew when he was pushing it.