One More Longish Thing I Wrote for My Class

Next to Christmas, Back-to-School day was always my favorite holiday. Sometime near the end of July, I’d carefully fashion a countdown chart and spend my days willing the torpid summer to end so I could don my sweltering new jeans and enter the hallowed hallway of Sage Creek Elementary.  I couldn’t wait to breathe its heady scent, a perfect blend of permanent marker, rubber kickball, and the smallest hint of sweet teachers’ approval.

But the year I was nine, that first day of school brought an unexpected twist. In the lunchroom, my friend Jessica plopped down on the bench across from me and dropped the bomb: “Did you hear about the kid with the fake eye?”

The what?

“Yeah, that new kid Richard Williams only has one eye. I guess his brother was swinging a pipe around in their backyard and it tore out the kid’s eyeball, and the eyeball rolled across the grass and the dog ate it. So now he has a glass one that he can take out whenever he wants. See, look, he’s showing people!”

My eyes followed her finger to a table across the lunchroom, where a dark-haired boy sat surrounded by a group of—from the sound of things—admirers. His head was bowed and he held something small in his outstretched hand. The enraptured oohs and aahs carried across the noisy room and set my heart hammering.

I suddenly became engrossed in my chicken patty with mashed potatoes and a side of green beans. Was it true? Could eyeballs really fall out? Did the fake kind see just as well? Why would a person want to take out his fake one? Was he scared to look in the mirror now? Would a dog really eat such a thing?

There were so many things I didn’t know right then, as I stared down at my chocolate peanut butter bar that had suddenly lost its allure. But there were two things I knew for sure. First, I could never let Richard Williams—or anyone else—know that I was bone-chillingly terrified of his fake eye. And second, I must never, ever, allow myself to see the hole that was left behind when he popped it out. Because even at that tender age, I knew that there were some things you could never un-see.

I don’t know how it started, this panicky distress that used to rise up in me at the prospect of body parts not being where they belonged. As an even younger girl, I had developed a fierce and secret aversion to the mall after once seeing a legless man there wheeling himself from store to store. A nonsensical fear, perhaps, but one I now see revived in my own three-year-old daughter, who just the other day refused to walk past a headless mannequin torso modeling fashionable scarves.

“It’s scary, Mommy,” she whimpered, backing behind a rack of clothes, imploring me with her wide blue eyes to not make her look, not make her face the horrible incongruity of a body without all its parts, a familiar shape unfinished. I know, baby. Believe me.

And so that wretched disquiet gnawed at me for the rest of the school day and sat in my stomach like a rock as I made my way home. Since I could think of nothing else, I casually mentioned the new kid to my older brother after dinner.

“Oh, him?” he said, not taking his eyes off his Atari game. “Yeah, he’s in my class. He’s cool.”

“So, did you see him take his, um, fake eye out?”

“Yep.” Bleep, bleep, bloop went the Atari.

“What did it look like?”

“An eye.”

“Right, but what did it look like, you know, where his eye used to be?”

“Like a place without an eye.” Blip, bleep. This was getting me nowhere.

That night I kneeled beside my bed and offered up a heartfelt plea: “Please, Heavenly Father, please bless that I won’t ever have to see Richard Williams’s eye hole.”

Early on in life, I learned an important survival tip: the last thing you want to do is clue boys in that you’re scared of something. Over the next few days I became an expert at avoiding Richard Williams without looking like I was trying to. I ducked into the girls’ bathroom when he and his fan club came down the hall. I gave made-up excuses to my friends when they wanted to attend one of his popular playground demonstrations. I spent way too long fastidiously straightening my knee socks when he unexpectedly came around a corner.

I was starting to feel pretty secure in my newfound skill, until the day a few of us were summoned to the library for the first session of Individualized Math. The moment I walked through the door, my Richard-radar went off. Sure enough, there he stood. Through the high-alert sirens sounding in my ears, I heard Mr. Jacobson begin to read off the seating chart. And in that instant I knew, with more certainty than I’d ever felt, that he would make me sit next to Richard. And of course, he did.

“Hi,” Richard said as I shakily sat down. I murmured a greeting to the table and silently repeated my nightly refrain: “Please don’t let me see, please don’t make me see.”

And then we did our worksheets.

Days passed without incident, and I started to breathe. It turned out he wasn’t constantly taking his eye out in the middle of class. Who knew? I relaxed into math facts and even forgot after a while to pray for deliverance.

 Then one day, a week or so in, Mr. Jacobson stepped out of the library for a minute, leaving us unsupervised. The boy across the table seized the opportunity he must have been waiting for. “Richard!” he hissed. “Hey, take out your eye! C’mon!”

 

I froze. The seconds ticked by and I stared so hard at twelve times eight that I could see its negative when I shut my eyes. I knew that Richard would happily take out his eye any time he got a request. I was done for.

But Richard said no. When the boy persisted, Richard raised his voice a bit. “Shut up, David!”

Silence. Twelve times eight, twelve times eight. David’s pencil went back to scratching on his worksheet. When at long last I dared glance up, Richard was looking at me with both eyes firmly in place. He was smiling.

I suppose my fervent prayers were answered. Richard Williams never did remove his eye when I was close by. After that day I somehow just knew that he wouldn’t. We multiplied and divided our way through Individualized Math, and at the end of the year his family moved away. But I can still see that smile of his, still recall the shock of that moment when it occurred to me that not all boys exist solely to torment girls. Some of them can even be downright decent.

Man, that kid had a nice grin.