Job Well Done
We did not call you Brian; instead we shouted "Spaz!" at you when you hid in the rollaway coat closet. I was the one who discovered you there, cowering beneath the soft caress of our parkas, curled in the cold nest of our metal lunch boxes.
When you refused to come out a group of boys took it upon themselves to extricate you. They wheeled your hiding place into an adjacent classroom and forced the door open, exposing you.
"Spaz, Spaz, Spaz" we began to chant at you through clenched teeth.
You had doughy skin, pale hair, pale eyes, and each element of your face turned crimson at our assault. You shook your fists and bared your teeth, but your canines were blunt and ordinary and we laughed at you. Your balled up hands looked like giant marshmallows. You smelled like a basket of clothes on laundry day.
"Hey Spaz, what's the matter?" Tyler taunted. "Nothing clean to wear?"
Tyler smelled like Polo and wore pink Izods and green sneakers. His hair lay parted like an open book. His dad dropped him off in a Porsche at the front of the school each morning.
"Spaz, Spaz, Spaz, Spaz," we sang.
We thought we heard a teacher coming and all fell silent. You craned your head out of the coat closet to see if it was safe now. But when no teacher came someone giggled at your odd expression, the wetness at your mouth which you wiped absently with the back of your hand, and everything started up again.
How did you lose your name while the rest of us kept ours? Even Jen P., who shared a birthday with Webster and sometimes smelled like urine, escaped the ridicule you suffered daily. I wonder who you went home to and if you were happier there.
Did you know about the rest of us? Did you listen from the edge of the playground to our silly conversations over four square? Did you laugh to yourself when we ganged up and got Tyler to eat gravel from beneath the tetherball post? Did you feel sorry when Jen P. had to go home early with a round wet stain on her new Jordache jeans?
Did you know, for instance, that I was in love with Jason, whose hair made a bowl over his big brainy head, who had the highest IQ in our class and small berry of a mouth?
Supposedly you had the second highest.
But here I am talking about everyone else again, just like the old days; and there you are huddled in the corner, inconsolable, so that even the teacher grows tired and ignores you after a while. She gives the rest of us scratch and sniff stickers as we leave the room for recess, praising us for a job well done.