Posts Tagged “torment”

Stephanie Yuhas
First Grade

One morning in first grade, the principal made an important announcement. “There is a severe head lice epidemic,” he grumbled through the loudspeaker. “The nurse will call classrooms in one at a time tomorrow to check for head lice.”

Kelly, the pig-tailed girl that hated my guts from the moment she saw me in kindergarten, turned and gave me an evil smile, “Maybe when they’re checking for lice, the nurse will also see that Stephanie has the COOOTIES!” she snarled.

The entire class laughed. The teacher shushed everyone to listen to the rest of the morning announcements.

I looked over at my friend, Alia, who glanced at me sympathetically. Alia and I knew each other from our special ESL (English as a Second Language) classes. Kelly frequently picked on Alia as well for wearing a religious head covering to school, so we bonded through the shared torment.

“Alia,” I whispered. “Do you tink I have dah cooties?”

She shrugged, “I heard Jimmy B. got dah cooties so dey sent him away.”

“Do you know vhat cooties are?” I asked.

“I dunno,” she replied. “But dey sound yucky!”

Samantha, a girl that claimed to know everything about a whole lot of nothing, couldn’t resist chiming in. “You have the cooties if you wear all the same clothes all time like Stephanie does.”

I looked down at my clothes. I just wore what my mom gave me; I didn’t know there was a problem.

Patrick, the kid that was always picked first during gym class, chimed in. “You have the cooties when you have ugly brown spots on your skin like THIS!” he said, as he pointed to a small mole on my face.

“Ew, you touched her, now YOU have the cooties!” yelled Kelly.

“Nu-uh!” Patrick protested. “Last summer, my doctor gave me the ‘Circle-Circle Dot-Dot Cootie Shot’. Now I can’t catch cooties, EVER!” He stuck his tongue out at her.

“QUIET DOWN CLASS!” the teacher ordered. The morning announcements still droned on. I looked down and nervously scribbled on a piece of paper with an orange colored pencil.

“Alia probably has the cooties, too. I can tell because you and Stephanie can’t say words right.”

“I think Kelly’s dah one with dah cooties,” Alia muttered under her breath.

I kept to myself for the rest of the day and tried not to cry. By the time Anyu came to pick me up from school, my face was flooded with tears.

“Everyone says I have the cooties and I don’t want to go away like Jimmy B*!” I blubbered. “I need a shot from the doctor!” I thrust a piece of paper into my mother’s hands. It’s a bit faded today, so here is the transcription of what I wrote:

KUTYS
Brown spots and if you wear the same clothes all the time. If you can not say words right. Patrick Chan can’t get it he had dot shot in his arms.

This was a prescription for disaster. My mother launched into a complete panic attack.

“Oh, my GOD! Did you put your mouth on da vaterfountain?”

“No!”

“Did you use somevon else’s sippycup?

“No!”

“Did you shit down on dah toilet?”

“Um…”

“DON’T shit down on dah toilet, Stephie! You’ll catch DISEASE!”

I continued to bawl.

“I can’t handle it!” she screamed. She immediately called the school and hollered into the phone to anyone who would listen. “Do I need to take her to the Emergency Room? We don’t have insurance!”

The person on the other end of the line must have thought my mother was taking about the head lice epidemic, so they explained the lice checking procedure. As soon she hung up, she called Nagymama into the room, and sat me down underneath the hottest floor lamp on the planet. They hovered above me with a magnifying glass, pulling and poking at my head for what seemed like hours. If they even found so much as a piece of lint, they put it on a piece of paper at watched it for ten minutes at a time. Eventually, they gave up and Nagymama made me dinner. Instead of explaining The Truth about Cooties or even how to avoid head lice, she immediately called her sister to complain about how difficult it is to be a mother.

I went into school the next day and got my head checked – no lice, no cooties, nothing! Ironically, after the visit to the nurse, Patrick was immediately pulled out of class and was mysteriously absent from school for the next few days.

I guess his cootie shot didn’t work after all.

[*The truth is, Jimmy B’s parents got a divorce, so he moved to Florida with his mom. He does not nor did he ever have the cooties.]

This tale originally appeared on American Goulash, which is a story-sharing project much like Can I Sit With You?, and which we encourage you to visit and support. -Eds

by Mike Adamick
Third Grade

The crazy began in third grade. Mrs. Rudolph, my teacher, was circling the classroom with a new assignment, cackling about its difficulty like a grade-school Elmira Gulch. Only instead of riding a bicycle and threatening to put down Toto, she pointed out that she had spent all night conjuring up the most horrendous quiz we could imagine.

“Good luck,” she sneered, leaning over my desk.

I was wondering why she singled me out specifically—did I need it? Jesus, was I the dumb one? What did she mean?—when I saw it. Her nose. Her nose started like a lump of fleshy pudding between her eyes and then suddenly sprouted forward as if someone had installed a tiny stick in the taste treat that was her main feature. The stick came to a sudden stop and seemed to split at the tip. The forked effect was frightening.

Considering how big of a witch she was, it didn’t necessarily surprise me that she had what amounted to two pointy noses, but it was still discomforting to behold them up close. I stared too long, a moment too much, and Mrs. Rudolph recoiled a bit, as if to say, “What?” So it didn’t put me in her good graces when my hand instinctively reached for my own nose, to feel whether my proboscis split as well.

She put her hands on her hips and huffed, “And what exactly are you doing? That’s not polite, you know.”

But I couldn’t help it. I was enthralled. My fingers felt around my nose, examining the tip points. Just like Mrs. Rudolph, I had two nose tips as well. Only mine were buried beneath a layer of flesh like a normal person.

It quickly became an uncontrollable habit. Whenever I saw Mrs. Rudolph, my hands jumped to my nose and felt for the two tips. At some point, as the year progressed, I began to feel sorry for the poor woman, as I hounded her with habitual nasal mimicry. She began to avoid looking in my direction, as I would spend hours staring at her nose while examining my own. Most children picked inside their nose. I felt mine up. But her nose had cast a spell on me, and it became something of a ritual to enter the classroom, glance at her face, and then put my hands to my own, assuring myself that my nose hadn’t visibly split over night.

It was my first quirk, my first small, nascent bit of what would become a lifetime devotion to crazy.
A few months later, I entered the class to find Mrs. Rudolph with her back turned, engaged in a conversation with another broom-rider. I was devastated. Didn’t she know so much depended on our new routine? If I couldn’t see her nose right away, I couldn’t feel my own and then I couldn’t walk the exactly three steps to my desk, circle it once and sit down so that both of my butt cheeks touched plastic at the same time. Didn’t she know that my quirks were reproducing like rabbits and that her oddly-shaped features were the cause of my burgeoning personal torment? I stopped in the doorway as other students pushed around me. But I couldn’t move. I craned my neck, hoping to catch a glimpse of her nose.

“I know you’re there Michael,” she said suddenly, her back turned. “Just take your seat.”

My feet were glued to the floor.

“Go on,” she insisted, “I’m not in the mood for your little antics.”

My foot lifted off the ground and simply fell back in the same place. It tried again. And again. But I was motionless. I could see my desk. It was only three feet away. But I couldn’t make it. I couldn’t move.

It would become a familiar feeling throughout my life, this inability to function if my quirks and superstitions weren’t first sated. Some people can’t leave the house, for instance, without checking the coffee pot or making sure the lights are off. A lot of people can’t go to bed without first checking to see whether the stove is turned off. But how many people have to touch each dial, ensuring they are all in the off position before crossing the room and flipping the light switch exactly twice? I’ve been playing in a Sunday softball beer league for seven years now, and I have yet to step on the third or first base line, and every time I jog into the outfield, I am forced to pick up a clump of grass and toss it into the air to test the wind—even on perfectly calm, windless evenings. Flying is of course a nightmare, as the entire flight hinders on whether I can utter an exact phrase exactly six times in the time between the first engine roar and take-off. That kind of responsibility is daunting.

But it gets really embarrassing when I have to knock on wood.

A lot of people subscribe to the superstition that if you don’t knock on wood, whatever fate-tempting statement you just made may well come true, or not. A lot of people don’t know, however, that you have to be precise in the administration of this superstition. What if, for instance, you accidentally knock on wood more than the usual two times?

In my view, if you accidentally knock three times, you have to knock one more time to make it an even four. But four, oddly enough, balances out two knocks because it is the polar opposite—it is double two knocks, in other words, and therefore carries more weight. So if you accidentally knock on wood three times instead of two times in the very beginning, you have to just go ahead and knock on wood six times to make the number round and to cancel out all the ill-effects of having an accidental knock in the first place.

But did you know that six is part of the devil’s notorious numbers, 666?

You have to go higher than that—but you can’t stop at seven because it’s an odd number, and you can’t stop at eight because it’s double four and therefore evil. Ten seems too even for some reason, so why not just go up to twelve? But wait a minute—how many knocks have you done now?

Was it twelve or thirteen?

Friday the thirteenth?

You can’t risk that.

Just keep going to fourteen, but wait—there’s a four in it. Fifteen … no. Sixteen? Please, it’s double of eight, which is double of four—you might as well just give up, go lay down somewhere and wait for the Fates to destroy you.

So there you are—approaching twenty knocks on wood because you said something a little too gloating, too wishful or boastful.

Once, I knocked on wood 522 times.

The worst part is when I’m around someone else who knocks on wood three times. It is apparently my lot in life to even things out for these imprecise imbeciles. At a work party a few years ago, a coworker knocked on wood three times. My boss was just a few feet away, and because I was relatively new to the job, I didn’t want to appear as out and out loopy as I usually am, and so I didn’t run to a nearby table or door frame in search of wood. Rather, I relied the one allowable substitute for wood: my head. I stood there holding a drink with one hand and tapping my head with the other.

As I was approaching thirty knocks, my new boss nudged me on the shoulder, and asked, “Um … are you OK?”

“Whatever do you mean?” I replied, trying to play it off by using my finger instead of my knuckles. I lost count, however, and had to start over. At the time, I imagined I simply appeared thoughtful, tapping my reddening pate with a finger as if pondering something important. In retrospect, tapping yourself 58 times in the side of the head probably doesn’t come off as intelligent. I remember thinking that if I didn’t wind up fired or institutionalized the next day, my new coworker owed me his annual bonus.

Almost every time I knock on wood or check the stove or skip lightly over the third base line, I am taken back to standing in the classroom doorway in third grade, waiting for Mrs. Rudolph to turn around so I could see her nose. The bell rang and she still hadn’t turned around, which meant I couldn’t touch my own nose and then find my desk.

It was a pivotal standoff—we were nose to nose, so to speak. And to this day I wish I had backed down. I wish I had simply returned to my desk and forgotten all about this fledgling system of twitches and quirks.

Sadly, Mrs. Rudolph turned first, pointing a finger in my direction.

“Don’t you dare—do you hear me?”

And there it was—her nose. It was a two-pronged beacon, pulling me toward a lifetime of regret. I tried my best, I really did. But there was no stopping my hands. They jumped on their own accord to my face and felt the tip of my nose, as Mrs. Rudolph shook her head and sighed. She went to her desk and pulled a slip of paper out of a drawer.

“Try explaining this to the principal,” she said, while I fondled my nose, hopped over the doorway, being sure to land on my left foot, and took a long, precise route to the school office.

by Dori Ben-David
Age six at the time

Betsy was small and frail. She barely had eyelashes. Her hair was thin and wispy and in my memory, it was silvery gray although I don’t know if it was really like this. We were six years old, Betsy and I and most of our first grade class. Betsy had a weak voice, high pitched and a little whiny. She also had some kind of skin disease. Maybe it was just eczema. Maybe something more serious. Her skin was very dry and easily irritated. White, flaking pieces dotted her body -– her arms, her legs, her face. Her hands were dry and wrinkly. She looked like a little old lady in a child’s body. She wasn’t supposed to wash with soap or even with water too often.

Our torment of her was relentless.

A few times a day, the class would line up in the hallway outside the restroom. Six at a time, we would go in, use the restroom and wash our hands. It was usually one of these bathroom breaks that triggered the torment –- we called her gross, said she was dirty, how nasty it was that she didn’t wash her hands with soap and water. She would protest and plead in her small, thin voice: “But I’m not supposed to use soap!”

I don’t actually remember if I ever said anything myself. My only memory is of standing in the group, a circle of us surrounding Betsy, tormenting. And of her protesting, defending.

Every afternoon, we were released for recess. Together the class walked across the huge grassy lawn towards the playground. Once we crossed an invisible threshold, we all took off running. This day I lingered behind and was one of the last to reach the playground. As I darted up one of the ladders, my teacher called my name — and immediately I was filled with dread. I knew what was coming: “Today you play with Betsy.” Great, just great. I slowly turned my body around and trudged disappointedly towards Betsy.

This is the third and last memory I have of Betsy. My Dad taught at my school so I stayed after every day, waiting for him to take me home. I would hang around in the front lobby, moving from couch to couch and chatting with Paula, the receptionist who always had a piece of gum for me. I was hanging around one afternoon when I heard Betsy’s high voice. It had a different tone than I was used to hearing from her. She sounded happy. I heard her excitedly yell, “Daddy!” and I saw from down the hall, a man coming towards her with his arms spread wide. Her face in a huge smile, she ran to him and jumped into his arms. He hugged her and spun around. I was bewildered. This guy clearly loved Betsy. Betsy, with the weird skin who didn’t use soap when she washed her hands.

After first grade, Betsy went to a different school and I didn’t think about her for maybe 20 years. Then she popped back into my mind one day. I’m not sure what made me think of Betsy -– Maybe it was having children of my own and thinking about their own vulnerability. Now I think about Betsy all the time. I hope she’s happy.

By Alicia Rios
Age 13 yrs at the time

I hated Karen Morley in year 8. She had naturally blonde hair so light it was nearly white. Her no-makeup skin revealed the colourless spots beneath to the world. When she laughed her small teeth were yellow against the red of her too-large gums; and she laughed a lot. Her clothes were boring and old fashioned, as if her gran had chosen them. She had no friends. Despite all of that, the boys seemed to love her. They flocked around her like seagulls around fish! And she had a boyfriend called Colin.

But she was so boring! She never said anything. She just laughed. She laughed at their jokes, she laughed when they teased her, she even laughed they asked her questions instead of giving an answer. But still they flocked.

Tania and I often stood frowning, arms folded, watching in disbelief. Now Tania and I – we were interesting, clever and funny. We could joke back, tease them with attitude and hold our own in any debate. We knew about football, politics, psychology and Marc Bolan. We also spent a lot of time on our clothes, hair and makeup. So why were they hanging around with her? She couldn’t even crack a joke and she had yellow teeth for goodness sake!

I can’t recall much about what we did to Karen Morley that year. I do remember Colin kicking Tania really hard in the playground for calling Karen names. I don’t remember the names that we called her but I expect being boring and yellow teeth were mentioned. We were outraged at his reaction. We had just wanted the boys to see what we saw. They were supposed to turn against her, not us.

Three years later Karen Morley and I sat together in the Form room only a couple of months away from leaving school. All animosities had long ceased. We chatted and laughed about teenage girly stuff. Then suddenly she told me that Tania and I had made her life Hell in year 8. She said we had sent her a card on her birthday and when she’d opened it “We all hate you” was written inside. I was devastated. I saw all the pain of that year in her face.

Karen Morley was a nice, pretty, not particularly clever person. She had never done anything to hurt me, but I had really hurt her. I remember that I said I was sorry and did not know what else to say. I wish now that I’d told her what pretty hair she had, how attractive her laugh was, and how destructive and powerful jealousy can be.