Truth, Pride, Victory, Love

Prologue“Reed, your word is a noun.” My fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Smeckler, stood beneath the big clock I spent most of the school day watching, her vocabulary book in hand, her stare boring into me. “It is defined as a deep feeling of pleasure or satisfaction derived from one’s own achievements. Mathias…” She turned to him. “Your word is also a noun, one meaning something accepted as factual. You must tell this at all times. As you know,” Smeckler said, “the score is tied.” Not for long, I thought. I was ready to kick Mathias What’s-his-name’s butt. “Whoever gets to the board and correctly writes their word first…” That’s going to be me. “…will bring their team the victory.” My word was pride. I knew Mathias’s too. His was truth. Truth and pride…I planned on writing both, just to show how smart I was. Come on! Say go! My entire body quivered with excitement as I waited. I really wanted to win, and not just because the victors got fifteen minutes added to recess while the losers had to stay in and study. I always wanted to win—at everything—because winning felt so good. “Remember, spelling counts.” Stop talking, Smeckler! I was ready to fly. “Take your mark.” She dragged it out. “Get set.” She raised her hand. “Go!” An empty chair toppled sideways as I bolted, and a book slid off Mike Savoy’s desk when I crashed right into it. “Reed!” Smeckler scolded me. “Dang it!” I had to go back and pick both items up, wasting precious time. “Remember, move to the opposite white board without actually running.” What the heck fun is that? The class was divided in half, my team in front of the windows, Mathias’s group shoulder to shoulder along the wall with the “What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?” bulletin board. “Go, Reed!” My team cheered me on. Mathias’s sort of coerced him—harassed might have been even more fitting. He hadn’t budged from his spot, and as I glanced back, half his teammates were yelling, while the other half were staring him down. Smeckler did too, like some sort of alien monster with laser-beam eyes. “Mathias…?” she said. “Do you know your word?” I came to a halt after picking up Mike’s book. Come on, kid, I thought. I don’t want to win on a forfeit. There was no pride in that. Truth! His word didn’t seem that challenging for a fourth grader, except maybe for the dropped E from true, its root. “Many of these words will have some tricky phonemes and graphemes.” Mrs. Smeckler had tossed that out at the start of the so-called game. I wasn’t familiar with either one of those terms, but I knew how to spell truth, and I couldn’t imagine any of us didn’t, including poor old Mathias…Mathias…what? Mrs. Smeckler had mentioned his surname that morning, and each of the four days of school so far that year. He sat right next to me in first-year band. We both played trombone. The band teacher had called out both names too, but I’d have been damned if I could recall it at that moment. The short, frail-looking kid always slouched down in his seat during scales. He was squirmy now, and had been from the start. Actually we were all still summery restless. The fall leaves hadn’t even begun to change color yet. It was still hot outside, and every one of us wanted to be out there, not in some stifling classroom involved in a nerve-racking matchup only Mrs. Smeckler could consider enjoyable. “A vocab bee is a fun way to learn and get to know one another.” Those had been her exact words. Fun? As if. Personally, I’d have rather been pitted against my classmates in a rousing game of dodgeball. I got a sense timid Mathias would have been petrified by dodgeball—not that he seemed the epitome of calm while playing word games. Me, I was always fidgety. When Mrs. Smeckler asked me on the first day of class why I couldn’t sit still, I told her it was because I had a constant surge of energy coursing through me like an electric eel. “They feel like that, right…all charged up and spazzy?” She looked at me funny. “Hey. Do they, like, electrocute each other when they touch?” Smeckler told me to look it up. I figured that meant she didn’t know. I decided I’d just ask my father—my father, not my mother, because she’d tell me to look it up too, even if she did know. The longer Mathias took to answer, the more restless I became and the more his teammates derided him and glared. Mine were on my case too, but I just flipped them off—three fingers, middle one straighter—as I stood between Trish Haley’s and Mike’s desks, transfixed. As much as I wanted to, I just couldn’t move. I’d noticed several new kids in the cafeteria the first day at lunchtime, but Mathias looked the shyest and always the most uncomfortable. He seemed completely panicked now. His spiky blond hair quivered as he literally quaked in his cowboy boots—red ones. Dude had fashion sense, if nothing else. His gray eyes were wet behind black plastic-frame glasses, as if he was on the verge of tears. Then as his teammates chanted, “Go, Mathias! Go!” he did, and the front of his pants grew wet as well. A bunch of our jerky classmates started to laugh. “Shut up!” I shouted. I had no real idea why I jumped to the new kid’s defense. It wasn’t as if I was Mr. Compassionate back then. “Reed, we don’t say ‘shut up’ in this classroom.” Mrs. Smeckler turned her evil sneer upon me. “We shouldn’t laugh at people either,” I answered back. Mrs. Smeckler didn’t have a comeback for that, nor did she chastise the others. Turning her attention back to her frigging competition, she simply asked, all straight-backed and pursed lips, “Would you like a new word, Mathias?” Mathias moved his head side to side as the wet spot on the front of his tan corduroys got bigger and bigger. Maybe Smeckler thought ignoring it was the compassionate thing to do, since we were close to dismissal. Surely she saw it. Everyone did. I’d have made a joke, something like, “It’s a vocabulary bee, not a vocabulary pee.” The word pee might have even brought forth a smile from Mathias. We were at that age. “Reed, it’s up to you, then.” Smeckler fixed her eyes on mine. Maybe she wasn’t being kind. Maybe she was wicked. “Please, go to the board.” “And if I don’t?” From wide brown circles to defiant slits, I imagined my eyes shooting death rays. I was quite the smartass, quite brave. I knew it was close to the end of the day. There was little time for conversation, let alone a new word. If I refused to spell out pride, I assumed the bee would end in a tie. “Please take your hand from in front of your face.” Ugh. She was really on my case. It was a habit I had—covering my mouth sometimes when I spoke, because my teeth were jacked up. “If you know the word, Reed, go to the board and write it.” The entire class grew silent. It was a real competition now, not between my team and Mathias’s, but between Mrs. Smeckler and me. “Reed?” “What?” Tick, tick, tick, the clock over her head counted off the final few seconds of the day. She knew I knew. Even after just a few days as my teacher, she knew I was smart, and I knew she knew. Would she call my bluff or just move on to my teammate Caryn? “Fine. If that’s the way you want it, tomorrow we’ll have a written test.” Smeckler clapped her book closed, like an alligator capturing its prey. “Spelling. Fifty words. Unless everyone in the class gets a passing grade, there will be no recess at all for the rest of the week.” Big deal. I may have lost the vocabulary bee, but I’d won the fight for human decency, and the victory felt good, at least until Jeff Ackerman got up in my business, hissing a whispered warning, like the snake he was. “We lose recess, Watson, I beat the crap out of you.” Jeff was a jerk—and a troublemaker. He sat right next to me in our assigned seats, way up front, real close to the teacher’s desk. My reputation had preceded me. His word had been homely, and he’d written underneath it on the board Like Reed Watson. The class had laughed at me, like they had at Mathias. Had it been aimed at someone else, I might have considered it clever from someone our age. I got some solace at least from the fact the doofus put two M’s in homely—h-o-m-m-e-l-y. I got to laugh right back at him. The difference was, when he hung his head and looked sad about the teasing, I actually felt bad. “I’d like to see you try, Ackerman.” That was a lie. I was pretty sure Jeff could put me in a full-body cast if he wanted to. “Meet me in front of my bus outside, then, and I’ll rearrange your ugly face.” “I will.” I didn’t. I might have been mouthy, but I wasn’t masochistic. Though I hated my jagged, whack teeth, crooked nose, and scarred chin, I didn’t really want my hommely features rearranged. My pride took a backseat to common sense that day. Jeff scared me, and that was the truth. * * * * The following morning, Mrs. Smeckler went down the list in her little black book to call attendance. “Reed Watson.” “Here.” “Did you bring in your picture for the bulletin board?” Again with that damned bulletin board. A large banner asked the question “What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?” Beneath that were cutouts from magazines and other sources of a doctor, a race car driver, a news reporter, a teacher, loving parents with two little boys approximately our age, and assorted other occupations, including a shepherd. Who the heck wanted to be a shepherd, I wondered. We’d each been assigned the task of bringing in a picture to add to the collection, a representation of our future plans. Mrs. Smeckler had made the request the very first day back from summer vacation, insisting we comply by Monday of the following week. It was already Wednesday, and I still hadn’t done it. I kept forgetting. Plus, my nine-and-a-half-year-old brain couldn’t totally settle on one eventual vocation. “No,” I told her. “I forgot.” Given the way the day before had ended, I’d never even thought about it. “Bring it tomorrow.” Smeckler rolled her eyes and continued. “Mathias Webber?” Webber—that was his name, but Mathias Webber didn’t answer. “Mathias Webber?” I looked toward the back of the room where the well-behaved kids got to sit. I hadn’t been back there since my first day in kindergarten. There was an empty seat, presumably his. “Mathias isn’t here?” I assumed Smeckler’s question was rhetorical. I knew the word—and I could spell it, silent H and all. I was ready for her test. Last I’d seen of Mathias Webber, he was moping across the parking lot to his bus, with a windbreaker tied around his waist to cover his pee pants. He’d probably taken a lot of crap on that bus, and now sat at home, a bad case of embarrassment a more likely cause than any virus or the runs. I figured he’d be back in a day or two. He wasn’t. I thought about Mathias Webber for a few days, a few weeks, maybe even a couple of months. Heck, even after several years I’d get to thinking every now and then, I wonder whatever happened to that kid who peed his pants in Mrs. Smeckler’s class. Eventually, I let it go, figuring I’d never know.