Isn’t That Special

I was in second grade when I vowed, before I died, to someday violently harm Johnny Davis.

It was a very small class of 30 or so. I was sitting there at my metal desk in my uncomfortable plaid uniform. The room was silent. The walls a pale butter yellow. Our desks were arranged in groups of four or six, facing each other as if we were having a very adult conference every day. But for the short chairs and those hidden spaces of our desk slots, like a large mailbox. Giant chalkboards dressed two sides of the room and the teacher’s desk was as far away from me as it could possibly be.

Leroy was on my right. He was the boy who kept stealing my pencils. In fact, he stole everyone’s pencils. Ten years later, he was arrested for stealing Sally Smith’s mother’s Mercedes from the family’s gated and security guarded community (he and Sally became friends), then driving it into a fence.

Johnny Davis sat behind me. I hadn’t paid much attention to him before then. He was just another boy in class that I never hung out with. A bit of a miniature athlete and I was a painfully shy child. With my thick glasses and awkward height and lack of social graces, I pretty much stayed in my small group of friends and didn’t quite realize anyone else existed.

We were taking a spelling test that I don’t remember studying for. The teacher announced the word and we wrote it on the sheet that we would later turn in.

“Excuse me, Miss Bradford?”

“Yes, Johnny?”

“She’s cheating.” He pointed at me.

I looked up. My face heated up in that telltale fire of reliable Catholic guilt and restrained fury.

“What makes you say that?” Miss Bradford had stood from her desk and was making her way toward me. I was certain she was going to throw me out of the class or beat me with a ruler.

‘She’s got the word ‘special’ written on a piece of paper in her desk.” He pointed to it.

What could I do? I was busted. No way out. I failed the test and it was all Johnny’s fault. I had done nothing but written a little word on a little piece of paper so I could remember where the “I” and “e” went. And Johnny had to not only spy on me, but also rat me out for his own personal smug gain.

I made it my personal mission for the rest of my grade school career to ace every spelling test thereafter. And I did. I even beat out Rich Stanford, the smartest kid in class (who eventually joined me in that creative writing class and proceeded to his Ivy League school) for the most perfect scores in a row.

Throughout grade and high school, I reminded Johnny of his folly regularly and promised retribution. Right before graduation, right before we finally parted ways for different universities in different states, I reminded him that I never managed to get my much-deserved revenge.