My parents only moved once when I was young. It was a short move, made when I was three or so, taking us 45 miles south of where I was born. We stayed put after that. Because of this, I attended kindergarten with a group of people who I would see for the next twelve years of my life. People who I would never be able to look at without picturing their mouth suckling a bottle of Elmer’s glue, or the look on their face the first time they removed their shirt during nap time for no reason. I was a timid child, very shy and frightened of everything. One day after school at a friend’s house, some of the kids there began flicking pebbles at each other with plastic spoons. I promptly ran and hid behind the nearest available shrub and whimpered until my mother showed up.

Once, I got the guts up to perform a magic trick in front of the class for show and tell. It somehow involved miraculously holding a glass of water upside down, and needless to say I spent the rest of the day looking like I had pissed myself. I reverted back to my comfortable timidity after that. For the most part I had a good time in kindergarten, so I shouldn’t complain. It was fairly low pressure, and aside from the occasional glue-guzzling topless kid, it proved to be a place where everything was pretty easy. It was probably my only truly easy year of school.

The Genuine Trembling of a Semi-Fortunate

On my first day of first grade I acted like I was tough shit, standing on the front steps of my house with my Star Wars lunch box, letting my mom take a picture of me. I look at that picture now, and in it you can see my eyes, and inside them the fear, the worry, the thought that this just might be the last day of my life. I was being transferred from an environment where they did basically everything for you except hold your dick when you pee, to a place where I shared a building with girls almost twice my age whose florescent sweatshirts rode off their shoulders as they lugged around their ESPRIT bags. I began to panic.

During our short drive to school I started concocting ways to get out of going, searching for a logical way to let my mom know that this just wasn’t going to happen today. I had nothing. The car pulled up to the school and she looked at me, smiled, and said she would be back later. I turned and stared at her.

"Would it be alright if we went back home? Just for a while?"

She looked like she was going to cry. "I want to stay with you too, but you have to go sweetie. Everyone has to go. I’ll miss you."

I pushed the car door open and started toward the building. Shit.

I quickly located the class that she had shown me a few days before. I walked in, sat down where my name tag was, and surveyed all the other frail children who had arrived before me. They all looked scared too, and accordingly, it was dead silent. One boy stared straight ahead with his finger crammed way up his nose, while another had his sweater pulled up around his face with his thumb obviously deep in his mouth. A thin black haired boy walked in with his mother and she led him by the hand to his seat. He was noticeably unkempt, his greasy hair spiking in various directions. As soon as his mother began to walk away, he hit the floor quick and started wailing, grabbing her by her ankles and not letting go. She dragged him for a few feet and as he was struggling to curl himself around her I could see that he was wearing his pajamas underneath his clothes. He held on for dear life as his mother stopped and stood silently, peering down at him. He pleaded with her to not leave him. She finally managed to peel him off, whispered something to him, and he thumped down in his seat, continuing to sob.

We all stared at him, and it was the first time that day I felt like I kind of had my shit together. Just then, our teacher walked in; a tall, beautiful blonde woman who had braces even though she was probably thirty. She didn’t waste much time in introducing herself and handing out to us fat, sharpened pencils and photo copied placement tests that proved to be really basic. We started them, went to recess, went to lunch, and we came back and finished them. I felt confident about my performance.

I had no way of knowing this test would land me in a different class. As a result of an abnormal number of students or something of the sort, they decided to put a group of first graders in with the second graders. I prefer to think I was chosen because I was in the smarter half of the test takers, but I can’t be sure if that’s true or not. It don’t make no difference. Now I write good.

The teacher in my new class was a small, stern, old woman whose name was Mrs. Masterson. She was roughly four and a half feet tall with thick glasses, an extremely tight perm, and a crotchety demeanor that genuinely scared the shit out of me. If my first teacher was a Donna Reed, this one was more of a Granny from the Beverly Hillbillies. She called roll on the first day of our new arrangement, only first names and not in alphabetical order. When she called "Brent" and no one responded, I quickly panicked and thought for sure that she must mean me. I raised my hand. To this day, I have no idea why I did that. At the time, I guess it was inconceivable to me that two kids in the same vicinity could have such similar names. And yet I knew kids named Brian and Brandon. Critical thinking was never my strong suit.

Later in the roll list, she called "Brad." I had no choice but to raise my hand again. She dropped her head down, peered over her glasses, and targeted me with her hollow eyes. She set the roll sheet down. "So what is your name?"

"It’s Brad", I said meekly.
"Not Brent."
"No."
"Well, let’s see if we can keep it straight, Brad."
I clenched my fist in frustration, cursing Brent for being absent that day.

I spent the next couple of months not saying much, doing well on my assignments and keeping to myself. During this time I had observed Mrs. Masterson disciplining various children, and quickly deducted that I would have no choice but to kill myself if that happened to me. Handing my parents that little pink slip would have broken them. I guess. Who knows. My father worked as a counselor at a live-in facility for juvenile delinquents. He probably wouldn’t have been beside himself, since he spent his days watching teenagers jabbing each other in the shower with homemade knives. He had certainly seen worse.

The make up of the split class seemed to generate a grim bunch of children. In this class, one of the most memorable was a girl named Tanya Bingenheimer (no shit), a fellow first grader whose interests included following me home from school and explaining to me how we would someday be married, and how then we would have to kiss and do other things closely related to that. I expressed my gratification for the heads up. Tanya lived along the route on which I would walk home after school with one of my only friends Jason, a young man who shared my interests and participation in wall ball and running faster than everyone else.

Jason was quite a bit gutsier than me, and he persuaded me into thinking that spitting into the resident’s mailboxes on this route was a rush that I just had to experience. This became a tremendous guilty pleasure for me, and it allowed me to open up after a hard day of sitting silently and doing exactly as I was told. I didn’t consider the consequences until a fat man in a ribbed tank top spotted us hawking in his box one day and informed us that our act was a federal offense and he would be calling the cops if he saw us doing it again. I pictured Tanya’s parents observing me as I was whisked away in a FBI transport, my hands cuffed securely behind my back, a trail of spittle running down my chin as I cried for my mother. This would certainly dissuade her from her dreams of marrying me, but the actual consequences might outweigh this small victory. We ceased, post-haste.

Anyway, on the days that she got a ride home, Tanya was able to stop me on my way, strolling out of her house in her lacey blue Sunday dresses she wore every day. I would watch her, almost in slow-motion, as she strutted towards me, her semi-buck teeth preceding her as her thick glasses reflected the late afternoon sun. She would often skip up to me, no matter if I was with a group from my neighborhood or not. It seemed she preferred the group setting, it allowed us to be seen together. She had an arsenal of tactics. Among them: the yank of the backpack strap, the stand in front of me even when I move quickly, and most notably, the recollection of the day’s art project we had all turned in.

"You sure put a lot of feathers on your turkey today." She would say.
"Well, turkeys have a lot of feathers, I guess." I would reply.
"Turkeys are neat." She was glowing now. "Do you like turkeys?’

"They’re okay, I guess." I would stand perfectly still in front of her and then dart quickly left or right, trying to fake her out like a scurrying running back. A childish defense, even for a first grader, but her undying will and determination had left me with no choice but to sink to her level.

Tanya moved the next year, and I never saw her again. Oh Tanya, you young lass, I rest assured sensing that you have produced a litter of children by now. I can still hear the stark pitter- patter of your glossy black shoes skipping across the sidewalks in my nightmares. God bless.

One of the other notable curiosities in my class was a boy named Stephen, a husky chap who managed to always be a little filthier than the rest of us. Looking back, this was certainly nothing to gawk at. At the time, I was simply in awe of the consistent nature of his appearance. Sometimes he would wear the same dirt stained clothes for the entire week. Stephen was a second grader, and I think he was placed in with the first graders because he benefited from a little extra help that way. In a physical sense, he faintly resembled Tanya, with the slight buckness of the teeth and a tinge of the crazy eye. Stephen also scared me, but in a more serious way. He gave me that crook-eyed loose cannon vibe. He was the kid who just might tackle you even though you had agreed to play touch football.

One day the class came in from recess, and slowly, we all began to notice that Stephen smelled particularly bad, like shit. By some ill-fated chance it was our specified day to clean out our desks, so we all ended up down on our knees. For a completely unforeseen reason Stephen had taken it upon himself to walk around observing everyone. Apparently he didn’t have a desk, I don’t know. Anyway, from the close range face to crotch angle that we were all gratuitously treated to, it became an undeniable fact that the guy had a load in his pants. You could see it, you could smell it, you could simply sense it when he walked by. The kid had shit himself. In a way, I didn’t blame him. I was not a fan of using the toilet at school myself, but I had never considered shitting myself as an option in avoiding it.

The girl with the desk next to me waited until he made his rounds past us and then whispered to me, "I think Stephen pooped his pants."
"I know," I said. "He stinks."

Instantly I looked over at Stephen, watched his eyes light up, and realized he had observed our exchange. He must have specifically heard me use the word "stinks," because he pointed his index finger up in the air and began to wave it towards himself, gesturing for me to come over to him. Being the incredible sissy that I was, I put my head down, walked over, and stood in front of him like a dog awaiting punishment. We were facing each other near the coat racks.

He was doing his best to appear intimidating, and the puffed out chest he had mustered was hardly wasted on me.
"Don’t tell anyone," he said. "Or you’re going to have to deal with me."

Now, this is coming from a notoriously disheveled second grader with shit in his pants, so it was a bit unclear to me as to what he exactly meant. What I did know was that I did not want to have any contact with this kid in his present state. A terrible picture sprung to my mind of the two of us rolling around on the playground, tussling in front of all our classmates, shit squirting out of his Toughskins. This was simply not an option.

"Okay," I muttered. I put my head down, walked back, and continued to clean my desk. The girl next to me, who I began to realize was extremely preoccupied with this, looked over at me.
"Didn’t he stink really bad up close like that?"
I nodded. "Yeah, I guess."

I instinctually looked over at Stephen, who I knew had not stopped staring at me, and watched his eyes blaze up again. I quickly deducted that when he saw me nod yes, he figured I was confirming to the girl that yes, in fact, his pants were full. I couldn’t stop wondering how I had become mixed up in this. As I was thinking about an exit from the situation that might be as sly as my entry, he made a gesture, some cutting of the throat or some pounding of the fist in the palm, to let me know that I had crossed the line with him.

I felt my throat muscles constrict and I became ashamed that I had allowed myself to be so manipulated. Why was I in trouble here? Everyone in the class knew that he had shat himself, I was not alone in that. And yet I had been targeted. I eventually realized that this wasn’t a situation that was based in the area of reason at all. I still felt uneasy. Soon it was time to stop cleaning out our desks and we sat back in our seats. I made a point to not look in Stephen’s direction when he sat down, or for the remainder of the day.

As school ended he walked briskly out of class without looking at me, and I was thankful for that. I carefully gathered my things, walked outside by myself, and sat in my normal spot where I waited to get picked up. As soon as I sat down I remembered that my mom had told me that my father was going to pick me up that day, and I winced a little. He always left work right around the same time I got out of school, and if the traffic was bad he sometimes didn’t make it to get me until 20 minutes later than my mom usually did. I put my head down as I sat on the concrete stoop outside of the front doors of the school with my backpack on my back and my lunchbox in my hand.

It all happened quite quickly: I caught a whiff, I caught a glimpse, and he caught me hard on the arm right below my shoulder. It was probably the best shot I had ever taken in my life. My parents never came close to actually laying into me like that, and my little brother was too young to be capable of actually hurting me. I stood up and felt my eyes well up. I didn’t know any other way to react. Stephen stood in front of me, looking at me like I might retaliate. He was staring down the wrong guy. Still, he fixed his beady eyes on me. The smell of shit was relatively gone but still hinting a bit.

"I told you." he said. Then he turned around and he walked away.

I watched him, frozen, and when he was out of sight I began to rub my arm. I didn’t want to cry anymore. I checked for witnesses. Somehow, no one had seen the awkward debacle. I put my head down, stared at the ground for a few minutes, and then I heard my father’s motorcycle pull up. I raised my head. He was stopped next to the curb, wearing a tank top and mirrored sunglasses. He straddled the machine carefully. "Hey buddy," he yelled. "You ready to go?"

I nodded and walked down to the street where he was balancing on the bike. I examined it. "Where’s my helmet, dad?" I asked as I hopped on the back.

"Shit, I forgot it." He said. "Shit," he said again. "We’ll be alright. I just hope your mom’s not outside waiting for us. You know how she is about that."

"Yeah," I said. "Just go kind of slow, OK?"

He revved up the motorcycle hard and quick, pushed it forward, and I wrapped my arms around his belly and as we sped up the hill I looked at all the children walking home and they looked back at me and they pointed and the wind blew my hair back hard and as we sped past Tanya’s house I saw her outside waiting for me and I stared straight ahead and acted like I didn’t know she even existed and it seemed more and more probable that I would never make it to the next grade.