SICK by sfg

[This is the continuation and conclusion of the story I read in class this past week. Warning: it morphed into something quite lengthy!]


I never told anyone the real reason why my best friend in the fifth grade, Shelly Michaels, went home sick from school that Thursday afternoon in May. I’ve kept her secret for years, not thinking much of it beyond the rare glance back to elementary school photos. The real reason Shelly went home sick can be summed up in one evil, nasty, smelly, disgusting name: Elias.

Elias was a classmate of ours, although I’m convinced he was actually a few years older than us and had been held back in the fifth grade because he wasn’t ready to go onto middle school. He wore the same clothes to school everyday and had a serious body odor problem. One day he smelled so bad the teachers sent him home to have a bath. Elias wasn’t loud or obnoxious in class. On the contrary, he kept to himself and what looked like devious strategizing most of the time. His only friend was his partner in crime – a smaller, red-headed, beady-eyed boy named Ian. Ian had a Pigs in Space lunch box and he and Elias would sit at the lunch table with the top of Ian’s lunch box flipped up to obscure their faces while they plotted and planned their terror-inducing missions. They were the type to turn over school garbage cans when no one was looking or traumatize a squirrel on the playground by chasing it and throwing rocks at it until it could escape up a tree, beyond their aim. Everyone knew these evil undertakings were straight out of Elias’s cunning playbook. Ian’s only real value was to help in carrying out each monstrous task. On the day that Shelly went home sick, Elias had turned his slimy attentions toward her.

It had been a bad behavior day for our class and to punish us, Mr. C, our balding, heavy-handed authoritarian teacher, had decided we would have to sit boy/girl/boy/girl at lunch. He lined us up and put us in order on the way to the cafeteria. Shelly was put in between Elias and Ian.

At lunch, from the other end of the table, I could see her brave face falter while they flicked bits of their food across her and onto each other. I knew Shelly was upset when Elias "accidentally" knocked his chocolate milk onto the new pink flamingo print t-shirt she and her mom had bought at the mall over the weekend. Shelly kept her cool though. She knew how to be tough when toughness was required. She managed that half an hour in what must have felt like days to her.

But lunch wasn’t the reason Shelly went home sick that afternoon. It happened after lunch.

On the walk back to the classroom, Elias and Ian had slipped out of order in our line and managed to walk side by side behind the glance of Mr. C. Each held a hand to his mouth to cover up their secretive conspiracy and, after a few minutes, their creepy giggles grew to a nasty, guttural laughter that caused Mr. C to notice their being out of step with the rest of line. He reprimanded them accordingly as the rest of the class shuffled back to our desks in the classroom. Shelly looked relieved to be back in her rightful seat in the desk next to mine and we rolled our eyes at each other with the knowledge that the worst of it had to be over.

But it wasn’t.

Mr. C’s geography lesson stretched into the afternoon. The class gave off the appearance of better behavior. (Could it have been the combination of our full stomachs from lunch and the late afternoon May heat that soothed us into submission?) We were rewarded with what Mr. C considered a good time: his own invention, The Map and the Math Game. According to the rules of the game, the class was divided into two competing teams and a player from each team would stand at the front of the classroom and choose either a Map card or a Math card from a pile on the small, low table at the base of our dual paneled chalk board. On one side of the chalkboard, a massive world map was pulled down. The other side of the chalkboard was stocked with erasers and chalk. Depending on which card the player drew, Mr. C would ask either a Map question and the player would have to find an obscure location on the map in an allotted period of time, or he would ask a Math question and the player would have to deliver the correct answer to a problem in the same allotment of time. If the player who had chosen the card wasn’t able to determine the right answer in time, the same question would be asked of the opposite team member who was sharing the spotlight at the head of the class.

The first few questions went off without a hitch. In fact, our team was in the lead when it was time for me to go up to the front of the class. Ian, on the opposing team, joined me at the chalkboard and stood by while I drew a Map card and somehow managed to find the Bikini Island in the Northern Pacific within the required time period. We both sat back in our seats as the next players took center stage. Shelly went up to the board from our team and, in a horrific twist of fate, it was Elias who joined her at the front of the classroom from the other team, a calculating pink smirk plastered across his face. Shelly flashed a momentary look of panic my way but then quickly re-directed her attention to Mr. C who was telling Elias it was his turn to choose a card. Elias chose a Math card off the table and Mr. C proceeded to dictate the problem while Elias scribbled it on the board in his mildly legible handwriting. Even though his back was turned to most of the class as he wrote the problem out, from my seat, I could see that Elias’s lips were moving, and they didn’t seem to be mimicking the numbers Mr. C was reciting. He was saying something else entirely. I shifted my glance to Shelly. Her icy stare forward and straight face had broken just slightly around the corners of her mouth and her cheeks were beginning to take on a cherry red flame. She whipped her head toward Elias and attempted to cease his low volume chatter with an abrupt “Shhh” just as Mr. C called out a loud “Time!”

Elias had not finished his problem in time. He handed the chalk to Shelly as the rules dictated. It was her turn to take a shot at finding the right answer to the math problem. She accepted the chalk, but Elias didn’t step too far out of her way as she turned to begin trying to compute the math problem on the board. While she worked, Elias stood near to her, his lips continuing to move and his gaze fixed on Shelly’s swiftly cracking expression.

I knew something was really wrong when Mr. C. called “Time!” before Shelly was able to finish the problem. It was fairly straight forward long division and Shelly was particularly good in math. Better than me. She should have been able to solve this one. Instead, she threw the chalk back on the ledge hard enough to break it, turned back to the front of the class and, with a bright red face that blinked back tears, called out in one rushed breath, “Mr. C, I have to go to the bathroom.” Not waiting for his response, she darted out the door of the classroom, leaving Elias alone at the chalkboard looking smug and satisfied.

Shelly didn’t come back to class that afternoon. Turns out she did go to the bathroom, but only long enough to give into the tears that she had been holding back. After quickly dabbing her eyes and blowing her nose with the brown, sandpaper-like bathroom paper towels, Shelly took her semi-composed self straight to the administrative offices where she told the school nurse she had just thrown up in the bathroom and that she needed to go home. The school nurse first put a call into Mr. C to admonish him for letting a sick student walk down to the office on her own and then she quickly dialed Shelly’s father’s work number. Shelly lay back on the cot in the coolness of the nurse’s office until her father was able to retrieve her and take her home. That was Thursday afternoon, and Shelly didn’t come to school on Friday.

On Saturday, Shelly must have been feeling sufficiently healed enough for her parents to allow her to come to my house to play for a few hours. When they dropped her off, it was all I could do to invite her in before asking what had happened up there at the chalkboard on Thursday. Shelly promised that she’d tell me before she left, and satisfied with that, I suggested we change into our swimsuits and go for a swim in the pool.

While we swam, my mother kept a half-eye on us from the screened in porch where she was consumed with another of her suspense novels. At the far end of the pool and quite out of the blue, Shelly asked if I knew what the f-word meant. The question certainly didn’t fit with the mermaid swimming contest we were having, but I didn’t want to appear too phased, or even worse, ignorant in front of my best friend. So I told her ‘Of course’ and shrugged it off by diving straight under the water with a flourish of my imaginary mermaid tail. I quickly resurfaced. “Why?” I asked her. And that is when, in very hushed tones, she swore me to secrecy about why she went home sick on Thursday.

“The real reason I went home sick on Thursday,” she started, “was Elias. It was what he said to me up at the chalkboard during the Map and the Math Game.”

It turns out, that all the while that Shelly and Elias were center stage at the front of the class, Elias had been whispering to Shelly, in a sadistic chant, the same five words over and over again, until she couldn’t take it anymore and threw down her piece of chalk.

“What? What was he saying to you?” I wanted to know.

“I want to f you,” she said.

Elias had been saying “I. Want. To. F. You.” to her over and over again. But he didn’t say “F.” He used the whole word. And the last thing he said to her was “After school.”

Shelly admitted that she hadn’t known exactly what the f-word meant, but she knew it was bad. She also knew that she wasn’t going to stick around until after school to find out its true meaning. The idea of it made her nauseas to the core. There was only one place Shelly could think of to escape this threat and it was home – far away from Elias and far away from school and safe within the confines of her parents' protection. That was the only place Shelly could begin to feel better. Distance was the necessary cure.

And that was why Shelly went home sick that afternoon. It’s been our secret, but surely now, you understand.