Found Nickels
My time in school had always been wasted, like every moment of my life was a penny in a billionaire’s trust fund. Not just my time, but my body too. There were so many moments that felt like they would never end. One moment in particular is fresh because it’s one of those memories you recall as a fun story to tell at parties. Until you sit with it and wonder, why did they do that to me? Why did that happen?
I knew that moment would last forever because it felt like forever then. I was seven years old in the second grade. I was staring into my workbook in Ms. Hilsbury’s class. Me and Shantay called her Pilsbury cause she was pale and doughy, and I thought that was what she had said at the beginning of the semester.
I couldn’t read the various reports and permission slips she sent home with us each week, and nobody told me what her name was except for Shantay, and that wasn’t until well into October when we cemented our friendship with me throwing up in the bathroom in front of her and her friends. Shantay’s friends all ran out, but she had asked me if I was okay. Her voice was loud but didn’t have a hint of disgust, just curiosity, like she’d never seen throw-up before. I latched onto her as my sole friend, and somehow she balanced being alone with me, with having a multitude of friend groups.
Anyway, my workbook sat in front of me, bare as a baby. Shantay was nudging me at our group’s table to make up an answer. I was drawing a blank because I hadn’t heard the instructions enough to fake an answer. I couldn’t ask Ms. Pilsbury to repeat, or whisper to ask Shantay either, because Ms. Pilsbury took note of names that didn’t pay attention for her to send home in those reports I couldn’t read-- reports that had me on punishment every other week.
“Deja? Number four?” her mouth was a thin line that tucked into itself in a perpetually disappointed frown.
“Uh… I didn’t do number four”
“Number five?-” I shook my head, “Six? Seven? Eight?”
Each time I shook my head, my face got hotter with shame and the threat of tears. By the time she put me in the corner, my head was boiling and my throat was tight while I argued with wall, in a near whisper, gasping around teary hiccups, “B-But you told us not to ask anybody for h-help”
“What was that? Speak up, Deja,” she was not looking at me, but was arranging letters on the Mugshot Pass. It was a special hall pass she reserved for kids on timeout. It looked like a mugshot placard, and she arranged our names and the nature of our crimes underneath. “MUGSHOT PASS” remained at the top. The pass hung next to the corner where we stood for timeout, just out of our sight. If what Pilsbury wrote was particularly funny or charming to her, she’d take a picture on a disposable and tell us cheese if we didn’t want our parents called. Administrators smiled to themselves when they saw it, they loved making small talk with me, a timeout regular. Their over-familiar and condescending reminders to “Do better, Deja”
Not like I could even fucking read what was on it anyway. My back to the classroom, I heard a conspiratorial giggle go through the class. The last time the class thought she wrote something funny, it was after Raymond, who was having one of his fits- screaming, throwing things, curling into himself like he was in pain- got a placard with a single word on it, not even his name above it. I laughed along, trailing off when I saw Shantay beside me was silent as a stone.
“What does it say?” I asked her at lunch over the din of the crowd, curious to know what could possibly have everybody rolling like that.
She shook her head, “My momma told me not to say that word”
“Sound out half slow and I can guess”
Hesitant, she said, “Ree- tah-” she stretched out that final crumb of the word, and it was my turn to be silent. People called me that sometime. I didn’t like saying it, not even then, cause it hurt.
Their secretive snickers prickled my back, and my heart clutched itself tight in my chest. I could see the sign just out of view, Ms. Pilsbury’s arm stretching just slightly in reach of my head. Next thing I knew, my mouth was full of the pink skin that hung off that arm. Blood spilled onto my tongue, salty and metallic. I clamped down harder, and she began screaming, a late response to her shock. She released the placard and it clattered to the floor.
It was blank. No, I was looking at the back of it. I was desperate to assure myself that I would not see the shape of that condemning word. I dove for it, but Pilsbury dragged me by the back of my shirt, the buttoned uniform collar choking me. I spit a bloody dribble on the ground, and growled at her. I didn’t give a fuck what I looked like right then. She was gonna call my mom eventually.
They sent me to the ISS room, cold and devoid of the flowery posters I liked staring at. There was hushed talk outside the door about pressing charges. I was sitting in a chair for fifth graders, and my feet dangled above the ground. In that blank, white room, I felt way more tired than a seven year old could verbalize. They left me alone for I don’t know how long. Footsteps passed, and I prayed that the next pair would be the ones that would take me away from that place.
Maybe God likes to listen to the little prayers. Shantay seated herself next to me. Her flats fell silent against the floor, and then they were swinging in the air alongside mine. I swung my left in time with her right. A moment passed before I spoke.
“What did the sign say?”
She shrugged, “Nothing”
“Nothing?”
“The word, ‘nothing’. Cause you didn’t do nothing”
I thought about it for a moment before I realized grown-ups just weren’t funny. It hurt just as much as it wasn’t funny. Cause everybody had made me felt like nothing.
“I feel like a used-up nickel”
“Huh?”
“I feel like a nickel they found on the street, and they got way more than enough to make a dollar, so they spent me”
I didn’t know the word ‘spent’ could be by itself to describe how I felt.
I was seven, and I was spent. Shantay didn’t mind my talk. She grabbed my hand.
“That don’t make no sense,” she jumped out the chair, and tugged me behind her, “Let’s go”
So we walked outta school that day, with the administration calling our mothers up and down at work. Meanwhile, we sat on the couch in Shantay’s apartment watching PBS Kids and Nick Junior, which ran during school hours. Pocketed in the comforting dark of her home, tucked away from sight and sound, that was another moment that felt like forever to me. A good kind of forever that I’m glad I kept.
