Over the years, I have spent many somber hours reflecting on
the litany of trespasses I have committed against my fellow man, and woman.
And you know what I've come to realize? I'm an asshole. Not only am I currently
an asshole, I've always been an asshole. My first piece of commissioned writing,
in fact, was an essay my mother insisted I write on "Maliciousness,"
after I committed some kind of moral crime (I forget what) against my older
brother in the fourth grade.
It was, in fact, right around this time-fourth grade-that my
cruelty reached what has been, to date, its zenith. Though certain of my lady
friends might be inclined to disagree, I feel safe in saying that no matter
what slipshod, spur-of-the-moment malfeasances I may have committed over the
past year, none even begins to rival the meticulously-plotted campaigns of terror
I undertook against my classmates in elementary school. And of these, none was
more calculated, more coldly sadistic, than that I perpetrated upon Sheila Walken.
Children are visionaries of cruelty. It comes naturally to them,
like sonatas tumbling effortlessly from the mind of the young Mozart. And like
wild animals, they tend to prey on the sickliest, weakest member of the herd.
I myself was hardly the largest or strongest of the pack, standing
just over three feet tall by the age of ten. However, I compensated for my diminutive
stature by developing one hell of a Napoleon complex. I was small, dangerous
and mean. Sheila Walken was merely small. In the heartless calculus of childhood,
such a tempting target could not be resisted. There are times when I find myself
looking into my own eyes thinking, "How could you have done that?"
But I did. I preyed on her, along with the rest my piranha-like classmates,
and to this day, I regret it.
Sheila Walken looked like a dirty Q-Tip. Everything about her
was filthy and scrawny. Her hair was greasy and yellow, and her limbs were no
bigger around than pixie sticks. I now realize that she was dirty from neglect,
like a forgotten doll in a sandlot, and skinny from malnourishment to the point
of anorexia. But at the time I knew only that she was a weakling, a perfect
victim: too puny to defend herself, and too unsavory to inspire others to defend
her.
Her lack of appeal was rooted in something deeper than mere uncleanliness.
After all, I had plenty of dirty friends. Eli Gortley and I were friends and
he had lice. Sarah Hartford picked her nose and ate her boogers, and I played
handball with her. What separated Sheila Walken from the rest of my classmates
was that she was haughty about her filth. Her behavior was, if anything, even
more loathsome than her person. As much a stranger to shame as she was to soap
and water, she reveled in her own vileness like the Whore of Babylon.
She would rub her crotch with a pencil in class. It was a souvenir
from Disneyland, one of those long, thick, hard pencils with a knobby pink eraser
on the end. She sat next to me in class, close enough that I could hear her
whimpering while she did it, not that she made any particular attempt to keep
quiet. "Why do you do that?" I would ask. "Because it feels goooood,"
she would say, savoring the last syllable of base animal pleasure on her tongue
like something she could bear neither to swallow nor to spit out.
Feel good? I'm sure it did, but it looked wrong. She would slide
back and forth on her pencil faster and faster, her desk rattling and squeaking,
getting goofy on it until she looked like her eyes were going to shoot out of
her skull. It made every hair on my body stand up in disgust and confusion.
To this day, the image of her greasy, wriggling little body jacking off on her
thick, knobby pencil sends shivers up my spine. It was like watching a dog fuck
an amputee's good leg. There was something profoundly wrong about it, even if
I was unclear of what or who was being wronged.
Other times she would position her minge on the corner of a desk
and squiggle, wiggle and squirm on the seam of her velour culottes as if she
had an invisible hula-hoop around her waist. "Stop that!" Our teacher
would shout.
"Why?" she would ask, "It feels so gooood."
"Just because certain things feel good," our teacher
would say, "doesn't mean that you should do them." The guardians of
juvenile morality have been making this argument for generations, but few of
them ever had such a compelling visual aid at their disposal as Mrs. Apple had
in Sheila.
Sheila, for her part, made no effort to cover up her actions.
As we watched films in the dusky afternoon light of a darkened classroom, she
didn't even try to muffle herself. She whined and groaned and finger-banged
herself in the shadows. This might have been fine at the Lusty Lady, but it
didn't make her many friends during the screening of Earthquake Preparedness
films in Room 12. She had blasphemed the sanctity of the after-lunchtime movie
by turning our classroom into her own private jack-shack, and she deserved to
be punished. "Stinky Fingers." It had a ring to it and the name stuck.
One would think she would have been embarrassed but no, not Sheila
Walken. She would strut through the cafeteria with her skinned knees and dirty
ankle socks and glower at me while she held her fingers under her nose and smelled
them. She was rode hard and put away wet by the age of ten and proud of it.
It was the final straw for me. All year I had listened and watched, and when
I told her how disgusted I was, how her behavior was an embarrassment, she only
shrugged her shoulders and went back to fellating her crayolas.
I spent weeks plotting my revenge. It's hard for me to tell at
this point who was more twisted, psychologically speaking. It doesn't take a
genius to read between the lines; the girl was obviously disturbed, most likely
in the middle of the night by a grandfather, father, brother or uncle. And,
on the other hand, there I was, deciding that the best way to get revenge on
her would be by befriending her, obviously, and then beating her up.
It took me weeks of apologies to begin to build the necessary
trust between us. Anyone familiar with hostage negotiating is well acquainted
with this protocol. Step one, establish a common bond: You still like Snoopy?
Me too. It was no lie, I did. Step two, bribe and praise: I did. I brought her
candy. I told her I liked her pencil. My deceit proceeded according to plan.
Then I caught her in the bathroom. She was crumpled up in a
ball on the wet floor with one thumb up her ass and the other in her mouth.
I remember thinking she was hurt and so I asked her, "Do you want me to
get the nurse?" No, she said, she would be all right if I helped her fix
her pants. Apparently she'd torn them in her eagerness to get on with her anal
exploration. The girl was a natural.
I helped her fix her pants and that was it, you could have called
us best friends. We had lunch together a couple of times, in secret, and then,
when I was 100% sure she trusted me, I decided it was time to kick her ass.
Tuesday was Doomsday. I wrote it on a note and stuck it to my binder. It was
as if I was planning a murder.
It was a piece of cake. She had brought her toy horses in for
show and tell that day (bo-ring). I feigned fascination and asked if I might
walk with her back to her house so we could play pony together. Guilelessly,
she accepted this invitation I had extended to myself. It was a nice warm day,
the birds were chirping, and as soon as we were a few blocks away from school,
I snatched her plastic horses out of her hands, shattered them in the street
and shoved her into the bushes. As she struggled to her feet I taunted her,
shoving and jeering.
She was a fast runner, but I was faster. I caught up with her
in Daly Park, tackled her and slugged her a few times until she was grass-stained
and sobbing. But it wasn't her tears that stopped me, that instantaneously grabbed
the brittle remainder of my ugly soul and shook it to its core. It was her words:
she looked at me and she asked, "Why? Why would you do that, pretend to
be my friend?" I spat out something about pencil-fucking, turned and ran
home.
Sheila wasn't in class the next day. In fact, she didn't return
to school for the rest of the week. But when I saw her the following Monday,
she was covered with bruises. They were on her arms and her legs and there was
one on her face. My classmates were pointing and laughing and patting me one
the back; rumor travels fast.
The police showed up after recess. I saw them walk down the
hall towards our classroom and scrambled my brain trying to think up some fiction
that could possibly justify what I had done. Sheila Walken saw them too, and
a wide, shit-eating grin spread across her face. "My uncle is a cop,"
she said, looking me up and down. My throat closed, my stomach cramped and I
gripped onto the sides of my desk. The cops came into the class, looked around
the room and pointed in my direction. They nodded.
Just as I was about to get out of my seat, Sheila Walken stood
up, grabbed her faithful pencil out of her desk, flipped me off and left the
room with the cops. She didn't return to school the next day, or the day after
that, or the day after that or the day after that. In fact, I never saw her
again. But I want her to know, wherever she is, I'm sorry. I'm really, really
sorry.
Alena Nahabedian is a Contributing Editor to Lime
Tea. To the best of her knowledge, she has no currently outstanding arrest
warrants, but she's headed for Mexico just to be on the safe side. Until then,
she resides in Portland, OR.
