Hungry Boy That Close to Danger

I went to grade school with a girl who had the world’s tiniest paper shredder above her lips. If you didn’t know better, you’d think it was an oddly symmetrical scar or maybe a pale mole. But we knew what it was. When our teacher Ms. Orlich left the room the girl—her

name was Janice—fed paper through the shredder and let us watch. The shredder made a faint, high pitched drone, like a bee hive at the bottom of a well. Seconds later, streamers of paper shot out of Janice’s open mouth and we laughed and laughed and laughed.

Lucky for us, Ms. Orlich left the room a lot because she was having an affair with the janitor. Don’t think just because we were in the fifth grade we didn’t know this. We also knew teachers were supposed to have affairs with our fathers or other teachers, not janitors. Ms. Orlich was white, and the janitor was black, which also seemed a little off. When Ms. Orlich told us she had to leave the room to “get supplies,” i.e. rendezvous with the janitor in the boiler room, it was shredder time. “Drum roll, please,” Janice said, and we would give her one.

Janice moved to our town sometime before Thanksgiving. “Class, please welcome our new student, Janice Timberland. Her family moved here all the way from Tucson, Arizona, if you can believe it.” We couldn’t believe it, but we also didn’t care. The first few weeks at our school, Janice drifted around like a half-manifested ghost in a pair of socks and sandals, like she’d never heard of winter.

In early December, Ms. Orlich told us she needed to get more tinsel for the classroom. The janitor doled out the school’s Christmas decorations, which were mainly tinsel and handmade meat tray ornaments donated by a local DIY club called the Trash Crafters. Our room was a regular tinsel town, not Hollywood, but a real tinsel tinsel town, silver and gold and metallic red and green hung with meat tray stars and Marys. Ms. Orlich handed out a math worksheet and told us she’d be back once she found the “right tinsel for our needs.”

“You guys want to see something?” Janice asked once Ms. Orlich had gone. We didn’t say anything, not because we didn’t want to see something, but because we were surprised the sandaled half-ghost had a voice. But Janice didn’t seem to notice. She took the math worksheet and shred it down the middle, cutting the arm off the dumb looking girl who was carrying a basket of apples to multiply and divide.

How did you do that? Were you born that way? Does it hurt? Does your family know? We asked Janice every question about the shredder we could think of. But she just shrugged and gave one-word answers like it was all no big deal. When we were finished, Agnes, who liked horses, asked her questions about Arizona: Did you ever drink from a cactus? Did you ride your horse to school?

Things changed for Janice after that. The mean girls and the horse loving girls fought over who got to sit with her at lunch. The cool boys Mike and Zach and Kenny invited her to play four square and didn’t mind that she let the ball go out of bounds nine times out of ten. Patty gave Janice her patent leather snow boots with silver stars stitched on the sides because she said she didn’t need them anymore. But I’d seen Patty with her mom at the mall, so I knew all she had to do was scream and kick a trash can or the wall and her mom would say, Ok, fine, you win, and buy her another pair.

We started bringing Janice paper from home which she dutifully shred whenever Ms. Orlich was out on one of her trysts. She could shred in all kinds of patterns. All she had to do was tilt her head, run her tongue over her teeth a couple of times and she’d be shredding zig zags or curlicues, thin strips, thick strips, jagged strips like bolts of lightning.

We told Ms. Orlich Patty shred the paper at her mom’s office after school. “That’s great,” she said, her blouse half tucked into her skirt from a recent tinsel harvesting. “We can use the paper for our art projects.” She thanked Patty for thinking ahead. I think she was mostly happy because she didn’t have to pay for art supplies out of her own pocket, but can you blame her? Teachers have it rough.

After Christmas, the tinsel came down and the shredded paper masterpieces went up. We braided strips of paper in different colors to spell out our names on the bulletin board. Veronica Lachsdorff chose viridian and chartreuse, because those were her favorite colors she said. But Veronica was a mean girl and, we all knew, a show-off. She brought in thick cardboard and demanded Janice shred it into intricate scrolls. I hoped the complicated shredding wouldn’t hurt her. Ed Lee, a bottom feeder who had a thing for Orcs, said white lined paper was good enough for him, which made me like him more.

When the name project was finished, we moved on to other creations. We made a shredded paper reproduction of Picasso’s The Greedy Child, Janice carefully shredding the girl’s delicate strawberry blonde curls. We made a battle field diorama of the Spanish- American war, adding hundreds of wispy paper shreds of yellowing grass. On the ceiling, we hung a shredded paper replica of Jupiter and 43 of its 67 moons. We got so into our shredded paper projects, Ms. Orlich said she wondered if we even needed her anymore. “Carry on children,” she told us. She went off with the janitor and didn’t come back for half a day. Janice was always shredding and shredding and secretly shredding more at home when her school shredding time was still not enough for our shredded paper greed.

For President’s Day, we decided to make a life-size shredded paper sculpture of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree to enter into the school’s art contest. The first prize was a gift certificate from Fran’s Ice Cream Emporium for the entire class. We wanted to win the gift certificate because we all loved ice cream except for Kenny, who was lactose intolerant, but said he wouldn’t like ice cream even if he wasn’t lactose intolerant because cold things made his teeth hurt. The cool boys and the in-betweens, like myself, and the bottom feeders banded together to make George Washington out of knotted cotton rags attached to a music stand. The mean girls and the horse loving girls and the Mormon girls, who were sometimes mean girls and sometimes horse loving girls and sometimes something else entirely, were in charge of the cherry tree. They formed the tree out of twisted wire hangers and medical bandages and mostly didn’t fight, which was a miracle. But they did bicker about what to use for cherries. “What about moth balls?” one of the something else entirely Mormon girls suggested. In the end, they all agreed moth balls would be best. Patty got her mom to buy some after school. They spent the next morning peacefully wrapping the balls in wire and hanging them from the tree, until our classroom smelled like the inside of my grandmother’s closet.

When we were ready to start adding the shredded paper details, Agnes and the horse loving girls said they wanted a life-size horse next to the cherry tree, a white mare with a long paper mane, placidly grazing on paper grass and flowers. “You and your dumb horses,” the mean girls said. Veronica Lachsdorff, who was the meanest of the mean girls and therefore their leader, said, “Equestrianism is so third grade.” Boys across the coolness spectrum agreed that horses were dumb, and Mike said a white mare would be historically inaccurate.

“I’m not sure I could shred enough for a horse,” Janice said. “My lips are already sore from the waistcoat and the leaves.” We all stared at her. None of us had considered asking her how she felt about it. I wished I could say we were sorry we hadn’t thought of her, but that would be uncool, and I wasn’t the kind of kid who could afford to say something uncool. My mom was going through a trying to turn her life around phase, but these kids had known me all my life. They still remembered when I was the boy with too small shoes who cut his own hair with a blunt pair of scissors, the one who stared at their pixie stick and little bags of chips and Wonder bread sandwiches with such longing they started calling me Hungry Boy. Too many uncool statements and I’d be Hungry Boy again, demoted back down to bottom feeder.

The rest of the week we glued shredded paper to our creation: pink, glittery paper for the moth ball cherries, white natural fiber paper from the organic grocery store for Washington’s wig, graphite paper for the axe. If we kept up the pace, we could finish the project in just enough time for the President’s Day assembly and art contest.

But then it happened.

Ms. Orlich marched into the classroom on a rainy Monday morning, her hair pasted against her forehead. She threw her teacher’s bag across the room where it landed with a wet smack against the wall. “That’s it. I can’t take it anymore. No more art for the rest of the week.”

The janitor had dumped her over the weekend, or maybe she had dumped him and was now acting like she was the one who had been dumped. Mike’s aunt was always doing that, according to his mom. Either way, Ms. Orlich was a wreck, and hell bent on taking her heartbreak out on us.

She replaced art with math, and when I say math, I mean word problems. She gave us a pop spelling quiz with words like exasperate and conundrum. She dug up an ancient reel to reel camera out of the AV room and forced us to watch a black and white film called The Coming Miracle of Adolescence. George Washington slouched in front of the cherry tree, half clothed, his face unfinished. Many of the moth ball cherries were still an exposed, crystalline white, and their smell made me dizzy. Janice had finished shredding the paper we needed for the project, but it didn’t matter. Ms. Orlich never left, not even to go to the bathroom. And if we got anywhere near the sculpture, a gluestick surreptitiously in hand, Ms. Orlich let out the dreaded battle cry: Detention! From experience, we knew reasoning with her was futile.

Ms. Orlich’s mood was at its worst on Valentine’s Day, which she renamed Word Problem Day. She read the first word problem of the day out loud.

“Minnie has 16 green marbles, 22 blue marbles, 106 rainbow colored marbles, and 27 clear marbles. She gives six blue marbles to her best friend and loses 53 rainbow colored marbles because Minnie isn’t very good at taking care of her things. Her sister steals 61 marbles, but none of the clear ones because of course she wouldn’t take the boring ones. How many marbles does Minnie have left and how many of them are the crappy clear ones? Will she lose her marbles completely because her sister stole more important things, like husbands, forcing Minnie to start an affair with someone she was too good for in the first place and now, of course, he dumped her? What’s the answer, children? Tell me, what’s the answer?”

Kenny raised his hand. “51 marbles and 27 of them are clear?”

Ms. Orlich started weeping. Mascara ran down her cheeks like tire tracks. “Finish the worksheet on your own children,” she said, and put her head down on the desk.

Ms. Orlich was so distracted by her misery we probably could have snuck a trip or two to Washington to finish his face or glue on his shoes. But we felt sorry for Ms. Orlich. She wasn’t the world’s best teacher, but she was the only teacher we had.

We decided to send the janitor a note in Ms. Orlich’s name, so he’d start loving her again. Patty said Agnes should write it because she had the best handwriting, but she probably just said that to piss off Veronica Lachsdorff. By the look on Veronica’s face, I’m guessing it worked.

Agnes wrote:

Baby,
I mis u. Pls. come back 2 me.
Luv,
Ms. Orlich

“Oh my god, you can’t write Ms. Orlich. That is so lame.” Veronica hissed. For once, we all agreed with her. Agnes crossed out Ms. Orlich and wrote you know who and Patty and Mike slipped the note into the janitor’s dust pan during lunch. When we got back to class, I expected the janitor to burst through the door at any minute with a heart-shaped box of chocolates and a dozen roses. Ms. Orlich would fall into his arms and excuse herself from the classroom, and we would finish up George Washington Chops Down the Cherry Tree faster than you could say mint chocolate chip, rainbow sherbet, rocky road, and bubble gum ice cream.

But he never came. The President’s Day assembly was tomorrow. We were doomed. The next morning, Ms. Orlich told us we had to have a little talk. “My actions yesterday were unprofessional. Do you know what unprofessional means?” “The opposite of professional?” said Kenny.

“Someone smart, like the professor on Gilligan’s Island?” said Agnes.

Veronica Lachsdorff rolled her eyes. “Uh, if he’s so smart, why can’t he just fix a hole in a boat?”

“Never mind, children. The important thing is I shouldn’t have cried in front of you, and I’m sorry. I know you all worked very hard on George Washington. You’re free to spend the rest of the morning finishing the project.”

Oh, joy of joys!

Donning ourselves with glue sticks, we went to work, united for a single cause, and finished the sculpture with ten minutes to spare.

But things went wrong from there.

On the way to the auditorium, Zach and Kenny dropped the cherry tree, and half the moth ball cherries fell off and rolled out into the yard. We’d somehow given our young George Washington a diabolical smile, and the tree, now lopsided from the fall, made it look like it was cowering in front of a bullying founding father, scourge of fruit trees everywhere, a deranged lunatic in the orchard, relishing the sound of splintering wood.

The first prize went to Mrs. Mason’s third grade class for their portrait of Lincoln, made entirely of lentils and lakeside debris they gathered from a Save Our Lakes lakeside debris gathering field trip. Our George Washington Chops Down the Cherry Tree sculpture got an honorary ribbon of participation, but we were old enough to know they only handed these out because no one likes to see losers cry.

We had snow days for the rest of the week. I sat with my mom while she watched her soaps. A cigarette dangled from her lips while she drank a Jim Beam and coke, I would not begrudge her because turning your life around is hard. I kept thinking about Janice over at her house on Madison Court.

Had she ever seen snow like this before? Probably not.

Trevor Anderson used to live in Janice’s house. Trevor was a grade below me at school. One day he got a headache, and it got worse, and worse, and worse, and then he died. “We’re very sorry to inform you Trevor Anderson passed away last night from a Meningitis infection,” the principal told us over the intercom at school. “If you need to talk to someone, please come by the school nurse’s station.” They did not mention our school nurse, Mrs. Croughty, made rattle snakes seem nice.

Did Janice know she was sleeping in the bedroom of a dead kid?

Janice’s family hadn’t taken Trevor’s basketball hoop off the garage. Maybe they planned to take down the hoop in the Spring, or maybe they would leave it there just because.

I couldn’t imagine Janice playing basketball. I’d already seen her play four square, so I knew balls weren’t her thing. But that’s ok. Balls aren’t my thing either.

On our first day back at school, Ms. Orlich came ten minutes late to class. I could hear her laughing in the hallway before she walked into the room. “Wait one second, Earl,” she said.

“Good morning class.” Ms. Orlich was beaming. “I’m going to be in meetings all week, so you’ll be on your own. Here’s the lesson plan and a stack of copies. Mike, you’re in charge.” She handed him a box of chalk.

The janitor peeked into the classroom and waved. “Coming Earl.” She turned around. For some reason, I noticed there was a run in her stocking. “Be good, children,” she said, and left.

“You guys want to see what I worked on during the snow days?” Janice folded a piece of silver glitter paper, which she fed slowly into the shredder, repeatedly adjusting the setting with nods and tongue swipes. She pulled the paper out of her mouth as though it were as fragile as a butterfly’s wing. It was a snow flake, as intricate as real ones look under a microscope. “I shredded a whole box of them when my parents were at work.” (The answer to our question, Do your parents know? was, No way.) “I thought we could work on a snow scene with a shredded paper snowman and maybe a snow angel with shredded paper wings.”

Someone was going to have to tell her snow angels weren’t actual angels. They probably don’t learn that in Arizona.

Veronica Lachsdorff groaned. “Not more shredded paper.”

“Yeah, shredded paper is boring,” Kenny said. (Kenny was in love with Veronica, which I couldn’t understand. She was pretty, I guess. But way too mean.) “Can’t your shredder shred anything else?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never tried.”

“Seriously?” Veronica said.

“I guess I could see if it can.”

We decided Janice should shred a popsicle stick left over from a frontier village art project we built before we became shredded paper obsessed. Janice lifted the stick above the shredder and froze. “I’m too scared.”

My heart was pounding. Before he left, I used to help my dad in his woodworking workshop. He made bird feeders and bird houses and wooden boxes where he burned Pirate’s Booty or A Man’s Treasures across the top with a wood burning pen. He never really used any of the things he made. I think he just liked making them. My mom threw them all out after he ran out on us. But I could handle wood and would know what to do if her shredder jammed up. Let me do it, I wanted to shout. But before I could say anything, Zach grabbed the stick. The shredder sucked it out of his hands, making a sound exactly like one of my dad’s old saws. Eight long toothpick-sized slivers of wood lay on the ground.

“Awesome,” Zach said.

Janice smiled. “I didn’t feel a thing.”

“What else can it shred?” Ed Lee asked, an Orc-like gleam in his eyes.

But Mike put on the brakes. “We need to stick with the lesson plans.” Ms. Orlich was right to put him in charge.

For our English lesson, we took turns reading The Red Pony out loud. Agnes and the horse-loving girls became hysterical when the buzzard ate the pony’s eye. “Gabilan, no! Gabilan!”

“Why is this book called The Red Pony when the pony dies in chapter one?” Veronica said. She had a point.

Ed Lee said, “Finally a book where a boy beats a fucking bird to death.”

As the week went on, it became clear Mike was remarkably good at keeping the class in order. Some of the Mormon girls wanted to tell on Ms. Orlich because they didn’t approve. Some of the mean girls wanted to turn her in just to be mean. Who knew what was lurking in the hearts of the quiet kids. But Mike got Patty to make her mom buy each girl a magazine if they promised not to tell. They took two orders for Cosmo, one order for In Style, six orders for Teen Beat, all made by Mormon girls mean or otherwise, and four orders for Horse Fancy and I Heart Ponies. As for the rest of us, Mike promised daily shredding on his terms. Before she started teaching the fifth grade, Ms. Orlich used to teach Kindergarten. She still soft spot for chubby crayons and started each class with a ten-minute sharing circle, which we found very embarrassing.

“Sharing circle will now be shredding circle,” Mike said. “Each person can bring something from home and Janice will shred it for them. After that we continue with the day’s lesson, no complaints.”

Janice smiled and nodded, like she hadn’t noticed Mike didn’t bother to ask if this was ok with her.

And so the morning shredding circles started.

Kenny had her shred a Macy’s card he found on the bus that had belonged to a woman named Hildegard H. Kallis, which he kept because he thought that was the world’s weirdest name. Patty had her shred her report card because even though her mom was a push over, she still wanted Patty to get perfect grades, and she didn’t. One of the mean Mormon girls had her shred a picture of Robert Smith from The Cure she found in a copy of Teen Beat magazine which she now regretted asking for because Robert Smith was obviously of the devil and Ensign was good enough for her, thank you very much. Mike had her shred a Jose Canseco rookie card because he was a Giants fan and his older brother was an A’s fan and he wanted to teach him a lesson and didn’t give a rat’s ass that the card was valuable. “Mark McGuire is next,” he said. Veronica Lachsdorff had Janice shred a My Little Pony to piss off Agnes and the other horse lovers, its pieces laying on the ground like mint green entrails. Ed Lee had her shred a picture of every member of the Fellowship of the Ring, because Orcs are so much more bad ass than men, and dwarves, and hobbits, and elves, and stinking wizards.

The shredding was hard on Janice. I saw her wince when she shred the Macy’s card, a small drop of blood beading up on her upper lip. She got paler as the week went on. I probably should have protected her, or maybe told on Ms. Orlich myself to put a stop to things. In grade school, and maybe in life, normal is king and blockheads rule. Janice was different. But she wasn’t sticking up for herself.  She just shred whatever they wanted, no questions asked, letting them treat her like a rag doll, and I resented her for it. Did she want to be liked that much?

I also didn’t tell because I wanted her to shred something for me.

It was a plain wooden cross with my name burnt across the middle with a wood burning pen. My father left it on my bed the night he left. I never understood why he did. We never went to church and he’d never made a cross before. I’d kept the cross in my sock drawer for two years. Now it was time to shred it.

“Are you kidding?” said the mean Mormon girl who hated Robert Smith. “You can’t shred the cross.”

“He’s always been a freak,” said Veronica. “Stupid Hungry Boy,” said her shadow, Kenny.

The kids glared at me, half of them shaking their heads, and I realized I’d been lying to myself. I wasn’t an in-between boy; I never had been. I was still a lowly bottom feeder, small fry lingering in the sea grass, only now the bigger fish were focusing on more interesting

prey. Even bullies get bored I guess. “It was just something laying around my house I didn’t need. But fine, I’ll take it back.” I was about to put the cross back into my bag, when Janice grabbed it. She shred it without a word, the two sides like a toy gun made for children in a poor country. Janice gave me a look like, Me and you we’re going to get out of this. Life will take us other places. There was sawdust on her chin.

“Oh great. What other freaky thing is going to happen now?” asked Veronica. As though that were his cue, Zach reached into his backpack and pulled out a translucent plastic case with a hamster asleep in the corner. “It’s Sniffles shredding time.” Ed Lee grinned, his teeth like jagged rocks. “Now you’re talking.”

“No.” Janice cupped his hand over her mouth. “No!” She ran out of the room, slamming the door behind her. Mike sent Patty after her.

Agnes and the horse loving girls and a handful of mean girls and something else entirely Mormon girls were weeping and pleading with Mike. “Don’t let him do it, don’t let him do it. We can’t shred something alive, not something that cute.”

“You don’t understand. This hamster is a total dick. Look.” Zach put his hand in the carrier and the sleeping hamster woke up and bit his finger. “See?” He smeared the blood across his forehead, his eyes wild.

“You can’t do. Don’t let him do it, King David, don’t let him,” begged the Mormon girls. They’d started calling him King David last Thursday afternoon and the name had stuck, at least with them.

“It wouldn’t be so bad if my little sister wasn’t always putting her fingers in the cage and whining when the fucker bites them,” He shook the carrier. “Why does Sniffles hate me mom? Why does he hate me?” Sniffles stared at us with his little black eyes like, What? Widdle ol’ me? “I’m telling you, this hamster has to die.”

I found it painful to watch Zach go from cool kid to grade school psycho with no awareness of how much this would cost. Did he have shredder fever, or had he always been like this only none of us could see it? I don’t know. But it made me realize I had nothing left to lose.

“No!” I slammed my fist against Ms. Orlich’s desk. “If you make Janice shred the hamster, I’ll tell. Do you understand? I’ll tell, and all this will end. Don’t think that I won’t.”

Patty walked in, her hand on Janice’s shoulder

Mike looked at Janice. He looked at me. “No one is shredding Sniffles,” he said. Ed Lee threw up his hands. “What? Now we’re listening to Hungry Boy?”

“Zach, you and Ed are excused to go to the bathroom and deal with the hamster as you see fit.”

“Now you’re talking,” Zach said. Ed let out a whoop that sounded more animal than human.

Mike said Janice was to shred no living creature, although the matter would be re- addressed in the spring when grasshoppers and tadpoles were in plentiful supply.

“King David has spoken. Blessed be the word.”

Janice nodded, her eyes still swollen, grateful she’d at least been spared a day.

“I still have something to shred. If that’s ok.” Kenny pulled a photograph out of his backpack, one of those really old kind printed on metal. The boy in the photograph didn’t look much older than we were. He was wearing a uniform and holding a rifle at his side that was almost as big as he was. Kenny said the picture was of his great great grandfather, a Confederate soldier in the Civil War. We asked him if he was sure he wanted to shred a family heirloom like that, but he just shrugged, “My mom says everyone knows he was an asshole. Besides, we haven’t shred anything metal yet.”

Janice took the photograph, relieved that a shredding first for the day was tin, not flesh. She shred it halfway through with ease, and then there was this sound; a sound like a garbage disposal makes when you’re grinding up bones and forgot to turn on the water. “Get it out,” Janice cried. The photograph was stuck. “Get it out, get it out, get it out!” Blood was pouring down her chin. Half of the girls were crying hysterically and a few of the boys were punching the wall like they couldn’t figure out what else to do. I held Janice down on one side and Patty held her down on the other and Mike pulled, and pulled, and pulled. Finally, the picture came free. But the damage had already been done.

The rest all happened in a rush. Janice was whisked off in an ambulance, the front of her dress soaked with blood. The principal found Ms. Orlich in the utility closet with the janitor’s head between her legs and fired her. The whole class was suspended for the rest of the week. The freedom we’d known had come to an end.

When I got home, I found a note from my mom on the kitchen table. Had to leave town for a job, back on Saturday. She left a case of Cup O’ Noodles on the counter, a mix of three flavors: beef, spicy seafood, and lime shrimp. I hoped what she wrote was true and she wasn’t out on a bender, her life not turned around one bit. But if she were, she probably wouldn’t have left the soup.

I heated up a lime shrimp Cup O’ Noodles in the microwave and switched on the television. I watched a documentary about a factory in China where it’s Christmas all year round. Saxophone playing elves, shimmying plastic Christmas trees singing Jingle Bell Rock, Rudolph stuffed animals with blinking noses. That’s all they make every month of the year, their lungs full of fake snow, the factory floor covered in red flocking spray from the suit of millions of cheap plastic Santas they didn’t understand. Factories like this existed in the world. But none of the factory countries, not China, not Vietnam, not India, not Mexico, not Bangladesh, not even watch making countries like Switzerland, made tiny replacement shredder blades for the world tiniest paper shredder.

I took a bite of the Cup o’ Noodle, the lime flavoring too bitter for my taste. Poor Janice. I wished there was some way I could save her.

Janice didn’t come back to school for another six weeks. A lot had changed by the time she did. Our new teacher, Mr. Reavis, was an ex-army sergeant who believed it was a sin to use more than ten gallons of water to bathe. He’d drawn the ten-gallon mark on the inside of his bathtub in permanent marker. When his sons took a bath, Mr. Reavis checked the mark. If they’d gone over by as little as a half an inch he whacked them upside the head. We knew Mr Reavis wasn’t supposed to whack his sons upside the head, but we didn’t tell anyone because this was the man who had the power to say recess, yay or nay.

Patty and Mike we’re going together; Veronica Lachsdorff claimed a friend of her cousin had seen them at a party two towns over, doing it on a pool table. Zach and Ed Lee had been expelled for flushing lit cherry bombs down the toilet, which burst the pipes and flooded the teacher’s room and the cafeteria. Crocuses and daffodils were forcing their way through the slowly thawing earth.

When Janice came back, it was like the shredding had never happened. She sat in the back of the room, her shoulders slumped like a sad bear, with the kids whose names no one seems to know, the extras with the pixelated faces. She looked the same. The shredder mark was still above her lip unchanged. But something about her was different. I just couldn’t put my finger on what it was.

Did the shredder still work?

I wanted to know if she was ok. But I didn’t know how to talk to her.

One day, about ten days after she’d come back to school, I ran into Janice alone in the hallway. I was out on a hall pass to go to the bathroom and she was coming late to school with a note from her dad, saying she’d been to the dentist.

This is it, I thought. It’s now or never. “Does it still work?”

Janice blinked at me. “What?”

“You know.”

“Why do you care?” “Does it?”

“Yes.”

“Then prove it.”

She took her father’s note and fed it into the shredder. But she didn’t open her mouth, so the paper stayed trapped inside. When the shredder was done, she spit the note into my hand where it landed with a splat, like an oversized spit wad.

“Happy now?”

She marched off to the inevitable detention she’d get from Mr. Reavis now that she had destroyed the note from her father.

I wish I could do it all over again.

If I could, I’d say, I’m sorry we broke your shredder. But I’m mostly sorry you got hurt.

And she’d say, That’s alright. The shredder fine, by the way. And I’d say, I think you’re special.

And Janice would say, You do? And I’d say, Yeah.

And then we’d kiss, and her lips would taste like cake, and my face would be that close to danger.

________

Rebeccah Von Schlieffen is originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, but has lived in Berlin, Germany since 1999. She’s had work published in Sixfold and Verdad under her maiden name, Rebeccah Dean, and is currently working on a collection of short stories and a novel. You can find out more about Rebeccah at rebeccahvonschlieffen.com