The Rope

“Thomas!  Really?  A wet bed? You’re twelve!” Thomas’ mother shouted from his room.

“I...uh spilled some water.  Last night it was dark, and I tripped on my bed post after I got a glass. I’m...uh... going to school now.” 

Thomas sprinted out of the apartment before any more questions exposed his secret and upset his mother.  He didn’t spill any water on his bed.  In fact, he hated drinking water; it didn’t taste good like soda or Kool-Aid.  This made the wet bed harder to explain.  Even worse, it was the third night that his bed was wet when he woke.  This mystery could not be easily solved, so Thomas pushed it out of his mind and walked to school.

Along the route to school, Thomas passed an old abandoned service station guarded by a grey chained-linked fence.  It sat along the town’s main route and used to be popular decades ago.  Now, a hollow plaster building, rusted metal gas pumps and a partial neon sign reading “kins” remain.  The rumor was that the owner’s wife left him many years ago.  The owner never remarried, and had no children to take over the station after he died.  Thomas felt haunted by the building, as if the building itself wanted him to know more of the story.  This frightened him, so he always rushed passed the service station and on to school.       

Thomas entered the school building.  It smelled like wet paint and dirty socks. He hated school.  Most of the time he didn’t understand the subjects, and even worse, the teachers didn’t seem to care.  In fact, once, in pre-algebra, Thomas asked Mr. Modstiff, for help with his math work.  

“Thomas, I gave the lesson already and the answers are in the back of the book.  Check your own work,” Mr. Modstiff said.  He then raised his coffee to his lips and buried his grey, hairy, wrinkled head in a black and white newspaper.  Now granted, Thomas knew he could have paid better attention to the lesson, but the lessons seemed to be taught in a different language.

“If you take the numerator and plug it in to the sumcubchous murinthonarib you will receive the sum of zuchibob.”  This was what math sounded like.  Thomas knew that math was important and necessary for life.  Planes flew on math, cars drove on math and rockets roared into space on math; but just like a deaf person who has thoughts in his mind without the ability to voice them, Thomas understood math’s concepts but did not understand how to do specific calculations to demonstrate his understanding.        

Not all the teachers operated as dryly as Mr. Modstiff.  Miss Heirfull taught Social Studies.  She always had an odor somewhere between freshly cut grass and an old moth-balled sweater.  Thomas thought she looked like the photos the police officers would bring in for their “Say No to Drugs” classes.  The policemen would show a photo of a normal, pretty lady the first time she got arrested for drugs. Then they would show a photo of the same lady only three years after the first arrest in which the same lady seemed 30 years older.  The police did this to demonstrate how fast drugs made a normal person look ugly.  Thomas thought Miss Heirfull looked like the last photo.          

“How do you feel right now?” she would ask Thomas during class.

“Uh…fine?” Thomas would say.

“Fine?  Exactly!  And society thought the same thing in the time after World War II,” it was here that she arched her back, puffed her chest out like a rooster about to crow addressing the rest of the class. “However, inspired people knew that daily life was phony and began uniting to write about the vacuum they knew sucked the life out of the average American who really wanted to break free from the burdensome rules that strapped them down.”  Now she would stand stiff with her arms at her sides, as if Sergeant Pepper was about to inspect her.  “Then,” she continued slowly raising hands palms up, “in the nineteen sixties, these brave souls began to speak loudly from the corners of the streets in San Francisco,” her fists now pumped in the air., “They broke free, crushed restraints, and set the world on fire.” Here she turned and made eye contact with Thomas.  “Thomas, do you want to be fine, or do you want to be free?”

“I… don’t know,” Thomas would say, but he really meant I don’t care.  At least people using vacuums to light San Francisco on fire entertained Thomas more than a Math lesson.  But still, how did knowing anything about other people’s lives have anything to do with Thomas?  Social Studies also seemed to be in a different language. 

Mrs. Duhme taught literature, and Thomas thought that she would be just that: his doom. It wasn’t because she was mean, but because she seemed honest, and Thomas felt she would not just give him a passing grade like all the other teachers had.  Literature class became an escape from the other subjects.  Thomas loved stories.  The only problem was that Thomas could not read well.  When he became stuck on a word or phrase, Thomas’ mind kept telling the story without reading the actual book.  And of course, when test time came, none of the plots and characters from Thomas’ mind were on the answer sheets.  One time, Thomas made up a report about a book which he had taken from the class book list.  Thomas thought that everybody probably read at his same speed, and therefore, Mrs. Duhme probably had not read every book on the book list.  When she asked if anybody else in the class thought that The Adventures of Huck Finn was a story about a boy and his pet shark, Thomas figured out that she had probably read the book before. 

Thomas also liked science class; however, he could never manipulate science like he could the stories in literature class.  Science was exact.  If you took two chemicals and added them together, the same reaction occurred every time.  Mr. Bickerton taught the class and he explained that science is the process of finding repeatable, provable facts.  If it could not be repeated it could not be proven and therefore was not a fact.  Thomas formed his own theory stating that school grinded against his soul and made him more miserable inside; therefore, it was a fact that school was bad.  Nobody ever gave in to this theory.  Oh well, it was time to eat anyway.

The lunchroom always stank like milk that had been left out for days.  It was colored a light caramel brown from wall to wall, but it used to be white at one time, almost the same way an apple turns from white to brown after it is cut and left out in the air.  Thomas, sitting alone, grabbed his warm brown lunch sack, reached inside, and … tuna.   

“Hey Thomas,” shouted a voice as Thomas starred at his room temperature tuna.  It was Frank.  Frank attended the church that Thomas occasionally attended with his mother.  Church.  That seemed to be more confusing than math.  One moment God loved everyone and everything, the next moment Thomas felt his very breath fuelled the flames of eternal punishment.  At least with math, the answer was always the same.