bARTknows

The second hand on the wall clock snapped quietly from one mark to the next. I stared at it, watching it tremble with every pause. "There's no way it can really be this slow." My disbelief was compounded by the sinking urge to leave the classroom I was sitting in and find my way back to my house where my father would surely be waiting for me. I needed a way out. I needed a car. Something made me feel this entire school day had dragged itself out entirely too much and I was never going to see him again. Quickly, I realized my ticket to happiness was hidden in my theatrical ability to feign sickness. Hadn't it worked all those times I'd wound up in the nurse's office with a frozen damp yellow sponge pressed to the part of my body that had fallen victim to injury at a particularly careless recess?

At lunch I teased my food around the plate, thinking about the time my dad showed up at my school in his '76 Chevy Malibu with a Knight Rider lunch box full of snacks that as he put it "my mom would not like me to eat." The memory of cheese puffs and chocolate to go with the fruit juice he'd filled the mini thermos with made the staleness of my elementary school lunch that much more unappealing. Slowly, the anxiety crept over me and I thought how badly I wanted to spend time with him.

In the bathrooms after lunch recess, I didn't think twice to laugh at the kid who always dropped his pants to the floor along with his spider man briefs, exposing his white boyish ass to the whole second grade. This daily ritual, which usually would have sent me reeling in a fit of laughter, just came and went on this day. The other kids ate it up. I washed my hands and went back into formation outside in the common area.

While most of the other kids went back to their classrooms, I went to what the school called a "special class for gifted and talented students." I remember two things about this class. One, the teacher's hands, hair, breath - well, lets just say the teacher en sum - smelled like old fish. She was old, short, very round, and fishy. I didn't like that too much. Two, the class was full of very strange kids and we were entirely partitioned off in our own room where we mostly learned about libraries, wrote research papers, and did logic problems. This was fun in a "get me the hell out of here" sort of way. [Yes, in second grade, I thought "get me the hell out of here" a lot.]

After seating myself and listening to the fishy teacher talk for five or ten minutes I raised my hand and with the utmost ambiguity, said, "My stomach hurts." When asked what was wrong with my stomach, I replied, "It just really hurts, and I need to go home." My intent was clear. I wanted to get the hell out. I threw in some watery eyes for added effect. Without batting a fishy eyelash, the teacher stood up and walked me to the nurses office.

In the office, I could smell the sterility of the room, a pungent odor of band-aid plastic mixed with Lysol burned into the nylon cot my face was pressed into as fake tears welled up from the depths of my anxious theatrical mind. "Please call my dad. He will come get me." The nurse wanted to know if I needed to go to the bathroom. "No, it hurts up in my stomach, I don't need to pee." I threw in a couple guttural groans that loosely resembled a cross between the sound of a frog croaking and a cat dying. That sealed the deal, I believe. I heard numbers getting punched on the nurse's phone. Then, a short conversation followed with the a terse "sit tight" meant for me confirmed my success.

Hours passed. Maybe it was minutes, but it felt like hours.

He smelled like stale cigarettes baked in body odor and ozone from all the welding he'd been doing at work. The engine turned over in his Malibu and we drifted out of the parking lot to the school. He asked me how I felt, and I told him that my stomach hurt again, and that I missed him. There was some concern in his voice, but moreso a tone of satisfaction. He didn't nag me or baby my the way a mother would at the news of her only baby boy getting a tummy ache. I hung my head out into the dry Texas heat blowing in through the passenger side window. Smiling, I was happy I had a dad who could leave work and spend the rest of his afternoon lounging around the house with me, his boy.

In hindsight, I think he was happy to have a son who faked stomach aches just to hang out with his old man.