Chapter 4- Old Teachers and Reminiscing

A week later, Mom and I were at Walmart, looking for school supplies. It all went well, all up until I decided to go and look at CDs.      

I went to the rock/alternative music CDs and looked around for the new Green Day CD. I found it and picked it up, then turned it over to the back side so I could look at the songs. It looked pretty good, so I took it so I could ask if Mom could buy it for me. As I was walking back to my mom’s cart, I saw her talking to someone that looked so familiar, it was frightening. She was big and fat, with a smushed-in nose and a disfidured mouth that looked like it was falling off when she laughed. I couldn’t believe I was looking at her.                           

It was my old teacher, Mrs. Dallion.                              

“Hello there, Austin!” she said to me. She tried to have a big smile on her face, but it just looked like she was about to sneeze. I wanted to grab that box of tissues that’s ten feet away from my right hand and chuck it at her face.        

My mom was looking at me like she was expecting me to answer her. I dind’t know what to say, though. I hated her; she sent me to the principal’s office three times because she thought I was punching kids. The problem: I was the one that was getting punched.    

I ended up just saying “Hi,” and walking away, then watched them and came back when Mrs. Dallion left. “What was that all about?” I asked my mom, pointing to the ugly lady at the checkout counter.

“We were talking about a couple of things that happened in kindergarten that I never heard about. Austin, why were you punching kids? You know that’s not right!”                             

All I could do was sigh. I love my mom, but she always takes someone else’s side. She never believes me when I say that it’s someone else’s fault.                   

“Austin, I’m expecting an answer,” she said, and gave me that I’m-really-disappointed-in-you face.  

“Mom! I really didn’t do anything! Why don’t you believe me!?”       

“Why aren’t you telling me? Do you honestly think that I would punish you for something that you did years ago? That’d just be really stupid!” She looked fed up with this conversation.       

“Because I didn’t do anything. She just favored everyone else except me. Can you just believe me?”  

She sighed. “Fine. Let’s pay and get out of here.” She noticed the CD in my hand and said I could have that too if I really wanted it. I guess she was just fed up with arguing with me for the day, because when we got home, she went straight to bed after taking a couple of headache pills.

It was getting sort of late, so I took a shower, put some pajamas on, and went to bed. No matter how much I tried to sleep, though, I couldn’t. All that I could think about was why own mother didn’t trust me. It seemed kind of sad to think about, because ever since I can remember, my mom’s always said that your heart always knows what’s right. Well since her heart helped create my heart, why does she trust everyone else’s heart?  Did I do something wrong to earn her distrust? Did I leave the house one too many times? I had to figure it out.

By the time that the clock struck 2 in the morning, I gave up on sleep and opened my notebook. I flipped through all of my poems, drawings, and stories, and found my favorite thing in the notebook. It was a drawing of me that Alex made last year. I was listening to music with headphones and writing in the very notebook that I was looking at right at this moment. Next to the drawing was the picture that she looked off of, and everything seemed to completely match up between the two images. The hills of bags under my eyes on my face, the frown that used to always be hanging around me like a little lost puppy, even my bangs that I dyed blue without my mother’s permission and later got grounded for. My hoodie covered the top of my face, making my eyes look like dark pools of blue and silver. The page showing on my notebook was a drawing that I made of a raven sitting on a tree, crowing at the full moon. Alex even got that onto her drawing, making it look exactly like the original picture.

Like most of the works in my notebook, this picture had a story behind it. That day, I had lost my dad to prison and I felt completely hopeless. Alex and I had never talked, but she was working on her drawing skills and saw me feeling bad. Without me knowing, she snapped a picture of me, collecting every little bit of sorrow and sadness inside of me in that one single shot. She took three months to draw it for me and gave it to me as a Christmas present that year. After Christmas vacation, we started talking and soon became best friends. We’ve been inseparable ever since.

I didn’t realize that I was crying until a tear fell onto my hand. It was warm for a split second, until it hit the coldness of the air and began to feel frigid. I got up and wiped the dust from my old mirror to see a red-faced, snot-running version of me. Tears were streaming down my cheeks, causing me to look like I had just stuck my face in a bowl of water.  I reminded myself of some of those circus clowns, painting smiles on their faces while all they really are couldn’t amount to anything. They had to build up some kind of mask just so they could get laughed at over and over again instead of being forever ignored.

I guess that feeling pain and sadness is better than feeling nothing.

I decided to try sleeping again, and slowly fell into a deep sleep consisting of no dreams.