Needle, Meet Haystack

Sometimes, there are things that we just need to talk about, to get them off of our minds, and to help us get over them. Today, I’d like to share one of those things with you. It’s rather personal, and has taken me years to even begin to cope with.

Now, before we begin this story, it should be noted that it takes place a while back, so it won’t be so much current-me you’re talking to, but rather Li’l Andy, with his awkward bowl cut and glasses:

It was the beginning of the third grade. I was in a new class with a bunch of my friends, and was excited for the new year to come. But the thing that I was the most excited for was the soft-serve ice cream machines that the school cafeteria had picked up. Sure, the cafeteria had hot dogs that you could literally bounce off the ground like a rubber ball, and pizza that was pizza in name only, but this was real, honest-to-gosh ice cream.

The first week that they had the machine up, they had one flavor: chocolate. As that was one of my favorite flavors, I was so excited that I could barely eat lunch. So I went up and ordered one.

I then proceeded to wolf it down with the unbridled joy that can only be seen in a child eating ice cream at school.

Unfortunately, something was wrong. As I discovered much later, there were two different ice cream mixes used each day. And on that day, though I had though I had asked for chocolate, I instead got the coffee flavor. And for my delicate, 8-year-old constitution, coffee was not something I could handle. And so…

I barfed.

From that moment on, I made an executive decision:

That promise was later amended to “No more ice cream at school” when my mom brought home some Ben & Jerry’s the next day. And it was amended again to “No more ice cream at school when it’s chocolate” when a friend let me try some of his vanilla, which was quite good.

This served me well until a couple months later, when my class won a school-wide contest for getting magazine subscriptions or reading chapter books or coloring within the lines or something. Our teacher announced the prize to the class…

Everyone was thrilled.

Except for me. Because I realized that our coupons were only good for one day: chocolate ice cream day. So, during social studies study time when we were going over the state capitals in New England or something, I went up to my teacher to explain the situation.

I asked her to either get me a different coupon or give it to someone else, since I didn’t want it. When she asked me why, I told her that it had made me throw up, and I didn’t care to repeat the experience. She smiled and said that it would be fine, and I returned to my seat to learn that the capital of New York is Albany, not New York City like a lot of people think.

The next day, she was about to hand out the coupons to the class. “Everyone gets a coupon,” she said. “Except for Andrew. He doesn’t want one…”

I was horrified. The entire class laughed and pointed at me.

My shame and fear slowly turned to rage and thoughts of vengeance. How could my own teacher do this to me? My hatred burned with the intensity of a thousand bajillion exploding volcanoes. I began to pray that she would get fired and wouldn’t be my teacher anymore.

At lunch, one of my classmates took pity on me and gave me his bag of carrot sticks. “This way, you’ve got something,” he suggested. I stared down at the bag, trying to justify the trade-off. I couldn’t.

As I began to take the carrot sticks out of the bag, their orange forms mocked me. It was almost as if they were saying, “You chose healthy food? What are you, an idiot?”

A few weeks later, the principal came into our classroom and announced that our teacher was going to be leaving. She cried a bit, said a few things to us that I don’t remember, and left as a new teacher came into the class and took over.

My plan had worked! Someone had listened! She was gone, and would never again tease me in front of the class!

Looking back on it all, I still feel a bit responsible, even though I realize that I did nothing that would have directly lead to my original third grade teacher leaving. Heck, I still don’t know why she left. But every time I look at coffee ice cream (I can keep it down now), I wonder what would have happened if I’d been served chocolate instead…

Apologies to Allie of the far superior Hyperbole and a Half for biting her style a bit on today’s post.