Sore ass aside I learned several things from my encounter with the elementary school principal that I didn’t know before.
1) Old fat bald guys can be deceptively strong when they are wielding paddles.
2) You are supposed to lie.
3) My monster was getting the better of me.

Getting the better of me, for lack of a better word did have one advantage that I had not before noticed. Where most little boys would have been frightened by such a notion my monster had already taken from me the capacity to truly be afraid. Instead, I was filled with a new resolve; if I couldn’t beat it by forcing myself to be a normal little boy I was going to beat it at its own game.

All of the residual feeling that I had I willingly shut down. I took all of the little things that made me a person and I killed them. In a sense I murdered who I was or the man I might have grown up to be in order to have the strength to subdue the monstrosity that was growing inside of me.

My parents noticed the drastic changes in me as well and on several occasions my dad tried to sit me down for a hear to heart. Those were all one sided conversations. Although I am capable of regretting the fact that I made them worry about me on the most superficial level beyond that I’ll always know that I did what I had to do.

It wasn’t just my parents that noticed that I was becoming a soulless shell. I also had the misfortune of being targeted by my school guidance counselor, Ms. Duval. She was an eccentric scarecrow of a woman. Tall, bony, toe headed, and unnervingly chipper. I mean, she wasn’t all that bad I suppose, if by not bad I mean she got dropped off by an alien culture sometime during Woodstock.

When I got called into her office the monster spoke to me for the first time. “They’re on to you now Johnny. They know what you’re doing and it’s scaring them.”

For all of my newfound heartless efficiency I had to agree. The monster’s voice wasn’t entirely unlike my own save being aged a few years. For all of the raging hunger that it filtered through my psyche the sensation that I got then was not at all what I expected. It spoke very calmly.

“What should I do?” I asked.

“There’s only one thing that you can do. Since neither of us want to spend any time in an institution, or worse, you have to remember rule number one.”

“What’s rule number one?”

“I think you know.” My monster said.

The realization hit me all at once as I figured out what it was talking about. It was not being so bold as to make a rule that I had to follow because it said so it was making a rule to ensure our mutual survival. “You are supposed to lie.” I said.

posted on Feb 5, 2008 7:19 AM ()

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