The Wounded Poet

Chapter 7: Pain

 Samantha became very interested in lots of things. She became better at baseball and enjoyed throwing the ball around. She heard Avril Lavigne's song "Complicated" and so Erin bought the song on iTunes and played it over and over because Samantha liked it so much. And those interests usually satisfy curiosity, which opens up undiscovered doors. But there lay a red door. A door far away in Samantha's mind. A door so far and faded that Samantha completely forgot about it. But because you forget something doesn't mean that it's still there.

It was a normal day in San Francisco. The birds were tuned out by the chirps of car horns and the tweets of pedestrians. At school, the normal chatter of school kids continued. I was not there, as I had a doctor's appointment at the time. A doctor's appointment made me oblivious to the change of time.

"Alright, question number five!" Mrs. Zauner, our second grade teacher, announced. "Who can tell me their answer?"

Samantha's hand naturally lifted itself up.

"Samantha?" Mrs. Zauner said. "Can you tell us the answer?"

With a calm, innate, but elementary school appropriate voice, Samantha provided her answer.

"Seven!" Samantha answered confidently.

All of a sudden, a shockwave took Samantha by surprise. It was an earthquake of words, and a presence only she could sense. Samantha's face turned bright red as if a field of shy roses were forced into blooming. A tsunami rocked the earth, and the wolves were cackling at Samantha's lack of fastidious trait. The clock was pointing at her with its hands, chuckling with the posters on the wall. But no one felt this shockwave. Compared to how powerful the wave was, Samantha barely felt a thing. But there were the tsunamis of laughter and words.

"It's 12, dumb dumb!" a girl said from across the room. Then there was laughter.

The girl's name was Madison Kowalski. She had brown hair in long, straight strands. For a second grader, she was pretty fast. Faster than nearly every kid in the school. She had blue eyes too, but they were faded. The blue seemed to cry out of her eyes in little tiny droplets, and the hue flushed itself down her dark, bottomless pupils.

"Alright, class!" Mrs. Zauner said. "Let's settle down! We all make mistakes. But yes, Samantha, the answer was 12. I think you just missed the multiplication sign. You see that?"

Samantha nodded. Mrs. Zauner might've been trying to play diplomat between Samantha and the class, but it made her feel dumb. A multiplication sign is just a plus sign that has fallen over. Plus, this is content that is new to Samantha and the rest of the class. Maybe she was just a slow learner as a child. Maybe that fact alone inflated Samantha's ego, and it was suffocating the room. So the students pulled out their needles of laughter and burst that bubble. But now, the words will never escape their heads. Samantha would be seen as dumb and the class would remember that Samantha was the girl that once thought she was so smart and so important that she could confidently shout a sum instead of a product.

And now, Samantha became the outcast. When I got back, I had gotten weird looks from people. People chuckled when Samantha walked by. Maybe she told a sharp joke? But no, it was just the decline of my social standing and into the outcast bin for being good friends with a dumb girl. It was inevitable. You know how kids get those ideas about masculinity and femininity and how they can never ever integrate with one another? Yeah, that would've killed me too.

Samantha felt like she was alone in all these worlds. It was just a sense; not a thought, an idea, or an emotion. Just a simple string of wind blowing by her ear. I guess a second grader doesn't have a real secure sense of loneliness and how it can destroy someone. But she became excluded along with I, with the only other people she knew being two other friends she made at the beginning of the year and Madison. But she would know more and more people. People that would love her, and people that would hate her.