I Drew a Monkey in a Math Book and Now I'm Married

IV - Risks

As I sat there quietly and curiously wondering if it was possible that Jennie was in possession of the book I had vandalized a year prior, I caught the look in her eyes. Her face may have still been half directed to the math book, but her eyes shifted to me and a coy smile crept across her face. I think it was the first real time I looked into her eyes or seen her smile. She had a beautiful smile. 

"It's yours." she said through a playfully condemning smirk. Her face communicated more than her words. The subtle smile told me what I really wanted to know. She knew my secret. She knew what I had been up to a year before. She indeed, had somehow been issued the very same math book I had improved upon only a year earlier!

In the moment, I couldn't believe the odds, but I do suppose someone had to have it. We didn't live in a large town, so I guess it would be easier there than anywhere else. Still, I was lucky at my good fortune that my shameless act of delinquent shenanigans would reward me with this opportunity to carry on a conversation with one very particular girl. I made a smirk of my own, a guilty grin of one who had been caught, but lacked the necessary remorse of his transgressions. 

My guilt obvious by now, I beamed as I interrogated to ascertain the depths of her knowledge.

"So… did you find the monkey?" 

She shook her head in feigned disapproval. “Yes, I found him.”

She lightened up further and told me that she enjoyed the "artwork" and that it had gotten her through a lot. I couldn't know how much then, but I never considered that my little rebellion would place me in the thoughts of a girl who was going through some very hard times a year later. 

Her parents were ending a very ugly divorce. She alone was the bearer of so much of the hardship of that breakup. She absorbed it woefully and the time damaged her greatly for someone so young. I'd like to think that in those nights, when she had to do homework regardless of what happened in the world outside of the Algebra classroom, I was there, in a very small. It makes me happy that a comic romp between a wayward fool and an obstinate ape may have given her an unexpected smile when she may have no one else to give it to her. Whatever the case may have been, my presence was in her mind, in much the same way she was in mine, and I never had any way of knowing it as she couldn’t have known that a simple “trusty” look could have put her in mine either.

As we sat there laughing and giggling, for the first of many times, I remembered the depth of my antics. I had forgotten just how bored I was. Then it hit me. Mr. Blevins! 

"Oh! Did you see the pictures I drew in the back?"

Of course she hadn’t. I had erased them, but I remembered during my purging that the impressions were deep enough that if I could just get a hold of the book next year, somehow, they could be redrawn. No one else could have known about them and it was doubtful she would have discovered them either. Well, there was my chance. I showed her the impressions and begged her to let me borrow the book. She allowed my request and I took it back to my desk.

She watched as I sketched out the delicate lines of the faces I drew on the pages. I decided I would take my time. In the first place. I owed it to the world to give my absolute best in the artistic pursuit of perfection. Secondly, and more honestly, it afforded me a continued excuse to spend more time with her. I finished after a few days, but that wasn’t good enough. I didn’t want the same thing to happen to her that had happened to me. I went over it all again, in pen. The heartless censorship of creativity would not be an affront to the decency of the education system a second time. Idealism aside, I stole a few more days with her. 

I know what you might be thinking. Weren't we in class? Wasn't there something we were supposed to be doing? Well perhaps in a better school, but what can I say? The Oklahoma school system was hopelessly flawed at the time. It still is in many ways. Just suffice it to say that apathy of our administrators also played to my favor in at least this instance.