One Weird Day

The Witch In Blue Pants

The sound of a scream is sudden, sharp, and loud, even though it comes from behind the closed door. Mr. Brown turns away from the blackboard, and the students look at one another. Nobody looks at me, because I sit at the back of the class, but even if I sat in the front they wouldn't look unless they wanted to say something nasty, so I prefer it that way.

The scream happens again, and everybody go quiet for a second, and then they start talking loudly to each other.

"What on earth was that?" Mr. Brown opens the door and goes outside. We see his shape through the white glass wall, and we hear his muffled voice as he speaks to someone. Inside the class, everybody's talking, some students stand up, and Lisa from the first row turns around to speak to Murray who sits behind her. As she does, I see the tower she's constructed on her desk from markers, rulers, and a stapler. I concentrate and push it with my mind. The elaborate construction crumbles down. Lisa yelps, and jumps in surprise, and everybody around her begin to laugh.

"All right, people," Mr. Brown says, coming back. "Where were we?"

"But what happened?" someone says.

"I believe there was some kind of a commotion on the first floor. But please, sit down. You too, please. And you." He points around, and the students reluctantly return to their places. The sound of chatter slowly dies down.

I like Mr. Brown because he never asks me questions. He knows how I hate to attract attention. Mrs. Drake used to ask me questions all the time, and she insisted on me sitting in the first row because she claimed I would be more involved that way. But I couldn't answer anything, because everyone would start laughing and poking jokes at me, even though she tried to shush them down. So I would just sit there, frozen, and get a bad grade I didn't deserve.

I sat up front until that lesson when I spotted that rare insect under her table—the Nicrophorus Americanus it was—and I collect insects, so I just plunged under her table to catch it. Mrs. Drake was so surprised that she started to squeal. Nobody understood what was going on. I took the Nicrophorus home, and the next day I was the laughing stock of the school again. Mrs. Drake told me to sit in the back row, and she spoke to my father one more time about transferring me to the special needs class, but he said no.

Anyway, later that week Mrs. Drake stumbled and fell down the stairs, and she broke some bones, so Mr. Brown had to replace her.

"You just need to survive high school, okay?" Dad said to me. "They may laugh at you but you just grow up and show them who's the boss."

He's not a boss himself, just a bank clerk, and there's something in his eyes behind the thick glasses that makes me think he knows what surviving a high school could be like.

"Why do they bother you?" Murray asked me once during the lunch break.

Murray's a new student. He's relatively nice, which means that though he laughs when others say nasty things about me, he never says them himself. But even though he's nice, he's still a boy, so I went all red, turned around like a robot and walked away. Which was probably a good enough answer for his question.

They call me 'the witch in blue pants' because I wear blue pants. That's what Dad got me. But even after I told him that everybody else wears jeans and he got me jeans, the other kids kept laughing. Them wearing jeans was cool, and me wearing jeans was just copying them, so it was just another reason to show me my place, which was in the back row and in blue pants.

As for the witch part, I guess that's because I've got black hair and a Roman nose, and that's what they expect a witch to look like.

And, I may actually be a witch.