Milk Carton Chicanery

His eyes cut through her like sharpened daggers.

She loved him at first. Always, at first. He was a god, full of things she didn’t know, full of experience, life lessons, secret book passages. No other teacher read How to Eat Fried Worms the way he did.

During silent reading, he would tell her how beautiful she was; he said these words in her language—with his eyes and face, completing the message with a sly smile. She returned the smile. No one else in the room knew their secret.

She wanted to please him, be desirable to him, but at this age she knew not what that meant. At ten years old, all you know is your own desire to perfect the art of people-pleasing. So, that’s what she did.

She tirelessly pored over her assignments, mentally checking all the boxes she knew he’d be checking himself: penmanship, clarity, grammar, sentence structure, comprehension. She turned in every assignment with a smile and shy glance to the side. She played her own innocent, harmless game with him. It drove him crazy.

He showed her the attention her family didn’t. He wowed her with innocent compliments and sleight of hand as he turned cardboard milk cartons into electric vacuum cleaners. At this, she was tickled. He wanted to impress her, amuse her, and he did. Every day it was his mission to bring a smile to her forlorn face.

He presumed life at home was rather difficult. Her immigrant parents were stretched thin; it was clear, some days, she wore her brother’s hand-me-downs. On those days she slunk in her chair, mortified, and on those days, he made sure to be extra kind. It was then, he began falling in love with her.

She approached him in the lunchroom, pointing to her throat, asking to visit the nurse’s office. He bent down and kissed her ever so gently on the neck. He looked into her black saucer eyes and asked, “Is that better?”

She was taken aback—scared but curious because she knew he loved her. Like no one else had loved her. He saw her, saw her brilliance, her maturity. She’d not yet begun wearing a training bra, but her adolescence was showing—her perspicacity, her uniqueness. She didn’t know just how crazy she made him, or how and why his affection toward her grew into a monstrous beast, but it became clear the day of the big trip.

She worked extra hard on a class project and subsequently won a seat on the coveted, white van, next to him along with four other students, to enjoy a bump-free ride—on soft, cushioned velour seats—all the way to a neighboring state.

The moment her name was called as one of the five lucky children chosen to forgo the skeleton-rattling, yellow bus ride and sit with him on the van, his eyes grew into dark circles, swirling with want; his brows sprouted with thick, black vines, rising into his forehead; his teeth morphed into sharp edges, clawing their way out of his mouth to rest along the bottom of his lips. He drooled with lust as he said, “You’ve won a spot next to me on the van!”

His once tender and inexplicably attractive voice morphed into a foreboding growl—desperate and deep. It rattled against his vocal cord, shaking the floor beneath her.

Did anyone else feel that?

She looked around the room and no one batted an eye, including her immigrant mother—nervous about chaperoning English-speaking students.

She smiled and asked the beast, “Can my mother ride on the van, too?” She couldn’t bring herself to collect this reward and leave her mother to ride the bus with children she couldn’t communicate with.

The beast frowned.

Wasn’t riding in the special, six-passenger van enough for this child? Did nothing please her? Didn’t she want to sit next to him?—feel his leg brush against hers, feel his hand pat her knee, lingering for a brief moment, and perchance, sneak another peck on her young, supple neck without the other students noticing?

No.

She didn’t want to give in to him the way he wanted her to, the way he thought she wanted to. All those adorable side smiles, the batting of her eyelashes, and hurried glances at each other when the other students were reading to themselves hadn’t meant as much to her.

His wrath multiplied, his chest heaved and widened, then he growled long and abject.

“No,” he said slowly, “there isn’t room for her, I’m afraid.”

Snarling teeth, thick drool, dangling from his snaggled teeth.

Did anyone else hear that? See that?

She searched the room. Nothing. No one had felt the room shake, heard him growl with precision, or saw his ribaldry exposed. Nor did they see the puddle of drool at his feet.

She had worshipped him. She had loved him dearly, wanted his adoration, attention, and devoted pride all to herself. But he was changed. The harmless dalliances they shared throughout each school day, unnoticed by everyone else in the room, suddenly felt wretched, filthy, wrong.

“I want to ride with my mother,” she said.

He shot up from the industrial-tiled floor to the ceiling. The top of his monster-head broke the flimsy, dropped ceiling-tiles. The metal framing cracked and came down. He clenched his fists and one angered claw broke the clipboard into pieces, the other punched through the chalkboard—slate cracking, jagged pieces shooting across the room. He met her at her level and bellowed in her face.

“WHY?!”

A hot wind blew, and his forked tongue slithered around her face. His breath nearly knocked her down.

What she wanted to say was that she now understood his game. She didn’t want to ride with his coquettish glances, the secret language they’d created so he could say inappropriate things, the magical milk carton tricks that won over her inquisitive mind, soft kisses along the edge of her neck, or this outburst as she rejected further advances.

She wanted to say, “Who knows what you’ll do sitting next to me without my mother there! Maybe you’ll put me in the back of the van with you where no one can see what you do! Maybe you’ll put your arm around my shoulder, let your talons drift near the top of my chest! Or maybe you’ll slip your arm around me and fondle the button on my acid-washed jeans, creeping your hairy knuckles along my quivering tummy then slip your claw into my cotton panties. Maybe you’ll say things in my ear that make me want my mom—the mom you made ride on the bus!”

These were the obvious things she could tell from the yearning in his eyes. In a secret cobwebbed part of her, she knew what he wanted from her was youth, innocence. He had a restless longing to live forever, and he fancied he would find that somewhere along the contours of her budding breasts, between her inexperienced thighs. This older man wanted nothing more than to hold on to his youth via the skin of a young girl. He saw a way to live forever, dancing carelessly along the soft curves of her untainted body. Did she smell of Love’s Baby Soft and sweet perspiration? Cloudless skies and sun yellow buttercups?

All this she now understood when he showed himself as he truly was, which no one else in the room noticed. Including her mother, for her mother could only pull bits and pieces of English from the air and make sense of a few.

Instead, the young girl breathed in deeply, met his gaze, and answered his question of why, “Because.”

He stepped away and shrunk back to his original size and shape—the shape of a lonely man that no woman wanted. A balding man with a potbelly, ugly, hairy knuckles, beady eyes, a crooked smile, messy mustache, and a desperate, whiny voice. A man who knew this about himself and preyed on small girls, enticing them with playful grins and milk carton prestidigitation.

She could see that now. She stood beside her mother, stronger than she had been the day before. She threaded her arm through her mother’s, looked up and said, “I’m riding the bus with you,” in their native tongue.

Her mother smiled big—proud of her daughter, though she didn’t quite know why.