The monkey bars happened in the spring of second grade. I was able to get through the last weeks of school uneventfully, and then summer break provided a much-needed escape. Coming back for third grade, I screamed and fought my mom every day to go to school. She says that I never explained why I didn’t want to go to school anymore, that she and my teacher conferenced multiple times to try and get to the bottom of it.
To these two adults, it didn’t make sense that this smart, kind, lovable kid who loved learning would have such an aversion to school. Eventually, I just told them that I was being bullied, which I’m sure happened in little verbal jabs behind my back and whatever you’d call third grade gossip. But any kind of abuse that left marks? That never happened, and I always felt bad about lying, but they wouldn’t believe me when I said that I was just sad all the time.
From my perspective now, I understand their confusion. But, in my place then, it was so frustrating to have these feelings inside I didn’t have any way of communicating. I was hurting every time that my classmates ignored one of my suggestions, or turned away from me when we were asked to pair off for activities. And, for the first time, these emotions were actually coming to the surface. Seven year old Nicholas didn’t have that language to communicate all of those feelings - all those feelings of hurt, being silently ostracized, being afraid of my own existence - to his mom. But, I figured out how to say something close enough.
After six weeks of attempts, my mom finally broke and pulled me out of school so I could be homeschooled. That ultimately relieved a lot of those feelings, and being around my mom again took away the negative influences of my classmates who didn’t care about me. That was all replaced with my mom! I loved (and still love!) my mom! She acted as a stopgap for those feelings of rejection and inadequacy, and I loved learning with her. We even had little report cards she’d use the family computer to produce in Microsoft Word for the “Provenghi Academy,” and all my success was charted below a little piece of clip art.
—
That was nice. Even if we used a bizarre fundamentalist Christian curriculum, it was nice. Speaking of...
Not wanting to stunt my social growth, my mom enrolled herself and me in a parent-child Bible study at a church she’d been recommended by a friend. Even as a child, I had trouble grasping onto Christianity, and nothing about the stories, the rituals, or the community really hooked me. Sure, my parents baptized me after I was born, but that was about it for our engagement with church, until this point, that is.
There isn’t much that remains in my mind from these Bible study meetings. I remember our conference room was cold, kind of impersonal, and that there were a surprisingly wide range of ages in the class. Some of the kids were really kind to me; there was one girl who I became friends with quickly, and thankfully, my mother’s magnetic personality meant that she’d be friends with any of the moms whose kids were kind to me, so I got to hang out with her a few times. I don’t remember what we did, but we usually just all met at playgrounds and ran around and played while our moms chatted at one of the picnic tables.
One time, I remember that we all went to her family’s house, and wanted to play board games. My friend, Carrie, had most of the games in her room, and so she, an older girl who was her relative of some kind, and myself all went to go grab the box for “Trouble” or whatever the game was. After we found the box, we saw that our moms had taken over the living room, so we just sat on the floor of Carrie’s room and started our game.
Again, that was nice. We all had a good time, played multiple rounds, and just sat and talked. Eventually, the older girl suggested we play something else, and - like a true tweenager - asked if we wanted to play truth or dare. In these days of As Told By Ginger and All That, the idea of seeming like a teenager was pretty much the sickest shit imaginable, so both Carrie and I agreed immediately.
That started innocently enough, and really, it ended the same way, too. But something did happen that day; at one point, I chose to be dared on my turn, and the older girl dared me to kiss Carrie. But I didn’t want to. I really didn’t want to. But I also wanted to be a cool teenager and finally feel like I was really a part of the fold. Carrie didn’t seem too excited about it, but eventually admitted it wasn’t a big deal, but I was still putting up a fight. After a few minutes, in the quiet room painted shades of grey by the setting sun sneaking through the shutters, I leaned in for my first kiss.
And it sucked. What, did you expect violins to explode and fireworks to go off?
It was weird. I know that I felt ashamed, and by Carrie’s face, I could tell that she wasn’t too keen on what happened either. On the insistence of the older girl, we promised each other to say nothing to our moms, and that seemed easy enough. So we swallowed the feelings of discomfort and went back to having a good time playing the game.
Later on, my mom and I went home. Carrie and I didn’t really get along as well after that; not knowing her perception of that day, I can’t tell if she was possibly scarred by what happened. I really hope not, but that’s something that the sands of time have already worn down into nothing and blown away from my grasp.
—
Around that time, I was trying to make friends with one of the older boys, and he seemed receptive. We bonded over playing video games when he saw me playing Super Mario World on my GBA before class one day and started talking to me about it. Naturally, I lit up; I’d majorly loved Super Mario World and played it on my parents’ old SNES obsessively. They even had one of those paperback guides laying around that I read the way I was supposed to read the Bible. Seeing the brightly colored sprites hopping around the screen, I was able to somehow tune out the rest of the world, and so I did everything I could to chase that feeling by engaging with as much Super Mario World-related information as possible. I probably seemed naïve and weird to the other kids, but that was fine. Especially if it meant this older kid wanted to be my friend, I thought.
Somewhat luckily for me, his mom and mine clicked immediately in the mom group, and so we had a playdate set up before we had even really gotten to know each other. That day, my mom and I went over to his house, where his mom greeted us and brought us in, where I saw that the older boy had invited two other kids from Bible study. I was nervous to be around these other two guys, but I steeled myself and soon, my mom left me alone with them and grabbed some coffee with her friend.
It became pretty apparent pretty quickly that these kids and I weren’t interested in the same things, nor were they really the best playmates a sensitive eight year old could’ve had; they were all at least over 10, and wanted to play FPS games. But initially, they seemed to be trying to include me. The one kid who’d initially invited me asked us all to follow him to his room, and it seemed nice enough. I remember seeing a small little office cart - the kind from Office Depot that have the impossibly cheap rainbow colored translucent drawers - and being drawn to that. Seizing the opportunity, our host moved toward the tiny chest of drawers.
He put on this braggadocio out of nowhere and announced that we were about to see why his life was the best out of all of ours (!). That we were going to be amazed by what his mom had let him have in his room. Our minds were about to be blown! After having whipped up enough excitement to frost a three-layer cake, the boy leaned in and opened up one of the middle drawers, and as he slid it out, I realized that he might have been telling part of the truth.
The drawer was filled with Dum-Dums, a.k.a. the tiny lollipops that every pediatrician’s receptionist has bowls of at the exit door.
I was puzzled. I mean, sure, lollipops were nice… but why was this worth the whole buil-HOLD ON. My thoughts were interrupted when I saw a patch of Blue Raspberry Dum-Dums. In the past, I had been known to scrounge through the free lollipop bowls just to find a blue raspberry lollipop. And now, here they were, just sitting in front of me? Now I was gobsmacked.
Looking up with apprehension in my eyes and saliva in my mouth, I reached forward and grabbed one of the little sapphires of wrapped sugar on a stick. The host asked me if I wanted one, with a glint of something in his eyes; he seemed almost too excited to let me have a lollipop. Mind you, neither of the other boys had reached into the drawer yet. I excitedly nodded and stood up with the lollipop in hand, but before I could unwrap it, the older boy interrupted me with a question.
He asked if blue raspberry was my favorite flavor, because that was his favorite flavor, too. I said that it was, and no sooner after I had finished my sentence did the façade finally crack. This little fucker gut punched me, and daintily lifted the Dum-Dum out of my hand. I was reeling over in pain and shock, and he just stared down at me, waiting for me to readjust. When I finally did, he leaned in and told me that no one gets to have his favorite lollipops in his house. And he and the other two boys left me, alone with my confusion, my shame, my pain, and my silence.
The rest of the day was uneventful, in comparison. I can’t even remember what happened, except that his mom had a different brand of frozen popcorn chicken than my mom, and that I really liked it. I didn’t tell my mom that, though. I didn’t tell her anything about that day. She asked if I had a good time after we got settled into the car to drive home, and I said nothing. I just opened my Game Boy and started playing my game again. She turned her as-seen-on-TV Christian rock album up, and we pulled away from their house.
Playing Super Mario World was nice; it felt easy-going, and I could do anything I wanted. But, most importantly, I wasn’t me. I was Mario. I was this ever-changing assembly of pixels on a screen, responding to the taps of grey buttons in a hurt child’s hands. I was able to fly, collect coins, destroy castles, and save the day, and it was never me. It felt amazing to escape myself, and the world that never seemed to appreciate me. Even in the bursts where it had, I would much rather be riding Yoshi through the Star Road, hitting all the colored switches, just like it told me to do in Chapter 17 of the guide book that was falling apart. At least there, when I fell down, I just had to push a button to get back up. Falling down in real life was never as easy to handle or fix.