We dropped the kid off at her friend’s house, apartment actually, Alpha and I walked her over on a bright cold weekend day. They let her in, we said goodbye there in the hallway, the mom in the doorway and the kid’s friend and Alpha didn’t see him because their Golden Retriever was out saying hi, licking me and jumping on me and she’s not a dog person and so all she saw was dog but I, being a dog person, was all Yeah, boy, howyalikedat Yeah, attaboy and relaxed and I saw him, peeking out from behind his mom, the kid’s friend’s little brother, pure psycho evil and only five years old. Eyes as dark as the deepest pockets of Johnny Cash’s blackest coat. The little kid stuck a 60 watt lightbulb in his mouth and it lit up. Not really, but I imagined him doing it; you wouldn’t be surprised if he had. Gamma came home later with a bruise on her cheek and a wiggly tooth where he had hit her in the face with a big chunk of icy ice when they were playing outside and for some reason her friend got grounded for it. And I thought, we got off cheap and I thought, this isn’t the last we’re hearing about that guy, some day his neighbors will be saying on TV, He was such a quiet person.
And then they’ll stick the microphone in my face and I’ll say, That little fucker’s given me the heebie jeebies ever since he was a little bitty boy.
Wavelength
Posted in Metamorphosism
It’s really slippery now. Maybe he’ll slip and knock a few teeth out on a step. It could happen.
It’s not supposed to be cool to peg some little kid as a creepy future felon but I know what you mean…I’m making a list and plan to compare notes in 35 years.
i read that kindergarten teachers have a higher than average ability to peg down what kids will be when they grow up. which is depressing. although when i taught kindergarten it gave me an incredible sense of power and foresight.
“i read that kindergarten teachers have a higher than average ability to peg down what kids will be when they grow up. which is depressing.”
Especially because teachers reacting to their perceptions of how a kid will come out might help make it happen. Kid reminds teacher of someone but she can’t place the face (it’s her evil ex-boyfriend), teacher subconsciously starts out thinking kid is bad, keeps an eye on kid, sees bad stuff kid does (and not bad stuff other kids do), punishes kid more often than other kids, makes kid look bad in front of other kids, makes kid embarrassed (sad, angry, resentful, lonely, mean, etc.), tells kid’s parents that kid is a problem, make notes in kid’s record for next year’s teacher, makes kid more likely to end up talking to the school psychologist and, eventually, more likely to climb a clock tower with a rifle.
Not that the kid wasn’t destined for that anyway, maybe, but if teachers can make a positive difference, they can also make a negative difference.
Still, what if he slipped on the steps?
I refrain from branding kids negatively. If they’re geniuses, they’re geniuses, although that’s probably unfair too. My youngest was in a class that they split when it got too big and put all the lackluster boring soccer-playing kids in one group, and the rest in the other, said rest consisting of psychopaths (the worst of them also a talented artist), troubled children, foreigners or semi-foreigners such as my own kid, who although being from here has a foreign name, bad boys, and geniuses, no rule saying the kids can’t belong to more than one group. My kid gets along fine with the bad boys, although they shipped the psychoartist out after he tried once too often to kill another boy in the class. If I remember the story right. Nothing says those kids won’t grow up to be fine adults. But that little kid who conked Gamma, he seemed creepy. Hate to be unfair, though. Maybe he was just having a bad aura day.