“Look, there’s no easy way to put this, Billy,” Billy’s first grade teacher, Mrs. Shelly, said.
“But you have to stop eating crayons or else you will go to prison.”
Billy looked up at his teacher, mouth agape. Teachers had been telling him this since he started school three years ago. And yet, still no prison. Billy was beginning to think that school was the prison. Billy laughed in the teachers face and licked a marker. He ran into the coat closet.
“Billy, get back here!” Mrs.Shelly yelled.
The rest of the class went silent. They loved it when Billy went into the coat closet. So did Billy. Sometimes he would leave crayons in there to eat later. It was so quiet. So dark. Billy felt like he could stay inside the coat closet forever. The other kids wondered what he did in there.
Tommy had started a rumor that he kept frogs in there, but that was bullshit. It was all based on Billy bringing a frog in for show and tell on a day that Tommy was absent. Tommy just wanted to be included. Tommy liked frogs.
Mrs.Shelly let him stay in the closet a little longer. She enjoyed the time away from him, and she knew that he just sat in there and ate crayons. Whatever, who cares. As long as she didn’t have to see it.
A few years later. Billy was in the fifth grade. He had quit eating crayons. In fourth grade they started using cubbies instead of closets and the allure of eating crayons in a cubby wasn’t nearly as mysterious as a coat closet. Billy wasn’t popular by any means. He might have been if he wore anything besides beige turtle necks with stains on them. He liked to dance when he got math problems right, which was frequent.
Billy would ask to use the bathroom and then go sit in the auditorium by himself. He would imagine giving speeches to the whole school. Lots of them. Some about eggs, others about Tony Parker, most about how bullshit class was. He didn’t have any crayons to eat, but he would chew gum and put it under the seats. The oral fixation thing would become a problem when he started smoking in several years, but at 10 it was just endearing. Sort of. It was kinda weird to the faculty, who all saw him sitting there, alone by himself. None of them bothered him. They didn’t want to get involved.
Billy noticed this and appreciated it. He didn’t hate any of them. Just the whole rotten system in general. He hated how they accepted that the system was broken. He hated that they refused to try and fix it themselves.
But he didn’t hate them personally. They were pretty nice, and at least they paid him a little attention.
In the 5th grade, Billy started making up stories to tell at discussion times. Discussion times were when an issue in social studies or a book came up and everyone got to say what they thought. Billy would always lead the discussion away from the topic. He was very good at it. He would ask questions to the class, and clarify his question after a response was given. The questions and clarifications were relatable enough to the discussion topic not to arouse suspicion from the teacher, yet vague enough to pique the other students interests. For example, one week the class read a book about Lou Gehrig. Billy raised his had and asked if the Yankees still played in New York. When the teacher said yes, Billy replied saying that his Dad said that they had moved after 9/11. Billy didn’t have a Dad.
“No, they still play in New York.” Billy’s teacher replied.
“Yeah, they’re still in New York.” a few kids echoed.
“Do they play next to all of those big buildings?” Billy would ask.
And then the whole class had answers. Everybody was talking about different theories about where the buildings were. One kid said they played in a skyscraper.
By the time that the teacher got them settled and taught them about all five boroughs, 15 minutes had passed. Billy got really good at doing this about all subjects. Especially science.
When Billy got to Eighth grade he was really bored. He had started smoking pot behind the loading dock. Sometimes the janitors would join him. They had known him for years, and they had grown quite an alliance. Billy cleaned up after himself and others, and the janitors would give him cool stuff they found.
There were two of them. One of them was a tall scrawny pale white guy, with long scraggly hair and thick-rimmed glasses. He was a nice-enough guy for someone who smoked pot with kids. He didn’t sell to them or anything. He kept to himself.
The other was a short, fat Dominican man. He was the most normal looking of the two but that wasn’t saying much. He had a lazy eye and a liver spots all over his face. He was old. Tired. He hated everyone at that school except Billy. He didn't smoke.
“You know kid if you keep smoking that stuff in public they’re gonna throw you in jail.” The scrawny Janitor said.
“They’ve been telling me that since I got here. Is that what happened to you?” Billy said.
“Look around, man!” He replied. The three of them laughed and Billy went to class. He smoked, but Billy still showed up on time for everything, mostly. He wasn’t the best student, but he never had been. It was just the same old shit for Billy.
High school was easier. He could leave whenever he wanted for the most part, and it was close to downtown. Billy would go into buildings and walk around telling people he had an internship. Everyone knew it was bullshit, but they weren’t going to stop him. He was harmless, even a little boring. For the most part they didn’t even notice that he was there.
Billy’s Junior year was a special one. He got a girlfriend and started hanging out with her a lot. Her name was Melissa. Melissa was really gorgeous. Freckled all down her face and her arms, with eyes that lit up when Billy said her name. She was into the theater scene at school and so Billy would make up characters for her and write down stuff for her to say. It was just an exercise, but Billy felt it was sort of symbolic of their relationship.
Billy was still going to class all of the time. He had decent enough grades to go to school. His Dad had died somewhere in Montana, but had left Billy some money. He could turn it into at least a year or two of college. He didn’t know what he wanted to study, he didn’t really care. Maybe economics or something. He liked making stuff up.
Billy had quit smoking pot. He was starting to get dizzy all the time and didn’t enjoy it as much. He picked up cigarettes, which were much lighter and didn’t require so much maintenance. Billy still felt sick sometimes.
Billy graduated on time. He broke up with Melissa after prom. He was sad afterwards, but he got over it eventually, sort of. Melissa didn’t at all, initially. She had thought that they would do long distance or something. She totally wasn’t ready for it. One night after they had broken up, Billy and Melissa drove around and got ice cream. It was the most fun they had had all through high school. They stopped by the lake and walked out to the shore. They saw the abyss of dark blue and heard the silence through the waves. It reminded Billy of the first grade, and Melissa was his crayon.
“I can’t do this to you, lady.” Billy said.
“Let’s go home.”
Billy drove Melissa home and then went to bed.
College was a fun time for Billy. He sold pot to other students and totally got away with it. It was easy money, and he gave really fair prices. Everyone loved Billy. He didn’t really study anything in particular. It was still kind of bullshit to him. He kind of hated it, but he liked how much everyone liked him. He hoped the real world would be just as kind.
It was, sort of. Billy got a job tending bar at some building downtown. He had met the owner in High School, and they had stayed in mild contact. After Billy graduated, he was offered a job immediately. The bar was nice. It was for the business type who didn’t want to be forced into politeness with a soft spoken decor. It was wood chair and a wood bar with hard liquor. These guys got piss-drunk and tipped like there was a currency collapse incoming.
Billy didn’t drink much, which was strange. Everybody was sort of bracing for him to overdo it and lose his job. But he didn’t. He would wait for everybody to leave and then go out for a smoke. One day the owner came out and talked to Billy.
He was thin lipped with slicked-back brown hair.
“You know, if you keep smoking you’re gonna die.” The owner said.
“They keep telling me that, but I’m still here.” Billy replied.
The owner laughed, but he was sort of just being polite. He had heard that retort a million times. “Then why do I keep saying that?” The owner wondered to himself. Billy sat next to his boss for a minute and then went inside.
Billy started going to plays on his nights off. He would never admit it, but a part of him wanted to see Melissa on stage. He didn’t expect to, she wasn’t a particularly good actress. But it would’ve made him happy. He never saw her.
He was better off that way, probably.
Then one day Billy drove his car down to San Francisco and jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, because sometimes life just goes that way.
A lot of people were sad. But they all moved on, and so will you.
