(This entry uses 100% recycled words)
This "oh-so-fine" day, took place "oh-so-long" ago.
Stephanie. Yes, I the one that can barely remember names and never phone numbers, remember her name as if what I write about in this entry today happened just yesterday.
Stephanie. She rode the same yellow school bus as I did each morning to Junior High school. It was 8th or 9th grade - here my memory is a little fuzzy. She walked down the aisle of the bus, her smile dazzling all of us, but I think perhaps it dazzled me the most. As a young boy-man, the feelings I felt her were unfamiliar, raging ones. How I wanted to feel her sleek soft, shiny hair against my fingertips, and her luscious lips... against mine.
"
Stephanie! I have a seat for you!", my mind would shout
silently to her as she walked past me, a seat I had cleared by roughly shoving a buddy off and onto his surprised behind in the aisle when we boarded the bus the stop before. I made sure Stephanie had a place, if she wanted it. But each day, day after day, she went back to the end of the bus and sat with the cool and popular kids, their laughter always made the bus terribly noisy each morning.
Autumn turned to winter, and winter to spring, when a new semester started with new classes and new classrooms. It also brought old man Snyder's
Biology class in to my day to day schedule. Snyder had the look of a surprised walrus, his big coke bottle glasses made his eyes look blood streaked and huge. His bushy red handlebar mustache made his face look pouty, as if he had just eaten a particularly salty sardine.
His teaching style consisted of facing the blackboard and mumbling, in the softest monotone, while he drew indecipherable pictures of ...well whatever it was he was droning on and on about... Something to do with
Biology I suppose. I took no notice, and cared not. For inexplicable reason, Mr. Snyder had offered me the gift from God, the assigned, coveted and treasured seat next to Stephanie.
The desks were set edge to edge, forming a circle around the classroom. The desk I sat in, connected to Stephanie on one side, and her best girlfriend on the other. I had gone to heaven. Her face was always toward me, as she spoke to her girlfriend. Her smile, hair, and smooth soft skin, were only inches away. Her soft giggle as she laughed with her friend, was musical and special, more so since, probably I was the only one in the room that could hear it.
She never seemed to even notice me. I was struck speechless by her angelic visage, and her soft perfume... ignited those unfamiliar, raging, teenage feelings I struggled daily to understand and to control. Then one lovely soft spring day, you know the kind, the first day where you know winter's grip has gone, and the flowers have burst into being... Yes, I'm sure you know.
The sun was warm on my face, streaming through the big classroom windows. Mr. Snyder started his dull buzz, face to the blackboard, and I... found myself in another place, daydreaming, yearning... wondering what it would be like to hold Stephanie in my arms and...
...her elbows sharply nudged my side. I mumbled, my mind tumbling back into the warm schoolroom from wherever it was that it had wandered.
"
Give me your paper!", She whispered fiercely to me. I must have appeared drunk (of course, I was a number of years from experiencing that sort of thing). "Paper? What paper?" I stammered and sputtered in dazed confusion. "Your oral quiz paper!", she shot back. "Huh?!?", was my witty retort. On my other side I heard a snorting giggle and a quiz paper shoved at me by her girlfriend - who must of had a name, but I surely have no clue what it was.
In the next few jumbled, confused moments, I realized that I had daydreamed through an oral quiz, and that the class was to be grading them, each of us grading the test paper of the person to our right. I took the girlfriend's paper and bewildered, said to no one in particular, "I don't have any paper." Pity appeared on the girlfriend's face and she tore a blank page from her tablet and shoved it at me. Numbly, I turned it around and passed it on to Stephanie. Blank. Pristine. Untouched.
Question by question, we marked the paper in front of us. Stephanie looked like the princess she was, sitting there, nothing to do but smile at all that looked upon her. Finally the torment ended, and Mr. Snyder said, "Return the quiz papers to their owners please." I slid the girlfriend back her paper, she was a lot smarter than I had thought... and I got the once blank, pristine, untouched paper now adored by the cutest handwriting I ever saw - even though it was a single character... that mind searing, mocking "0" back from Stephanie. Her expression when she handed it back to me was one I have never determined the meaning of, ...or perhaps, I tried never to do so... for reasons some of you might know.
Totally, completely, utterly embarrassed, no.... make that mortified, I huddled into the smallest clump I could make myself. And then the most horrible words I had ever heard buzz sawed through the air. "Ok, when I say your name, tell me your score," came from the man that just 10 minutes before was my everlasting hero... and who was now my biggest tormentor. As he worked through the alphabet, my mind feverously looked for a way out... but still dazed senseless, I found none when he called "Iggy!". My mouth felt like the dust at the bottom of Death Valley after hours, no make that weeks, of blazing afternoon sun.
My tongue was inoperable. "IGGY!" he repeated, an edge of irritation entered his voice. I moaned out a barely audible, "zero". Mr. Snyder stood suddenly at his desk and his huge eyes drilled into me as he said, "What? I can't hear you IGGY". I choked out "Zero!" and the merciless tittering of my classmates broke the silence of the room. Perplexed, Mr. Snyder said, "You get 10 points for your name Iggy!". I replied, "I... it... I, um, didn't write my name."
With a walrusy "harrumph", he said with steel in voice, "Stay after class Iggy", and he went on through the rest of the names in his list.
Stephanie moved away from the neighborhood that summer, to a new school district and I never saw her again. Some days, I wonder where she has gone, and what has become of her... and wonder if she ever knew out what effect she had on me... of course, she probably doesn't remember me at all, except as perhaps, Mr. Zero. But her smile... oh that smile... I will always remember it.
P.s., Mr Synder returned to being my hero after I told him what had happened in detail - I can still hear his chuckle as he said something like, "Oh, well, I see you got a real lesson in biology today." He allowed me to retake the oral quiz and I got a respectable grade.
