At recess, there will be worms

By Mark A. Rayner

Each April would bring rain, worms and mortification. But this year was going to be different. I could feel it in the marrow of my ten-year-old bones, because this year, I didn't have to wear the clunky black oxford shoes that had been the bane of my existence for most of my short life.

In kindergarten, there was still a glorious joi-de-vivre to everything. Need to take off your dress in the middle of class? Why not! Wanna eat the paste? Go for it! Mom makes you wear ugly black shoes? We don't care, you're beautiful baby! But sometime in early grade one, that laissez-faire attitude changed. All of us discovered, in our own ways, the horrible truth: "I'm different and that's bad." My difference was a minor one -- my shoes were weird. But this kind of tiny deviation from the norm can have enormous consequences. I became a figure of fun and teasing for at least a few minutes of every day that I had to wear that hyper-functional footwear.

I'd had one brief respite from the embarrassment of those shoes, which was the year my family had lived in Britain. I was sent to a state school where the food was terrible, the teachers were mean, and most of my classmates were jerks, but did I care? No, because everybody was wearing clunky black oxfords, so I didn't stand out. My "American" accent was distinctive, but that was one of those rare differences that made people like you.

That lasted almost two years. While abroad, I picked up the accent, so upon my return, I had another season of being the schoolyard novelty. The strangeness of my English accent meant the black oxfords went unnoticed that fall. Over the winter, my dialect returned to that of everyone else.

At that point in my life, the winter was my favourite season. It was the great equalizer in terms of footwear. In the 1970s nobody had heard of global warming, and it had yet to reduce the severe cold snaps or snowfalls we'd get. Almost everyone wore boots, not shoes. In the winter, I was free of the oxfords.

We used to carry our notebooks to school in old milk bags, though to say "carry" is stretching the truth a bit. We'd slide our homework to school in old milk bags; the beaten-down snow and ice along the walkways were our impromptu rinks. We didn't sweep, or try to hit a target in this crude version of curling. The object was always distance.

When we weren't playing this game, we usually took the high road to school. The high road was the steep snowbanks that would emerge as the winter progressed -- successive dumps of snow, plowing and driveway shoveling would create incredible ridges to follow along the roadway. The only problem was coming off one ridge at the end of a driveway, and climbing up the next. These were adventures in mountaineering. My fellow climbers were Jason and William, whom we called Wild Bill. Jason was a quiet, athletic kid who did well in school, and generally didn't get noticed, either for good or ill. When Bill and I would get into scraps, Jason tended to stay out of the fray, and neither of us could really blame him for it (though I secretly hoped he would fully join our triumvirate of trouble and take the odd bloody nose for me).

Wild Bill was an unrepentant maniac. His visible deficiency was a large birthmark that covered his right ear and a big part of his neck. The invisible problem was that his dad was a drunk, a bully, and as we used to say back then, a "complete a-hole." Bill was smart though, and strong, and I believe that he might have become a bully himself if he hadn't been a consistent target of other bullies at school. That year we were both still too small to stand up to the grade eights, but we got in our fair share of fights with their apprentice ruffians. The schoolyard fights tended to disappear in the winter too, which is another reason I loved the season.

But the best part was that everyone wore boots. Well, everyone except for the really cool kids in grade eight, and I apologize for the pun. These were the monsters of the playground, leviathans that wreaked havoc our lesser lives the way that Godzilla could ruin your shopping trip to downtown Tokyo. In winter they did not deign to notice the ice and snow, and came to school wearing their brand-name running shoes -Adidas. I vowed that someday I would have a pair of Adidas, and wear them in the winter too damnit. Though I realized that was sheer bravado -- Mom would never let me out of the house wearing shoes in winter. I could get away with stuffing my toque in my parka pocket before I hove in front of the schoolyard, but that was as far as I was likely to take it.

Throughout the winter, I'd lobbied hard to get rid of the oxfords. Mom was a tough nut to crack, but Dad was somewhat sympathetic to my plight. As a boy he'd had bright red hair, and suffered under the Godzillas of his day too. The main resistance from my mother was that as a younger child, I'd had a slight problem with my gait, and she wanted to make sure I had enough arch support to correct it. Well, my walking had been four and a half-years corrected, and even with the reprieve of living in England it had seemed like a lifetime of suffering. Okay, my Mom agreed. If we would find running shoes that had good arch support, I could wear them to school.

The only shoes she would let me get, that weren't oxfords, were stiff leather Adidas. I couldn't feign disappointment. I was one happy little dude.

So, it was April. It was wonderful. There was no hint of cruelty in the air, just the damp fecundity of worms as they came out in the rain. I'd always liked watching them stretch and move. They were fascinating, but I wasn't the kind of boy that needed to pick them up, or God help us, eat them. According to Jason, Wild Bill had been a prolific worm-eater in his early days, before my family ever came to the neighborhood. Jason shared my live-and-let-live attitude towards the worms, but Wild Bill maintained a visceral, if not a digestive interest in the poor creatures. He stomped on the bigger ones, and ignored the tiny, spaghetti-like worms as we walked to school in a light rain.

Despite the rain, I'd insisted that I could wear the new shoes, and Mom had finally acquiesced when I explained that I wasn't going to get them wet. They were the best shoes I'd ever had -- how could I get them wet? It was unthinkable. Don't worry, I'd said. They'll be okay.
I was true to my word. Jason, who was wearing rubber boots, stomped in the occasional puddle while Wild Bill committed enthusiastic squirmicide. I stayed on the straight-and-narrow, studiously avoiding any contamination of my brand new Adidas. They were white, with blue stripes. They were cool. I was wearing something cool. Jason noticed them, but didn't say anything. Wild Bill may have noticed, but if he did, he didn't let on.

We arrived too late to play in the yard, so we went straight to class for an exciting morning of repeating things. It was math, my worst subject, but I didn't care. While we recited the times tables, the skies opened up outside, and it rained hard. Cindy Macliesh, who sat next to me, sighed heavily while we were copying stuff in our notebooks.

"What's wrong?" I asked. It might have been the first time I asked a question like that, openly solicitous of another person's feelings. But I was in a great, effusive mood.

"At recess, there will be worms," she whispered, almost inaudibly as she tried to escape the notice of Mrs. Walsh's supra-normal hearing.

"You don't like worms?"

"No!" She stopped herself as Mrs. Walsh roused herself from the book she was peering at. A dangerous moment passed, as Walsh scanned the classroom, looking for the source of the outburst. "No. I hate worms, they're disgusting," she whispered with feeling. "I especially hate it when the boys whip them at the girls."

Cindy had a bit of a lisp, almost undetectable now because she'd had two years of speech therapy to rid herself of the blemish on her normalcy. She also had curly blond hair and bright blue eyes that I'd never really noticed before. She was kind of pretty, I thought at that moment. And the way she said "wormths" was cute.

"I won't throw them at you."

She looked at me, and smiled. "Really?"

"No. Especially if you don't like it."

"Thanks," she said quietly. "By the way, I like your shoes."

I beamed a smile at her instead of saying anything, which was good because Mrs. Walsh was looking at us over her hawk-like beak of a nose. One more word would have got us both detention, and there would have been no going outside for recess anyway. As I smiled at her, I was acutely conscious of two things: she was smiling back, and Wild Bill was watching this whole exchange with incredulity. He was staring at me, asking me, as if by telepathy: "what are you nuts? You're talking to a guuurl!" His accusation distracted me. If I'd been able to fully absorb that moment, it could have saved me years of frustration when it came to the opposite sex, and I might have learned a valuable maxim: women care about shoes. They notice them. It matters what you have on your feet. It's a lesson it took me another twenty years to absorb.
At recess, there were, indeed, worms. Lots of them.
In the annals of childhood, I doubt that there had ever been - or ever will be - such an orgy of worm-hurling.

Cindy and I got there late, as we were pulled aside by Mrs. Walsh, who had actually heard our whole conversation and wanted to let us know that she was not pleased by our distraction. She wasn't going to make us stay inside at recess though. A warning was enough.

No warning could have prepared Cindy for the horror of that recess. We walked outside in the fresh April air, my feet resplendent in their new Adidas, to a scene of rampant worm-whipping debauchery. The girls squealed in disgust as the boys chased them, their hands slippery with worm goo and the creatures themselves. Wild Bill was a central figure in this slimy saturnalia, as he gleefully directed other boys to "really fat ones" and chased Amy Menderson around the yard with a handful of the poor creatures. Had the worms the capacity, they would have been, no doubt, troubled and confused by their sudden aeronautics.

Of course, now I realize that the act of whipping a worm at a girl could either be construed as the worst of outrages or the most flattering thing a boy could do. Amy Menderson was squealing, but I'm sure now it was only half in disgust.

Cindy took one look at the chaos and froze in the doorway.

I stood with her and tried to talk with her about horses -- I vaguely remembered that she liked them, but she wasn't much of a conversationalist right then. For the most part she just observed the goings on with the watchfulness of a meerkat. Her eyes were as big too.

Near the end of recess, Wild Bill had finally tossed the last of his worms, and he called me over. "What's up?"
He had one left in his hand, and he showed it to me. "For you."

"Yeah?" I laughed. I was nervous. He had that look in his eye, the one that he gets right before he does something crazy.

"Yeah. To throw at Cindy."

He was testing me, and I guess I failed in his eyes, because I said: "No! She doesn't like it."

"Oh, she doesn't like it," Wild Bill teased. "Well, we better do whatever Cindy says." He proceeded to launch into a rousing rendition of me and Cindy "sittin' in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g," loud enough for Cindy to hear, which was brutally embarrassing. I didn't move to grab the worm, so he said, "fine. I'll do it myself."

"No, Bill, don't."

"What, you gonna stop me?" That was the moment when I really failed us both. Of course, I should have stopped him. But I didn't want to fight Bill, especially because we were best friends. You don't fight a best friend over a girl.

Or a worm.

It looked kind of pathetic. He'd had it in his hand most of recess, so it wasn't moving very much and it was starting to dry out. Bill curled his fingers over it, and ran towards Cindy, and before I could even warn her, it was all over.

There was a high pitched shriek, the kind of sound a small mammal makes when it gets nabbed by a weasel, and Cindy was running away from the doorway, trying to flick the worm off her shoulder. Eventually she got it off her, and she stopped running. Meanwhile the rest of us were lining up to get back into class, girls on the left, boys on the right. I was in a perfect position to catch Cindy's withering look as she got in the line.

It didn't really matter that I'd promised not to fling worms at her, not stop other people from flinging worms at her. I knew that, even then. Wild Bill waggled his eyebrows at me, as the girls went in first -- like they always did, because they were always quiet first. As Cindy walked by, she ignored me, and I looked down at my new Adidas shoes. They were still pristine, practically glowing white.
And I thought that things were going to be really different, but maybe in a way that I hadn't guessed.

- The End -

©2007, Mark A. Rayner