Philip Hassey
Jerry
They told me that "Jerry likes milk. Lots of milk. For breakfast. Bleh!" and they meant it, and not in a nice way. I could do nothing but stand there with my mouth dropped slightly opened in wonder as to why those boys said that about Jerry.
Jerry was a seventh grade boy. Very thin. Very tall. Black hair, and he liked milk. He also thought that his presence in the universe was indespensable, perhaps that is why the forth graders said those things about him. The way they stuck their little toungs out after they said it really made me wonder what was going on.
Jerry was strange, I knew that. As a seventh grader at the vacation bible school, he was designated to help out. So he came in and tried to help. He demanded that he lead Simon-says and that, "Simon says to bite your own tounge," I could only assume there was some scarring childhood experience which would be able to explain a Simon-says demand like that.
Jerry seemed to be a young boy at the age of nine. The fact that he still wore a pacifier around his neck to school gave that away. He always shyed away by himself and whenever anyone would try to talk to him he would just suck on his pacifier until they would go away. The bigger boys were afraid to beat him up, because they thought he might be psycho, even though he looked like he weighed only about thirty pounds and probably couldn't have been all that dangerous.
However the day Jerry came to school without his pacifier, everyone noticed. Not so much because he didn't have his pacifier, but because he obviously didn't want anyone to notice that he didn't have his pacifier. Not that having people notice that you have a pacifier hanging around your neck is all that great to begin with, but having people notice that you don't have one just really rubs the pain in even worse.
The look on Jerry's face was what really made it obvious. Usually he had a fairly forlorned look on his face. The look on his face without his pacifier was one of almost complete terror and panic mixed with agony anguish and suffering.
Somehow as his teacher Miss Blackmire looked at him, she could for a brief moment feel she knew the pain he must have been feeling. The pain she knew was the pain she had the day she came to school wearing a large red wig and holding only a large black whip. She marched up in front of her class of innocent fourth graders and took the whip and whipped across the room and the whip hit the glass globe and shattered it to pieces. At 8:04 in the morning, fourth graders aren't ready for this kind of excitement, so they could only gape at her, as she began to fall and collapse to the ground and cry.
That incident was not what reminded her of Jerry's pain. The incident on that day was far too strange and emotional for her to even try to begin to explain to anyone. What she did understand was the janitor's pain. The janitor came in at the end of the day to clean up the glass and he cut his finger on the glass, and had to go to the town doctor, Dr. Bloggert.
Nobody liked to go to Dr. Bloggert, and so not many people in Phillip's, ME ever got very sick. Although Dr. Bloggert was disliked, people knew that going to him would make them better. Dr. Bloggert had a theory that said if a person is made to look even worse than they did before they came to him, they would try to get better quicker and wouldn't get sick again. The next day the janitor, who only had a small cut, requiring perhaps three or four stitches, came back into the school with a large ceramic cast that must have weight a good thirty pounds covering his whole arm. He looked a lot like a large white dead dog had been pasted to his arm, and he had the look in his eyes.
Jerry's mom had tried for years to get Jerry to get rid of his pacifier. She had tried everything from bribery, to hiding it, to spraying weird tastes onto it, to anything she thought might have worked. She took Jerry to child psychologists, and dozens of therapy sessions, with no luck.
Finally as a last resort she took him to Dr. Bloggert. Dr. Bloggert took one look at Jerry and told her that nothing was wrong with him. Jerry's mom insisted that there was, because Jerry wouldn't give up his pacifier. Dr. Bloggert looked at Jerry. He looked at Jerry's pacifier. He violently reached his hand out and grabbed a strong hold on Jerry's pacifier. He lifted it over Jerry's head, and hed it for a moment. Looking at it carefully.
Then Dr. Bloggert dropped the pacifier on a metal counter, and walked out of the room for a few moments. Jerry's mom hugged Jerry for support as Jerry quivered softly. Dr. Bloggert came back into the room with a large jar of acid. He looked straight at Jerry's face and did not smile at all. Then he walked to the counter and poured some acid on the pacifier. The pacifier melted into a small puddle of blackened mush. Dark steam billowed off of it. Jerry cried.
Some people reacted well to Dr. Bloggert's treatments. Those who took amusement in themselves, often came out happier people from all the attention and fuss that they could cause by having a huge disfigurement brought out even stronger. They'd usually get better quicker than the others who would try to hide that which was obviously unhidable. Jerry couldn't hide that he didn't have a pacifier, and everyone knew what had happened, even though nobody asked.
I still have no idea why "Jerry likes milk. Lots of milk. For Breakfast. Bleh!" was bad thing. But I do understand a lot of other things. I try not to get sick very often. But when I do get a runny nose, I try to blow my nose nice a big and show off my snots, because I can make more boogers than anyone else that I know.
