by Jon Scieszka
After some deep breaths I pulled myself together for a moment and steadied myself against the doorjamb. I peeked around the corner. I didn’t see my mom, so I desperately hopped on one foot down the hall toward the bathroom. I glanced over my shoulder and saw little pools of blood scattered behind me. I knew they might lead to trouble with my mom, but there was nothing I could do at the moment but concentrate all my “mind-over-matter” techniques to block out the pain. I kept hopping and zigzagging down the hall like a wounded rabbit until I lunged into the bathroom, spun around, and wisely locked the door behind me.
I was out of breath, and between gasps of air I kept chanting, “Now you have done something really, really stupid!” The blood was still burbling out of my foot when I worked my way over to the tub spigot and turned it on. I knew I should clean the wound, but when the water went into the ragged, bloody hole in my foot, I thought I had been jabbed with a hot poker. “Oh, cheese!” I shouted.
I was blinded by the pain as I danced up and down while splashing bloody water all over the walls. And then just what I dreaded most in the world happened next. There was a loud knocking on the door.
“Jack!” my mother said sharply. “What is going on in there?”
I quickly bit down on my lip and composed myself. “Nothing,” I said blithely as if I really were telling the truth.
“Well,” she continued, “then can you explain why there are blood drops leading from your bedroom to the bathroom?”
“Oh, I just had a tiny accident,” I replied with a jolly chuckle. “No big deal.”
“Are you okay?” she pressed.
“Yes,” I said in a fake cheerful voice because I was about to explode. My muscles were so contorted I thought all the bones in my body would snap. “I’ll be okay.”
“Just make sure you clean up the hall,” she ordered, and I heard her turn and walk away.
I instantly shoved a wet washcloth in my mouth and tried not to scream too loudly when suddenly there was more loud knocking on the bathroom door.
“What?” I shouted.
“You didn’t do something stupid with the Pagoda boys?” she asked, and I could tell by her harsh voice that she was already convinced that I had.
“No!” I shouted back.
“Well, you know you are capable of hurting yourself,” she reminded me. “You’ve done it before.”
“I know,” I replied indignantly, “but I’m fine.”
“Just checking,” she added.
“Thank you for your consideration,” I said sweetly, “but you may go now.” Honestly, I was in so much pain I was ready to beat myself unconscious on the dull edge of the sink.
And she did go! I pressed my ear to the door and heard her walk away, and when I could no longer hear her, I said to myself, “Oh, boy, this time you really did something stupid.”
I didn’t know what to do next so I opened the medicine chest and looked inside. There was a little plastic bag of cotton balls. I never in my life had noticed them before when suddenly I got one of those “Eureka!” moments.
“They are for stuffing holes!” I shouted joyously. I shook a few from the bag, took a deep breath, and pressed one up into the hole. Then I did another, and another, until the hole was filled up. I stood and pressed my foot down on the floor. It hurt, but I was relieved that the blood had clotted and stopped. Then just to give the cotton balls a little more strength, I took white first aid tape and wrapped it around my foot. Perfect! I thought. It’s as good as new.
I took a towel and wiped up the bloody mess in the bathroom, then crawled down the hall, wiping up the blood drops on the floor until I got into my bedroom.
And there it was—the reward for all that pain. I grinned like an idiot as I knelt down over the puddle of blood. Right in the middle was the rusty pair of pliers, and right at the tip of the pliers was that big hunk of bloody, yellow, warty flesh. I plucked it out and made it over to my bedside table, where I snatched up my journal and then got a knife out of my toolbox. I gouged a hole in the cover of the journal and shoved the juicy wart inside. “That’s a keeper,” I said, admiring my souvenir of pain as I shuffled over to the window, where I set the journal on the sill to dry under the sun.
That night I slept well, and the next morning I hopped out of bed, but when my foot hit the floor, the pain made me wince and I jerked my foot up. “That’s sore,” I said, and then added, “Of course it is sore, you idiot. You just ripped a wart out with a pair of pliers. Now suck it up and go to school.”
I got dressed, put on some well-padded sneakers, and left the house. For once Frankie Pagoda showed up to school before lunch. He was in my math class.
“Hey,” he said, and pointed at my shoe, “how come you are limping?”
With great pride I told him about my self-surgery. He didn’t seem terribly impressed. “I’m sure that hurt,” he said, “but Gary just burns his warts out with the tip of a soldering iron. When you burn them out, it seals the wound so you don’t bleed plus it kills all the germs that could infect you.”
“Wow,” I said sarcastically, “I didn’t know Gary was such a deep thinker.”
“He thinks about pain all the time,” Frankie said. “Believe me.”
I believed him.
The rest of the day was okay. I told the gym teacher I had stepped on a nail, so I got a pass to sit in the library.
The next morning when I rolled out of bed and put my foot on the floor, it seemed extra tender and puffy. And then with some alarm I noticed a red streak was now running out from underneath the bandages. That can’t be good, I quietly thought as I shrugged it off. So I’ll ignore it. But all day at school it would not be ignored. It burned. It simmered. It pounded. No matter which way I moved my foot it throbbed as if beating inside the wound was a tiny, angry heart. I started to worry but then I got a grip on myself. “Suck it up!” I hissed. “A wound always gets worse before it gets better.” I didn’t know if that was true but Gary had said it was.
The following day I got out of bed and my foot was like a hot anvil and the red streak was above my ankle and heading for my knee. I took a deep breath. “I’ll just pretend I didn’t see that,” I said bravely, and limped off to school, where all day I could think of nothing but my screaming foot.
The next morning was worse. When I stood up my foot was killing me, and then I looked into the mirror and saw I was covered with hundreds of pussy little pink boils all over my body. “Oh, creeping crud,” I moaned. “I’m dying!” In a panic I hopped out of the room and careened off the walls all the way down to the kitchen, where my mother was making coffee.
“Look at me!” I shouted hysterically, and held open my PJ top so she could see the boils. “I’m dying!”
“Mother of mercy!” she shouted in return, and stepped back in horror. “You are dying! Now get some clothes on and get in the car.”
I chicken-hopped back up to my room and pulled on some clothes and my sneakers and met her at the car. She looked insane, so I thought I must be dying, and when she hit the gas, we flew out of the driveway and down the street. Gary Pagoda was standing on the corner. It was hard to tell if he was just coming home from a wild night out or if he was going to school because he had the kind of hair that was always damp-looking, so you couldn’t tell if he had just taken a morning shower or if he had a sweaty head from running from the police. As we passed him, I saw that he was holding a baby alligator between his thumb and forefinger.
I waved to him.
“Don’t wave to him!” Mom ordered. “You’ll only encourage his sick behavior.”
I lowered my hand to my lap. As I did so, I saw the boils along my arms and closed my eyes. It scared me to look at myself.
It didn’t take long for Mom to pull up to the hospital emergency entrance. “I’m warning you,” she said as she stomped on the brakes and threw the gear shift into Park. “You’d better tell the truth or I’ll kill you, because I’m sure you did something stupid.”
“You a
re scaring me,” I said weakly. “Please don’t.”
“I’m your mother,” she replied. “I’m supposed to scare you, so don’t tell me how to behave. Now get a move on.”
Inside the emergency room we were directed into a small alcove that was sealed off by a white curtain. I sat on a bench and my mother sat next to me.
“What stupid thing have you done?” she whispered, with her fist hovering over her shoulder. “Tell me before the doctor gets here so you don’t embarrass me.”
Just at that moment the doctor pulled aside the curtain. “Well,” he said, after taking a long look at me, “what do we have here?” He sat on a stool, and with the rubber tip of his pencil he began to poke my boils. He took my temperature and then looked inside my mouth.
“I think he has done something stupid,” my mom blurted out. “He does stupid stuff all day long.”
“Is there something unusual you have done to yourself?” the doctor asked calmly, trying to offset my mother’s tone. “You can tell me. I won’t think it’s stupid.”
“Well…” I said, getting ready to tell him, when I made a mistake and glanced at my mom. That big fist of hers was still making a circle above her shoulder, and she was squinting at me like she wanted to split my skull. One wrong word and I knew she would knock me to the other side of the room.
I turned back to the doctor. “No,” I said innocently. “I can’t think of anything unusual I may have done. This is a complete mystery to me.”
“Peculiar,” he replied. “I think you should go into the next room.” And he pointed toward another curtained space. I stood up and half smiled at my mom. She nicked her chin with her fist as a warning while she mouthed, “Tell the truth or else!”
I was so happy to get away from her that for a moment I forgot I was dying. But it didn’t take long before I remembered. In an instant a big nurse in a stiff white dress pulled aside the curtain and looked at me revoltingly as if I were infected with the plague.
“Take off all your clothes and stand like an X in the middle of the room,” she ordered.
“Did I hear you correctly?” I asked.
“Like a big naked X!” she snapped. “Now, no monkey business.” Then she pulled the curtain closed and dashed off.
I did what I was told, taking off all my clothes, and that’s when I saw the bandages—no way was the nurse not going to notice those. I peeled them off, slowly, throwing them in the garbage by the curtain. My foot looked like the big hunk of ham you see behind the counter at the deli. Blood immediately started seeping through the cotton balls, but I pressed my foot against the ground to keep it all in. If I angled my foot in a bit, you couldn’t even see the red streak, which was almost at my knee, unless you were looking directly at it.
Before she returned I got into my big naked X position. I looked straight up at the blinding lightbulb because I couldn’t bear to stare down at my naked, pus-covered self. In a moment the nurse returned. In one hand she had something like a gallon of paint in a bucket and in the other she had a wide paintbrush. She surveyed me up and down with her eyes. I dropped my hands to cover my private parts.
“Don’t you dare touch yourself!” she snapped. “Now get those hands in the air, mister!”
I threw my hands straight up as if she had pulled a gun on me.
“Now stand still while I paint you with this medicine,” she growled, “or I’ll put you in quarantine with the rabid animals.”
I stiffened up as she dipped the brush into the bucket and began to paint me from the top of my head on down, and to my dismay the medicine was bright, neon purple.
“What is this?” I whimpered.
“An antifungal agent,” she replied as she brushed my chest up and down like a fence. “It’s called Gentians Violet, and we paint kids with it who have really bad hygiene. Now stick out your hand.”
I did as I was told and she pressed the brush handle into my palm. “Now swab your private parts—both front and back and all around your behind,” she instructed. “Do a good job because the parts and cracks of the body that don’t get much sunlight are where fungus hides and grows.”
I didn’t need to know that.
She watched with her big hands on her hips as I did a very thorough job, and while I had the brush, I ran it down the red streak on my leg and over my foot. Then I gave her back the brush. It didn’t take long before she was finished and I was glowing purple from head to toe. I stood still for as long as it took to dry off then put my clothes on and slowly ambled out to my mother. She looked at me and grimaced. “You look like a pickled beet,” she said, shaking her head in amazement.
“Can I have a hug?” I asked, and held my arms open.
“Maybe tomorrow,” she replied, poking at my skin. “You are still tacky.”
Thankfully, we were both quiet on the ride home, but when we pulled back into the driveway, my sister was just leaving the house. “Oh, puke!” she shouted as I stepped from the car and into the full sunlight. I was blinding to look at, and she covered her eyes with one hand as she shouted out loud to the neighborhood, “Hey, everyone, come see our new yard gnome. Its name is Purple Pus Boy!”
I lowered my head and marched toward the front door. “Thanks for all your kindness,” I hissed as I passed her. I went into my room and closed the bedroom door. I took off my shoe and then peeled off my sock, which was already soaking through with blood, and wrapped bandages around it again. The clean wrapping felt better but not by much. Then I got up and walked over to the windowsill, where my journal was drying out. I reached forward and touched the pebbly surface of the wart. It was great, and I smiled just a little.
That night my mother brought me my dinner on a tray. “I thought you’d rather avoid the family spotlight,” she said, and reached out to hug me but then remembered that I was repulsive and pulled away with a look of fear and loathing.
The next morning I woke up and when I put my foot down on the floor, I knew there was a problem. It felt like that little volcanic wart had erupted and now I was standing on red-hot molten lava. And then there was the streak. Even though I was purple, I could still see it. I almost wanted to cry because now it was running up the inside of my leg, over my hip, and aiming for my heart. “This can’t be good,” I said slowly, and instantly I knew the terrible, hard thing that I was going to have to do. I put on a pair of long pants and a long-sleeved shirt, and pulled a baseball cap down low over my forehead, and slipped my hands into a pair of work gloves, and painfully limped down the hall.
“Hey, Mom,” I said as casually as I knew how. “I forgot to tell the doctor one little bitsy thing that I think would be really helpful for my future health.”
She gave me a withering look that would scare a bear. “Back in the car,” she commanded with one stiff finger pointing toward the front door.
I got into the car as if I were taking a ride to where I would meet a firing squad. The whole way there she drove with one hand on the wheel and the other balled up into a red fist and aimed at me. She knew I had done something colossally stupid. But I still wouldn’t tell her what. And why should I? She’d never understand. It was a boy thing.
She pulled into the parking lot. “Out!” was all she said.
I scurried from the car and hobbled up the stairs and into the emergency room. Very sick people pulled back from me. The ones who were too sick to move just closed their eyes.
The nurse receptionist escorted us to the same little room with the curtain. My mom and I sat on the same bench. She held the same fist up in the air, but she looked at me in a new way, a way that confirmed all her fears. “You are one of them,” she said, passing a final judgment on me. “You’ve become a Pagoda. Admit it!”
Before I could put together some flimsy lie, the doctor pulled aside the curtain and stepped toward me. “What did you forget to tell me?” he asked.
“Yes,” my mother echoed, “what did you forget to tell us?”
There was no other way to say it except to blur
t it out. “It slipped my mind the other day,” I said breathlessly, and I pointed toward my foot. “I had this big volcanic wart on the bottom of my foot, and I took this rusty pair of needle-nose pliers, and…and…and ripped it out!”
“Ripped it out?” my mother shrieked. “Are you kidding me! Ripped it out with a pair of pliers! Oh save me, doctor,” she said mournfully, “my son is an idiot.”
The doctor patted her on the knee to calm her down as he looked up at me. “You know what you did, don’t you?”
“No,” I replied, “I’m too stupid to know what I did. What’d I do?”
“You gave yourself blood poisoning with the rusty pair of pliers,” he explained.
“Oh,” I said quietly as my pride shriveled up like the ugly wart in my journal.
Then the doctor gently removed the bandages and looked at what I did. Neither he nor my mother said anything. They just sadly shook their heads, which was worse, in a way. The doctor gave me antibiotics.
On the way home I tried to tell my mother I would never do something this stupid again. “I promise,” I said tearfully. I raised my hand and began to cross my heart to swear on it, but she reached out and clamped down on my hand with a steel grip.
“Don’t cross your heart and hope to die,” she warned me, “because you will. Even if I cut your legs off, you will drag your severed torso across the ground to go over to that Pagoda madhouse and somehow maim yourself.”
She was right. I would. I knew I’d take the antibiotics and get over my boils, but when it came to the Pagodas, I was infected for life and there was no cure from them other than death. Or maybe if I was extremely lucky, I would only be crippled for life.
“Mom,” I asked, and reached for her free hand. I lifted it up to my purple lips and kissed it. “If I were paralyzed and strapped to a bed, and in a coma, and unable to speak, would you take care of me?”
“Of course,” she said without hesitation. “I’m your mother. I’m compelled to take care of you even if you can’t take care of yourself.”
Yessss! I thought. Just then we turned the corner on to our street and Gary Pagoda was on the peak of his roof, balanced precariously on a unicycle.