In the stream there were crawfish and tadpoles, as any good carnivorous water creature should know.
Continuing on from the bridge, the library and the shopping centre were across the street to the right. The children would walk on this side of the street to get to school, but they would invariably walk back home on the other side. All the more to stop at the library to do their homework or stroll the shopping centre looking for mischief to get into.
At last, the boy reached the wire fence of the school boundary and noticed that he was early by the lack of children in the playground. Dolphins have no sense of time, and he was no exception, but it was better to be early than late and he was never, ever late.
He ducked under a bowed section of the fence and hurried along the back perimeter of the school. The fence gave way at the back to a wooded section that was unfenced. Beyond the woods, no one knew what lay there. However, there were a few pathways beaten down over the years by many feet, and these furtive paths seemed intentional as if they knew where they were going and how to get there. Otherwise, why would the paths exist at all, and why would many people pass that way?
He followed the first path he knew best to his favourite spot: a small clearing in the middle of the thin trees where the rusted hulk of an automobile sat. The roof was completely rusted away and the tyres were gone. The car’s make and model was unrecognisable from any other car the boy had seen that rolled around the streets in the town of the valley. The paint was completely gone and the car was now coloured the deep rich brown blood of rust.
He liked this spot because there was no one else here, and indeed, he often thought no one knew this place even existed. It was extremely pleasant to stay inside a protective pregnant lagoon where nothing betrayed the presence or even changing of time. Not even the trees or their leaves rustled or moved. One could not even hear the silent sound of the rust eating the metal of the car slowly over eons.
He liked to imagine the automobile was his, and he could drive it with his flippers and fluke: a car built for sea mammals. He would drive the car through the forest, across the bridge over the stream back there, and up and over the rickety appliance swaying bridge (backing up if needed for the brown horse, of course), and then down the other side to park in front of his three storey house.
The first bell rang in the distance and the boy stopped making car sounds with his mouth and zoomed back toward the school buildings.
Inside the classroom, the students could tell that the teacher was in a foul mood. She was an unattractive woman who seemed to be every bit of her elderly 25 years on this planet. Perhaps the cause of her mood, or perhaps even because of her mood, the children were particularly rambunctious and refused to settle down.
The boy was a natural leader, although like all good leaders, he never knew he was a leader. He set the tone of the misbehaviour because he was situated in the centre of the centre column of desks. He was an expert at making fart noises with his mouth in such a way that no one could tell where the fart noises were coming from or who was making them. The other children, especially the boys, copied him inexpertly and were often caught by the teacher and given disapproving looks. This only made the students more bold and laugh and hoot louder.
The boy realised that they were pushing their collective luck, and the teacher’s patience besides, so that he finally settled down and from his example, like schools of fish, the other children settled down too. The teacher was handing back the previously completed and now graded homework assignments. She stopped on one particular sheet and her lip curled up in ugly distaste at what she read there.
The boy had signed his name Usagi which means Rabbit. The class erupted in laughter at the fake name, and the boy grinned in satisfaction at his prank, conceived of more than two days ago, an eternity, and executed with deft precision, hidden in a pile with all the other normal papers, and then discovered only at the last, final moment for all to enjoy.
The class erupted once again but even more loudly in laughter and raucous merriment. The boy sheepishly, but it was only an act of course, raised his hand to take ownership of the paper and anoint himself the moniker Usagi. What was clever most of all was that he had called himself a rabbit but was actually a dolphin. The two animals could not be more diametrically opposed, and no one would ever discover the ruse:: a dolphin boy in rabbit’s clothing.
The teacher’s face twisted even more repellently and hideously than before. She was completely fed up and grabbed the metre stick that hung on the wall from a nail, then swung it over her head and smacked it loudly on the boys desk. The laughter stopped instantly and children within three desks covered their ears too late to stop the ear-splitting snap of wood on wood. The boy raised his arms up reflexively to shield his face, but fortunately nobody was hurt or struck by the stick and the violent force of the snap.
The teacher swung her hand up again with a now half-metre stick and all but brought it down again before she realised she had completely lost control and gone too far. She lowered her hand slowly and demanded the other half-metre piece from his desk be handed to her. He reached out for the stick on his desk and the teacher violently threw the remaining sheets of paper in her other hand at him.
The papers fluttered around his desk but none reached him or touched him. He held out the stick he had picked up and handed it back to the teacher. She took it and turned hurriedly to retreat back to her desk. Silently, quickly, two boys in the next row where the desks opened toward the aisle, slid out of their seats and half-kneeled to pick up the scattered papers.
This violent display had a strange effect on the boy. He suddenly felt invincible and untouchable, as if he had been net to a bomb blast and survived unscathed. In a very real sense, he had. Close calls of this kind can have either a strong negative or positive effect, and the boy dolphin in our story had taken a huge dose of confidence from the event. A thin layer of invisible armour was applied to his sleek grey skin, making him stronger, more attractive, and bulletproof.
The children who had gathered the papers from the floor effortlessly collated and merged their piles right-side up and then sat down again. The teacher had been screeching, apparently, this whole time about the rowdy children and how all the bad things in her life should conspire to happen at this one moment when she didn’t need it to. She pointed an accusatory finger at the boy in the centre of the room and admonished him, especially, as a devil and a force of grave evil in the classroom. This was patently false, he knew, because the devil didn’t exist, just as he knew that God did not exist.
The fact that she yelled shrilly and impotently across the room, from the safety of her own large desk implied that she knew she was wrong and the boy coasted nicely on happy chemicals tracing through his blood stream. He rode the natural high and grew even more thickly applied armour over his body.
Finally he realised that he was being sent out of the classroom and needed to visit the principal’s office. At this, his armour started to crack a bit. The principal was a mean man, prone to anger, and all the students spoke of a large wooden paddle with holes drilled into its face hanging above the desk in his large office. Of course, none of the students who spoke of the paddle had actually been to his office and seen the paddle, but it was certain that it existed. There were conflicting reports about whether one needed to drop one’s trousers to get the full impact directly on skin or not. It was argued endlessly in some circles whether ‘twas easier or better to get a paddling with trousers on or off.
Seeming to confirm the rumours, the students had each witnessed instances of a child, always a boy, coming out of the principal’s office slumped over like an old man, weeping openly and generously for all to see. Surely no person could withstand the impact of that large, unseen paddle. Surely the noise that echoed in the witnesses’ ears at the time confirmed the sharp impacts of the vicious device. And even though tears among boys are strictly forbidden, any boy who came out of the principal’s office crying and weeping was forgiven for the display because none among them could possibly do better.
The boy got up from his desk slowly as his shield sloughed off and approached the teacher’s desk apprehensively. She was still shrill but not screaming. She flung a piece of paper that was a hall pass at the boy, and he picked it up from the corner of her desk where it landed. Now riding a different set of chemical cocktail in his bloodstream, he walked out of the classroom in shock and disbelief.
He caught a glimpse of the face of one girl who sat in the corner near the door. The look of concern, shock, bewilderment, and amazement had a dreadful effect on him, and his eyes started brimming with tears. He fought them back, however, because dolphins can’t cry.
Outside the classroom, he wandered the exterior breezeways aimlessly, clutching the hall pass. His mind began to race as he considered what to do. He couldn’t go to the principal’s office: that way lay death via the bum smacking maniac. He had on corduroy blue pants that were likely to hurt a great deal, and leave a striped impression besides, if he were swatted.
He steeled himself silently for the punishment, yet nevertheless resolved to get out of it somehow. Along the back of one row of buildings, there was a short hedge of bushes that lined the buildings just below the windows. The boy knew that there was enough room between the wall and the bush to form a hidden sanctuary that would screen him from all pyring eyes while he decided what plans to create.
Climbing behind a hedge and crawling in the dirt next to the building, he sat on the ground and hugged his knees close pondering the best course of action. Slowly, a plan dawned on him that was surely infallible. He would simply wait for a while hidden from view and then he would appear back at class at some point, pretending to have been struck at least twice, perhaps three or four times for good measure, and appear contrite.
He even fake cried a few times to himself to show himself how he would do it. He had mastered the art of catching his voice in his chest mid-sentence, at the most emotional moment of course, so that the impact of his words and the sincerity of them could not be denied. He was already a dolphin living as a boy, so this was an easy task to put on airs and pretend to be an emotional human.
With all of his careful planning occupying his attention, he started suddenly when the first recess bell rang and he decided to join the other students on the yard. He quickly buried the principal’s office pass under a fine layer of dust and crawled out to join his mates.
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