I drove to the first of my freeloading friends houses to pick him up for school. Pulling into the driveway I gave a light tap on my horn before resting my eyes on the gleaming 6:52, comforting myself with the thought that the five minute drive had indeed only taken five minutes. Absentmindedly I picked up my can of breakfast and gave it a quick shake before opening it up. Hurriedly I put it in the cupholder so I could make room in the front seat for David. After three precious minutes passed on the clock my irritation level began to rise. He had already had my seven minutes, he really needed three more? In an effort to release some tension I picked up the breakfast drink and gave it a hard and fast shake. But wait- didn’t I…
My question didn’t even have time to fully form in my mind before the chocolate liquid splished and sploshed and splattered all over what I had now identified as a pink shirt. Lost in a cloud of fury I began to search the glove box for old napkins I had saved. Mopping up the chocolate mess I saw the dark stains settle on my clothes and I began to realize the theme of the day. It was 6:59 and Wednesday was clearly playing a cruel joke on me.
The passenger door swung open and my apologetic friend gave me a sheepish smile as I tried to take some deep cleansing breaths. Furiously I drove to my second friend’s house while David tried to make small talk but was instead met with my cold stare. I gravely explained the events of my short morning to him culminating with the news that we were now running fourteen minutes late. I turned off the main road on to the side street that led to Jenn’s house, our last stop before heading to school. Still reeling from the chocolate incident I glanced down and looked at the brown speckles covering my jeans. When I looked up terror filled my heart. Staring back at me from the road was a tiny pair of beady black eyes. His bushy tail bobbed and his front paws rustled in front of his mouth. I tried to swerve but it was too late.
The ba-bump that came from my tires as I ran over the little squirrel echoed in my heart while the guilt and grief was sweeping over me. I pulled into the driveway and put my head in my hands as my bubbly friend piled into the backseat. Making my way back to the main road I made a rookie mistake. I took the same route back that we had just come, instead of the shorter one, to make sure the squirrel, who my mind had named Charlie and convinced me that he was out gathering breakfast for his squirrel wife and his three little squirrel babies, was really dead.
He was. My eyes found the flattened squirrel on the road and I began to get an even sicker feeling in my gut. I remained quiet on the remainder of the drive listening to bits of conversation between my friends and thinking about Charlie’s hungry squirrel babies, Mabel, Carlos and Percy.
At 7:15 we pulled into the community center where I had to park my car- of course sophomores could not park in one of the three parking lots on campus. There were ten minutes left before the bell rang. Only ten minutes to walk from the community center, visit my locker and cross the sprawling campus to get to first period on time. As we sprinted toward the school I loathed my two friends who had English first period- the first building as you enter the school grounds. Their heads disappeared into the 700 building while I was making my third attempt to get my locker open. I blindly pulled my books for my first two classes and began to once again sprint as I headed to the math building.
The chimes of the first period bell began to sound as I closed in on the door. Grateful to have made it almost on time I sunk into my seat hoping for one of Mr. B’s easy review days. The quiet chatter of my neighbors alerted me that something was off. I kept hearing words like “studied”, “conic sections” and -–gulp-- “test”. My eyes fell on the weekly schedule and those four letters may as well have been in flashing neon lights.
I pondered the consequences of making a run for it but Mr. B had already begun to hand out the three page exam which I was sure to do poorly on. Armed with my graphing calculator and my number two pencil I set to work feverishly calculating and surmising, hoping that somehow I would remember the correct formulas.
I handed in my eraser worn paper and slowly made the trek to psychology. Surely my favorite teacher this semester would have all kinds of fun events lined up to enlighten me as to the human psyche. As he requested our homework from the night before I flipped open my pink binder and shuffled through the papers trying to locate the worksheet in question. But words like “cellular division”, “photosynthesis” and “single cell organism” kept flashing before my eyes. I slammed the binder shut and looked at its innocent pink cover. “Pink for biology,” my calm and logical brain told me, “you need the blue one for psychology.” It was not the ten points I was going to lose on the homework assignment that were upsetting me. No, it was Wednesday and all of its harsh practical jokes that I was upset about. As I silently sat through the discussion I pleaded with God to give me the strength I needed to finish out this day to end all days.
I meandered slowly to biology knowing I wouldn’t need to stop at my locker since I had already mistakenly taken my supplies with me for class. I settled in for a long boring lecture but was pleasantly surprised when I found out we were working on identification instead. I smiled, thankful that my luck finally seemed to be turning around. My lab partner and I began the tedious task of sorting through the twenty five types of fish. The boldfaced words stared up at me from the word bank. I slowly read and reread the word third from the bottom in the last column.
The letters came together forming the word “squirrelfish” bringing the memories of the morning whooshing back into the forefront of my mind. Suddenly I was back in the woods with Charlie’s hungry family and the guilt revisited me all over again. Halfheartedly I finished the worksheet, saving Charlie’s aquatic relative for last, longing for the release lunch would soon bring.
I roamed through the cafeteria already nostalgic for the five dollars which would soon be missing from my wallet. Settling in at the picnic table I ate my chicken sandwich, resenting every bite for stealing the last remnants of my birthday money. I thought that the best plan of action was to pack up early and make my way to my last class of the day. I slid my water bottle off the edge of the table knocking into something on my way. My eyes darted to the table to see what I had undoubtedly knocked over. When I saw that little yellow cup tilted on its side I knew that only one thing could have been inside it. I looked downward seeing the blue slush, already feeling the sticky residue it would leave on my foot. Wednesday had struck again. The bitter chicken sandwich and the blue icy had not given me the time I had hoped to have to decompress and regroup.
In a trance I made my way across campus. I could visualize the imaginary black rain cloud hovering over my head, threatening to erupt and drench me at any moment. I passed the threshold into my creative writing class and instantly I could see the black rain cloud that was ruining Mrs. Stevenson’s Wednesday. When we had our one on one conference about my latest short story I could feel the full force of her bad day land squarely on me. My grammar was imperfect, my details lacking detail, and my characters unbelievable. If I had been having a better day I probably would have responded better. Instead of having a mature reaction I childishly pushed my chair back from her desk and felt the hot tears streaming down my face. Back at my desk I sat quietly with tears still dripping off my cheeks, ignoring the inquiries from my concerned classmates. I packed up my bag and sat in a silent protest, my inner two year old giving Mrs. Stevenson a steely eyed glare whenever she dared to look at me.
I stalked from the campus, thankful that the school day had finally come to an end. I drove to the doctor's office I worked at thinking that the worst of the day should be behind me. I walked into the back entrance of the office and could tell it had been the same kind of Wednesday there. Dr. J had been running behind and it had caused the mostly geriatric clientele to become cranky and cantankerous. I spent the afternoon finding the charts for the next day’s appointments doing my best to avoid the grouchy patients. When I finished collecting the brown file folders I stacked them in time order and began to put them under the counter at the front desk. Crawling backward slowly I began to stand up realizing too late that I wasn’t far enough out from underneath. My head banged on the hard undersurface and I heard a loud crack, immediately falling onto my knees again. I continued my journey from under the counter but I was too dizzy to stand up. My concerned coworkers flitted around me offering me water and a place to sit as I got my bearings back. The rest of my work day passed in a blur as I was relegated to answering the incessantly ringing phones.
The last stop of this horrible Wednesday was at my tap class. I hustled into dressing room and began the process of changing into my dance clothes. From my big black bag I removed my blue leotard and black pants. I dug out the thick white socks I had packed so that I wouldn’t get blisters from the shoes rubbing on my heels. I began sifting through the bag of shoes, looking for those silver taps that distinguished them from the others.
Frantically I tossed aside ballet slippers, hip hop sneakers, and toe shoes. I sifted through three pairs of jazz shoes and reached the bottom of the bag. I realized that there were no tap shoes in the abyss and immediately looked for the obvious solution. If you forget your jazz shoes, you wear your ballet shoes. If you forget your hip hop shoes, you wear your jazz shoes. But tap shoes have no obvious solution. Unless you are also a clogger. I am not a clogger. I pulled the thick socks over my feet and walked down the endless hallway to the studio door.
From the doorway I looked at the slick, shiny hardwood floor and instantly knew that it would be slippery in my white socks. I spent the next hour slipping and sliding across the hardwood, trying unsuccessfully to manage new steps and combinations. At the end of the hour I fled the room that I usually had to force myself to leave. Driving home was almost like a dream to me. I went through the motions without really registering what I was doing. Looking to my right I saw my street pass as my car continued to zoom forward. Making the u-turn in disbelief I recounted the day’s events in my mind, ending in what seemed to be the most unlikely of all of the events. Wednesday had me so distracted with all of its hijinks that I had passed by the road I turn down at the end of every day.
The frustration that had been brewing inside of me finally forced its way to the surface. I heard the scream before I realized that it was coming from me. I pulled into my driveway feeling battered and beaten. Leaving all my bags in the car I approached the front door of my house, looked to the sky and said, “You win Wednesday, you win. But tell Thursday to look out- I am ready for a fight.”
PS: This is a true story from a particularly tough day in my sophomore year in high school. Our assignment was to take an inanimate object and give it life. I chose Wednesday as my "object" and tried to write a story of a day that I will surely always remember. Though I do not know for sure that it was a Wednesday, that detail has seemed to escape me ; )
