Lunch Bag Theft

Posted on July 13, 2003 in Adolescence Book of Days

Note: This is part of a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days. It’s something of a rebellion against the Friday Five and similar tupperware content memes.

Today’s topic: Write about a theft.

There was no telling who did it unless I caught him in the act or someone told me who did it, which was unlikely given the stupid code of the school that said you didn’t narc on any other student. Narcs got beat up, so people looked the other way when things happened unless one of their friends were involved. I didn’t have any friends around the lockers. So I guess that made me an open target.

Someone stole my lunch every day. Every now and then, I opened the locker to find trash stuffed inside. Kids didn’t like me. I was alone. If I complained to the dean, I was a narc. If I complained to other kids I got laughed at.

I don’t know what made my lunch especially attractive. Perhaps it was because some kid didn’t want to spend the money his mama gave him every day to buy lunch in the school cafeteria on food. Maybe he wanted to save it for candy or cigarettes. An ugly crowd of smokers hung out in front of the school, pretty girls who glued themselves to boys who looked as if they’d been kept in cages all summer. All for the love of nicotine.* Or perhaps he liked the cookies my mother made.

When I did tell the dean, he just sighed and said “You’ve got to protect your combination better.” He didn’t offer me a new locker nor did he promise to do anything if I did manage to catch the thief. He was more concerned about keeping kids out of the hallways during class and dealing with malefactors who disrupted classes. Fights and thefts were things he didn’t care about unless there were large numbers of students involved or, as happened when I was in seventh grade, someone brought a gun to school “to shoot the niggers”.

I never had a problem with the black kids who went to my junior high nor with the Latinos. They had as much right as I did of being there. The white trash and the elites who lived on the ridges overlooking the city disagreed, however. They thought the minorities brought diseases and stupidity to the school. And I became suspect in their eyes, first because I didn’t think agree with them on those counts and second because we lived on the flats — in a nice neighborhood.

White kids ambushed me and beat me up. A perfect little Aryan with a face suitable for television was my leading suspect — I caught him hanging around, looking over shoulders to try to get combinations. He ambushed me a couple of times and kicked me where it hurts most for a man. The jerk smoked and didn’t care how he got his lunch. Once he made a snide comment about the sandwich my mother had made that day. It was him and there was nothing short of violence that I could do about it.

That was until I found the key for an old Master Lock and put it on my locker. The bully left me alone after that. He didn’t have the guts to seize my lunch from me outright. My neighbors among the lockers laughed — my own mother called me a sissy boy — , but I ate every day after that. And never found my locker trashed, though cowards still wrote things in magic marker about my sexuality.

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*Smokers scoff when I tell them that it is an addictive and personality-altering drug. When you don’t smoke, though, and you watch someone light up, the changes are apparent as the puffing begins.

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Tomorrow’ topic/prompt: Write about an epiphany.