"My dad's in prison," the boy said. It was going to be one of those years. I watched with fear in my eyes as the boy sitting next to me in my fifth grade class methodically sketched his daily car on the paper that was supposed to be used for homework. Every few minutes he would spout things off trying to look bad or impressive, and they usually led back to the fact that his dad was in prison. I shouldn't say fact, because for all we knew it was just a faked claim to fame for this guy, to make him seem scary. But my classmates and I were willing to accept it, because he was just that: scary. It was undeniable. This boy would be the end of us all, in one way or another. We all just thought it would be a bloody end, not the type of end we met.
One of the most important things to us as elementary schoolers was our economic currency. That is to say: the "Grabber". These small pieces of card-stock were what we lived for. They were the reward that drove us to be civil to each other on the playground, decent to our teachers in the classroom. Their very existence was the reason that we hadn't yet overthrown the principal in her unruly dictatorship. We had each saved up since the beginning of the year to have enough to get the big prizes, the loot, the treasure, at the end of the year grabber auction. They were what little power we had...
Gone. All because of one evil act, they were gone.
That car-drawing, prison-daddy's little boy had seized his ability to bring us all down in the lowest of all ways. Like I said, we had seen our demise coming, and had planned carefully. We had assembled an army so that had he launched a physical attack we would have been ready. But instead we watched as something more tragic took place. On the top shelf of a bookshelf in our teacher's classroom was the stash of un-rewarded Grabbers. At some point when all of us and the teacher were out of the room, the devil child had enacted a plan of his to climb to the top and steal the Grabbers for himself. He successfully mounted a precarious stack of textbooks, stole the packs, and hid them in his backpack. When everyone returned, nobody would have noticed the absence of the grabbers had it not been for his careless failure to remove the stack of books he had used for a ladder.
The teacher was furious when he found out what had happened. "Where are the Grabbers?" he demanded, distributing the worst of all death glares. The culprit, obviously as good at getting caught as his dad was, hid his face in his hands. The teacher walked over to the boy's backpack, opened it, and pulled out the missing currency.
We were horrified as we realized what had happened. This boy's act of stealing these Grabbers had invalidated all the Grabbers we had previously earned. For all the teacher knew, he had already distributed some of the stolen goods to the rest of us. It was only fair...horrifyingly fair...
"As punishment, Grabbers will not be accepted for the rest of the year."
Forlorn and broken, we marched out to recess that afternoon and conducted a burial service. We dug a hole big enough to bury our big dreams. We carefully tossed in the carefully earned Grabbers. We closed up the ditch as the worst day in childhood history came to a close.
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