literature

just a tiny blue sticker

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Literature Text

“I just finished marking your unit tests yesterday,” Albright said as she shuffled through her briefcase.

Rob smiled slightly, amused at the sudden outburst of groans and other sounds of suffering. He just didn’t understand why they hated getting their tests back. If they received a bad mark, well, that was their fault. No use in moaning about it now. He leaned back into the corner that the wall and the back of his chair made, tapped his pen on his graffiti-covered desk. He turned his head to look at the rest of the class behind him as he waited, a little patch of calm and control in a room of chaos.

Albright was handing out tests, weaving between the rows of old, marked desks that were made to look as though they were constructed of high quality maple. She was also stepping over the bags and books most of the students had thrown on the ground when they took their seats. That was something Rob never did. He didn’t understand why they were so careless. Perhaps it was because the room itself was just too ordinary, too alike all the other classrooms they had been in before: the imitation marble tiles were old and scuffed, the blackboards shouted due dates and information about the distributive law, and the institutional off-white walls vainly attempted to look more personalized by donning posters that appeared in every other room in the school. The curtains were open, but that only revealed a grey, cloudy sky and the bare branches of autumn trees. It was the beginning of their last year in high school, and yet Rob felt nothing had changed since he got here three years ago. The classrooms back then were loud, and he always had to struggle to block out the chatter. It was one of the reasons why he had gotten into the habit of sitting in the front row; he had discovered that loud students generally preferred to sit in the back. Albright’s class now was just as loud as his Grade 9 classes, but Rob had already gotten used to it – gotten used to living within a sea of unmannerly voices that blended together into…well, just loud background noise. The voices of these students that he led as class president were always one and the same; nothing ever stood out. It was a depressing thought, perhaps, but high school for him was just another phase that taught him how to deal with the miserable world they lived in.

Rob’s test paper landed in front of him. Though this was the first test of the year, he had been in Albright’s class before, and he knew that she always put the mark on the very last page. He flipped through the pages slowly. There was no need to hurry. He knew he did well. Check marks passed by as he skimmed through, and on the very last page was, in red pen, the expected 95%. But beside it, was...was a shiny blue star?

Stickers? Rob thought. She never gave stickers before. And why bother doing so with a Grade 12 class?

Another student, Blythe, seemed to have read his mind. “Miss! You gave us stickers?”

Albright was still handing out tests. She turned around to face Blythe, smiled. “Yes. I gave you one sticker if you got 80% or higher, two if you got 90% or higher.”

Rob looked down at his page. The single star glittered at him. Albright had forgotten to give him a sticker.

But then again, what did it matter? Why bother with such silly, childish traditions, especially since they were heading off to university next year? They were going to go into the real world, and who would use stickers as a prize? No one would probably bother to ask —

“Ms. Albright! You forgot to give me a sticker!” Beecher, a boy who sat in the back row, exclaimed.

“Oh! I’m sorry,” Albright said, hurrying over to Beecher, her heels clacking against the tiles professionally. “Did I forget anyone else?” she asked the class as she stuck a sticker onto Beecher’s test.

A couple of people raised their hands. Rob didn’t. Instead, he spoke up: “Aren’t we a bit too old for stickers?”

Silence fell. The chatter that seemed like a permanent fixture of the room actually died. This didn’t bother Rob. Nor did the stares of everyone in the classroom. He was used to being stared at by large groups, used to being the odd one out.

The silence stretched on for what seemed like a very long time. He expected Albright to say something, but instead, she seemed to be frozen in place. Her eyes locked onto his. When someone finally spoke, it was not Albright, but one of his classmates. “Not everyone’s like you, Rob.”

“Yeah!” someone else exclaimed. “Stickers are fun!”
The dam had cracked. Albright broke eye contact. The class rabble started up again.

“I like them!”

Albright walked to her desk, placed her sticker book on top of it. She looked at Rob briefly, gave him a slight smile as she began rummaging through her papers. “No one can ever be too old for stickers.”

Rob sat back in his chair, stared at the sticker on his test. The chatter had moved on to other topics already, and it resumed its status as background noise for him as his mind wandered.

How can they be ready for university if they’re all satisfied by something as petty as a coloured piece of tape? And Albright - who could’ve expected it from her? Always professionally dressed, attached to a briefcase, an honours BSc in Computational Mathematics in her arsenal...and stickers?! How odd and unfitting. Even he had moved out of the sticker phase by the time he was nine years old.

Yes, Rob thought, as he picked at the edge of the star with his finger nail. I used to love stickers. Blue stars, red stars, gold stars, silver stars. They used to cover those progress charts in elementary school. They gave them stickers every time they finished a book or did well on a spelling test. Rob smiled at the memory. He used to love seeing them, a glittering row of stickers that marched beside his name, which was written in pudgy black marker...

And his dad. His dad had given him a book of stickers for his fifth birthday, and he had used the whole thing in two days, covering his entire bedroom door with them. Instead of punishing him, his dad had just bought him more. From that point on, stickers of every size and shape began to show up everywhere, covering the closets, most of the kitchen appliances, the tiled floor of the bathroom, and any other surface that a sticker could adhere to. After a few months, his parents had become so tired of buying stickers every week that they called the company to send him some on a regular basis.

But everyone has to grow up eventually, Rob thought as Albright called the class to order. He stared absentmindedly at the board. She was taking up the test questions. How pointless. How could anyone not know how to factor an equation? They learned it three years ago. He shifted in his seat, tried to look like he was paying attention when he really wasn’t. Although Albright wouldn’t have cared anyways. In fact, none of the teachers ever worried about whether he was paying attention in class or not. He was an honour roll student, at the top of every class he took. He would never fail them. He never failed anyone.

Well, except his parents. They always thought he was too childish, that he never pushed hard enough, especially after they began working for Barclays’ and became obsessed with getting onto the company board. Though they were the ones who had bought him stickers first, they had sighed exasperatedly when they found that he was still playing with them at the age of eight. One day, at breakfast, as he was sticking a yellow happy face on his cereal bowl, his mom had gotten up, taken his sticker book, and thrown it into the garbage.

“Mom!” he had yelled, shocked into standing up. The happy face, which he hadn’t stuck onto the bowl yet, hung weakly from the edge of his thumb.

His mom sat down at the table beside him. “Rob, you’re too old for stickers now.”

“Yes,” his dad agreed as he sat down across from them with a newspaper. “You should be reading.”

“I do read! I just finished Holes yesterday!”

“Oh, did you? Well, that’s great!” His dad smiled at him, before unfolding his paper and scanning the headlines. “Did you try the Sudoku book I got you then?”

“All we want,” his mom interrupted, “is for you to try something new.” She reached over to Rob, took the sticker from his thumb, and held it in front of him. “You don’t need these.” She crumpled the happy face. Rob gasped. The smile folded. “You can do so much more without them.”

He was indignant by now. “But they use them at school!”

His dad looked from the papers at him. “Really?”

“Yes! And they also have LEGO and they give us candy when we do well on a quiz!”

His parents shared a look. “Do they now?”

Two weeks later, he was being driven to a boarding school wearing a new, itchy navy blue uniform. “It’s for your own good, hun,” his mom kept telling him.

Rob didn’t say anything. He looked out the window at the green foliage that met the clear blue sky, fingering the scuffed sticker book in his backpack. He had saved the book from the garbage can that day after his parents had left for work and stuffed it beneath a loose floorboard in his room. There had barely been enough time for him to cram it into his bag this morning before he was hurried into his parents’ new Jetta.

That ride had been the longest ride ever. It was composed of silence, the bad elevator music his parents loved, and his parents’ sparse attempts at persuading him that he would like getting isolated from everything he knew. Rob cringed inwardly at the memory, and he almost struggled to make sure that it didn’t show on his face. It wouldn’t help him if Albright or any of his peers saw that he was troubled; being the target of someone else’s concern would mean that he would have to reciprocate their care for him, and he already had his share of worrying for others. Maintaining his look of indifference was difficult though, since the discussion of car trips between the students sitting behind him didn’t make the memory of his own trip any duller. He tried to shut them out by paying attention to Albright, but that didn’t help. She was explaining how to graph a tan function — a lecture he had heard so many times over the past three years that he had already lost interest in it. Tiredly, Rob put his head on his desk and sank back into his memories.

His sticker book was his only companion at Saint Andrew’s Preparatory School for a while. He never used any of the remaining stickers; after all, it was his only piece of home, of happy memories of times when his parents actually took time from work to play with him. Using the stickers would mean letting go of everything good. Every night, he’d flip through the book quietly under his blanket so that the other boys wouldn’t see, running his fingers over the ridges that outlined little figures, the rough texture of glittered faces that caught the moonlight. As he did so, memories rushed back... Plastering his dad with stickers and laughing with his mom as they watched him jumping around, trying to peel them off... Ms. Hopkins, covering a classroom wall with stickers that actually caused one of his classmates to faint because it was too chaotic... Creating storyboards with stickers at Finley’s house... His eyes were watery every night, and sleep visited him only when his pillow had a darkened patch of tears on it.

That was his first year. In his second year, his sticker book had mysteriously disappeared one day while he was in class. When he had got back to his room, he had panicked, rummaged through his closet, under his bed, tears rolling down his cheeks. A few of his roommates had asked if he needed any help, but he didn’t tell them. They wouldn’t understand. No one there really did. By 10 PM, he had run down to the office and asked, but the principal had merely reminded him of the curfew and sent him back to bed. Her promise that she’ll “look into it” was never kept.

For weeks, he had been quieter than ever. He still did his work in class, finished his homework as if nothing was wrong, but he felt empty. Everything was gone. He was finally completely alone in a Victorian schoolhouse where everyone wore blue navy suits and ties, where chewing gum was strictly prohibited, and where bad posture equated to writing a three-page essay explaining its side effects when they grew older. He had tried calling home, just to hear his parents’ voices, but all he got was the answering machine.

“Hi, you’ve reached the Park residence. Please leave a message after the beep, and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.” Beep.

“Mom? Dad? Um… Call me back when you hear this? Um… I love you, bye.”

They never called him back. When he asked about it when he went home for Christmas, they always got these shocked expressions and apologized profusely that they never had time to check. And they always apologized to the documents that were always in front of their noses instead of to him.

After that, he had realized the world was a horrible place. Happiness didn’t exist. It was just like what his dad always told him: “Work comes first.” And there was always so much work that play never came into view. Eventually, stickers were replaced by books, good posture, and dress shirts. This made his parents content with him, for once, but it also caused them to push him to do more – more, even though doing it had made his parents into frenzied people. More, even though it gave them panic attacks and nervous breakdowns, forcing them into using medication to keep their sanity. More, even though it alienated them from each other, causing conversations to become stunted, formal.

When he had come home after his last year of private schooling at the age of fourteen, he was blown away as he opened the front door by the mess of papers and take-out boxes that covered every available surface. He had taken the bus home, since his parents were, as usual, held up at yet another meeting, so the thought that he had gotten off on the wrong street had flickered through his mind. It was a flash of hope that his parents hadn’t gone completely insane. This wish died when he picked up one of the pieces of paper that drifted in the wind to his feet. Nope, I have the right house, he had thought as he looked at his mom’s inky signature at the bottom of a photocopied contract. He had dragged his suitcases inside, and before doing anything else, he had started picking up all the loose papers, books, pizza boxes, and wrappers. He had fallen asleep on the stained couch out of sheer exhaustion by the time his parents got home, the room having been finally emptied and the yellow wood of the floor actually visible for what may have been the first time in years. However, his parents didn’t thank him for cleaning anything up. Didn’t even leave him a note explaining anything when they went back to work the next morning. But that was how they were. They were never really good enough at any job or task; they just had willpower and the ability to alienate themselves from contentment. They’d go to work at five in the morning, come home at midnight, and catch three hours of sleep before hurrying off again. They didn’t even have time to go buy new suits once they wore their old ones out. It was no longer surprising for him to wake up and find a note on the breakfast table that reminded him to please go buy them more suits over the weekend. “Work” was the house mantra, even though work only got his parents as far as the title of Executive Manager, and never secured them their ideal positions on the Board even after five years of endless toil. Work got them nothing except for insanity.

In fact, stickers – stickers – seemed to have gotten Albright farther than work ever got his parents. She was happy, she was sane, and, if what she said was true, her family actually talked about their day over dinner instead of doing work. She was definitely odd and had quite a contradictory personality – she once stated that she could never leave home if there wasn’t a stuffed animal in her briefcase — but then again, were his parents not worse? Why did they toil away like that everyday? Why did they think that relentless work would lead them to success when it repeatedly failed them? Why did they believe they could give him happiness by…by ignoring him? By depriving him of his childhood? By taking away…everything?

Stickers…

Rob blinked out of his reverie, resumed his focus on reality. He looked at the clock. Class was almost over. Students were packing up, and Albright was at her desk shoving papers into her briefcase so she too could move on to her next class.

“Ms. Albright!” he spoke up, his voice blending into the general chatter.

Albright looked up as she slid her papers into her briefcase. “Yes?”

“I — I’m missing a sticker.”

It was like a city blackout. The students closest to him fell quiet first, then other groups around slowly caught on so that sound eventually died in the class. Again. Twice in one hour in Albright’s class. That had to be a record.

Rob was stared at again. This time, he did feel nervous. It was just a sticker; they didn’t have to stare at him for that, did they?

“But you just said —” a student suddenly spoke up.

“I thought you hated stickers?”

“Aren’t you too old for them?”

The class was up and running again. Whispers of “Rob wants a sticker?!” filtered through the room. He held eye contact with Albright, who seemed too shocked for words.

Rob drew a breath and declared, “Yes, yes, I do want a sticker.”
For my Writer's Craft course, inspired by my awesome history class. (None such situation happened there; it's just that, for the first time, she started giving stickers on tests! She never did that before, when we were in our earlier high school years, so that started this whole story.)

I had to re-italicize stuff and reseparate paragraphs again, since the original was in Word and had awesome formatting via styles and what not, so some parts maybe be confusing where I forgot to italicize/seperate paragraphs. My apologies.

-story written march/april 2009-
© 2009 - 2024 patronus4000
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