Hot Tamales

The wood slats of the chair push into the small of my back. I creep my fingers between the top of my desk in the back of the room, my fingertips memorizing a small box’s smoothness. It’s full of hot tamales I begged my mom to buy for me yesterday when we went to the store. The classroom has a hot-kid smell that fills the still air. The kids around me are bent over their desks, their pencils copying down spelling words on beige brown paper, not the good kind with clear blue lines and crisp whiteness, the kind with holes for binder rings, but the kind that is cheap and thin and tears easily with the rub of an eraser after you’ve made a mistake. You have to be careful. I watch Mrs. Lasley at her desk, cat-eye glasses pointed down as she grades papers, stapling a sticker in the top left corner for assignments deserving praise. We put them in our sticker boxes inside our desks. Scratch-n-sniff. Puffy. Fuzzy. Smooth. Shiny-metallic with glitter. I like them all. With both hands hidden, I punch a hole in the box with a pencil—it isn’t easy—and I wrap one finger and one thumb around one of the candies, caressing a single red pill before I bend my head and open my mouth and quickly pop it inside. It is chewy, stickier than I was prepared for. I can’t swallow it quickly. I must chew it, the stickiness gluing to my molars and the cinnamon burning my tongue. I imagine I am a dragon breathing fire from my nose. I am not relaxed. And then Mrs. Lasley, from her desk, speaks my name. She calls it out in the middle of the quiet and everyone looks up, curious and searching. Are you eating? Her eyes are on me. She is kind, the teacher I love. I tell her no. My face burning now. And she doesn’t press me. But her eyes penetrate me, seeing through me, seeing who I am. She believes I tell the truth or wants me to think I think she does. And I die a bit right then. Even now the effort to not lie to you is exhausting.