The lockers are eating the students

Special to WordSmith

The lockers are eating the students. There�s no reason for you to believe me, I don�t believe myself. I hope perhaps I am going insane. Right now insanity would be a blessing. It is better to be insane than to have to deal with the truth. I am writing this to try to warn you, to warn everyone to stay away from those big lockers at school. You know the ones with no lock on them. But more importantly stay away from Bell Gold. You probably don�t know her. I didn�t know her until a few weeks ago. And I would give anything to have never met her, but I did and now I regret ever being born.

I am naturally forgetful. So two weeks ago when I lost my coat outside one of those lockers, I thought nothing of it. I was well used to losing things. That was also the day I met Bell. I didn�t trust her from the beginning. For one thing she was friendly. Way too friendly. Her attitude didn�t fit with the way she looked. She looked so common. She had plain brown hair. And her face looked like any other girls face on earth � every single feature on her, her nose, her eyes. Her mouth was so generic that it was scary.

Bell was the kind of person who not only can blend in with a crowd but could also become inseparable from the crowd because she looked like any other girl on the street. So we ended up becoming friends. She was odd. Actually, she was down right weird. �But we can�t all be normal,� I thought to myself. So what if she spends all her free time hanging around her locker. She was nice to me. She wasn�t a two-faced person, so within a week I called her a friend.

During our first week of friendship everything was just hunky dory. Then I started losing things. My favorite shade of lipstick. some hair bows, a pocket mirrow. Then students started disappearing. Bell never had many friends. I knew all three of them. Then her friends were gone. They didn�t tell of their departure. They were just gone. Bell didn�t seem the least bit disturbed.

I was slightly upset, but then I just thought, �a coincidence, right?� Looking back I should have seen the obvious connnection between the disappearance of these students and Bell�s sudden inhertance of new clothes that oddly enough looked like the clothes of the students that had disappeared. But she was my friend and I don�t accuse friends of stealing other people�s clothes. But Bell did start freaking me out when she insisted that I start hanging out around her locker. At first I resisted, but she continually insisted. So I hung out with her. Then one day � it was a Wednesday, I remember, because Wednesday was the night my father died and since then I always remember what happens on a Wednesday � but, anyway, one day she pushed me in. She pushed me lighty, as though just to tip me off balance. I fell backwards into her locker. I was surrounded in a wet darkness and for a while I just sat there. It�s not an everyday occurence that I�m pushed backwards into a wet, dark locker that smells of Channel perfume. Wait a minute, didn�t Jillian, Bell�s friend, wear that perfume? It was nauseating.

But back to my situation, I just sat there for a while. Then I realized that I was being digested. It didn�t really hurt. It felt like I was getting a deep massage. My mind quickly came to the conclusion that being digested is not a good thing. While I�m being digested, who will feed my dog and cat? So I made the decision that I had got to get the hell out of there, so I grabbed my pepperspray out of my pocket book and began spraying it around. Then I was spit out in a wad of mucus. Bell just looked at me in disappointment and she said to me, �Well next time I�ll just have to cover you in ketchup.�

I didn�t remember peeing on myself. I don�t remember screaming at the top of my lungs. I don�t remember vomiting all over the hallway. All I remember is the running. I ran faster than I ever did at track. I just ran with nothing but pure fear pushing me on. Then I was home. I live a mile away, but I was home in three minutes. I told my mom when she got home. But she knows me, knows I have an overactive imagination. So I was ignored by her. It was strange because the whole world was normal. But I knew something was wrong with the world. I didn�t go to school for a week. When I did go back, I didn�t think it was a coincidence to find open packets of ketchup on the seats of my chairs.

Monique Moore is a junior at Ben L. Smith High School.

� 1997 [email protected]

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