The clock reads 2:13, but it’s been that way for several minutes. I’d say about five. I am seven. I am swinging my legs so my Keds just skim the freshly waxed floor. My long hair, wrapped in braids around my head like no other girl in the second grade, strains against the bobby pins my mom stuck in this morning.
The bobby pins prick through my epidermis, a word that Cindy taught me today during recess by shouting that mine was showing, causing me to clutch at my pant’s zipper, my t-shirt, make sure everything was covered. My epidermis, or skin, as she finally explained after I, nearly in tears, begged her to, tingles with the all-dayness of those pins. I will get to take them out in exactly, wait...exactly 27 minutes. Or perhaps never at all, because time is not moving. An eternity of metallic aching in the space around my eyeballs.
We’ve just arrived at the auditorium. I was the line leader, a position that I do, indeed, enjoy, just quite to the extent Mrs. Pasco imagines. She always bestows the title as if it is something edible, something to be pinned to the fridge. It’s just walking. But I do a good job.
More importantly, we’re still stuck in 2:13. The chairs are hard, perhaps a little harder than they were when 2:13 started. I am sitting in the front row. Because I am an A+ student and often the line leader, I glue my eyes to the stage, hold my legs rigid, and look entranced. This is an extremely safe way to daydream, because grown-ups love to feel they have entranced small children. I have friends who take a less-subtle approach to daydreaming, turning heads and fidgeting, and I’ve learned plenty from watching them. A stiff neck is a small price to pay for freedom of the mind.
I'm thinking about time and the clock. One or both have clearly broken.
When we finally, if ever, escape 2:13, we’re going to see Grandpa in Sacramento. We’ll walk to Gunther’s, the only ice-cream shop in the world where they put real gumballs, gobs of them, into their candy-pink ice-cream. Jenny and I will spit them back out in little cups so we can count them up and see who won. Then we’ll go to the Nut Tree, where they sell iced gingerbread cookies in the shape of rainbows, painted with impossibly smooth icing, the kind that cracks and crumbles when you bite it. The gift shop has rocks for sale, the quartz and the purple one I can never pronounce, and my favorite, the one that looks like a normal rock on one side but, upon being flipped over, becomes a whole universe of spikes and shining crystals.
Then it finally ticks. 2:14.
Alright then. Time is moving.
But then I think about it: that black hole of 2:13 passed, which means every minute will keep passing, whether it is as boring as a end-of-the-day assembly or as euphoric as the first crunch of rainbow gingerbread. The whole trip will pass. All those minutes will just keep disappearing, the way the water from our hose keeps disappearing into the grass, even after Dad has forgotten about it and left it running.
The trip, then the year, and then I’ll move over to the big side of the schoolyard, the side where we’re all scared to go but where I sometimes go to wait for Jenny. And then the rest of life. It will all go about as fast, or as slow, as this very assembly, and I’ll spend much of it being line leader and sitting rigidly in hard chairs, looking like I’m interested and waiting for the clock to move me to the next minute.
There is clapping around me. I realize my teacher is digging me with her eyes, and my little hands come together, too, to thank the nice man on stage.
And when I look at the clock again, it’s 2:30, and it’s time to go.
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