The Juice Box Incident, from the memoir "The Golden Skillet" by Tara Ann Lesko

Ignore them and they will stop when they see they can’t get the reaction they want out of you. Another commonly used and utterly false declaration. Nuisances don’t care about being ignored by one person because there is always going to be a group of sheep bleating behind them in support.

So I sat at the table with my head down. My tiresome lunch looking up at me – the scent of chocolate milk, fruit cups, and mozzarella cheese swirled around my throbbing head. I looked at my juice box that was slightly crunched since it was mostly empty. Juice boxes are all fine and dandy, but there is only problem with them. They are never enough. Your thirst is vaguely quenched once you reach the point where there is nothing left but air.

I was thirsty. I was on fire. I grabbed the juice box and pointed it at Prospero’s head while barely looking at him. I wasn’t expecting anything to shoot out except maybe a gentle mist. But what actually came out was a perfect, unbroken stream of red cranberry juice – like a line of blood firing out of a severed artery. Where the stream landed was even more astonishing – directly into Prospero’s right ear canal.

The visual of his reaction will stay with me forever. He looked like he had been bludgeoned across the head with a Twizzler. His high-pitched squeal immediately caught the attention of a gruff lunch room aide.

“What’s going on at this table?” In a burly voice that reeked of familiar annoyance, as if our table was always a problem.

“Tara squirted juice in my ear!” yelled Prospero, pushing out as many tears as he could. He looked more constipated than distraught.

I munched on a carrot and looked at the robust lunch lady with white hair. She was still handing out the school lunches not far from our table. She was the only lunch lady that always looked unruffled and complacent. I wasn’t sure if she even had a voice. We never spoke, but I wanted to stand by her and help her pass out the warm chocolate milks and the purple Sun Cups.

“Excuse me? Is that true young lady?” Her eyes were freakishly wide – like Large Marge in Pee Wee Herman’s Big Adventure.

I didn’t get in trouble. I was the kid who clapped the erasers together instead of banging them against the building. I was the kid who wanted to go to the “Think Tank” in the back of the room when all of my assignments were done. When I was told by my teachers to stop biting my nails, I stopped, and they were the only ones who could stop me. I wrote book reports for fun. I was seen before heard.
I had no idea how to react to an authority figure questioning my behavior.

After the aide exaggeratedly comforted the weepy Prospero, she walked both of us back to our classroom where our teacher was trying to eat her turkey sandwich in solitude. Mrs. Bush’s gray blue eyes quickly became wide with astonishment. Tara was taken out of the lunchroom?

“Mrs. Bush we have a situation here,” began the lunch aide in a solid baritone, “it seems like Miss Tara over here decided to squirt juice into this young man’s ear. He could get an infection from this, and all because he was laughing with his friends.”

She used Kleenex and a pudgy finger to wipe out his cranberry-tainted ear, and he piled it on thick with multiple, loud grunts. Mrs. Bush thanked the lunch aide, and the aide departed but not without one last disappointed glance. Kids like Prospero were removed constantly for bad behavior. It was expected, accepted, and damn near respected – made a lot of the adults’ jobs more fun. Kids like me - we acted up, we faced yellow-slip-sent-home crucifixion.

“Prospero, what happened? Why did Tara shoot juice into your ear?” I liked how Mrs. Bush used the word shoot, made it sound cooler. But her voice was calm and collective which was typical for her. She never needed to be loud to be acknowledged. If she wasn’t a teacher, she could have been a psychologist.

“I was eating my lunch and joking around with Danny and Nick.” Intense hiccups were slowing down his speech at this point. “And Tara said I was making fun of her clothes and being poor and I wasn’t and she squirted me. And now my ear is really itchyyyy.”

This was only a segment of his dramatic tale. He tugged on his right ear lobe and hit the Water Works on his Monopoly board of drama. Mrs. Bush only rubbed Prospero’s shoulder a little – her face a grayish-white sheet of nonchalance.

“Ok, Tara. Now what do you have to say about that?”

Even though the mood and the tone in the almost empty classroom couldn’t have been more serene, I felt as if running chainsaws in desperate need of oil surrounded me. Fears of disappointment or banishment typically lead to breathy tears. Hell, that still happens from time to time. But at that particular moment, I became infuriated.

Before Mrs. Bush gently asked for my side of the story, I had inexplicably picked up a new, full box of crayons from one of the classroom shelves. While Prospero was milking it for all it was worth, I opened the lid to the box and ran my fingers across the unused crayon tips. The only kind of crayons that felt soothing to the touch were brand new ones. The colors were arranged decorously, and once a crayon box has been used a few times, the colors are never organized the same way. The papers that hugged and labeled each color were a vivid hue. For a moment, within that box of Crayola’s, the world made sense again…for a moment.

“I FUCKING HATE THIS SCHOOL!” I sent the box flying through the air. It hit the chalkboard, and an array of untainted colors scattered all over the teal, linoleum floor. Mrs. Bush’s eyes engorged from the shock, and Prospero shut up quickly. I remember the flutter I felt in my stomach when I screamed, and it was more than likely not the first time I yelled “fuck” aloud. The tears poured down like rain from a holey gutter, and my fists clenched tightly as they often do, leaving bluish crescent moons on my palms.

“I hate being called stupid! I hate that I can’t talk right to people! I hate that you are always bothering me and calling me poor! I’m not the one who lives in an army trailer, you jerk!” My hometown of Eatontown was home to Ft. Monmouth until it shut down in 2012. Prospero, along with countless other Eatontowners, called the base home until they were transferred to another state or to another country. I didn’t know much geography at that time, but wherever the farthest country was, that is where I wanted Prospero to go.

“Oh, and by the way, I know you’re not related to Daisy Fuentes, so stop lying! My Mom said, “Do you know how many Fuentes’ there are in the world!”

“Tara,” Mrs. Bush moved me away from Mr. Fuentes before I could get any closer to his face and his bottle-cap thick glasses. “Let’s try to take a breath and come down. Prospero, I would like to speak to Tara alone, please.”

“But is she going to get in trouble?” he asked meekly before I gave him one last patented Lesko look of fiery death.

“Prospero, go,” she answered assertively.

Mrs. Bush led me to one of the kidney-shaped tables in the classroom. There was a period of necessary silence before anyone spoke. I was still having those fits of agonizing, tantrum-induced hiccups that kids always get. All I wanted to do once my breath came back to me was read aloud for Mrs. Bush the way I always did at that table. We read early-reader books that may have been two or three grades below my level, but I was “neurologically impaired” so that’s the way it had to be. Jan or Pam always sat with a cat or a hat in her lap, or something to that effect. Sometimes Dan, or Jan, or Pam ate ham, and I would often look at Mrs. Bush’s soft, rosy mouth that reminded me of grandma's. When Mrs. Bush read the word “ham” with me, her lips always looked like they were about to taste a soft piece of Hillshire Farms. She wasn’t the most riveting teacher in the world to me, but she did have that going for her.

“I’m incredibly disappointed but even more concerned about your behavior today. What has made you so upset?”

I thought for sure the first thing she was going to bring up was the f-word, but she was genuinely more concerned with what spurred on the profanity. In those days, saying “fuck” in front of a teacher simply didn’t happen, so she knew that whatever was going on in my head was startling.

“I don’t want to be called poor. I want a calzone too (gasp). I don’t want to be slow anymore. I just want to go to a real class and have lunch (sniff/snort) with the cool kids…I’m sorry I threw the crayons,” I blubbered almost inaudibly, forgetting I was more than likely getting in trouble for cursing and the attempt to deafen a peer with juice from concentrate.

“Hmmm…I wouldn’t want to be called those things either, honey. Do you think you’re poor or slow?”

“I got my own boom box and clothes from the Gap for Christmas. None of the girls have said anything though.” I pulled down on my red Gap cardigan that had shrunk in the wash and was a little too short for my unusually tall and stroppy frame.

“Ok,” she chuckled a little which I thought was weird. She rarely laughed. “What do you think when someone calls you slow? What does that mean?” She gave me a quizzical brow.

"Lindsay said that I have trouble speaking. That's why I am in the special class."

"Well, you're shy. You always are. That doesn't mean your slow or can't speak."

"Umm, I guess not."

"And you're not poor, and your not broke," she smiled. We had read Not Poor, Just Broke around that time - one of many thematic children's stories that are often lost on entitled youth.

"No way, my Mom goes to Atlantic City, and we eat out a lot."

I laughed when she laughed, acknowledging the humor in all of it, even at the age of eight, even if it were only a minute. We spent the rest of the lunch period together talking about her cats and how colorful my book reports had been. I watched her eat apple slices and whole almonds in a sandwich bag. She thankfully shared a few slices of her huge Granny Smith with me, since I was only able to finish a quarter of my boring, brown-bagged lunch that started all of the drama.

Eating lunch with a teacher was a pleasant experience, so I learned. At the time, it solidified my childish illusion that teachers didn't exist outside their classrooms. In my mind, knowing that Mrs. Bush had cats and children of her own didn't allow her to escape the confounds of my classroom's reading corners and Think Tanks. There was something about watching her read, watching her eat, and watching her move along the chalkboard then back to her kidney table. It all gave me hope. One day I was going to have short gray hair and look good in it. One day I was going to want to eat a healthy, grown-up lunch of fruits and nuts. One day my mouth would always be soft and my jaw always loose, and I would look and sound fabulous when I read aloud. Nothing anyone did or said would waver my poise.

"Are you going to tell my parents what I did?" I asked looking down at my stained Gap khakis.

"No, I am not. I'm sure his ear is just fine. But let's find a better way to get your anger out besides throwing things and swearing."

"I will. I won't do it again. I promise."

Yeah, well...so much for promises.

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