Glued
Written Summer 2002
“Augh!” I screamed. It was
three o’clock on a cold December night when I woke with a bad dream, and
I realized that there was something seriously wrong with my left eye. I couldn’t
open it, no matter how hard I tried. I tried and tried, feeling panicked.
It was as if someone had glued my eyelashes and stuck them together, like
mortar holds together bricks.
My ten-year-old mind was racing. I had heard of
people going blind, but never people having an eye that closed and stayed
closed! The other girls woke up to my scream and asked what was going on.
I told them, and they didn’t seem too worried, they just shrugged it off
and tried to go back to sleep, but that didn’t seem strange to me at the
time; I was too focused on my eye. It was as if someone had glued it shut
during the night.
Finally I decided to call Mrs. Chapmen, who was
our chaperone for our five night stay in Washington D.C. I dialed the number
of her room. The other girls didn’t even try to do anything to help, but
at the time I figured that they were just tired. It’s a good thing that I
have better vision with my right eye than I do with my left; I could see
the numbers I was dialing. When Mrs. Chapmen sleepily picked u p the phone,
I explained the problem to her. She had no ideas on what I should do, and
I hung up feeling worse than before, if that was at all possible. I’d always
thought that adults knew how to fix just about anything; here was a time
when one couldn’t.
I forget whose bright idea it was to use scissors
and cut off the tips of my eyelashes, but that was our first idea for getting
my eye open. It never occurred to me how dangerous it could be, were the
scissors to slip and go into my eye. We came close to actually doing it.
We would have, but when Katina was almost cutting, when I saw out of my right
eye that the scissors were about to close on my eyelash, I chickened out.
I threw her hand away, and that was the end of that.
Our next idea was to simply splash water on my
eye, thinking that maybe that would work, but we were wrong. Water did nothing
to help.
We tried idea after idea, plan after plan, and
nothing worked. I ended up walking around with one eye shut until my eyelashes
finally opened on there own a little more than a day later.
From that time until I got home, I had no idea
what had caused my eye to get like that. It was the Monday after I got back
to Florida, when I was home sick (I had gotten sick waiting in line for the
White House tour in the cold and the rain with no coat), that I noticed
Amber. Amber was my stuffed orange tabby cat, which I had been using for
a pillow that night. Around the ear and the top of the head of my stuffed
cat was something hard, like dried glue. While I was trying to tug it off,
I remembered what had happened that night.
Katina and my other two roommates had been painting
their nails, but along with nail polish and nail polish remover, Katina
and the others had had out a bottle of nail glue. I had seen how strong
nail glue was from my mother using it, and I knew what it felt like dry,
all hard and clear. I figured out that that was what was on Amber and me.
It was just the kind of thing Katina would do.
That girl, she was a popular kid, interested in clothes, makeup, and teasing
the likes of me. I had often been at the wrong end of her jokes, and she was
always trying to get me in trouble. Maybe she was just jealous; I never got
in trouble, and Mr. Neisel even used to brag about me; that could be a reason
for her actions. I didn’t know anything about the other girls, I didn’t even
know their names the whole time we were on the trip, and of course I didn’t
know their personalities, but Katina is the kind of person who can persuade
just about anyone to do just about anything. They could easily have been
a part of it.
I told my mother, and, after questioning me to
the full extent of her ability, she marched me right down to Silver Ridge,
Amber in hand, even though I was quite sick. We went straight to the principal’s
office to talk to her. We told Mrs. Gundling what had happened, and she
called in Katina. My mother and I went to wait outside in the mail part
of the main office, thankfully, since I couldn’t bare the thought of facing
Katina.
When Mrs. Gundling called us back in, I couldn’t
believe what she was saying. Katina had told her that the girls were doing
a project with Elmer’s glue, and she believed them! Why in the world would
they be using Elmer’s glue in the middle of the night? I had proof of what
had happened to m e, Amber still had some glue on her and Mrs. Gundling
could have even called Mrs. Chapmen, she had seen my eye. It wasn’t fair,
those girls got away unpunished! Neither my mother nor I ever trusted Mrs.
Gundling again.
Nothing really changed between Katina and me,
except that I disliked her and what she does more than ever. She kept up
all her teasing and tricks and all that, as if the Washington trip was just
as ‘harmless’ as any of the other things she has done. All I could do was
try to stay away from her, not that it worked. I kept on her bad side all
the way until sixth grade, and after that I never saw Katina Picado again.