Congratulations to Ittai Sopher for winning second place in The Scripps College Journal Writing Contest with this short story!
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What I Do Not Tell my Mommy
by Ittai Sopher
My Mommy used to ask me when I got home from school what I learned that day, and I would always say “nothing”. My Mommy would ask me who I sat next to and I would say “nobody”. When I came home from camp, I would do the same thing. I once said somebody’s name, and my Daddy got annoyed and left the table. My face was red and I could not understand why Marcus and his Hot Wheels made my Daddy so upset. When I went to camp I would play Pokémon with my friends. I had a big book of Pokémon, I knew every single one. One time on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? they asked a man a Pokémon question and he did not know it. I could not believe that he did not know it! It was such an easy question, but I am forgetting the question now.
I hated going swimming because I hated being cold after and I was really fat and I did not want to change in front of everybody. I made my counselor hold a towel and he promised not to look. I really liked US Presidents and I used to sit outside the pool with my counselor, and I told my counselor about Warren Gamaliel Harding and The Teapot Dome Scandal and why Warren Gamaliel Harding was the worst US President. My counselor was very impressed and he told me that they were learning about that in school. He was in high school! There was a boy named Jeremy at my camp, and one time he didn’t swim also and we looked at my Guinness World Records book together. But Jeremy was really hyper and did not treat the book nicely.
Adam Kastner had green eyes and glasses and he was my best camp friend and on the last day of camp I told him how easy it was to talk to girls but I could not do it because I was too scared. His AIM screenname was “missingonerib” because Adam in the Torah was missing one rib and Hashem used that rib to make Chava. Adam from camp was not on my bus but Marcus was and Marcus kept asking for my phone number so that we could have a playdate but I told him I did not know my phone number. I knew my phone number but I did not know my address. Marcus eventually found my phone number in the phone number book and called my house. My Mommy did not answer because she was at work, but my Mommy told me some boy named Marcus left a message on the answering machine for me but I told her I did not know him well and that he was only some random kid with a blue hat from my bus. I was actually the quietest kid on that bus and at the end of the summer I won the baseball signed by the player from the Yankees named Kyle Farnsworth for being the most behaved kid on the bus even though I did not like baseball and I was just lucky because I was quiet and I liked to look out the window and not sleep.
I did not talk to my Mommy and Daddy about girls either and I did not talk about how I used to chase Talia Schwartz around the playground and I did not talk about how later I became very quiet to girls and nice to them because all the boys were mean and said that girls had cooties but cooties were not real. Cootie shots did not work, they were just people using their fingers in weird ways. I once was sitting with Ruth Bouaziz and I had a pencil and I circled the pencil around her eye and I poked her eye accidentally and she cried. I said I was sorry. People sometimes say that only girls cry but boys cry all the time. Yona Best cried when Binny Weisbrot got permanent marker on his shirt. He cried and said, “that was my favorite shirt!”. Binny Weisbrot said he was sorry. One time my Daddy made a website and I showed my friends the pictures and I showed them the picture of my big brother jumping in the sprinklers in his underwear and my friends laughed and it was mostly boys there but I told my brother it was mostly girls there but I was scared because on the busride home I knew my big brother was going to beat me up. And when I got home I saw my Mommy. And my Mommy saw that I cried when I got off the bus. One time, Yoni Feldman pulled my ear and I did not cry but it hurt a lot, but I told him to do it, so it was my fault. Alex Schlisser told me that her father never cried but I said that he probably cried when his mother died, and she said that he did. Adult boys cry, too, but they only cry when their parent dies. Alex Schlisser once worked with me on a Native American project but I accidentally called her a “bitch” and I did not know what that meant but she did not cry but she was really upset, and I once told Michelle Auerbacher that she could not pronounce the letter R and she cried and I also cried because of that and Mayer Strauss, my brother’s friend, saw me crying in the bathroom and I told him not to tell my brother but he told my brother. And my brother asked me why I cried and I do not know if I told him but I probably did not. I once brought a Homer Simpson can-opener that I got from the Pineapple and Movies store and it said, “Mmmm beer”, and Ms. Grossberg took it away and also took away Yoni Feldman’s loud magnets. Yoni Feldman got back his magnets after lunch, so I took my beer-can-opener but I got in trouble because I was not supposed to take it and I had to talk to Mrs. Wexler who made me cry and said that I could not bring anything that was related to The Simpsons to school. I forgot my homework in school that night and my Mommy brought me to school to get it and Mrs. Wexler was in school and my Mommy talked to Mrs. Wexler and told her that I was not a bad boy and Mrs. Wexler said that she hated The Simpsons. The Simpsons was my favorite TV show. There were so many characters but I did not talk to my Mommy and my Daddy about them because one time I had a The Simpsons t-shirt and I told my Daddy that I looked skinny in The Simpsons t-shirt and my Daddy got upset. My face was red and I did not know why a shirt made my Daddy so upset.
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Ittai Sopher is a Sophomore at Pitzer College and is currently studying Political Studies. He has always enjoyed storytelling and writing. His favorite writers are Virginia Woolf and Raymond Carver. He is originally from Englewood, New Jersey where he enjoys going on long walks through the woods and looking at dialect maps.