Ninja as Child - #14 - First Grade

It was 27 days, 3 hours and 22 minutes since the boy who would one day become Sleep Deprivation Ninja began first grade. On this day, the teacher had invited her identical twin sister to join the class. The women wore matching blue and white dresses in the Dutch style that reminisces the wardrobe of Dorothy Gail from the Wizard of Oz. Both women had applied the same grotesque amount of make-up, their eye-liner in thick swirls and rouge filled cheeks, which threatened to halt school buses, all culminating to make them appear to be at least a decade older than they really were.

One of the children began to imagine the classroom as a circus. The eerie twins, never separating, seemed conjoined at the hip like the famed circus twins of Siam. Another student wondered if they would ever learn to apply cosmetics with such horror inducing flair as the twins had managed--Halloween, after all, was only weeks away and the child who wondered this shined a bright, toothy grin of anticipation.

The young ninja only cringed in his chair, lowering deeper and deeper, hoping to vanish into the base of the floor, fearful that the verbal torment of the one teacher would be doubled with the introduction of her twin.

As the students began their first assignment, the teacher twins walked around the classroom, huddling together and whispering, with hands blocking mouths, like little gossip girls. From the back of the classroom, the young ninja could see that they were about to descend upon him. Their faces lit up, highlighting the rouge and eye shadow with emphatic creases and they scurried closer to him until they were blocking the tiny space that would have allowed him to leap from his desk and out the classroom door.

One of the twins then pointed to the young ninja and exclaimed, "See, his eyes are so blue." Her hands folded together in a Clove Hitch knot under her chin, as if trying desperately to contain her exploding enthusiasm.

"Oh," said the other, giving a little shoulder tuck and smile to indicate an agreeable curtsy.

"When you grow up, you are going to have the prettiest blue eyes!"

The young ninja casually adjusted his peripheral vision to take in as many of his classmates as possible. He inspected their faces, hoping that none were paying attention to the horror he was facing. At that moment none were, but as the ninja returned to face the terrible twins, the boy sitting next to him pointed with a chuckle. He had nothing witty to say, only a grin and a finger.

Soon the chuckling virus took hold of the child in front of the young ninja and progressed north by northwest until everyone had caught the influenza. They were not laughing at the boys blue eyes for they were not all that funny. The joke was somewhere in the way the twins were standing, dotingly, crooning in front of the young ninja.

This, thought the ninja, is too much.

At this point, the boy with blue eyes had nothing to say, only an obvious and immediate action to take.

As his eyes were the reason for this treatment, he sought to be rid of them, exchanging them with the eyes of his neighbor. Perhaps you would like blue eyes, Bobby. These words remained unspoken, but were conveyed with clarity as the ninja child reached out to pluck the eyes from his classmate. Perhaps brown eyes will allow me to vanish, unnoticed.