Boy in the Box

to grow accustomed to it. It had at least become a familiar, unwanted feeling, but today he felt something else, something more twisted and frightening than the usual alienation and confusion he normally felt. Maybe it was his dad being gone – the way he had packed up his things, his instruments for killing animals, and left early for some faraway place. Maybe it was the memory of the man from the woods still stalking through his mind. With his father gone, that lumbering figure in the darkness suddenly seemed more frightening. Even though Jacob always sensed something wrong about his dad, he at least knew that his father loved him and would protect him, protect the house. He was big. He was strong. He could do that. Now, with his father gone someplace far away, Jacob had an unsettled feeling that everything was wide open, like the door to the house was open and anyone could just walk inside. Perhaps it was the look on his mother’s face as the bus pulled away on the street. It was like a photograph in his mind; one thing about looking at pictures is that you look at them to remember people you haven’t seen in a long time. He missed her suddenly, overwhelmingly, and wanted to be in her arms, to have her hold him in his house where he could feel safe.

Or maybe it was something else. Perhaps, those dreams he couldn’t remember were slowly sneaking their way into his thoughts. He knew he would wake screaming; what did he see? Did he even want to know?

Jacob watched two boys giggling over a phone in a corner of the hallway, and their faces seemed suddenly sharp and devilish, their smiles too wide, their cheekbones like blades trying to cut through their skin. They looked at him for a moment like they could kill him. He looked away. No. There was something wrong today. He felt it, and he wanted more than anything to be home. It made him feel sick to his stomach.

In Ms. Cracco’s class, they learned about telling time on a clock, the small arm and long arm moving slowly across the numbers on a circle. They made their own clocks out of construction paper, wrote in the numbers with marker, cut out hour and minute hands and fastened them to the paper clock. They moved the arms into the correct position to match times Ms. Cracco announced to the class. Next it was on to shapes – squares, rectangles, stars and circles. Again, more cutting with scissors and arranging the shapes into neat patterns. Jacob enjoyed that lesson. He laid out different shapes over each other, their edges and angles intersecting, forming things that resembled objects in real life. A triangle and a rectangle to form a house; a circle with a square below it resembled a hot-air balloon. He even used the shapes to form people – a circle for the head, a triangle or rectangle for the body, two smaller rectangles for the legs – like the ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ signs in the hallway beside the bathrooms.

He placed the star inside the circle and sat staring at it for a while. It reminded him of something he couldn’t quite remember but somehow seemed important. He took the clock he’d made and then laid the star over it. He traced the lines of the star to the different numbers the five points touched.

“What are you doing, Jacob?” Ms. Cracco hovered over him suddenly, stern and foreboding.

“Nothing,” Jacob said. “I just thought it looked cool.” It wasn’t necessarily that it looked cool, but it looked like something.

The teacher kneeled down next to his desk. “You see how all the points intersect? And those points go to the numbers on the clock? What do you think about that?”

“You can go from one time to another,” he said, “and skip over the other times.”

“Maybe one day we can,” Ms. Cracco said. “You’re a smart boy. Maybe you’ll figure it out.”

Jacob looked at her. She seemed older than her face would suggest, and he thought he saw disappointment in her gray eyes. Was it with him? But she had just said he was smart, so it couldn’t be disappointment with him.

She stood silently and continued walking down the row of desks, overseeing the projects of her students. Jacob wondered what it took to be a teacher. He suddenly wondered about her life. It was a momentary flash of empathy. Wondering if Ms. Cracco was married, if she had children of her own, if she really wanted to be a teacher. Like most adults, she seemed to be hiding something. There was a lie somewhere. Maybe she was sad like his mother or disappointed in something else. The world of adults was strange. They always had information, knowledge, which they held back. When they looked at him, it always seemed like they were looking at someone to pity. It made him feel like a burden, that perhaps their lives would be easier if he didn’t grow up in their presence. The way his mother hugged him, clinging to him like he could be lost at any second, made him wonder what was out there, what waited for him in this strange world.

It was a day like any other. But it was Friday, and Jacob was glad that he wouldn’t have to come back tomorrow or the next day. He could stay home, play in his room with his toys and use his imagination to construct other worlds where there were no secrets because he had them all. They were boy’s games made of Legos and action figures, spaceships, trucks and cars, imagined heroic personalities and villains bent on world domination. In those worlds he had control over the action figures, what they did, what they thought, who they battled and why. He could reach into those imaginary worlds, pull characters out and put them back in, shift time and location and