The Playground Slide

• Fiction

								
The Playground Slide 
By: me
	Evelyn Doll was a fairly normal little girl. She loved cherry soda. She loved days with plenty of sun. She loved coming up with stories when the hours dragged on and on. She always chewed on the top of her shirt, despite her mother’s hatred for it; she couldn't help it. She could do a handstand for a full 30 seconds, and she wasted a day trying to find that out. She was good at games like Uno, checkers, and The Legend of Zelda. She had a big, brown dog named Stickers, whom she loved very much. She would fall asleep every night listening to Mozart. Once on a school trip, she stayed up all night because she couldn't listen to The Magic Flute. She loved cheese crackers yet hated pretzels. She disliked school, but loved all the subjects. She was a whiz with reading, spelling, history, math, science, and art. In all the subjects, she was quite gifted and she loved them all equally. But she hated school. The reason being, the recess period. It was there she was tormented. 
	On a dreary Tuesday morning, where the whole sky seemed to be weeping, Evelyn sludged through the sticky, thick mud of the since marked muddy track. This mud felt like more dirt due to its density, but it still sloshed and stuck to her sneakers. Evelyn felt she had no sense in her head this morning, for she had forgotten to wear her boots and instead wore her white sole (mostly brown now) sneakers. It had stormed all of the week before, and the sun seemed to be reclusive and too scared to approach the sky again. She wished the sun would be kind enough to say ‘hello’ on her morning trek. The mud would slosh and splash and land on her socks, staining them. She felt very foolish to not have worn her boots.
Evelyn walked past the playground. She had to, to make it to class. She ran her cold fingers along the black, colder chain fence separating it from her. It made a clunking noise until she reached the locked gate door, which rattled back and forth from the force of her small hand. She wished it would stay locked forever. She could see the silver colored poles of the swing set. The swings were blown back just slightly by the wind. The merry-go-round moved too. She could imagine happy, normal kids playing on them, laughing and yelling for each other. She imagined the day would be full of sun. The only motionless piece of the playground was the giant, rusted slide. 
Every kid at school knew this slide. The one with no handrails; the one that burned or freezed kids (depending on the weather); the one they should've replaced a long while ago. It was a million feet tall to Evelyn and taller to the younger kids. No one ever wanted to use it. Evelyn hoped she never would have to. The sliding down wasn't the hard part. It would be somewhat difficult; it would take a lot of propulsion to get yourself to move. You would have to defy friction as strongly as you could. But when you were sliding, everything seemed fine and good. It was the slight curve at the end of that red-rust slide that did it. Kids would fly off and just keep flying and flying. All around the world, it seemed. The kid then would hit the ground with a SMACK on the rough grass of some other playground in New Zealand. At least, that's what the older kids would say. Evelyn always felt bad for the kindergartners who never heard any of the rumors. They would climb up the slide for ages and use all of their little might to slide down. And they would slide, for the same amount of ages. Then off they would fly all the way to New Zealand, never to be seen again (until around reading time when they got back from the nurse’s office with an ice-pack and a sticker). 
Evelyn finally made it to the fourth grade classroom. Her teacher made her take her shoes off so she wouldn't track mud on the old, smelly classroom carpet. Her plain white socks with a few muddy splotches got a few chuckles from the front of the class. She didn't worry about them. They were only followers with no thoughts outside of scrambling to remember the math lesson  and daydreaming about what they would watch on the television when they got home. None of them were so very mean like the older kids. Two boys and a girl from the sixth grade named Lukas, Georgie, and Pearl were those older kids; the older kids. The slide, to them, was only six feet and three inches tall. They had fun on the playground by shoving kids off the slide and calling them rather cruel names. Mostly they would pick on just first graders, who would do anything they said because they were older. It made sense why they would pick on those kids; Lukas had a little sister in that grade. But the only kid outside of the first graders that they would bully was Evelyn. She never did know why.
Evelyn took her seat at the very back corner of the classroom. The first half of the day went on happily. Math, science, history happened all in the same room. With the quizzes she got back, she passed them all with flying colors. She was chosen for the school wide spelling bee out of all the fourth graders. She felt less and less silly and stupid as the day went on. But she couldn't help but drift off while the lessons were being taught. She was too worried about lunch and even more worried about recess. Even though many times she wished and wished it wouldn't come, it was all for naught. The clock hit 11:45 in the big, bold font of the digital clock. Evelyn’s stomach sank all the way to her feet making a deafening noise throughout her nervous system. She felt like her shirt and skirt were full of bees; angry, fed-up bees. She moved her swollen self slowly and nervously down the hallway to the cafeteria where all the kids ate.
Sloppy-Joes. She could smell them from five classrooms down the hallway. Past the first third grade class, the second third grade class, the first second, the second second, and the guidance counselor’s office. It was an awful kind of smell. Like the dying squirrel, twitching on her lawn that she found last summer, only with more bombarding salt in the air. What you couldn't say about the taste, you could say about the scalding temperature. She walked down the line quietly like a sea cucumber thrown out of the water. She could hear the soft thump of the bottom bun on her tray, the wet squelch of the meat, and then the swish of the top bun. She walked to a table pushed against the corner with no other person sitting there. 
Evelyn shuffled her nervous feet over the bright, plaster floor. The plastic-y smell of it blended with the odor of the food on her tray. She walked slowly and slowly, like there were magnets on her feet. Then from behind her she heard a crackling, sinister voice yell, “WORM!” in big bold, all caps letters. Before she could turn around, her head was hit and scraped by something that flew towards her. A pencil hit the bright, plaster floor with a light rattle. All the fourth, fifth, and sixth graders cackled loudly. There were three laughing louder than all the others combined, however: Lukas, Georgie, and Pearl. They loved to call her a worm. And right now, she felt squashed.

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