Riley

Riley had the biggest head out of everyone in sixth grade. My first thought of him was he had an grown-up’s head on a child’s body. It seemed almost like a bobble head on days he wore hats—adult sized hats—or put the hood of his coat on. But his strange appearance didn’t end there. His front two teeth stood out like a baby beaver’s. They were longer than all the rest of his teeth, and made him spit sometimes while he talked and talk with a bit of a lisp.

If his appearance wasn’t enough to label him as odd, his behavior would. He was one of the loudest, most desperately-want-to-be-the-best kinds of kids I’d ever met. He tried to show-up anyone in anything, from kickball during recess to the spelling bee to the climbing rope during gym. Every time he tried to out-do someone, he came up short of his insanely high expectations and ended up being average at best.

When Mrs. Williams, our sixth-grade teacher, rearranged desks, I was moved to the cluster of four with my best friend Duane, Eric the quiet kid, and Riley. I wanted to ignore him like everyone else in the class did, but Duane had other ideas. He invited him to play with the two of us during next recess. I was about to object, to say that the imaginary world we acted out stories in was just for us, but I could tell by the look he gave me that he wouldn’t accept my protest.

“Okay, what do we do?” Riley asked us. I looked over at Duane. This was his brilliant idea, after all, I had no idea what he was expecting.

Duane explained our world in brief, telling about the evil monsters we were fighting and the enchanted weapons we used to defeat them. “So we were just about to break into this base, and take out the boss. We ended last recess at a hallway full of enemies.”

Riley nodded and started swinging his imaginary sword, cutting down a fictitious line of bad guys in an instant, and he told us that to make sure we ‘knew’ how cool he was. Every time we encountered an obstacle, he magically was able to beat it in only a few seconds.

“That’s not how this game works,” I said quietly. “You can’t just win at everything.”

He looked at me as if I was crazy, but thankfully Duane backed me up. “Yeah, you can’t just beat everything. Sometimes you have to let one of us do it.”

His face scrunched up in confusion, like he’d never even considered that before. “Okay,” he mumbled, and we tried to go back to the imaginary world of our game. The only problem was he didn’t follow the rules. He still tried to be the best-of-the-best and completely pushed Duane and I out of our own game. Next recess we didn’t play with him, or any recesses after that.