“I don’t know is not an answer, Phillip. This is unacceptable work. You know that you are supposed to do your homework in pencil. I just want to know why you chose to do it in crayon.”

Phillip shrugged again and sniffed his wet nose loudly. “I…”

“What was that?”

He sat silent trying to control his tears. Breathing hard through his nose, he tried to relax his jaw muscles. Mr. Atwood leaned back on the desk and crossed his arms. He looked straight into Phillip’s eyes to let him know he was expecting an answer.

“I… I didn’t have a pencil.” Phillip croaked. Mr. Atwood clicked his tongue and sighed.

“Phillip, you have plenty of time through out the day to do your homework. Everyone else in your class can get their homework done, and you’re are an exceptionally bright boy.” He emphasized the exceptionally by drawing out the syllables and jutting his chin as he said it. “You’re very bright, but you don’t apply yourself. You could be a straight A student if you just tried. But you don’t try. You don’t try and you continually turn in work that is…” He sought for the word. “…disappointing.”

Phillip had managed to sublimate the crying and now sat breathing deeply and staring at Mr. Atwood’s knees.

“Phillip, I’m going to have to call your parents.” He waited for a reaction from the boy but didn’t get one. “Are you going to do this again?”

Phillip shook his head.

“Good.” The principal put the paper back on his desk and considered the boy. “Phillip, is everything okay at home?”

Phillip nodded quickly.

“You know you can talk to me, Phillip, I’m your friend.” Phillip looked quizzically at the Principal and then back at the ground. “Phillip, I’m going to have you start talking to Ms. Spellman. It’ll be during class time so you won’t have to stay late. Is that okay?”

The boy didn’t respond.

“Okay, you can go back to your class now.”

Phillip slid from the chair and walked out of the office and up to the counter. He took a hall pass from one of the ladies and left the office.

The door to his left was shut. On the door hung a plastic sign that said “Principal Atwood.” On his right two middle aged women were filing papers behind a fake wood and orange counter top. “Overridge Elementary School” was printed in gold letters across the wood paneling behind them. Occasionally they’d look up at him with sympathetic eyes and Phillip would quickly look back to the ground. He sat there swinging his feet back and forth examining the floor some more. He noticed that every three tiles down and to the right were identical. Apparently there were three more tiles in the set that could fit across the room Phillip thought to himself. As he was thinking about this the door to his left suddenly opened.

“Phillip, come on in.” Phillip got off the chair and walked past the Principal into his office. “Take a seat.” Phillip climbed up onto the green vinyl chair as the Principal sat behind his desk. Reconsidering, he came around the desk and leaned on it in front of the boy. He fished a paper out of the pile on his desk.

“Phillip, do you know why you’re down here?” He asked. Phillip shook his head. “Did you do this?” Mr. Atwood handed him a paper. The paper had about fifty multiplication problems in ten neat rows. Under about half the problems were the answers scrawled in purple crayon. Phillip looked at the paper and nodded as he handed it back. “Why did you do this in crayon?” Phillip shrugged. “Phillip, I asked you a question. Why did you do your homework in crayon?”

“I dunno.” Phillip whispered through the lump in his throat. He felt tears fighting their way to the surface and he tensed his jaw muscles to hold them back.

Phillip sat squirming on the edge of the plastic chair. He was finding patterns in the cream colored linoleum that was flecked with brown marks that gave it the effect of something between wood grain and marble. In the markings he saw faces, long nosed men with bouffant hair-dos and grimacing goblins with fat chins. He also saw hills, and trees, some mythical animals and the occasional long neck of a giraffe or the boxy smudgy shape of a dog. When he bored of that he began trying to find duplicate tiles, tiles that were marked in the same way. There seemed to be a pattern to the way the tiles were laid. He followed the black lines between the tiles pretending that they were highways through an endless stretch of Nebraska prairie. He remembered riding in the back of his parents Suburban through the long trip from Omaha to Yellowstone they had taken last summer. He remembered the endless corn fields, wheat fields and fields of some other long wispy grain that stretched out under the hot Nebraskan sun for miles and miles. And then suddenly nothing appeared. The corn was replaced with dirt and the occasional red butte that shot out of the ground in protest.