True Story

There was nothing in the thrift store that Caleb really wanted. No, that wasn’t entirely true. There were many things in the thrift store that Caleb wanted—the Casper lunch box, the Tiki mug, the bowling shoes—but Caleb, having already spent most of his small allowance, was left with a budget of just eighty-seven cents. This limited his shopping to only one of the store’s many aisles—the aisle of broken sunglasses, half-used journals, rickety baskets from Easters past, miscellaneous cords—where there usually stood a man, searching for the power to something in his life—and a sad selection of small figurines, most of which included either a bear, a hula dancer, a turkey, or a clown. There was also, on one of the shelves of the aisle, a plastic tub filled with cheap rings and bracelets tangled up in a sea of green and purple Mardi Gras beads—items not even worthy of their own price tags. Instead, riding on top of this beady sea was a box of snack-sized plastic bags, and taped to the outside of the tub, a sign: FILL A BAG FOR A DOLLAR, OR 25¢ EACH. This is where Caleb found the ring.

Yes, it was true that he already owned a mood ring, which, judging by the rainbow gem at its center, this clearly was. It was also true that he did not ever wear or even look at that other ring—mainly because there were certain people at his school who loved any excuse to harass him. In fact, that other mood ring was currently under his bed in a plastic storage bin that he rarely opened and that his mother repeatedly asked him to donate to this very thrift store.

This ring, though, was different. This ring was not some cheap plastic trinket you might get from a gumball machine outside the grocery store (which is where Caleb’s last mood ring had come from). This ring had the look and weight of one of his grandmother’s rings, and it appeared to be just as old, with leafy vines twisting around its tarnished metal band and a marble-sized gem held in its center by a circle of thorns. Also, this ring did not come with the usual list of boring and rarely accurate moods: RELAXED, CALM, HAPPY—or the usual reminders of what Caleb was not: COOL, NORMAL. This ring did not even change color when Caleb slipped it onto his finger. Instead, a word—a word that appeared to be handwritten—rose to its surface: CURIOUS. And when Caleb immediately decided that he must have this ring, CURIOUS was replaced by another word, which was equally true: NERVOUS. The truth of this word kneaded at Caleb’s stomach and gave his hands the shakes as he dug among the various wrappers, hair bands, and coins in his pocket for the quarter that would bring this strange ring home with him.

That night at home other words appeared:

ANNOYED (when his phone died right in the middle of a video he was watching).

STARTLED (when the mail carrier dropped a package on the porch and the dog went berserk).

EXHAUSTED (when he fell asleep while doing his homework, and again the next morning when his mother came in to wake him).

On the school bus, new words came at such rapid speed that Caleb barely had a chance to read them, until finally the ring settled on the words that most accurately captured what he was feeling just then: FREAKED OUT.

He tried shaking the words away—as much as he could manage without drawing too much attention to himself—but with every shake, the words only grew brighter. Flicking the gem with his nail did nothing. Knocking it with his knuckle: nothing.

Finally, after attempting to crush the gem between his teeth, the words faded away, and in their place appeared an equally irritating word: IRRITATED.

“Stop it!” Caleb hissed at the ring, which immediately responded with: ANGRY. He looked across the aisle at Trey, who was now glaring back at him.

“Not you…” Caleb started, but what was he supposed to say? Explain that he was yelling at a ring? It was bad enough at his school for a guy to even wear a ring, let alone talk to the thing. As he tried to hide the ring by slipping it under his leg, he thought he caught a glimpse of the word SCARED. And so what? Wouldn’t YOU be scared? he wanted to yell at the ring. You’re just a dumb ring anyway…What do you know?

He could already imagine what Dylan would say. Nice grandma ring. Does it match your grandma shirt? That’s what Dylan had called his shirt, just because it had flowers on it. “Nice shirt, grandma,” he said, and everyone, even a few kids Caleb thought were his friends, had laughed. Making the whole thing worse, a teacher overheard the scene and made the horrible decision to pull the two boys into the hall, where she forced Dylan to apologize. “What?” Dylan said. “All I did was compliment his shirt. It isn’t like I called him gay or anything.” He said gay like it was the worst thing you could be. The teacher didn’t say a word, she just looked at Dylan for an uncomfortably long time, until finally he said, “Fine. Sorry.” And for the hundredth time since moving to this stupid town, Caleb wished he could go back to his old school, where he could wear whatever he wanted, and where he wasn’t the only guy who painted his nails. Paint his nails at this school? No way.

Realizing now that he was crazy to wear the ring to school, and wondering why this didn’t occur to him before, after all he had been through, Caleb attempted to remove the ring from his finger. With every tug and twist, though, the ring only grew tighter—a tightness he could feel in his chest, as if the ring had looped itself around his entire body. Heart racing, hands turning numb, he knew it would only grow worse if he didn’t do as the counselor had taught him after his first panic attack. Closing his eyes, he drew in a slow, deep breath, counting one-two-three as he filled up his chest, then one-two-three as he let the breath out. He repeated this over and over until his heart settled back into a calm and steady rhythm.

Fortunately he had placed the ring on his left hand, not his writing hand, so it was easy enough to keep it hidden inside the pocket of his hoodie. Still, there were challenges, especially in PE, where he had to fake a stomachache to get out of volleyball, and again in art class, where he had to fake an even more painful stomachache in order to get out of molding a clay mask. The few times he slipped his hand out from his pocket—mostly in the hope that it had vanished—the gem glowed with the same word: SCARED.

At home that afternoon, he looked up on his computer: how to remove a tight ring. He tried Vaseline. He tried butter. He tried shampoo and lotion—he even tried peanut butter. Nothing worked. Nothing produced even the slightest twist or wiggle. And through it all, the ring insisted on stating the obvious: FRUSTRATED.

“Brilliant,” Caleb muttered. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

DEFENSIVE, the ring said, which made Caleb blurt out, “Look who’s talking! You’re just a cheap thrift-store ring! You didn’t even have your own price tag! You’re lucky I even—”

“Caleb? Who are you talking to?”

His mom stood in his doorway, a familiar concern in her eyes. Since they moved to this town, Caleb had been through a lot. Mostly it was minor bullying, but once he had arrived at school to find a crowd of kids gathered around his locker, waiting to see what he would do when he saw the cruel words someone had written there.

“Rehearsing some lines,” Caleb said, the ring squeezing in on his finger. “For a skit.”

“Oh,” his mom said, “I thought—” but she caught herself before saying what they were both thinking: that his medicine had stopped working, that he was back to his angry outbursts. “What’s it about?”

“Huh?” Caleb said, distracted by the word he had caught a glimpse of just before slipping his hand behind a stack of books: LIAR.

“What’s the skit about?”

“It’s—just a skit. I should probably keep practicing.”

“Well, I’d love to hear about it sometime.”

“Sure,” Caleb said. “Maybe later.”

The next morning he awoke late, with a vague memory of his mother coming in sometime earlier to wake him. He now had less than twenty minutes to get to the bus stop. Throwing off his covers and pushing himself out of bed, he made a quick grab for his sweatshirt balled up on the floor—which he immediately dropped again, as if the thing had bitten him. “Ow!”

Looking first at his finger to make sure it was still there, then glaring into the gem through watering eyes, he could just barely make out the word: FALSE.

“FALSE? What’s that supposed to mean!” Shaking away the pain, he tried once more, this time moving his hand much more slowly toward the sweatshirt. With every inch, though, the ring grew tighter—and tighter—until he had no choice but to give up entirely.

“Fine!” he shouted, wondering for the hundredth time since buying the ring if he had officially gone mental, if Dylan and his friends were right. He was a freak. Who else but a freak would argue with a ring over what to wear to school?

At least the ring had seemed to cure him of his panic attacks. Who had time for a panic attack when you were busy losing your mind?

Caleb—no, the ring—went through nearly every shirt in his dresser until finally it came to the one shirt Caleb did not want to wear, the shirt that he had crumpled up and shoved into the farthest corner of his drawer so he would never again have to even look at it. “No way. No way I’m wearing that thing.”

But with the clock ticking closer to 7:30, and the ring biting into his finger with every other shirt he attempted to pick up, he was left with no choice. It was that shirt or no shirt. As he shoved his arms through the sleeves and angrily pushed the buttons through their holes, watching himself in the mirror, covered in yellow and blue flowers—the very image of a Dylan punching bag—he came up with his countermove. If the ring was going to make him wear the shirt, he would just wear his sweatshirt over top of—Ow!

Fine, his coat, then. He would wear his coat.

How to get to his coat without his mom or sister seeing him, that was the only problem. More than a problem, it was an impossibility. The coat was on a hook near the door, and the door was on the other side of the kitchen, and in the kitchen were his mom and sister. He could hear them in there talking away.

Taking a deep breath, trying to look as casual as possible, he made his move.

The talking stopped.

Through the corner of his eye, he could see that his mother was also trying her best to look casual. His sister, not so much. She sat at the counter openly staring, a spoonful of cereal halfway to her mouth. “What if they beat you up?” she said to the Cheerios piled just beyond her nose.

“Dee!” her mother snapped. Then, to change the subject, she added, “Hey, you look—”

Caleb grew itchy inside his shirt as he waited for her to finish.

“—like yourself,” she said, looking somewhat surprised, and then pleased, by her words. “I always did like that shirt.”

For a brief moment, Caleb smiled—he always did like that shirt too—but then his smile faded as thoughts of the shirt were replaced by thoughts of school.

“Is that one of Grandma’s rings?”

“What?” Caleb had been thinking about Dylan, and so his stomach seized on the word grandma.

“The ring. That ring you’re wearing.”

“No. It’s—just a cheap ring from the thrift store.” On cheap, the ring grew tighter, letting him know that it disagreed. “So I should probably run.” Grabbing a granola bar to eat on the bus, and then his coat from the hook by the—

“Ow!”

He did not dare make a second attempt, not with his mom rushing over to check on him. “Just—stubbed my toe,” he said, rushing out the door before she could tell him to pick his coat up off the floor.

And then he was outside.

Though nervous, he had not fully thought about what would happen next. The stares. Maybe even the words, the terrible words on his locker last year that had made him run home and crumple up the shirt, which had felt like he was crumpling up his insides. Since that morning, Caleb and the shirt had stayed balled up and tucked away where no one could find them.

The nearer he came to the bus stop, the more those awful feelings came back to him, until there was no way he could join the group of kids waiting there, no way he could get on that bus. Did he hear the word freak as he walked past, or did he only imagine it? Either way, with every step he took, the word was a Ping-Pong ball bouncing from one side of his brain to the other.

Two miles is a long walk when you’re covered in flowers. At least in this town it is. Caleb did not look up the entire way, even when he heard the bus driving past him, even when he was sure that everyone on the bus was staring out their windows at him. Was that laughing he heard? Did someone just yell out their car window? It was impossible to hear over the pounding of his heart and feet.

Every time a car passed, he looked down at the ring—out of nerves more than anything, out of not wanting to be seen, out of not wanting to know who had seen him—and each time he expected to see the word FREAK or IDIOT or DEAD MAN, or at least the obvious—SCARED, NAUSEOUS—but every time he looked into the gem, the same word, the same lie, appeared: BRAVE.

By the time Caleb got to school, first period had already started and there was no way he was going to walk into class late, so he found a place behind the building where he was sure to not be seen. Minutes passed like hours. Rain came and went. A pigeon pecked at a chip bag near his foot, others arriving to feed on the crumbs. Finally, the end-of-class bell rang out.

With a deep breath, Caleb dragged his heavy feet to the door, where he took another deep breath before pulling it open and walking on wobbly legs into the school.

Eyes, so many eyes. It seemed as if the walls had eyes, the lockers had eyes, the drinking fountain—everywhere he looked, eyes, every one of them looking at him.

And then:

Dylan.

Dylan walking straight for him.

Dylan and his friends, a wall closing in on him, and before Caleb could turn away, Dylan’s hand was on his shirt, pinching at it like it was something disgusting, something contaminated. “Don’t you look pretty today. Borrowing your mom’s clothes again?”

Mom. Even worse than grandma.

Caleb’s heart was a thousand hearts pounding at once. An icy wave swept through his body, his hands went numb. But he did not run. He did not crumble. He would not crumble.

The longer he stood there, at first terrified, then slowly calmer, then just watching as Dylan walked his “gay walk” circle around him, his friends snorting and hee-hawing—how stupid they were, what idiots they were—the more Caleb realized that this was it. This was all they had. This was his worst fear, and soon it would be over, and he would still be here.

One thing, though, one thing would be different:

They would not be touching his shirt again. Next time Dylan came in for a grab, he would be ready.

It was the force that surprised Caleb the most. How he had made Dylan’s hand swing back as if hit by a bat. The force of his voice too, like it carried with it everything he had ever kept inside him, and there was not a soul in that hall who did not hear him when he said, pulling on his own shirt: “THIS. THIS IS MINE.” And when Dylan started to laugh and pretend that he was shaking with fear, Caleb’s voice became a storm: “SO GO GET YOUR OWN MOM SHIRT IF YOU LOVE IT SO MUCH.”

The laughter was another storm, so loud that Caleb could barely hear Dylan’s mumbling—something about not being caught dead in that shirt.

“WHAT?” Caleb said, holding his hand around his ear for better hearing. “CAN YOU BORROW IT? NO WAY.”

Dylan’s fist started for Caleb’s chest and Caleb did flinch—okay, he might have even ducked—but like every other awful Dylan moment, that was it, that was all Dylan had—along with a pretty good shoulder ram as he walked past Caleb and shoved his way down the hall. But now it was over and here he stood.

Down at his hand, the ring had loosened its grip and, before he could move to catch it, had slipped free of his finger. He did manage, though, to catch sight of the word as it fell to the ground: TRUE.

After rolling a few feet, the old ring spun to a rest in front of a girl—a girl Caleb only knew as the girl who ate alone.

“You keep it,” he said when she brought the ring to him—though the ring, which the girl had momentarily, in her nervousness, slipped onto her finger, had already made its choice.