A WARNING

Everyone is afraid of me because of my theories. I have too many of them. I talk about them when I shouldn’t. The problem is that I’m always thinking and that I can’t stop thinking. Like one morning when I was in first grade, I thought of something I hadn’t thought of before. I woke, I blinked a few times, I saw the ceiling above my bed—and then I realized that I was in the same body that I had been in when I had fallen asleep. And it surprised me. It seemed odd to me. That I would never be in another body. That I always would be stuck in my own body. That every morning I would be waking to that same ceiling. I don’t know why, but it made me sad. Even more than sad. Sad^sad—sad to the power of sad—sad multiplied by itself a sad number of times. That I would never know what it was like to be anyone other than me—what chocolate tasted like to their tongue, what the color green looked like to them, what it felt like to have their feet.

On the playground that afternoon, I was drawing a forest with chalk I had brought from home. Mark Huff and the Geluso twins had borrowed some of the chalk to draw pirates fighting on a ghost ship. I stopped drawing.

“Want to know something that, once you start thinking about it, you’ll never stop thinking about it, and then you’ll lose your mind?” I (forte)said.

Mark Huff (piano)said yes. The Geluso twins didn’t say anything.

“Every morning you’re going to wake in the same body. You’ll only ever be in one body. You’ll only ever be yourself,” I (forte)said.

None of them said anything. They gave me back my chalk. Then they ran away toward the soccer field. Before that they had asked to borrow my chalk almost every day. After that they never asked to borrow my chalk again.

I’m telling you this as a warning. Kids at school don’t talk to me because they think that I have Dangerous Ideas. And I can’t explain everything that’s happened without Dangerous Ideas. So if you found these, I can’t stop you from reading them. But you might want to stop yourself.