The Lonely Aspen

The teacher walked her class of a couple dozen third graders in from lunch with a stern look on her face. She cooly waited for them to settle into their chairs and quiet down in that slow manner school children take on when they know their teacher is about to dish out something seriously scary. The last embarrassed child stopped at the end of a sentence; the words bouncing through everyone’s ears and out the doors and windows. They were escaping from the icy doom; palpable through the stale, pencil shaving scented air of this arboretum of our nation’s youth.
“Someone has stolen something from my desk,” the teacher announced, “A pair of sharp scissors that none of you should have.”
Everyone shuddered with excitement as if they were all the same aspen; except for one aspen who shuddered nervously. To steal sharp scissors from a a teacher was to steal a gun from a police officer.
“Empty your pockets onto your desks and leave your pockets turned out. All of you.”
Now two students we’re shaking nervously; the rest still with excitement. One of the two had actually stolen the scissors but thrown them away on the playground before anyone could have known that he had them. Yet, he was still nervous that he’d be caught. He couldn’t even understand why he took them. The other of the these two was Charles Roberts. He was the only one not to empty his pockets.
“Charles?” she asked with cold stillness of expression, “Do you have my scissors?”
Charles shook his head numbly and mumbled in the negative.
“Then please empty your pockets.”
Charles took things out of his pockets, one by one, carefully placing them in front of him. A worn buss pass. A house-key with a green and blue lanyard keychain. A hand-me-down cell phone with many dents and scratches across it. And last, a small pile of change he had accumulated through the day from leftover lunch money and what he had found on the playground, which he removed one coin at a time. He liked to count it and this was another opportunity to do it. A quarter sat with a scratch on the veneer. Another quarter plinked on top of it. Three pennies, two nickels, and no dimes. Each stacked by denomination from lowest to highest, a space left in between the nickels and quarters for the dimes that would never be there.
“63 cents,” Charles thought to himself; his pockets still on the inside of his pants.
“Turn out your pockets, Charles.”
He turned out his left one.
“Both,” she quietly demanded.
Charles turned out the other and put a small jagged rock on the desktop next to the quarters, as if they were the highest denomination in the row. But in the eyes of a faculty member he might as well have drawn a knife. He’d only taken it from outside because a rock of sizable proportions on a modern, paved, and padded playground is a rare and precious thing.
Charles was suspended for three days for what he did and no adult could understand why he did it. Of course, the rest of the aspen grove understood all to well the need for a fellow sapling to find nature in the artificial environment they had been planted in. But all they did was sit there and quake. For that is all that even the most mature and strongest of aspens can do. Quake with each and every shift of the winds, as the winds intend. No aspen tells the wind what to do.
Upon returning to school from his suspension, Charles wanted only one thing. Not revenge or even justice. No, such actions are not befitting of a tree. He simply wanted to be replanted in the soil of his root brothers. Especially his friend Ryan Plinks. But Plinks, unknown to Charles, was behind Charles’ suspension and he felt a strange guilt about it that he didn’t want to admit to himself. So Ryan didn’t want to see Charles. He didn’t even want to acknowledge that there was any such thing as a Charles Roberts. To do so would only remind him that his silly and nonsensical theft of scissors is what got his best friend in trouble for the very understandable possession of a rock.
So when lunchtime ticked its way into class, and all the students rushed out with sack lunches and lunch money, Ryan did not sit where he normally sat with his lunch; waiting for Charles to arrive from the cafeteria. That day, and for all the days of elementary school to follow, Ryan strategically sat with his classmates at a table that only had enough room left for Ryan. This would insure that Charles couldn’t sit with him.
As Charles left the cafeteria register, tray in hands and counted change in pocket, he quickly noticed the absence of his friend. After doing a quick scan of the tables, Charles saw Ryan chatting, eating, and generally avoiding eye contact with his friend turned fall-guy. Charles, in his fateful ignorance of the situation, walked to the table. Ryan sat on the edge of the seat so their ensuing conversation was kept mostly to themselves.
Their conversation didn’t go well. From the perspective of anyone in that lunchroom who had decided to observe, it seemed that the conversation started pretty normally, except that Charles was the only one speaking. As he continued to speak, and Ryan just quietly sat there, Charles’ movements and expressions became steadily angrier. Eventually Charles tossed down his tray and, in a crying fit of rage, knocked Ryan off his seat with a flailing right hook to his chin. Charles and Ryan were never seen talking together again. Few people at all ever talked to Charles again. He had acted against the winds. He had flung his limb through the wind; rustling the leaves and snapping the twigs of another, and therefore, himself. He had taken on the actions destined for wind, not trees. Blasphemy.
The missing scissors were never brought up again and quickly forgotten by all who’d been involved in the incident, but Roberts’ suspension and assault loomed over him and his reputation amongst classmates, parents, and teachers until he was presented with the opportunity to begin anew in middle school.