Greeting Card Killer
It’s 1979 and I’m on Dance Fever starring Denny Terio. I’m on Dance Fever and “Last chance” by Donna Summer is playing. I look at myself and I realize I’ve forgotten my costume. I’m standing naked on Dance Fever with Denny Terio and the disco ball is accenting every blemish and fat pocket on my bloated, hairy, albino looking body. This week’s celebrity judges are Madelyn Kahn, Billy Crystal, and my mother. The lights are blinding, the music is deafening, and my mother is apologizing for my nakedness. Being a good mother, she’s trying to sway their vote with her homemade brownies that are laced with the stash she found in my laundry hamper. The stage manager is waving everyone out of the studio, and at first I think it’s because of my current state of undress, when I realize the fire alarm is going off. I’m trying to decide which would be worse, dying in the fire, or going out in public naked, when I recognize the fire alarm as my phone ringing. Thank God, I’m only dreaming.
I got up and answered the phone. I haven’t been that happy to talk to my ex since she left me. I didn’t get to the phone before the answering machine turned on, so the first minute of our conversation is forever recorded on one of those little tapes. She told me I sounded tired and I kept telling her that I was dressed and that my costume shouldn’t affect my score. Knowing that I’m prone to sleepwalking, she just let me rant and rave until I was awake. I didn’t try to explain my dream to her, she wasn’t even born when Dance Fever went off the air, and she already thinks I’m a nut. When she was sure I was awake enough to talk to, she got right to the point and told me our 5 year old son had just killed his kindergarten teacher. I waited for Donna Summer to come out of the closet and start singing, because I was definitely still dreaming.
I had to smack myself in the head a few times to make sure I was awake. The next thing I heard was Becky telling me to pick her up so we could go to the school and meet the principal. A trip to the principal’s office at my son’s school is something I have always anticipated, but I never thought it would be to pick up my son after a murder. As I drove across town to pick up Becky, I tried to imagine how the hell my little boy had killed a grown woman. I had images of him stabbing her in the neck with a pair of blunt school safety scissors. He would have had to find a stepstool, since he was the shortest kid in kindergarten, making him the smallest kid in the entire school. That’s probably why he did it, I thought, someone was making fun of him, and he snapped. I thought that this might turn ugly, like one of those school shootings. How the hell could he have killed his teacher? He must have set a trap for her like that kid did to those crooks in tat Home Alone movie. My son could never be that violent, so he must have been sneakier. Maybe he slipped some cleaning fluid in her coffee, or gave her a fatal paper cut. It had to be something simpler. For Christ’s sake, he was only 5 years old. All the true crime novels I read were flipping through my head as I pulled into Becky’s driveway.
Her eyes were puffy and her nose was all red, so I knew that once again I had to be the strong one. She was obviously torturing herself with the same thoughts I was having on the way over. She got in the car and didn’t say a word. She just sat there and tore apart the Kleenex in her hand while she had a line of snot slowly run from her nose. I didn’t know if I should say something about it, I didn’t want to sound stupid. So I pulled over and put my arm around her. She rested her head on my shoulder and sniffed a couple of times, leaving the rest of the rouge mucus on my jacket. This made me look sensitive, and solved the snot problem at the time. I can’t believe I was worried about her nose at a time like this, but it took my mind off my son for a minute, thank God.
The principal was a very obese man named ironically, Mr. Thinnings. His grey hair was a mess, as if he was pulling it out. He was very polite, given the circumstances. He offered us coffee, which we both declined, and asked us to sit down. You could hear a pin drop in his office, and I was waiting for Jack Webb from Dragnet to come in and ask us for just the facts. They obviously had let school out early because of the tragedy in the basement kindergarten class. He then proceeded to tell us how our son happened to cause the death of his elderly teacher. It seems that the whole scenario revolves around our son, Nicholas, and his best friend, Ben.
Ben lived down the street from us when Nick started school. He was a year older than Nick, so he took him under his wing when Nick started on his road to the big house. Ben was a familiar face for him in school, and at our house. Nick looked up to him, and wanted to do everything that Ben did, including getting his tonsils out, which is what led to the death of Mrs. Vitch, (make up your own dirty little rhyme) Nick’s teacher. Who would ever think that a simple surgery would kill a perfectly healthy woman in her 70’s?
The whole mess started a week earlier. Ben and Nick were walking to school together, talking about the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday. Ben was telling Nick how he wasn’t going to be able to enjoy the holiday like the rest of his family since he was having his tonsils out. He wasn’t all that disappointed, he was going to be able to eat ice cream, and wouldn’t have to touch his mother’s infamous sweet potato casserole. This last bit of information must have struck a chord with my son, because later that day, while making handprint turkeys, his teacher asked the class what they were having for the upcoming feast. The normal staples were quickly rattled off, and when it was my son’s turn, he dreaded to mention that he didn’t like anything that would be on his table on that particular Thursday. That’s when a plan started to hatch in his head. I have to give him credit; I was impressed that he could think so fast on his feet.
Nick asked Mrs. Vitch if he could go to the nurse’s office, complaining of a sore throat. When he got there, she took his temperature, looked at his throat with a flashlight the size of a thermos, and pronounced him well enough to return to class. This was the groundwork he was laying for what has to be one of the most intricate plans to get out of eating turkey I had ever heard of. Nick was fine; he just needed to convince his teacher that he felt ill so that later in the week, he could pretend to be sick enough to eat sweets for Thanksgiving. Now being only 5 years old, he didn’t have the necessary trivial knowledge that you need to accumulate to be able to pull off a charade as big as this.
As with many of the best laid plans, my son found his quickly running out of control. When he got back to class, Mrs. Vitch asked him if he was feeling any better. Nick must have felt that he had to strike while the iron was hot, and told her that the nurse had called his parents, and that he wouldn’t be able to eat Thanksgiving dinner due to his upcoming tonsillectomy. Mrs. Vitch, being fond of children in general, and sick children in particular, decided that the class should do something to make Nick feel better since he wouldn’t be able to enjoy the holiday. She scrapped the next day’s lesson plan so that the class could have their own celebration, one that Nick could enjoy. That day 18 five and six year olds ate a cake shaped like a turkey, sang songs, and spent the entire afternoon making handmade get well cards for my perfectly healthy son. Nick was in heaven, he was the center of attention, and while everyone else was making get well cards, he got to play on the computer all day by himself. It was the perfect school day for him, until the bell rang and everyone started to get ready to go home.
While his classmates were putting away the glitter and getting their coats, Mrs. Vitch called Nick over to her desk and presented him with an envelope made out of poster board that was almost as big as he was. She had addressed the envelope to Nick with the disclaimer reading “Open when you are in the hospital!” Nick couldn’t read the legend, but he knew those get well cards were in there. Bringing home get well cards a week before he was supposed to come down with his ailment did not fit into his plans at all, so he had to figure out a way to explain a two and a half foot envelope to his mother. Most people would have just thrown the cards away, but my son thought that they might come in handy later in convincing Becky that he was actually sick. I’m not sure exactly how they were going to do that, but Nick was only 5, and anything is possible at that age. He marched right up to his bedroom when he got home and hid that huge envelope under his bed. Having solved the immediate problem, he totally forgot about it, and went on with the business of being a 5 year old. He remembered to cough a few times as his mother put him to bed that week, and it seemed his plan was working perfectly, until his mother cleaned his room that weekend and found a huge poster board envelope.
Needless to say, Becky was pissed. If it had been me that had found that get well package, I would have complimented my son on his creativity, after I had stopped laughing. I then would have sat him down and helped him rethink his actions. (This doesn’t mean that I would have told him that he had done anything wrong, I probably would have shown him a better hiding place for his envelope.) Becky took a different route. She marched Nick up to his room and confronted him with what she had found. She was so mad at what he told her that she couldn’t even look at him. Nick spent the rest of the weekend in his room, and waited until Monday morning when his mother was going to make him bring back those cards and tell his teacher what he did. I personally would have rather taken a spanking. Admitting that you did something bad in front of your whole class would definitely be worse than having a sore butt for a little while. Nick wasn’t given that choice, so he went to school Monday morning and killed his teacher.
Nick walked to school that morning in tears. He wasn’t going to carry that huge envelope anymore. He dumped it in a trashcan a block away from home and ran the rest of the way to school. When he got there, before anyone else was in the classroom, he walked up to Mrs. Vitch and told her all about his plan to avoid Thanksgiving. Mrs. Vitch had not been this upset in all her years of teaching. In order to keep herself from cursing my son the way she wanted to, she clenched her teeth and imbedded her dentures into her gums. This caused her false teeth to slip, and they slid back and caused her to gag. Her eyes widened, she spit out her teeth, and grabbed her chest. Nick thought this was hilarious, and laughed his fool head off. Mrs. Vitch was so enraged; she had a heart attack right in front of my son. When she hit the floor, Nick decided to cover her up with the cardigan she always hung on the back of her desk chair. I guess he thought she was taking a nap, and he didn’t want her to get cold. The rest of the class came in at the regular time, and they just played, ignoring their fallen teacher until the teacher across the hall stopped in to see what all the noise was about, and found the kindergarten class playing duck, duck, goose around Mrs. Vitch, dead as a doornail. The class was ushered into the cafegymatorium, and the crime was soon figured out, at just about the same time as Denny Terio was lighting up the disco ball.