A blood red pebble the size of a nail head sits in the grass between the rows where I planted summer squash. When I turned ten, for my birthday present Mom and Dad gave me ownership of an eight foot by eight foot square of soil in the garden and let me plant whatever I wanted. Last year I planted tomatoes but they didn’t grow because I didn’t tend to them right. This time I’m doing it right. I don’t know why there’s a pebble here that looks like that. I don’t pick it up. My sister Kali yells my name. I look in her direction. She’s just being stupid. I look back to the blood red pebble and can’t find it.

I get bored in the middle of the day when there’s nothing to do and no music. I dig a shallow hole in the dirt, prick my finger with a thumbtack and let one drop of blood fall in the middle of the hole then pack the dirt back on top of it. I’m curious if it will grow into anything. Like a miniature person with blood red pebbles for eyes whose mouth forms no expressions and who’s fluent in two hundred languages. And never sleeps.

Dad is arguing with the man he hired to install a picket fence around our garden. I think it’s about price. I can’t hear them speaking, but from my hiding spot under the house I can tell that my dad is spitting while he talks, as he only does when he’s angry. Nobody knows about my hideout under the house, except for Danny and Seth. We get there by crawling through the hole in the garage wall. We play space commandos.

Kali never gets bored. Sometimes when I lie awake and pretend to be asleep, I hear her talking softly. I don’t think she has a telephone; Mom and Dad would kill her if she did and they found out. Kali likes to do grownup things, like get her ears pierced and put on makeup, and she’s been begging for her own phone, she wants it badder than she wants her own bedroom. Maybe she’s dreaming out loud and thinks she’s talking on a phone, I don’t know. It sounds like she’s talking to someone, though, and it doesn’t sound like Kali. She doesn’t laugh at the same things Kali would laugh at, when she talks by herself at night. She sleeps in the bottom bunk. I got the top bunk because I like it.

Danny gets to be Captain Herdball. Seth is Princess Gwyneth. Seth has to play a girl because it was his fault Danny’s bicycle got stolen last summer when Seth was borrowing it and left it in front of the pool to buy a candy bar, and we won’t forgive Seth until we’re fourteen. Until then, Seth gets to be Princess Gwyneth. I’m Lord Vernal. The three of us crawl briskly under the porch to man the battle station when Seth screams and scurries onto his back, slamming his head on the wooden cross-member. His scream is tangled up with other frenzied chirping sounds. Two rodent like things with whip-like tails retreat from Seth and disappear. They’re the reason Dad’s building a fence around the garden.

My arms are shaking a little bit all through dinner. It’s like a refrigerator when you press your face right up close to it and listen, that’s what my arms feel like. Mom asks me what’s spooking me. I say nothing. Mom moves her elbows out in front of her, the way she always does when she’s about to ask hard questions, and Dad says let the boy eat. At night I’m already sort of asleep and I hear Kali talking, louder than usual, breathing quickly, and then a scream. I jump down from my bunk and spin around the bedroom. I look at her but she’s not in the bed. I hear Kali screaming. I can’t find her. In her bed all I see is a thousand blood red pebbles the size of nail heads piled on top of the covers.

Mom and Dad’s rushed footsteps clobber down the hallway, drowning the scream. I want to tell them I’m Lord Vernal, I can handle this, but then I’d slip and tell them about our fort under the house, and they’d kill me if they knew that.

My sister and I used to be best friends, we used to play hide and seek under the house—and sometimes at the pond—and got in trouble for it. She never goes under the house anymore, because she wants to be older, but she didn’t sound older when she was screaming. She has a square of the garden that’s the same size as mine. She grows flowers. I don’t care much about flowers. I can’t sleep.

Keep closing my eyes and seeing pebbles, piles of them moving slowly making me dizzy and I hear Kali’s scream like an echo, still can’t sleep.

I go under the house with a flashlight, look for the pebbles. I wonder if my summer squash is growing.

Yes Mister Davis, I understand the nature of my transgression. As you indicated in your rednotes, my paper, although grammatically impeccable, was neither cogent nor germane to the topic, but rather leapt from one digression to another like the rant of a lunatic in the throes of a fervent drug trip. As demonstrated by my prior academic performance, you understand that this paper was a fluke, and should raise no question about my mental aptitude or stability.

I mention only as a conversational aside that my sister Haley has been pressuring me to try marijuana — she says it relaxes her to take a few tokes before an exam. As her sister, I don’t know what to say to that. I should also mention that Coach Riley has offered me the opportunity to play varsity if I maintain a B+ average or better in all my classes. Whaddo ya know, this letter is starting to sound like my paper, jumping topics in a flight of candid tonguewheeling. Surely you can see the humor in my offhand connections. Your rednotes, sadly, were humorless.

In response to your request that I redo the assignment, start over from scratch and turn it in for a reduced letter grade, I deflect your request with a request of my own: I request that you, Mister Davis, take a closer look at my paper. If I were to redo it, I would turn in a paper identical to this one, without changing a word. If you look at it and read more than what’s on the surface, you will see a certain beauty and exacting meticulousness to it that will make it evident why it took me six hours to compose, refining every word, punctuation and formatting detail to perfection. I say that not to be ironic or facetious or daring or presupposing or presumptuously perplexing, or verbose, I say that because it is a fact. Again, I hope that you are reading this with a cigar in hand and a smirk on your face. My humor begs to be acknowledged.

Was I clear on the assignment prompt for this paper? If you read my first four sentences, there can be no mistaking that I began this composition with full awareness. Assignment prompt for Paper #3: drawing on two examples from the text and one anecdote from your personal experiences, compare and contrast customs of civilizations of ancient Greece to contemporary society and conclude by citing three to five specific insights the analysis offers on the human condition. Six to eight pages double-spaced (or equivalent volume of content).

With all due respect, Mister Davis, I think that you are a jaded idiot. Without sabotaging any more credibility or charm with my feeble attempts to insult you — as I know that you are unaffected by the opinions of those under the age of thirty-five, and invective thereof only serves to elicit a condescending half-smile on your face, at best a nasal chuckle and at worst a tickle in your loins — I’ll chalk this miscommunication up to our generation gap. And a pitiful miscommunication it is. But, as a father of two adolescent boys, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt; perchance, Mister Davis, do you fancy optical illusions? There is of late a noteworthy innovation sweeping the shelves of novelty bookshops — surely its commercial presence has not escaped you. State-of-the-art computer programs generate images that look like redundant patterns at a first glance, but if you flex your eyes in a counterintuitive manner and focus on the space behind it, three-dimensional images pop out at you.

As it turns out (as you will see when you take a second gander at my paper) this phenomenon does not require fancy computer programs. All it takes is a bored teenaged mind, a little bit of hypocrisy to spur inspiration, and it can be accomplished with English text, Times New Roman font. Read my paper between the lines, as you would say, and I think you will be pleasantly (no, not pleasantly, more…I don’t know, how should I say…harrowingly, perhaps?) surprised. And just between me and you, I strongly advise that you read it in a place of privacy such that your sons and your wife — especially your wife — are not within a radius of potential interruption.